Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 36 Editor's Choice: 6
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Somebody Say Amen
[Read the article: Pride and pathetic]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thank you Gina Fattore!!
I’m a Jane Austin fan with cats, so that should give you an idea of where I lounge on the social scale. Austin’s characters always knew where they resided within society as well, and they cared...oh how they cared.
To me, the most telling omission in the most recent adaptation of Pride and Prejudice comes when Lady Catherine de Bourgh, looking like a refugee from the court of Madame de Pompadour, comes to scold Liza Bennet about her attachment to her godson. After receiving a dressing down from Lady C regarding Liza’s low connections, in the book (yes, there, I said it...in the book and in 900 other adaptations of this story) Liza retorts that “He is a gentleman. I am a gentleman’s daughter.”
In Austin, as in life, it was always all about the Benjamins and how you earned them. Wealth mattered a great deal, but it didn't make you a gentleman. A gentleman didn't need money to be a gentleman, but his daughters would be spinsters without it. Austin never forgot this and neither did her characters.
In the current adaptation this line is nowhere. The humor is also nowhere. The satire, the charm, the wit have all been completely excised. Since many people believe that the charm, social criticism, wit and humor are pretty much the raison d’etre of all Austin novels, it seems as if it would take effort of unprecedented magnitude to rid the stories of them, but Joe Wright seems to have done it. Really, he almost deserves a prize just for the effort it must have taken.
I’ve heard those involved with the movie laughing off the Jane-ites for caring. These ridiculous fussbudgets without anything better to do…didn’t make this movie for them...made it for those who believe in true romance...that love is not love without being expressed in some kind of dangerous weather.
What this scoffing ignores, and the reason that so many Austin fans do care, is that P&P doesn’t NEED to be Brontefied to make it wonderfully entertaining. It’s not that we’re dried up academics hysterical that a word was changed. We’re fans of a great story wonderfully told which would make a fine movie in its own right, as Emma, Sense and Sensibility and untold numbers of earlier P&P adaptations have shown.
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I feel your pain
[Read the article: My mother sends me useless junk for Christmas]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I totally understand where the writer is coming from and I don't think that location is greed or anger that her Mom has lousy taste. Obviously the appropriate response to a lousy gift is ‘thank you’ regardless of how random it may be, but this writer mainly seems concerned about her mother’s mental stability or lack thereof. If her mother made coconut snowmen, or had been to Hawaii and picked up a coconut snowman, or the writer and/or her mom always loved coconut ice cream then no matter how much the writer might dislike a coconut snowman, she could still understand the impulse behind buying it. But year after year of nonsensical gifts would start to trouble anyone.
My question is did her mom always give bizarre gifts, even when they were growing up? Did it start at a particular time? Has it gradually been getting worse over time? Answering these questions might help narrow down what the problem might be. Was her mother deprived as a little girl? Did she never get gifts, so somewhere along the line she came to believe that a large quantity of presents, regardless of what they are, means love or security?
My mom is a master at picking random, bizarre and/or lousy gifts. Every year I open her gifts with a mix of dread and anticipation. Anticipation just to see what she’s managed to come up with this year. Dread at figuring out what the heck I’m going to do with it. It used to make me CRAZY. I felt hurt and offended. In the last few years though I’ve come to realize that every single ugly tchotchke, unnecessarily complex yet useless kitchen gadget or ill fitting garment has some meaning to her. She thought it was beautiful, or useful, or perhaps reminded her of me as a little girl, or maybe just reminded her of herself or her own childhood. I remember every year I managed to forget to even get her a birthday card, not because I didn’t care but because I was really wrapped up in being me, thank you very much. She’s never forgotten my birthday, and I have the neon orange slightly used fondue pot to prove it.