About

Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

Monthly Archives

Join Og's Mailing List

OgBlog.net

PRIDE and PREJUDICE BETRAYED

At least, so says JAMES BOWMAN in his regular column for THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR

In his REVIEW OF THE MOVIE, he says we get

a badly unbalanced if visually impressive film that ends up being a vulgarization of Miss Austen’s novel.

This rather harsh judgment is carefully supported by his article, in passages like the following.

The whole point of Elizabeth Bennet’s initial rejection of Mr. Darcy has to do with a deficiency of manners which she loudly proclaims to his face without realizing that her own moral judgment is to be faulted for being too hastily arrived at.

You won’t understand any of this from the film. It is clear that its Elizabeth doesn’t like Mr. Darcy at first, but this is only because of his behavior to her and her sister and not because he has fallen short of a more generally implied social standard. She is also under a misapprehension about his behavior toward Mr. Wickham (Rupert Friend), whom she likes. But that there might be anything more than personal preferences and real or imagined personal slights in all this the film gives us no hint. Jane Austen’s Elizabeth disapproves of Darcy not just because he is disagreeable to her but because he has behaved in a way that she and her society believe is objectively wrong.

I want to watch the movie again before I buy into this interpretation too completely, but I’m suspicious that he has it just about right.

I’m thinking about this right now most especially because Gail and I have just finished reading Jane’s original novel out loud together - my first time to actually read the book, everything I thought I knew about PRIDE and PREJUDICE having come from watching the BBC production. There are some wonderful things in the book that didn’t make the cut for the mini-series - one of these is the exchange of letters between Elizabeth and her Aunt Gardiner after they had met Mr. Darcy at Pemberley…...very rich!

Anyhow, as soon as we’d read the original, we adjourned to the other room and watched the entire mini-series through at one sitting - fortunately, we’re both recovering from flu, so we began around six or seven p.m. I must say that we were really impressed with how closely this video production comes to reproducing the sense and the essence of the book. Yes, we noticed again how “swept up” everything, including the driveways and paths, is—unless some mud is needed, in which case “there it is!” But, this is a minor quibble….it seems to us that these are early 19th century people, not 21st century people dropped into a 19th century venue.

Some of you may already have seen my earlier mention of FITZWILLIAM DARCY, GENTLEMAN by PAMELA AIDAN in the blog run by my talented children over at camacho.tv . But, I just checked and these books are STILL not in the top 100 sellers at Amazon, and that’s where they really ought to be. More seriously, these books are true (in language, sensibility, and culture) to both Jane Austen AND to the BBC production. If you treasure the original as we do, you will very much enjoy this version of the story as well.

As we read the original novel we kept exclaiming about how Ms. Aidan had picked up on various hints given by Jane Austen in order to make her “backstory” (of what Darcy was doing whenever he left the scenes of P&P) authentic and coherent with the original. What was even more fun was to find that some of the “extra” materials from the BBC production were ALSO picked up on by Ms. Aidan, making it plain (to us, at least) that she is very familiar with this mini-series. One example (of a number) is the fencing scene when Darcy returns to town from his rejection in Kent. It’s VERY short in the BBC video, but ends up playing a pivotal role in getting Darcy started toward his own ideal of a gentleman. Please risk a few bucks on at least the first book - you will not be disappointed.

For those of you who have read some horrible “sequel” to P&P, such as Mr. Darcy’s Daughters by Elizabeth Aston, please be assured that we HATED that one!! Awful, clunky prose telling the story of thoroughly (and icky) 20th century people pretending to inhabit the 19th century. We quit reading after a couple of chapters and returned it to the person who loaned it to us.

Hat Tip for the Bowman review is to
a WONDERFUL BLOG I was recently referred to.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/04 at 07:57 PM

Comments and reactions