Pride and Prejudice - It's Not Just the Tight Pants

Despite Gina Ardito’s claim to being “just a typical suburban lady with a husband and two kids,” she is one of the co-founders of Dunes and Dreams, the Eastern Long Island chapter of RWA, and not only does she write romantic comedy, she writes historical romances under the pen name, Katherine Brandon!

Please welcome Gina Ardito to the Wet Noodle Posse!

This past week, my husband caught me in the bedroom, indulging my favorite vice: watching Pride & Prejudice. Again.

"What is it about this movie?" my poor clueless hubby demanded.

"It's Jane Austen," I replied smoothly. "The grandmother of my genre."

Lie.

Okay, sure. Jane's terrific. But I don't watch Emma or Sense and Sensibility with the same rabid fan grrrl mentality I reserve for Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy. In fact, I can only think of two other movies that engender the same ferocity in me: The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Count of Monte Cristo. In each case, I own more than one version on DVD--Leslie Howard, Anthony Andrews, and Richard E. Grant all took a turn as the Pimpie, Alan Badel and Jim Caviezel both played the Count, and of course, Colin Firth and Matthew MacFadyen as Mr. Darcy.

"You know," my husband pointed out--not unkindly. "They're fiction."

Sure. Of course. I'm not delusional. But these three men are, for some reason I've yet to fathom, my idea of romance hero ideals. Mmmm...time to take stock and see if I can figure out why these three in particular, "do it" for me.

Maybe it's the tight pants?

Oh, please!

I'm not that shallow. ...Am I?

So what do they all have in common? Time period? No, not really. They're all English? If that was the only requirement, I'd have moved to the Empire thirty years ago in search of my Happily Ever After. But I found my guy in New York--in the 20th century. Okay, scratch that idea.

But then I started to think about their love relationships. And I hit on something striking. Each of them fell in love with a woman, who, he believed, betrayed him in some way.

Sure, Elizabeth Bennet's crime was more in her loyalty to her family than the so-called crimes of Marguerite in The Scarlet Pimpernel or Mercedes in The Count of Monte Cristo, the former having supposedly condemned an innocent family to the guillotine and the latter marrying the man who'd betrayed our hero.

Yet, in each case, the heroes remained steadfast in their hearts to these women, despite their belief in the ladies' guilt. Why? For honor? Maybe. Sir Percy was already married to Marguerite when he discovered her alleged perfidy. But neither Darcy nor Dantes shared that domestic arrangement and could have walked away at any time. But they not only stayed loyal to their hearts (even with thoughts of revenge burning in their breasts), they managed to learn the truth and find love at the end of their journeys.

And therein, for me, lies the key. These are heroes who remain constant, who face the hardships and still struggle to believe--even when love seems impossible. Because sometimes in life, the hardest thing to do is love someone you think did you wrong. But love forgives, love believes in second chances, and the truly love-worthy hero will be there waiting when the truth is revealed.


To learn more about Gina visit her website. And don’t forget Gina’s book, A Run For the Money, will be available August 24, 2009!

Labels: Dunes and Dreams RWA, Gina Ardito, Katherine Brandon, Pride and Prejudice

posted by Theresa Ragan @ 2:05 AM 21 comments

WWJD?

And that, of course, stands for What Would Jane Do?

After you have read Pride & Prejudice 101, A Study in Conflict, answered a pop quiz and turned in your papers, you will be able to see a picture of the famed wet shirt.

I'm one of those writers who doesn't do conflict particularly well and whose conflict diagrams always have huge holes; I find it particularly difficult in historicals, too, where women--and men for that matter--might have conflicts, or feel conflicted, but have very few practical choices to lead to action. However, what I did discover via Jane Austen, was this foolproof conflict jump start:

At the beginning of your book, if character A falls in love with character B it will ruin his (or her) life.

Naturally they do fall in love, and here's what happens--the most famous and brilliantly written proposal rejection scene of all time, Lizzie and Darcy in Pride & Prejudice.

Darcy begins, In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

His declaration of love is under duress, an admission from a man who is used to being in charge and now feels overwhelmed and out of control. Austen doesn't give us his exact words--she describes Lizzie's sensations as she listens. Lizzie goes for the jugular; all her initial suspicions and instincts about Darcy are confirmed:

...you chose to tell me that you liked me against your will, against your reason, and even against your character?

And Darcy digs himself in deeper, playing on Lizzie's hidden fears about her own family, and thus pushing all her buttons:

Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?

The first layer of conflict between them at this point is that Lizzie knows Darcy has destroyed her sister Jane's chance at happiness by persuading his best friend Bingley not to propose to her. But the real conflict between them is that they fight their mutual recognition and what could be, and will be, profound intimacy is now terror at what they see in each other and in themselves through the other's eyes.

Darcy takes off his clothes--whoops, no he doesn't. He writes Lizzie a letter, telling her the lurid details of his family secret--Wickham's attempted seduction of Darcy's sister. When there is another, very serious episode of Bennetts Behaving Badly (Wickham elopes with Lydia), Darcy is the first person Lizzie confides in, even though she believes that now she will never see him again. In other words, they grown, they develop trust, and they let go of the prejudices that have kept them apart.

What would Jane do? It works for me.

Labels: Austen, Pride and Prejudice

posted by Janet Mullany @ 11:29 AM 9 comments