Pride and Prejudice: ‘Lydia’s gape’

Abstract

Terry Castle asked us recently to look seriously at the question: ‘How bad are most of the novels produced by English women writers in the decades before Jane Austen?’²⁷⁸ Since Jane Spencer demonstrated that Austen did not emerge fully formed from the mists of women’s pre-literate history, we have been rightly preoccupied with documenting the relatively long and complex history of women’s writing prior to Austen. Perhaps this has drawn our attention from acknowledging the specific nature of her achievement in the context of that history.

In the face of the two possibilities which might seduce the imagination — an eternal summer or a winter just as eternal, the former licentious to the point of corruption, the latter pure to the point of sterility — man must resign himself to choosing equilibrium and the periodicity of the seasonal rhythm. In the natural order, the latter fulfils the same function which is ful- filled in society by the exchange of women in marriage and the exchange of words in conversation, when these are practised with the frank intention of communicating, that is to say, with- out trickery or perversity, and above all, without hidden motives. Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Incest and Myth’²⁷⁵

The simplest way out of the sacrificial situation, for the storyteller, is the Proserpine solution.

Northrop Frye, Secular Scripture²⁷⁶

8.50 am

Mmm. Wonder what Mark Darcy would be like as father (father to own offspring, mean. Not self. That would indeed be sick in manner of Oedipus)?

Bridget Jones, Bridget Jones’ Diary: The Edge of Reason²⁷⁷