Finding the humor in 'Pride & Prejudice'
I’m a little surprised that I read “Pride & Prejudice” over the last few weeks. It’s not normally the kind of book I would read but I did really enjoy it. There were several things that prompted me to do it.
One was that I like biographies, and at some point in my life probably about 30 or more years ago, I discovered at the Gaston County Library cassette tapes by an English professor by the name of Dr. Elliot Engel on many of the great authors in history including Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Mark Twain and many others. Today these same presentations by Dr. Engel can be found at the library on CDs.
One of these presentations that I actually ordered directly from Dr. Engel was called “The Brilliance of Jane Austen.” One of the things Dr. Engel said about Jane in this presentation was that she was the greatest comic ironist in the English language.
He said that irony is a technique where what the audience is given by the author is different from what is expected. An example is to say, “The police station is unsafe.” You don’t expect a police station to be unsafe. He said that was simple irony but that great irony would be to say, “The police station was robbed.” You really don’t expect that!
Jane’s opening sentence in “Pride & Prejudice” is an example of great comic irony. She wrote, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
The irony is that in Jane Austen’s day it was really more the case that the women were in want of a husband in possession of a good fortune. Women in Jane’s society didn’t have the opportunities they have today and if they were going to have comfortable lives and a place in society, it was all dependent on who they married.
Another thing that led to my reading this book was that I had seen the “Sense and Sensibility” movie with Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant and the “Emma” movie with Gwyneth Paltrow. Both of these were great movies and I really enjoyed the humor in them. Because both of these movies were based on Jane Austen’s novels by these same titles, that generated an interest in me to read one of her novels to see what they were like.
I chose “Pride & Prejudice” because I had heard more talk about this one than any other.
In a movie Polly and I always liked with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan called “You’ve Got Mail,” Meg sends this email message to some unknown person she’s met on the internet who will turn out to be Tom Hanks: “Confession: I have read ‘Pride & Prejudice’ about 200 times. I get lost in the language, words like thither, mischance and felicity. I’m always in agony over whether Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth are going to get together. Read it, I know you’ll love it.”
I remembered they had talked about this book in this movie, but I hadn’t realized until I went back and watched the movie again after reading the book that what happens in Meg’s and Tom’s relationship in the movie follows very closely what happened between Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy in the book.
In the book, when Elizabeth first meets Darcy, she doesn’t like him very much. He comes across as being very proud and someone who thinks he’s better than everyone else. At the ball where they first meet, he refuses to dance with Elizabeth saying she’s not pretty enough.
After reading the book I watched the "Pride & Prejudice" movie where Keira Knightley plays the part of Elizabeth. There certainly did seem to be a great deal of irony when Mr. Darcy played by Matthew Macfadyen says Keira wasn’t pretty enough for him to dance with. I was thinking, “Do you need your head examined?”
But over time Elizabeth discovers that Darcy is really not anymore proud or prejudiced than she is, and that he is really a very good man that loves his sister just like Elizabeth loves hers, that he is very good to his servants, and that he has been smitten by Elizabeth and loves her very dearly regardless of her not having the social standing that he did.
One question reading this book has left me pondering is: “How did Jane Austen’s experiences find their way into this book and other books of hers?” I read that she had fallen head over hills in love with a young man when she was about 20 but that his family put an end to the relationship because of Jane’s lack of money. I also read that when she was about 27, she accepted a man’s proposal for marriage, but that although this man had money and land which were very important for a woman looking for security in those days, that he wasn’t very smart and didn’t have a very pleasing personality.
Jane retracted her acceptance of his proposal the very next day, which was unheard of in those days, realizing that she would have been marrying him for convenience and not for love.
I think Jane would have agreed that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I think she also would have agreed that it was better to have lost than to have gotten stuck with someone you couldn’t stand for the sake of money.
One thing is for sure, the things Jane experienced and observed in her society provided her with much comic material to write about and leave for our enjoyment and entertainment.
Rick Dominy, who agrees with Dr. Engel that Jane Austen was brilliant, is a resident of Gaston County and can be reached at 704-675-4862 or humorick007@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Gaston Gazette: Finding the humor in 'Pride & Prejudice'
