Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen wrote six complete novels in her relatively short lifetime, all of which are pretty well known and successful. Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, was Austen’s second novel and perhaps her best loved. The storyline follows a family with five daughters. Though the girls want to marry for love, at least one must marry "well," meaning marry a rich man, for the sake of the family’s financial security.

To think about Pride and Prejudice in historical-terms, you have to realize that there was a "war of ideas" going on at this time, and boy was it bloody. It was taking place everywhere – in art, politics, society. On one side was the "Romantic movement," which was a response to the Enlightenment ideal of rationalism. The Romantics were all, "let’s talk about our feeeelings" and "let’s return to nature." The Romantics were reacting against the firmly entrenched conservatives who really liked rules, tradition, and the rigid conformity of the scientific method.

Every day the Romantics would express their ideas, and then the conservatives would express theirs, and the ideas would fight in these mad air battles all over England. But which side was Pride and Prejudice fighting on? Last we checked, it’s complicated, just like your last relationship status on Facebook. Pride and Prejudice has some characteristics of the Romantic movement, namely, that it deals with feelings, but love in Pride and Prejudice is still grounded in a certain kind of rationalism and celebration of human intelligence; Elizabeth and Darcy make sense as a balanced, complementary couple, and it is only after their heads come to terms with their hearts that they are ready to get engaged. So there are at least two reasonable options for thinking about Pride and Prejudice in the context of this intellectual war: it’s either waving a white flag between the conservatives and the Romantics, or else it’s simply ignoring them altogether.

But wait! There was another war. Well, maybe it was more like a friendly discussion. This conflict was going on in the literary world, where the novel was just growing up. There were two decisions a writer could take during this time – she could focus on developing her characters’ tortured inner lives so we could read all about their psychological torment, or she could focus on developing awesome storylines with great action sequences.

Pride and Prejudice was one of the first novels to bring both of these together – the characters’ complex inner lives don’t prevent them from living within an interesting plot. Austen weaves the two together skillfully by giving the less important characters a similarly less interesting inner life – Lydia’s character and her elopement, for example, is used to demonstrate the depth of Darcy’s commitment to Elizabeth and her family. By synthesizing these two novel forms, Austen helped the modern novel grow up.

We could talk about Pride and Prejudice in terms of class, gender, family, pride, and prejudice and other serious topics, but we're starting to fear that we've lost a fundamentally important perspective: silly teen emotions.

That's right; Pride and Prejudice is possibly one of the first romantic comedies ever. Needless to say, the genre took off from there. Many wonder why this is so – what's so funny about love, anyway?

You mean, aside from a twenty pounds overweight Renée Zellweger in Bridget Jones’s Diary? Or Julia Roberts flossing her gums in Pretty Woman? How about the fact that the devastating obstacles that filmmakers like to put in the path of true love are always funny? We can laugh because we know that a nice happy couple is waiting at the end of that movie. Ever watch a romantic comedy that had a tragic ending? (And no, Romeo and Juliet does not count.)

Reality aside, we like our romance watered down and humored-up. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Pretty Woman, She's All That – these films all use love as the mechanism to either break down or bridge social realities. Maid in Manhattan and Sabrina do the same. Poor girl (figuratively or literally) meets wealthy man (figuratively or literally), gets swept off her feet, and lives happily ever after is a chronically recurring storyline.

And yet, despite these glaring similarities, we feel that Pride and Prejudice is a huge notch above your average date night romantic comedy. Pride and Prejudice supposedly stands in contrast to this sort of fluffy (yet fun) entertainment. Austen's characters have a certain fullness to them; the richness of their personalities allows them to inhabit the page and our heads as fully realized characters. Elizabeth and Darcy both undergo some major character shifts and transformations that you just don’t see in your average romantic comedy. So grab your popcorn, jelly beans, and soda and enjoy this romantic comedy that actually counts in English class.