Have you had that feeling where its like waking up and realising that this book that changed your life, yuor point of view, just about everything about you, is about as real as a Disney movie? It happened to me once before with Ayn Rand, and now, I'm afraid its happened with Pride and Prejudice.
With "Atlas Shrugged", it was a slow awakening, as I shrugged off bits and pieces of the philisophy that had taken hold of so much of my imagination. With Pride and Prejudice, it happened in a flash. Suddenly, Elizabeth and Darcy were no longer who I wanted to be (or meet), and the last(?) of my illusions.
I blame it on Shannon Hale's "Austenland". Now, virtually every woman I know, has a favorite Austen, one to read and re-read, over and over again- i've vacillated, myself, between Persuasion and P&P. So I picked up Austenland- Shannon Hale's young adult stories are cute and funny, and I expected this one to be too.
And it was cute, and funny, and utterly disillusioning. Not because Elizabeth didn't get her Darcy, but because she did. And I wish she hadn't. Not because he wasn't a perfectly nice guy with a veneer of gruffness, that only that special woman could see through- actually, that's precisely why.
So it is a truth now, universally acknowledged that a woman -any woman- must be on the look out for a husband- why is it that Austen two centuries ago was so much more modern than we are now- all of us stuck in the 18th century?
No comments:
Post a Comment