Distorted Mirror Broken

by Molly Ivors

Once upon a time, when Thers and I were in grad school, we had a colleague, the child of a prominent economist from the developing world. She was bright enough, but she seemed fundamentally confused by the premise of graduate school. One day over the seminar table in a course on race and nationalism in literature, we were discussing Thomas Dixon's execrable novel The Clansman, the book upon which Birth of a Nation was based. Our colleague revealed that she had watched Birth of a Nation before the class. The professor, a young, perky fellow, asked "How did it compare to the book?" and she responded that she didn't know: she had watched the movie in lieu of the book. The professor, in a surprisingly gentle yet pointed moment, replied, "This is graduate school. You have to read the book."

MoDo needs to read the book. Shocking, I know, but passing out over a cosmopolitan ten minutes into during Bridget Jones' Diary does not, in fact, reveal much about Austen at all.

First, a movie is always an interpretation. Screenwriters, directors, and actors pick and choose. I know one Austen scholar who deplores even the BBC P&P because, he says, Colin Firth (who, should he improbably arrive on the doorstep of Liberal Mountain, could sweep me away in a heartbeat) plays Darcy as Edward Rochester. And Rochester, of course, is based on Byron. (And all women's romance novels are based on either Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, or Pride and Prejudice, but that of course is another conversation.)  Austen had a fair few nasty comments on Romanticism (see: Sense and Sensibility) and intended Darcy's flaws to be those of manner, not judgment.

Second (and related), both Fitzwilliam and Mark Darcy are fundamentally decent but introverted, they do genuinely good things (in both Austen and Helen Fielding's clever retelling) and they're not bad guys, and Elizabeth/Bridget is mistaken in her first impression.

Let's review, shall we? We'll start with P&P, in which Elizabeth's flighty and shallow younger sister risks the reputation and future of the entire family by scampering off with a charming but scummy scam artist. Darcy, the first in a long line of people Wickham has wronged, chases him down, pays his debts, and forces Wickham into a kinda sorta respectable arrangement to save the Bennett family. In Bridget Jones' Diary, Mark Darcy disappears to chase down Bridget's mother and her scam-artist boyfriend, who have bilked most of their social circle out of money. Even the miniseries of P&P only deals with this episode cursorily--it's pretty complicated. And the film of BJD doesn't deal with it at all.

And so, Mo, what you reveal here is your own shallowness. Go ahead, compare Obama to Darcy. Let him reveal himself to be the one who will go to extraordinary lengths to save us from our own foolishness and eight years of Wickham rule. Of course, Maureen, the giggling fool who doesn't even realize she's been fucked over because the parties are so jolly, is also prominently featured in P&P: she's Lydia.

And I'll be Elizabeth, Mo. I'll learn to love the guy the way she did. And so will all those "dead-enders" you're obsessed with. We'll be fine, and we're certainly not going to vote for Ebeneezer McScrooge. What will you do?

Comments

[billy b]

Good stuff, M.

I liked this from the harridan's column:

So the novelistic tension of the 2008 race is this: Can Obama overcome his pride and Hyde Park hauteur and win America over?

Given the fact that the man has already done so, I think the point is moot.

Hyde Park hauteur? That's as bad as the cigarette manure she wrote last week.

[iamcoyote]

And I'll be Elizabeth, Mo. I'll learn to love the guy the way she did.

Thanks, Molly that's exactly the way I choose to look at it. Great post!

[steve simels]

Words fail me.

The New York Times, as I have said on numerous occasions, is having an institutional nervous breakdown. That's the only possible explanation for their continuing to run this clearly unhinged woman's blathering.

Kristol, Friedman and Brooks, too, but that's another story.

[noblejoanie]

Jane Austen is chick lit?

Suffering our friend and neighbor's suicide last week, I turned to my bedside volume of the complete works of Jane Austen to help me see more clearly the "doings" and pettiness and goodness of people. So ironically, I'm about the first third through P&P.

Must MoDo trivialize everyone and everything? I only wish she'd read, with understanding, what Austen was on about.

Oh, and I see MoDo as the Bingley sisters.

[noblejoanie]

Let me add,after reading MoDo aloud to my husband. I said, "I can't wait to read what Molly will do with this!"

You have earned another fan.

[Fats Durston]

Huh. That was a lotta words by MoDo to paraphrase "uppity."

[julia]

That's so sweet that MoDo wants feminists to jump into the lists to defend Michelle Obama 'cause she's facing sexist attacks like Hillary wasn't, really, only women think so because they're shrikes.

OK, I'll do my bit. The woman who wrote that OpEd piece in the Times about how emasculating Mrs. Obama is because she doesn't talk about her husband like he's a demigod and how she's only successful because she hooked up with Howell Raines her husband is in fact a real shrike and should really stfu.

But hey, don't ask me. Ask Michelle Obama.

Michelle Obama dismisses such criticism.

"If you're 23 and reading Maureen Dowd's article, you could be crushed. If you're 43, it's sort of like OK, well, she obviously doesn't know who I am, and she doesn't understand"

You know, I do feel better.

Thanks, MoDo.

[mamayaga]

Lydia? You forget that Lydia got a man, such as he was. MoDo is Kitty.

[Phoenix Woman]

I'd originally pegged MoDo as Mrs. Norris, but this works very well indeed.

Thing is, MoDo's so afraid of getting older (and therefore Less Desirable To Men) that she'd see being compared to a sixteen-year-old girl, no matter how stupid, as a complement.

MoDo's Lydia in another forty years, with just enough of Elizabeth's brains (or perhaps some hard-earned experience) to be all too aware of just how badly she's messed up her life.

[Phoenix Woman]

Lydia? You forget that Lydia got a man, such as he was. MoDo is Kitty.

Ah, but MoDo's had men, and so did Kitty -- she's the one who was married off to the clergyman, remember? Kitty also managed to keep her man, unlike MoDo.

[julia]

Well, I think in Austen for most of the female characters "man" = "job with tenure," although depending on the circumstances of the person getting married it could be Charlotte Lucas' nine to five with room and board and a pension or the trophy job Maria Bertram wants to score over her friends with.

The women who do things for love generally end up very badly.

[Phoenix Woman]

The women who do things for love generally end up very badly.

Especially when they do it only for love.

This is the sort of thing that bothered male readers and reviewers of her works; she was, in fact, an anti-Romantic writer, stripping away the gauzy pretty veils that glamorized women's legally-enforced economic subjugation. (Emerson, for one, couldn't stand her works for that very reason.)

[flory]

It's like she's writing her column just for you these days.

[masculine_monica_nyc]

So the Prom Queen of Sulzberger High (hurray!) fancies herself an anti-Romantic? I mean, she's casting herself as Austen, right?

[Tehanu]

I'm with noblejoanie except I was already a fan. The NYTimes ought to be running you, Molly, instead of the Prom Queen.

[Nora]

Actually, Phoenix Woman, at the end of P&P, Kitty wasn't married off to anyone and neither was Mary.

I think MoDo's the Bingley Sisters, especially the unmarried one.

[Jemand von Niemand]

(Really enjoyed that, M.)

Dowd's writings aren't personal observations about living, so much as they're distortions, a disconnection from reality.

For anyone who claims to provide insight and opinion that might illuminate our lives through an Opinion column, it's folly -- she's failed as a writer before creating a single sentence. Mo's managed to float along in a professional life without ever having her intellectual shallows exposed

But the NYT didn't hire Mo for that. Pinch and Alfred are telling us We prize the manufactured controversies created by bad writers and a poor thinkers [Kristol; Dowd; Brooks; Friedman], more highly than any truth gained in replacing them with gifted ones.

Like her references from Greek classics last week, using allegory as a sly little method of character assassination with Obama -- but all she did was lay her own lack of understanding about literature and her private pathology (again) on a table for everyone to see.

I mean, did she think for a moment that professional writers and teachers would not call bullshit on her for faking an intellectual depth she doesn't possess?

Dowd is an embarrassment to herself -- but like the drunk at the party who pisses themselves and isn't capable of realizing it, there's not a chance that Mo knows how much of a public ass she is.

[aimai]

Jemand von neimand is correct--MoDo is the drunk at the party who has pissed herself and doesn't know it. I don't think she can be anyone in P and P other than Mr. Collins, a person of shallow but pretentious intellect who prides himself on serving his betters while utterly clueless about everything that is happening around him or of the true value of those he respects, as well as those he despises. He is invariably as wrong about everything, with the same level of certainity.

aimai

[aimai]

I think Phoenix woman is remembering the original movie version of P and P, in which both the youngest sisters are shown pairing off (one with a curate and the other with someone else). In the book I don't think anything much happens to them. Another difference between the book and the movie (the Laurence Olivier/greer garson and the book is that in the movie Kitty comes back as a "married lady" but I think in the book a curtain is drawn across this--she runs away, is ruined, is abandoned, and then is married off thanks to darcy's intervention, but she isn't restored to full respectability and no one is in any doubt that worse may befall her eventually since being married to a rotter is only slightly better than being abandoned by a rotter. Its real agony, shame, and poverty covered over by social respectability.

aimai

[julia]

aimai, in the book she's more or less destroyed in Good Society, but her mother forces her father to countenance her and Jane turns out to be a soft touch when she and her husband get in trouble, which they do frequently.

All the movies are pretty accurate to the book this far: Lydia's so removed from the morals of the times that she thinks she's done something really clever by ruining herself (Elizabeth, who as an unmarried woman can't talk too much about that sort of thing, does tell Lydia at one point not to matchmake on her behalf, because she doesn't much like the way she gets husbands).

[Molly Ivors]

aimai,
Fair enough.

[Willem van Oranje]

Did I read that right? Does MoDo claim to know that working class women crave mac and cheese?

Why does that remind me of Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake"?

[DrDick]

Good golly, Ms. Molly! I thinky you haz an internet hit here. This seems to be all over the web today. Bravissimo!

[Mo MoDo]

Dowd had several quotes she used to good effect, so I think she did read the book. Or at least made her assistant do it.

I think Barack makes a pretty handsome Darcy and I made a photoshop to prove it.

[masaccio]

Of course, MoDo is Carolyn Bingley, who hopelessly seeks Mr. Darcy for herself. Remember the scene where she makes a series of scathing remarks about Elizabeth in front of Darcy, then remarks that she remembers that "someone" once thought Elizabeth had very fine eyes. Darcy says that he had once thought so, but had for some time considered her one of the handsomest women of his acquaintance.

[EoH]

Miss Mow Down is not an Austen character. She is Bronte's mad wife, haunting the family pile and delaying more fruitful unions between the Times and its readers.

Her interest extends only so far as devising the tantalizing au courant slur, sure sign of a lemon with no twist.

[actor212]

New trope for MoDo: "It's all about the Jane"

[aimai]

I think Roger Ailes (the good one) has it nailed, we shouldn't limit ourselves to real fictional characters but can include hybrid ones:

Which Character From English Literature Is MoldDough, Or, Stewed and Stupidity

If DNA extracted from the fictive corpses of Uriah Heep and Miss Havisham was used to genetically engineer a putative human being, she'd write like this:

If Obama is Mr. Darcy, with "his pride,... "

http://rogerailes.blogspot.com/2008_08_03_archive.html#6766223064199633401#6766223064199633401

[dan mcenroe]

I guess if the WSJ is going to call Bush Batman, Modo has to call Obama Mr. Darcy - just to show that she misinterprets a higher class of literature than those cretins over at the WSJ.

[PurpleGirl]

For MoDo to say that women will see Obama as Darcy and love him is quite stupid; is she really sure that every woman has read and loved Austen and her characters? I must confess I've never finished reading anything by Austen. Somehow neither the characters or story sparked my interest.

[actor212]

Which Character From English Literature Is MoldDough, Or, Stewed and Stupidity

Hmmm...this would make a great contest.

My vote is for a combination of Ophelia and the Lady of Shallott.

"She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott. "

Hm. I did this on gut instinct but the poem is proving more right than I realized...

[Eric]

But at least she gets the McCain cast right.

He's the military man who is after a women to make his life easy (Cindi McCain == Georgiana Darcy).

[KRK]

Surely Dowd is Lady Catherine.

The inexplicable duration of her relationship with the NYT and her apparent conclusion that this means everyone wants to read her adolescent musings fits right in with Lady Catherine's inherited social position and self-appointment as arbiter of all things tasteful and important.

And don't these remarks seem Dowd-y (oops, see what I did there?):

"I must have my share in the conversation."
"If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient."

[actor212]

And don't these remarks seem Dowd-y

I'm stunned. I've never seen much less thought of that one.

[Ann]

It's "Bennet"--one "t". Read the book! ;)