Pride and Prejudice

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Many thanks to James for arranging the Pride and Prejudice event on Thursday.
I was fascinated by the talk on remix culture and by the lady in the audience who seemed to be casting doubt on whether this is a legitimate form of literature and whether people should be paid for writing it.
I confess I did not know what remix culture was, being the wrong side of 50 (though not quite yet an old fogey!).
Comic or satirical parodies of great literature seem a great idea and I really don't understand why that would offend purists or traditionalists. Austen, particularly, seems ripe for parody.
I have written a review of the book and add it here:

REVISITING Jane Austen is rather like going back to see irritating old friends who shock and sicken you with their despicably, unashamedly materialistic values in an unfairly privileged setting – brandishing their wealth in palatial piles like gaudy gold tassels on a high-class hooker’s bra – yet entrance you at the same time with their effortless elegance, elan and smartly sardonic wit.
“Superior consequence” is at the heart of Pride and Prejudice in the sense that superiority is only really of any consequence if it is used to enhance a collective rather than an individual. But who really are the superiors? what does consequence mean? And, crucially, who comprises the collective?
Why would anyone care if the people who comprise the collective know the price of everything yet know the value of absolutely zilch? The distorting lens of obscene wealth makes everything and everyone obscene and in desperate need of redemption. Jane Austen’s task, then, is to initially make us like these entertaining grotesques, very probably in spite of ourselves, and then lead us to a pleasing and just redemption which brings hope and optimism for a better meta world in the future.
Elizabeth Bennett seems to be the voice of the author, constantly wondering what the answers to these questions are herself. Dear Eliza (I always have to resist the temptation to ape Austen’s affected yet breathlessly paced and instantly engaging prose style) concentrates her efforts on the aloof and taciturn Mr Darcy, largely because he epitomises superiority in almost everything he says and does.
He would have been superior at that time because he was a man not a woman, he had inherited enormous wealth and was not a poor pauper, and he had breeding, discernment and education and was not the village idiot.
But could he possibly also be a nice guy and could our dear Eliza – whose future happiness, like all the vacuous and decorative single women in the novel (they rate their value based on how many dances eligible bachelors ask them for at the ball rather than how well they dance), seems to rely on making a suitable match – really give her heart to him? The journey from hating him to loving him is tortuous and often contradictory for dear Eliza. She riles against him, finding him offensive and rude, then she finds him attractive and warm, then riles against him, then finds him attractive and warm. She is dizzy with distaste which turns into, whisper it, desire (though film and television versions, of course, overplay the desire – I can find nothing in the novel to even suggest that Fitzwilliam Darcy might partly strip to swim in a lake and shortly after encounter Miss Bennett).
This makes dear Eliza quite different to many of the other women, who seem to settle on husbands in the way homeless wanderers settle on accommodating, dry doorways in shops. Take Charlotte Lucas, who takes the hand of the odious Mr Collins. “Without thinking highly either of men or matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want.”
Dear Eliza, however, admits that “It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley”. She is a pragmatist, after all, though there is apparently a proven link between the state of a man’s garden and the state of his mind.
I can think of no better summary of an entire novel in the opening paragraph than “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”. In many ways, you do not need to read any further.
Pride and Prejudice (today it might be called Superiority and Snobbery), not in my opinion as good as Austen’s Emma, makes me wonder whether Austen was contemptuous of these characters and was engaging in social satire? I also wonder how aware she was of female emancipation?
The novel ends, of course, with a double wedding. I wonder if everyone threw confetti at the two couples. I might have been tempted to throw something far less decorative and fragrant but I’m sure that would have been of no consequence at all.
Garry W. Gibbs
http://garrywgibbs.wordpress.com