I recall having to read Pride and Prejudice in high school. I was a young teenager at the time, living in a community designated a "bedroom community," which aways sounded a little salacious, though what it really meant was that we were a community island, house after house, without the commercial or industrial development found in Dallas and Fort Worth mere hours away from my front door. I was a male, hormonal, unsuited for understanding the late sixteenth ramblings of a woman who wrote not only of the social restraints of young women in a male-dominated period and country, but with a fine subtlety whose irony and humor are lost by the antiquated language and odd sentence structure. It was no wonder that I read the book as I might read a scietific journal.
In college, by mere accident, I was pushed into studying English literature. To finish my degree I had allotted to myself, I was forced to sign up for classes which focused on English literature, and partiularly that of the Victorian era and some of the eras that sandwiched it. I was forced to read Thomas Hardy from a professor who actually had a science major. I read Frankenstein at least four times as I earned my under-graduate degree, not to mention having to see the Universal Studios and Hammer Studio adaptations of the book. I grew to appreciate the literature of the time, especially literature that grew out of a Gothic tradition and read on my own, without the need of a syllabus such classics as the George Elliot classic Middlemarch, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and even Charlotte Bronte's Whethering Heights. But still, even a new found love for literature, even Victorian literature, I still could not find some spark of interest in Pride and Prejudice.
Again, the book has again entered into my life. A member of a book club to which I belonged has suggested reading it, nothing that the anniversary of its placement upon paper and introduction to the world. Again, I am forced to ask myself, why is it that people find this book so compelling placing it as one of the greatest novels ever written, a tour de force, so much so that high school students everywhere are subject to its torturous banality. Of course, having matured since high school, I have conviently redrafted the question to be more introspective: why is it that I find this book, which has spawnd numerous movies adaptions, which has spawned numerous other books, much like spin-off television series, does not resonate me as other books have?
There is definitely something about the book which works against the grain of an American male. As has been noted by more studied persons, there is a theme running throughout the novel, idealization of the nobility and gentry, an idea so antithetical to the American ideal of self-made men, who were an amalgamation of the democracy so inherit in the American conscience and the idea of the entitled person who earned his social status by hard work. There is even contained in the book a subtle disdain of stature through hard work, a kind of honor in being born into your place in society.
This is repulsive to me, repulsive not so much that it eschews the commercial successes of the American male, even if the successes were gained through shady means, but that it fails to depict the common man, such as Dickens did. I dislike Pride and Prejudice for the same reason I dislike the Oscars or other award shows, because it is a half-depiction missing an important, and perhaps more interesting layer of society, the worker, who had no time for leisure, who felt the boot of the weathy landower's boot on his throat as a favor. The book is a piece of propaganda, meant to propagate an idea throughout societies that established that if you were not of a social layer, you were scum.
I am re-reading Pride and Prejudice. I appreciate the language, the themes, as banal as they are. I recognize that Jane Austin accomplished something much more than many woman of her time could do. And through said appreciation, my question has changed yet again. This time, my question is: why is a woman with such a talent for writing, with all of her wit and humor, wasting her timie writing about trivial matters such as the effects of marryig or not marrying in the late 1700's?
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