Blooms Literary Themes - THE HEROS ... - ymerleksi - home

Pride and Prejudice 189to engage her, conducts her to Lord Orville and presents him withher hand.[. . . Similarly,] Darcy, “all politeness,” as Elizabeth ironicallydescribes him, signifies his willingness to oblige Elizabeth Bennetwith a dance when Elizabeth is placed in a similarly embarrassingsituation at Sir William Lucas’s ball. 7[. . .]Mr. Darcy is a complex human being rather than a mere vehiclefor satire such as Charles Adams. Nevertheless, I think it is likely thatDarcy has somewhere in his ancestry a parody-figure similar to theones in which Jane Austen’s juvenilia abound. Such a theory is consistentwith current assumptions about Jane Austen’s habits of composition.Her first three novels are the products of reworkings of draftswritten at a period much closer to the time when her juvenile parodiesof fiction were written than to that at which Sense and Sensibility as wehave it was published. Both Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibilitycontain marked traces of satiric originals, and it seems reasonable toassume that Pride and Prejudice, as well as the other two novels, grew,through a process of refinement, from a criticism of literature into acriticism of life. Moreover, the theory accounts for what is perhaps themost serious flaw in Pride and Prejudice: the vast difference betweenthe Darcy of the first ballroom scene and the man whom ElizabethBennet marries at the end of the novel. We have seen that the mostexaggerated displays of conceit and rudeness on Darcy’s part—hisspeech at the Meryton assembly, his fears lest he should be encouragingElizabeth to fall in love with him, and the language of his firstproposal—could have originated as burlesques of the patrician hero.If we postulate an origin in parody for Darcy and assume that he waslater subjected to a refining process, the early, exaggerated displays ofrudeness can be explained as traces of the original purely parodic figurethat Jane Austen was not able to manage with complete success.[. . .]In the early stages of the novel’s development, I believe [. . .]Elizabeth Bennett was merely an anti-type to the Burney-Richardsonsycophantic heroine; Darcy, a caricature of the patricianhero. Later, although she retained an element of ironic imitation,Jane Austen refined her characters, transforming them from merevehicles for satire into human beings interesting in their own right