I still remember the day I made two boys take turns reading Mr. So, I avoided hurt whenever I could. I skipped school dances. I spent every single lunch in solitude, reading Shakespearean sonnets without knowing the first thing about real-life romance. I lived by the rule that if a guy talked to me, he either wanted to copy my homework or ask for directions or.
Out of necessity, I grew stronger and less weepy over time. I learned to talk back to my mother when she criticized me unfairly, and flip the bird at men and their obscenities. Yet I still found myself returning time and again to Austen, finding comfort—or was it self-flagellation? But then, one day, something changed. I flipped open my well-worn copy of Pride and Prejudice , and just like that, the marriage plot no longer did it for me.
It was none other than Mary Bennet, the sole unattractive member of her family. In real life, Mary, plain and unaccomplished, would undoubtedly be just as overlooked and underestimated. But I confess they would have no charms for me. And the more I observed Mary, the more I began to see clues to her true personality. She displays her questionable musical prowess in front of a snobbish audience, regardless of having received no formal training in her life.
In the one instance in which she contemplates marriage in the novel, she clearly considers herself superior—not submissive—to her imagined partner Mr. Collins and begins strategizing ways in which to improve him. And there will be more Mary to come. The books mingle across the literary spectrum to insist on Mary as a subject rather than an object, as a person rather than a mere foil. They assume something that Pride and Prejudice , via its narrator, refused to believe: that someone like Mary could have a rich interior life.
Austen is not George Eliot, after all; she is neither copious nor comprehensive in her empathies. Her narrator, in Pride and Prejudice , is judgy. She plays favorites. She mocks.
She deploys her wit with surgical strikes. That is what makes her such an enduring delight to engage with, but it also serves another function, Jones argues. Andrew Aoyama. The modern Marian resurgence suggests not so much the death of the author as the reincarnation: People are finding value in Mary even if Austen, on the whole, did not. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Mary Bennet. View source. History Talk 0. They would doubtless be congenial with the generality of female minds.
But I confess they would have no charms for me. I should infinitely prefer a book. I, Ch.
0コメント