“My dear Jane, Mr. Collins is a conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man; you know this, as well as I do; and you must feel, as well as I do, that the woman who marries him, cannot have a proper way of thinking.”
– Elizabeth, Volume II Chapter I
I have been digging into Jane Austen’s big book lately, and it feels good to be reading something so unabashedly English again, both in terms of complex language and plot. The English is beautiful, of course, though it takes some practice to be able to read this dense style efficiently. The ideas being expressed aren’t so different from our own, though the infrastructure of meaning, the words and flowing sentences, are more ornate and complicated. An acceptance that words are going to be used in ways that are slightly different than our own usage is a must. Daring explorers are rewarded with a trove, a bounty, of lovely interesting phrases.
“ready acquiescence”
“these sort of inconstancies are very frequent.”
“thwarted”
The unique way that Austen folds sarcasm and cutting evaluations of character into intricate, vocabulary-dense sentences is surely part of why she is such a famous and beloved writer. But sometimes the bullshit is slashed right through, and we are shown gems like the quotation at the top of this post. There, Lizzy speaks directly to what everybody, reader included, had been thinking for the past hundred or so pages: Mr. Collins is a dipshit and an idiot. I laughed when I reached that sentence, because it is so different than the language we are accustomed to in the novel and because the feeling conveyed is not one minute out of date. We say the same things in the same way about people when comforting our friends today, except the words and phrasing is a little different.
Between these glimmers of light are long periods of visitation in which language must be employed like a dagger between a smile. If life was anything like the novels say, being of the higher class in old England sounds like a major chore. Neighbors and family could descend upon your household at any time, and polite custom was that you’d entertain them. From Defoe to Austen we find the living room to be a maze of endless small talk and gossip. Protagonists have to fake ill just to escape. The neighbors are trying to pry open your brain with blunt talk of the weather! I argued, once, that the English custom of visits acted as a kind of social prison, a living room panopticon. The constant surveillance from visiting neighbors ensures that perverse, criminal, or marginal behaviors are neatly suppressed. And in novels, the surveillance really does seem constant! Every other chapter of Pride and Prejudice takes place in a dining room or living room and seems to surround the visit of somebody or other.
It is refreshing when Elizabeth breaks free and let’s something real slip out. She is a wonderful protagonist precisely because she manages to break rules constantly. She’s like a bull in a language china shop. I am just making my way into the second volume of the book now, and I am unspoiled. I have no clue what will happen to the characters beyond a general sense that Darcy will turn out to be an okay guy in the end. I wonder, however, if the prospect of getting married will force Lizzy into conforming and putting aside her rebellious charm. That would be a tragic low point!