Response #1: Pride and Prejudice

I ended up enjoying Pride and Prejudice much more than I expected to. I had read Jane Eyre in high school and despite its acclaim just couldn’t get into the storyline. The Victorian backdrop and style of the story bored me at the time and I struggled to get through the book. This was more than a few years ago so I think I probably need to take another pass at it. In spite of this I found Pride Prejudice to be an enjoyable read. The dialogue was much wittier and funnier than I expected and I found myself chuckling aloud at some of the character’s snarky remarks to one another. What struck me most about the book however was how surprisingly relatable the gender dynamics where. Since the 1790’s women’s rights and gender equality has advanced a great deal. Elizabeth and the female characters in the book are extremely limited in their life choices and opportunities. Their best hope for financial security and stability is to marry. Today women have the right to vote, can own property, pursue more diverse paths in life, and enjoy autonomy and sovereignty in a way that was nearly impossible during earlier points in history. In spite of the legal and social advances I saw many of the troubling gender dynamics I experience and witness today to be strikingly mirrored in Austen’s book.
One particular scene that resonated with me was when Mr. Collins proposed to Elizabeth. Collins completely disregards Elizabeth’s answer telling her “that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept… and that sometimes the refusal is repeated a second, or even a third time.” (Austen 104) The general distrust of women and their words is something that has persevered to varying degrees right up to the present day. Mr. Collins perceives Elizabeth as somehow playing a game or trying to trick him, he doesn’t take what she says at face value and assumes she is being disingenuous. Today we are still experiencing a lack of credence to our own words. Men will often refuse to hear the word no from a women they are pursuing this can range from the sexual to the social but if I am out at a bar or being hit on by someone I don’t have any interest in I know that most sure fire way to actually have my rebuffing appreciated is to say “I have a boyfriend.” A woman saying “no” carries little to no weight for too many men in such situations and women are characterized as “playing hard to get.”
Another scene that struck a cord with me was during the aftermath of Lydia’s departure when Mary remarks to Elizabeth “…that loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable; that one false step involves her in endless ruin; that her reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful…” (Austen 275) I think this ideology is very much present today in how women are seen and how they see themselves. It is very easy for women to damage their reputation through sexual behavior, much more so than it is for men. In our society women’s sexuality is commodified both literally and socially, many people see women who are sexually liberal as devaluing themselves on a whole.
I didn’t expect a piece of literature from the 1790’s to be so relatable to my own life in 2014. It was very interesting to find such striking parallels between my experience as women and the experiences of women from centuries ago. I think that this speaks to the lengths at which we have yet to go as a society. Legally women have achieved much in terms of gender equality and there have been many advances made socially and societally as well. What remains now are deeply entrenched social ideologies about men and women that we have all been so deeply conditioned to believe that they are the most difficult to identify and uproot.

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