Subject: Pride and Prejudice I have read two novels by Jane Austen. The first was Northanger Abbey, which was a bright and humorous stab at 19th-century upper-class culture and the vagaries of adolescent femininity. Since Northanger Abbey was not published in Austens lifetime, I mistakenly thought that the one book of hers which most gets propped up as literature, Pride and Prejudice would be at least as good, if not better. I was horribly disappointed. To my thinking, Pride and Prejudice is simply one more boring 19th-century novel about boring, self-obsessed rich people and their ludicrous, boring problems. Now, I understand that the bulk of people who would actually purchase novels in the late nineteenth century were themselves boring, self-obsessed rich people or at least boring, self-obsessed people who aspired to be rich. I fully understand why the book was popular in its time. What I fail to understand is how this truly boring, superficial, and trivial novel continues to be touted as literature when its only redeeming feature is that it is mercifully short. While reading popular books of an era can give insights regarding the people and culture of the era, literature remains literature because it has remained relevant to the concerns of readers over the entire intervening time. John Steinbecks The Pearl, for example, is a timeless kind of fable masked in the form of a short novel. Mary Shelleys Frankenstein remains relevant today because, for example, science continues to need to ask and answer moral questions about whether what science could be used for should be done. As a modern reader, I utterly fail to appreciate or understand how or why the behaviors of boring, self-obsessed rich people of the nineteenth century could or would remain relevant to any but the smallest group of twenty-first-century readers. Again, the fact that it was popular for its time is not especially important. Ann Radcliffes gothic-romantic novels were popular for their time, and they are important if one is studying literary development in the 19th century, yet they are not and never have been considered to be literature. Stephen Kings Needful Things was a bestseller when it came out, but it is not and never should be considered to be literature. On the other hand, Stephen Kings Misery is highly likely to remain relevant to readers a century or more after its publication and may very well one day meet the criteria for literature. Hence, I am left with a question: Why is Pride and Prejudice propped up as literature? How does it remain relevant to modern readers? What is it that people continue to identify within the work that leads to its continued popularity?
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 09:12:39 +0000
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