Oh, what? Seriously? Holly, what? You were doing so good there with the Bowerbirds and your one-sided hatefest for Judd Apatow. But yeah, I'm busting out the Jane Austen. As with many other girls you probably interact with daily, Pride and Prejudice was my first brush with romance. (Ok, that's not exactly true, I'll admit my first brush with "romance" was the weird relationship between Leia and Han in the original Star Wars trilogy that, from a female point of view, was entirely one-dimensional and devoid of emotion. But more on how that messed me up as a child another time.) Before Twilight, before The Notebook, and I guess right around the time Titanic came out, for me, there was Pride and Prejudice. And like the kiss between Wesley and Buttercup in the Princess Bride, oh, Pride and Prejudice blew them all away.Oh, please let me explain Pride and Prejudice to you, male readers, because if you're like any of the other men in my life, you have made it to your mid-to-late twenties and have made a pretty solid effort up to now of avoiding letting this book into your life. I'm about to ruin that.
Pride and Prejudice is the Rosetta Stone for understanding the female mind when it comes to courtship. Everyone knows there's the seemingly peerless Mr. Darcy contained in its pages, and many men seem to think him some kind of Edward Cullen-esque paragon of sensitive masculinity that like moths to a candle, is the reason why the book is so loved by women the world over. You'll be shocked to learn that's not true. Mr. Darcy is made out to be a boorish bastard. Of course, his asshole behavior is nothing when compared to Bronte's Heathcliff, but he's not exactly Prince Charming, either. He is, as the title suggests, a proud son of a bitch. His flaws are made achingly apparent in the first half of the novel, and Elizabeth, the heroine, is utterly repulsed by him, never mind sexy square jaw or his fortune.
Personally, the reason I think the novel is so popular with women--especially when read as a young, developing girl--is that it disabuses us of the jejune notions we develop as children of what love is. Elizabeth is not a Disney princess and unlike many Disney movies where the female heroine only actually converses with the hero five minutes before the happy ending, P&P documents the entire back and forth of what is a messy, almost-tragic courtship. In a word, it's textured in every way a Disney movie is silk.
Like I said, it's literally how thousands of women the world over learn to appreciate love as something complicated. Reading the book is, for its 14-year-old reader, an emotional awakening. Ironically, it was a book about love that made me retreat from dating altogether. Too many young girls grow up thinking, be it because of Disney movies or shitty sitcoms like Everybody Loves Raymond, that the endgame of life is marriage. And too often, shitty romantic comedies make it seem like marriage is literally something you trip and fall into when the planets align or some junk like that. After reading it, P&P won't let you think that way anymore. You start to think about how much more growing up you need to do before you can find yourself even contemplating the idea of love, let alone marriage. That it's not a game of house you play into perpetuity, but something richly dynamic and powerful--you don't mess with it until you're ready.
I'm not going to say that P&P is a treatise on the suffering, ups and downs of an actual long-term relationship (spoiler alert: the book ends after the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Darcy). It doesn't contain the priceless heirloom vase-throwing fits Elizabeth probably would have about Darcy's need to intellectualize even the most trivial, mindless observations she makes about the servants' whistling or Darcy's retreats into the study every time Elizabeth's sisters come over and want to gossip about bonnets or whatever the hell the zeitgeist comparable to Sex and the City would have been back then. I mean, let's be real here: actual relationships with real, flesh and blood people have their moments of sheer pain, which is why I always commend movies like Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind or 500 Days of Summer because they succeed in portraying balance instead of glossing over rough patches in favor of Disney velvet. But I digress.
To reiterate, P&P is the way many women are introduced to love. The reader falls in love with Darcy in the same way, at the same time Elizabeth falls in love with him. In so doing, the reader, along with Elizabeth, learns to accept a flawed man for who he is, and comes to love his strengths more than she hates his defects. She forgives him his mistakes and readies herself for their future problems. It sounds incredibly straight-forward if you've ever fallen yourself into a flesh-and-blood relationship and have experienced this first-hand, but for a little girl raised to think love is easy once you find the right person, this is a lot to take in.
But even more than that, there are tidbits and hints along the way--introduced by other characters (namely all other female characters in the book)--that offer insight into the female mind even when she herself is not in the process of falling in love. Jane's many failed courtships illustrate the accumulated effect that half-ass male affection has on a woman's self-esteem and ergo, her extreme guardedness with the next suitor, in the form of kind-hearted, but love-stupid Mr. Bingley. Lydia's and Kitty's--and in a way even their mother, Mrs. Bennet's--manic obsession with men and male attention illustrates exactly the kind naivete towards love many girls and young women carry with them about love until they are eventually disabused of it (either through the safety of good literature or through the harshness of reality). And even poor Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth's homely best friend, has to come to terms that her childhood dreams will never pan out, because as a woman, she is judged not on the basis of her character or the warmth in her heart, but on her sexual appeal.
In this way, P&P is thick with lessons about the female experience. It's long been "discovered" anew by each successive generation of young women since its publication and is timeless precisely because of its insight--not, as is often assumed, because of the Colin Firth fantasies its BBC adaptation inspires. Besides, the movies can only capture a fraction of the education Austen packed into its pages. It's like having a much older friend sit down next to you and explain to you the many horrible things men will do to you as you grow up but never takes away your hope that one day you're going to find one that makes putting up with all those assholes worth it. But it's also careful not to let you slip into a Disney fantasy, instead putting you on your guard that Mr. Darcy could be almost anyone, as even the plainest men become handsome with affection.
It's a lesson in reality, and it's remarkable fiction in the sense that it has intergenerational staying power. For this reason, I so highly, highly recommend at least giving this book a shot as a male and not writing it off as a Regency-era predecessor to Twilight. Honestly, I'm getting sick and tired of the horribly unfair comparison.
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