I’m So Fucking Serious When I Say ‘whether A Person Can Understand The Chronology Of Pride And Prejudice

I’m so fucking serious when I say ‘whether a person can understand the chronology of Pride and Prejudice is a marker of intelligence.’

Like. The reader receives very detailed character study of Darcy in the first half of the book that omits one very crucial detail of why he decided to indulge himself in his absolute worst traits in the scene in which he is introduced. This allows the reader to assume that this is his base state and not Darcy at his worst. Then the reader is, via Wickham, fed a fictitious account of Darcy at his worst which really does make him look like a villain who could and would have the power to make the lives of his family utterly miserable. Then at the midpoint of the book we are given information about what occurred prior to the start of the book which recontextualises everything about both Darcy and Wickham. Most people understand this should change their understanding of Wickham because Elizabeth explicitly dwells on it and thinks about how this changes her opinion of why he was behaving the way he was when Elizabeth and Wickham met. A surprisingly large amount of people don’t seem to realise that this should also change their understanding of Darcy, possibly because Elizabeth doesn’t explicitly dwell on these same facts being the reason Darcy was behaving the way he was when Elizabeth and Darcy met.

This makes sense from Elizabeth’s perspective because the primary way in which she relates to both Darcy and Wickham is as men who are courting her and who she has to decide to encourage or reject based on limited information, and Elizabeth has already been established to have an extremely low tolerance for male and marital bullshit — see Mr Collins, who is not brutal or economically foolhardy but simply an insecure ass who needs to be intensively managed. Darcy on a bad day is still a pretty good guy, but he’s Elizabeth’s absolute upper limit of how much she is prepared to put up with in terms of ‘my husband is having a bad day and I have to deal with it’ so it’s not enough for her to know he can be like that. She needs further encouragement that Darcy on an okay or good day is an actively nice, pleasant, responsible person to be around — which is what we get at Pemberley and in Aunt Gardiner’s observation of him.

But. But. YOU ARE NOT ELIZABETH, DEAR READER. You are getting to read about all these characters and their flaws. Which is why you need to understand when Elizabeth is wrong or doesn’t notice something!