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mrdarcysdadbod · 17 hours ago

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Not to be cliche, but Jane Austen's novels are a lot about how great power & wealth should come with great responsibility, and how most of the wealthy and powerful fail at that. She's asking questions like, "Is that insanely wealthy person polite, charitable, and considerate in a way that befits his station in life?" and she's finding most of them wanting.

#this is why it's so frustrating to see people just dismiss Austen's social commentary out of hand bc it's not suited to a modern lens.#like mansfield park is really the perfect example of this bc there's something so scathing about how Fanny (who is poor and sickly and ill #bred and they have such conniptions about her lack of education) is the only one with any moral backbone. it's not an accident that two of #the gentry most explicitly connected to slavery (general tilney and sir Thomas Bertram) are also some of the worst. austen is very much #aware and critical of the rot pervading the upper classes! but that criticism works in part by holding them up against what they could and #should be exemplifying. bc she recognizes also that people who do their duties and behave the way they should are able to do enormous good w #the power they have. tbh it's part of why Gaskell and Austen go so well together as social critics bc they're both equally able to see the #weaknesses and failures of certain social structures AS WELL AS how well they work when they work well.

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mrdarcysdadbod · 18 hours ago

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“Oh we love Jane Austen her stories are so great and her characters so good it's just too bad they were all stuck in silly stupid stuffy oppressive old-fashioned times that no doubt irritated and offended their plucky progressive viewpoints and modern sensibilities...” Lord grant me restraint.

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mrdarcysdadbod · 3 days ago

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the funniest part of much ado is after claudio and hero get engaged and beatrice is like “meanwhile I’m over here!!! forever alone!!! I wish someone like don pedro would ask me to marry him haha!!” and don pedro is like “would you like me to marry you?” and beatrice says no.

#much ado about nothing #Shakespeare

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mrdarcysdadbod · 4 days ago

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Elizabeth Gaskell really said, in the year 1848, "Why don't we take a minute and try to understand drug addicts and why they indulge in such dangerous habits before we judge them."

It is true, much of their morbid power might be ascribed to the use of opium. But before you blame too harshly this use, or rather abuse, try a hopeless life, with daily cravings of the body for food. Try, not alone being without hope yourself, but seeing all around you reduced to the same despair, arising from the same circumstances; all around you telling (though they use no words or language), by their looks and feeble actions, that they are suffering and sinking under the pressure of want. Would you not be glad to forget life, and its burdens? And opium gives forgetfulness for a time.

The empathy of this author is astounding.

#elizabeth gaskell #mary barton #oop there's one for the summer reading list

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mrdarcysdadbod · 5 days ago

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Wait so the difference between Darcy x Lizzy and Margaret x Thornton is that after a disastrous, rejected proposal, Darcy says well I’m going to become a better person and continue doing nice things for you from the shadows even though your opinion of me has reached an all-time low, while Thornton says I’m going to keep doing nice things for you and your family and taking your past advice to heart even though my opinion of you has reached an all-time low.

#technically thornton gets on a sadness bus and sulks for a few hours but otherwise yeah #pride and prejudice #north and south

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mrdarcysdadbod · 11 days ago

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Pride and Prejudice (1995) + Text Posts (6/?)

#bsnabsnsnbdiwnsjkahduwj #pride and prejudice #1995 pride and prejudice

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mrdarcysdadbod · 11 days ago

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i would so go on a walk with you

#pride and prejudice

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mrdarcysdadbod · 12 days ago

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Exactly exactly! I was just revisiting the book on this addition, your point about her disapproving of Milton and how he runs the mill even if her opinion changes, and there's a scene towards the end, after he's gone bankrupt and when he's in London, where he's at a dinner part at the Lennoxes and talking to a member of parliament (Margaret is listening in) about a change in his perspective on how masters and hands should relate to each other, about promoting more interaction and understanding between the classes and some experiments he wants to do in changing the running of the mills, and then:

Suddenly, as if a new idea had struck him, he crossed over to where Margaret was sitting, and began, without preface, as if he knew she had been listening to all that had passed: “Miss Hale, I had a round-robin from some of my men—I suspect in Higgins’ handwriting—stating their wish to work for me, if ever I was in a position to employ men again on my own behalf. That was good, wasn’t it?” “Yes. Just right. I am glad of it,” said Margaret, looking up straight into his face with her speaking eyes, and then dropping them under his eloquent glance.

Which is, like - first of all, the earnestness of "That was good, wasn't it?" is absolutely killing me. Secondly, this very much contextualizes her returning the mill to him within their ongoing debate over class relations, and the role of the masters: there's an implicit expression of trust in her giving him this opportunity, that it's her saying not only does she want to give this to him as someone she cares for and wants to help, but that she trusts him to be upright and treat his employees fairly, including her dear friend Higgins. And there's something almost artless about the way he approaches her, too, to be like "see, I did a good job, and all these people would say so, including people whose opinion you value." And he's not doing this to try and get the mill deal from her, or any sort of deal, because that's not who he is, he really just needs her to think well of him and know he's been doing his best as a man and an employer. And then he gets that validation and more!!!

So throughout North and South there's all these instances of Margaret needing to be the Backbone of her family/community/acquaintance/whatever, and roll up her sleeves and do the hard work or put aside her feelings to deal with problems, starting with her father having her be the one to tell her mother they're moving, and persisting through the move to Milton and her mother's illness and death, and then even outside the family circle, she's the one who goes and tells Boucher's wife that he's dead (because Higgins and Mr. Hale pussy out) and she's the one that literally takes the blow meant for Thornton, and ultimately to her this is her duty, and it's the right and noble and just thing to do, and she's not lying when she tells Thornton that she would've done the same for any man in that crowd, because all Margaret does all the time is take care of other people, and nobody ever takes care of her.

Which, in my opinion, is why it becomes such an affecting thing that Thornton takes care of the coroner's inquest even as he tries to think so lowly of her. Like, yes, people show Margaret kindness and care (otherwise she never could have coped with, like, everything lmao) but it's mostly out of a sense of obligation, and imo it's not equal to what she does for everyone else. Meanwhile here's Thornton, who's been rejected by her, who thinks poorly of her (and even more poorly still after she knows that he knows that she lied to the cops), who isn't her friend and owes her nothing, but still intervenes to protect her, and brings fruit to her ailing mother, and entreats his own mother to try and advise her (as disastrous as it was) and I just like...

Ok I'm gonna get emotional about this but I feel like Thornton definitely understands that she's sensitive to acts of service as acts of love, so at the very end when she's making the offer to invest in his mill, an act of service that will both save him from ruin and protect his pride, they're FINALLY face to face, speaking the same language and understanding each other, and it's SO telling to me that the scene immediately before has Lennox despairing of his idea to ask Margaret to marry him again, just because she talked to him about the idea of the investment scheme and, like. There's no way she casually threw in the line "oh and I'm in love with Thornton, nbd" but the entire idea is just such an enormous expression of love that, like. Yeah of COURSE she's hopelessly in love with this man! And the same way that Thornton's ending the inquest revealed to Margaret the depth of his feelings and made her understand that he loved her (truly, genuinely loved her with no hope of return and even when she was at the worst she could be in his opinion), Margaret saving the mill is telling Thornton that she loves him in a way she literally could not have expressed more clearly with words and I'm just,,,, damn

#margaret like yes you did a good job. actually saying it with words is not enough I need to make a business deal.#north and south #elizabeth gaskell

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mrdarcysdadbod · 18 days ago

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The fact that we don't have a Clueless-style Northanger Abbey adaptation where Catherine Morland is the most heartbreakingly earnest and unselfaware teenage fangirl with one of the longest self-insert fics on Ao3 is actually a tragedy

#northanger abbey #sorry if I've made this post before it's just that I think about it all the time #mr darcys dad jokes #she needs to be in that cringe larval era where you write reams and reams of iddy garbage so in ten years she can write the seminal work for #a juggernaut ship that every fanbinder prints a copy of

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mrdarcysdadbod · 18 days ago

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It's not unsympathetic I love Marianne and you're right. This is her downfall bc she's SO upset about someone she wasn't that close to getting murdered that it actually looks REALLY suspicious. Like she's not faking it for attention it's just rocking her to her core to think that this could happen to someone she knew in Real Life.

Marianne and Catherine and Fanny are all equally likely to get caught alone with a murderer but for different reasons (Marianne is trusting, Catherine is so high on the rush of her nancy drew/scooby doo moment that she gets the murderer alone on purpose to do the Confrontation and is only later like wait i didn't think this through, Fanny is caught in a social comedy of errors where out of an intense desire not to be rude or bothersome she ends up alone with the murderer and playing the dumbest anyone's ever been while also freaking out about whether it's immoral to lie under these circumstances)

I picked up another one of those "Jane Austen heroine solves a murder" books but this one is about Emma which is maybe the most correct pick for Murder Solving Austen Heroine. Anyway here's my list in order of most to least likely to (try and) solve a murder:

Catherine Morland - not only did she try and solve a murder, she invented a murder just so she could solve it. Iconic. Catherine would leap at the chance to solve an ACTUAL murder that she knew for SURE happened. Whether she's successful depends entirely on how closely the crime followed the plot of the average Regency CSI episode. Either she gets it in one or makes ten wrong guesses in a row. RIP Cathy you would've been the true crime girlie of all time

Emma Woodhouse - she's the smartest prettiest nosiest bitch in Highbury she has appointed herself lead detective (Harriet is the junior detective taking notes and gasping at the correct times) and she Will get to the Bottom of This. Sets up a dramatic reveal to accuse completely the wrong person, but in a way that lets someone else (probably Knightley or Jane Fairfax) figure out who the actual murderer was.

Lizzie Bennet - depends on 1) who died and 2) where. If there's any possibility Lydia did it she does NOT want to know and will interfere with the investigation. If it doesn't affect her personally she wants to know what's going on but is minding her business about it. If it affects her personally she's actually probably the most effective crime solver of the lot presuming she and Darcy can work together (if they're at odds her beef obscures her intellect) (i have not read death comes to pemberly nobody bring it up thank u)

Marianne Dashwood - honestly more likely to be, like, a witness or somehow involved with the victim and get accused of a crime of passion. I think she could figure it out to clear her name but she has to work around Elinor being like LET THE POLICE DO THEIR JOBS.

Anne Elliot - witnessed the whole thing bc the killer didn't notice her in the room. Fortunately Wentworth is willing to listen to her and it gets solved quickly.

Fanny Price - witnessed the whole thing bc the killer didn't notice her but nobody listens to her except the killer who then kidnaps her to tie up loose ends. Edmund rescues her and when he's like "why would you come after Fanny" and the killer's like "well she saw the whole thing" they're all like "Fanny why wouldn't you say anything" and she just stares into the camera like. Ok.

Elinor Dashwood - not her circus NOT her monkey also she's impeding the investigation bc the victim was Willoughby and she helped Colonel Brandon hide the body.

#mr darcys dad jokes #it's easy to rag on Marianne but please understand I do love her. i think dramatic girls are the cornerstone of society in many ways.

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mrdarcysdadbod · 19 days ago

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I'm in love w this response you're SO right.

I will say as someone who enjoys a procedural show but isn't into detective fiction otherwise, my vision of Marianne as the weepy (girl)friend of the victim interviewed somewhere in the first 20 minutes that becomes a red herring is just so vivid. Someone's convinced she's the murderer and her coming down with a Fever from Nerves is a ploy to seem innocent.