Some books are price studying. Others aren’t well worth the paper they’re printed on. After which there are the actually particular ones, the books price studying time and again. These are those that make you snicker so exhausting it hurts, or really feel a lot you might be exhausted, or these whose concepts transport you to a different world—and if you return, you aren’t the identical as if you left. Austen’s novels have the facility to do all of these items; they’re price studying as many instances as there are summer time holidays, winter retreats, or wet days within the south of England.
Recall the inimitable opening line of Satisfaction and Prejudice: “It’s a fact universally acknowledged {that a} single man in possession of a luck have to be in need of a spouse.” Austenian irony in effective kind. Observe that she is just not announcing a common fact, however quite a “fact universally acknowledged.” In different phrases, that is what everybody believes to be true, which after all, might or might not be true in any respect.
We are going to quickly discover out within the novel that Mr. Darcy is the brunt of a disparaging opinion that spreads like a contagion all through the neighborhood, turning into within the little world of Longbourn and Meryton, the equal of a “fact universally acknowledged.” Virtually instantly upon his arrival, his “character was determined. He was the proudest, most unpleasant man on the planet, and everyone hoped that he would by no means come there once more.” “Everyone says that he’s eat up with delight.” “He isn’t in any respect preferred in Hertfordshire. Everyone is disgusted along with his delight.” In contrast, Mr. Wickham’s manners “really useful him to everyone.” Shortly after his arrival in Hertfordshire, Wickham’s good character was so established that “his claims on Mr. Darcy, and all that he had suffered from him, was now overtly acknowledged and publicly canvassed.” Certainly, “everyone was happy to know the way a lot that they had all the time disliked Mr. Darcy earlier than that they had recognized something of the matter.”
One of many clear factors of emphasis within the novel is on what “everyone” says and thinks and is aware of. It’s so common it would as effectively be true—even when it’s not, which after all, it isn’t.
Elizabeth is aware of that she should take accountability for a way she treats others and the way she chooses to information herself.
The false info and unfair assessments aren’t even the half of it—actually. The bogus reviews are geometrically multiplied by gossip, which appears to unfold extra rapidly than fact. The parallel in our personal time is social media, in reality most likely the prime engine of misinformation within the digital age. Fb, Twitter/X, Instagram, Tik Tok—all out there within the palm of your smartphone-wielding hand. For many individuals at present, particularly our youth, social media is the supply of first impressions and ultimate verdicts—in regards to the nation, the world, and sadly, too usually about themselves as effectively.
One of many issues is that within the realm of social media there is no such thing as a middleman floor to sift by means of, look at, and edit the superficial impressions generated by the assorted platforms, not to mention refine and if want be, seriously change them. Social media is one-dimensional on this regard. It thrives on the superficiality of unexamined or first impressions—the very drawback Austen highlights in Satisfaction and Prejudice—and why the unique title of the novel was First Impressions.
When Elizabeth lastly sees the deceit that had as soon as handed for fact, and when she workout routines her personal judgment quite than enable herself to be caught up within the internet of contagious gossip that unfold and enveloped the village, the storyline turns. The second Elizabeth sees Darcy for the person he really is, she additionally involves know herself in a way more profound approach than she had ever accomplished earlier than. She is aware of that she should take accountability for a way she treats others and the way she chooses to information herself.
In a vital collection of research accomplished on adolescent women by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, he tells us that we dwell in precarious instances, that our younger persons are in bother, and that their state of psychological well-being and sense of themselves are in dangerous form. Reasonably than studying to know the world by which they dwell and to belief in themselves, they are usually overly depending on social media and the opinion of others—together with particularly a essential mass of nameless on-line voices, which are usually decidedly adverse, nasty, and brutal. These are at present’s “everyone,” whose “fact” is “universally acknowledged.”
That’s the dangerous information. The excellent news is that this weekend marked Jane Austen’s birthday on December 16, 1775. So it’s time to ask your daughters and granddaughters to place down their cell telephones and choose up one in all her novels—any of them (they’re all price studying many instances over). In one in all them, they may stumble throughout a bit of recommendation that might change their world, in the event that they let it: “Now we have all a greater information in ourselves, if we’d attend to it, than another particular person[s] could be.”
