Today, and continuing throughout November, I am presenting a series of posts I’m calling The Happiness Plot, which will make up a very brief introduction to storytelling structure. A perfect way to stay in the groove for NaNoWriMo2014.
For BONUS CONTENT related to The Happiness Plot, as well as special offers of FREE CONSULTING for writers, sign up below for The Comic Muse Email Newsletter. It’s free!
Ready to uncover the plot?
To find the beginning of The Happiness Plot, click here or “The Happiness Plot” category listing to the right.
Now, we continue with The Happiness Plot…
Romance Through Thick and Thin
12.
What does Elizabeth Bennet want?
Love.
Wrong answer.
Or, at least, a badly incomplete answer.
The superficial romance novelist, smitten by what Austen biographer Claire Tomalin calls the “dream denouement” of Pride and Prejudice, sits down at the laptop and bangs out 90,000 words of Girl Meets Boy, Girl Loses Boy, Girl Gets Boy Back Again. The focus is erotic, if not, these days, downright pornographic. Such a book will always find an audience, and that is because romantic love is one of the deepest of our heart’s desires. Romantic love, countless novels, movies, and pop songs testify, is practically synonymous with human happiness.
Yet none of this is why Pride and Prejudice is a great novel.
Jane Austen did not simply write a love story. She wrote a story of both Elizabeth Bennet’s and Fitzwilliam Darcy’s moral transformations which made possible their marital union. From the beginning Elizabeth wants romantic love, but what she has to learn is not only that a husband truly worth loving must also be a virtuous man, but also, and more importantly, that we can become blinded by “first impressions” (Austen’s original title for the novel) and proudly prejudge the virtuous or vicious qualities of others. And by “virtue” Austen meant something much more than “cute” or “nice” or “funny” or even “decent.” She meant qualities of character founded upon habits of mind and passion formed by a particular vision, an Aristotelian vision as scholars have pointed out, of the truth of the human person.
Austen’s has what we might call “thick” conceptions of what love and moral goodness are. Your average romance writer, by contrast, is content with the “thin” gruel of eroticism.
Leave a Reply