GuyLaroche said:
Pride and Prejudice - Thank goodness we no longer live in that era where all your life amounts to is being well married-off. Far too many female characters. I don't understand why Austen is considered a literary great. All of her works are about lost women in pointless worlds searching for pointless things. It is a Pointless novel with pointless characters, but very, very good prose style. She wrote good passages but told bad stories.
The first sentence, I agree with. Which is partly why Austen wrote her tales about a very specific class of women in the first place. Unfortunately, everything else said above is from a non-contextual point of view.
Austen's heroines aren't what we now consider feminist but I'd argue that they're proto-feminist within the confines of the patriachal society in which Austen still believes. With the exception of Emma, all of her heroines start out in financial straits due to circumstance, societal rules of inheritance, and poor parental planning. They're born and bred in the gentleman's class, used to life with servants and relative security. Not one of these girls could ever entertain the idea of working for a living since society would heavily frown and even ostracize them for demoting themselves in the social hierarchy. This leaves them with a well-made match as the only means through which they can assure themselves of future financial security. [Eliza Doolittle becomes groomed into this dilemma in
My Fair Lady.] They rely solely on their charms, their beauty, and their graces to recommend them. Again, besides Emma, none of Austen's women have enough dowry money to tempt a wealthy man who is on his way up the social ladder. The alternatives, should they end up marrying poorly or not at all, are a life of relative poverty in a potentially abusive/unfulfilling relationship (see Fanny Price's mother in
Mansfield Park) or a life of dependence on the charity of your former peers while taking care of an elderly parent (see Miss Bates in
Emma).
Austen's ideal pairings, the ones her heroines enter into, consist of a relationship between male and female equals. They may not be financial equals, but each person brings something into the relationship that is vital for the other. Part of the reason why P&P is so well-liked is because, of all her pairings, Elizabeth and Darcy's seems to be the best of all possible worlds. They're young. They're attractive. They're spirited. They are intellectually compatible. She doesn't make herself all stupid and helpless and ingratiating to him just because he has money. She has a sense of self-worth and dignity that is uncompromised throughout the novel. After all, she turns down Darcy's first proposal of marriage because it was such an insulting one [and Austen also uses it to prove to the reader that Elizabeth's not merely a gold-digger/social climber like Miss Bingley]. But she's got flaws and Darcy does too. In the end, it's their mutual respect for one another that leads them to a happy marital life, which (even nowadays) is a rare thing.
Ultimately, her stories are the happy-ending fairy tales. (I liken P&P to Beauty and the Beast.) But while she's telling these stories about social pairings and the traditional English patriarchy, she includes some deft criticisms of why she believes the patriarchy is failing, how women are a necessary part of fixing the flaws of society, and what a strong relationship between a husband and wife should rest upon. She avoids generalizing the female sex by having a wealth of individual females, some who are part of the solution (her heroines), some who are the grossest contributors to the erosion of the hierarchy (Lucy Steele, all the silly women), and some who just reflect how life is for women (Charlotte Lucas).
I don't know how applicable to men her works are, though I know of men who have an interest in learning about the differences involved with being a woman in the human society. For women, however, it's interesting to read Austen and see what's changed (and what hasn't) from her sociohistorical context to the modern age. I've found her to be more relevant than I would have expected.
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As for my books:
Le Petit Prince by Antoine de St. Exupery - The hardest thing to regain after becoming cynical is a pure sense of awe and wonder.
Watership Down by Richard Adams - First book during which I realized the terror of a completely controlled society.
Watchmen by Alan Moore - I'm still wrestling with this one.
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro - First time I realized that you can't trust the narrator. Everyone's got a bias.
Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje - First true appreciation for his prosetry style. Some of the phrases that he writes are just wonderful to roll around in your mouth and dance on your tongue. It's practically palpable, his lyricism.
HAHAHA
