Wedding Wise Wednesday: Everything I Know About Marriage I Learned From Pride and Prejudice (Los Angeles Wedding Planner)
Posted: November 7, 2013
Every Wednesday I bring you the best wedding stories, deals and events in Los Angeles, and from around the web. And we call it Wedding Wise Wednesday. Welcome!
Cool Wedding Thing of the Week:
From The Atlantic: I Learned Everything I Needed to Know About Marriage from Pride and Prejudice, by Karen Swallow Prior. 10+ years of marriage, I can tell you that everything in here is true, and here’s a little preview:
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Ironically, I’m reading Longbourn right now:
It’s a re-telling of Pride and Prejudice from
the point-of view of the Bennet Household Staff
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When I teach Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, I take great pains to un-sully it from students’ film-adaptation-induced misconceptions that it’s a “romantic” novel. As a satirist, even if a gentle one, Austen offers rather unromantic corrections to vices and foibles, many of which range far beyond the surface themes of love and marriage. Indeed, like most early novels, Austen’s contend with the seismic social shifts birthed by modernity, particularly the rise of the individual. In Pride and Prejudice, as in Austen’s other works, the private angst surrounding the choice of a marriage partner really reflects the larger, public anxieties swirling around a disintegrating class structure, a new social mobility, and increasing personal autonomy.
Nevertheless, the truth is that I still learned everything I needed to know about marriage from Pride and Prejudice.
Marriages are foremost in Austen’s world, and, its place in literary theory and history aside, Pride and Prejudice enchants me again and again with its hairpin sharp insights into matrimonial matters. Here are nine lessons Pride and Prejudice taught me about marriage—and surely, there are many more.
Mutual Respect Is Essential to a Happy Marriage
The first marriage we encounter in Pride and Prejudice is Mr. and Mrs. Bennet’s. These two illustrate magnificently by negative example just how crucial respect for one another is to marital bliss. Mr. Bennet treats Mrs. Bennet like the fool she assuredly is, and Mrs. Bennet, in return, exerts the only authority she has: nagging. As readers, we may laugh with Mr. Bennet (and the narrator) at Mrs. Bennet, but we don’t side with him entirely. Even Elizabeth, as much as she loves her father and as much as he respects her, admits she “could not have formed a very pleasing opinion of conjugal felicity or domestic comfort” based on her parents’ marriage.
We can’t help but wonder along with Elizabeth, who “had never been blind to the impropriety of her father’s behaviour as a husband,” if Mrs. Bennet might have grown into a better partner and woman with more active loving-kindness from him. Instead, Mrs. Bennet fits the description of what one marriage expert—Pat Ennis of the marriage-enrichment program The Third Option—calls the “Critical Nag,” one who is never happy with how others do things. Mr. Bennet, meanwhile, is the “Ridiculer-Name Caller,” the person who constantly puts others down. Ennis says that respect is the bedrock of lasting love, wisdom the never-married Austen recognized long before psychology, life coaches, and marriage retreats were invented.
First Impressions Can Be Misleading
As fans of Pride and Prejudice know, “First Impressions” was Austen’s original title for the work. The first half of the novel is an accumulation of false impressions, particularly Elizabeth’s misperceptions (leading to the titular prejudice) about the seemingly, titularly, proud Darcy. Ironically, Elizabeth’s confident assessment of Mr. Darcy as proud stems greatly from her own pride in her keen, but not infallible, perceptiveness. The rest of the story consists of the correction of those misreadings—and of the prejudice and pride that foster such misunderstandings.
Like Elizabeth, but for different reasons, I’m fortunate that my first impressions of the man who would become my husband were wrong, too. When as a Lydia Bennet-esque college freshman, I first spotted the man, marriage was far from my mind—and he appeared to be someone who might regard it the same way. He didn’t. Then I didn’t. We never looked back (as I have written about here).
You Can Judge a Man by the Size of His Library
Hah! Read the rest of the article here.
The Events
The Deals:
Silver Charm Events – There’s…something you want for your wedding, but you’re pretty sure it’s out of reach. Certain flowers for your bouquet, Chiavari Chairs…a prettier wedding dress? What do you want that you don’t think you can have? Anything’s possible, and give me 15 minutes, and I’ll show you how. 15 minutes? Yup. Email me at liz@silvercharmevents.com NOW to schedule your session.
See you at the end of the aisle,
Liz Coopersmith
Silver Charm Events
www.silvercharmevents.com
323-592-9318
liz@silvercharmevents.com
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