Tea at Trianon: What Elizabeth Bennet Knew

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, June 8, 2013

What Elizabeth Bennet Knew

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is 200 years old this year. To quote Daniel McInerny:

In the passage we have been considering, Elizabeth chastises herself for a want of discernment (lack of prudence), an overestimation of her abilities (improper pride), and a blindness to her defects (lack of humility). A similar moral accounting is made later in the novel by Darcy. The central narrative arc of the novel is thus a movement on the part of each of these characters from appearance to reality, from “first impressions” (Austen’s original title for the novel) to “full-fledged knowledge of who they really are.” And in coming to a clearer self-recognition, both Elizabeth and Darcy take the first step toward that friendship based on virtue that is the life’s blood of their romance.

In this year 2013, we celebrate the 200^th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice. There are many qualities that make the novel great and its television and film adaptations so enjoyable. Audiences for 200 years have been captivated perhaps above all by Elizabeth and Darcy’s romance. But while their romance is indeed overwhelmingly charming, we miss the entire point of Austen’s novel if we fail to see that it is first and foremost a story of moral transformation that begins with self-knowledge. (Read entire post.)