Pride and Prejudice

The first time I tried to read Pride and Prejudice in high school, I was so bored and uninterested that I had put it down after less than a hundred pages. But the second time around, some half a decade later, the entire story finally took hold, and I was gripped the entire way. The topic is marriage, and with it comes wealth, social class, and all of the nuances of common sense and romantic sensibilities. The overarching theme of the whole book is about external appearances, as manifest in the externally cold and aloof Darcy who turns out to be warm and kind, to another affable, handsome Wickham who turns out to be no more than a philandering pauper. I’m glad that I finally matured enough to appreciate Austen’s style, and the novel’s come to me at a rather confusing time and lent me some of its good, stable, and even romantic wisdom.

The novel’s original, draft title was First Impressions, and this title is much more revealing of the book’s contents (at the cost of being plainer) than Pride and Prejudice. In the main romance of the story between Elizabeth and Darcy, their first impressions of each other were so grossly inaccurate, that it took the entire novel for the two to finally let go of their initial prejudices against each other and realize who the other person truly was. If the ostensible moral of the story is “don’t judge a book by its cover”, I wonder if the modern world with its speed and superficiality would render a modern remastering of Austen’s plot much more implausible. It seems rarer that a person would give another person that second, or third, or fourth chance, when there are so many more people to meet, or so we’re told as consolation for an unrequited or bygone love. It seems rarer if someone would rather pay special attention to the little details of another person, when there’s supposedly so much to pay attention to with oneself already. The saving grace and the immutable riddle of love is that the more one gives, the more one receives: perhaps excessive superficiality has already warned us against giving too much, and instead instructs to give as much as necessary to satisfy oneself to avoid being heartbroken on the way out. Much of the art and beauty that I admire are superficial in nature, and I’m still taking a deep look in myself and wondering if those aspects in my life have done more harm than good, and I’ve a long way to go.