Short Paper #2 (due Tuesday, Oct.9th)

  Short Paper #2: Elizabeth Bennet: Sensibility or Sacrifice? 

Who is Elizabeth Bennet?  Is she a sharp-witted critic who gradually sees her own intellectual vanity through Mr. Darcy’s love?  Is she a woman without a history, who simply longs to have a ‘room of her own’ in Pemberley?  Or is she a vain, ill-educated husband-hunter herself, who has more in common with her younger sister Lydia than her beloved Jane?  (and yes, there are other options!) Click on the line below to read the rest...

The essays by Auerbach, Morgan, and Fraiman each explore different ways to read her through by asking who she is and what she becomes by the end of the novel.  Though their ideas and themes occasionally overlap, each author “reads” a different Elizabeth Bennet, and offers a unique solution to the riddle of her identity.  Far from making the novel something it’s not, these essays try to articulate why Austen makes the choices she does, and why Elizabeth Bennet seems so vitally alive to us. To understand what kind of novel Pride and Prejudice is, we need to constantly re-evaluate how the novel affects us (the very definition of sensibility) and why Austen funnels the novel through the unreliable, but ultimately rewarding perspective of Elizabeth Bennet. 

Choose ONE of the following statements from the 3 essays, and use it to examine a short passage from the novel (a paragraph to a page or so).  The goal is to explain what the author is trying to show us through this statement, and how we can use it as a “theory” to read the passage in question.  Feel free to use other passages from the essay, but use the one listed below as a guide, one that contains your essential ‘thesis’ about the passage. 

• Nina Auerbach: “Pemberley is Elizabeth’s initiation into physicality, providing her with all the architectural solidity and domestic substance Longbourn lacks…Surely, to be mistress of Pemberley is “something,” in view of the imprisoning nothing of being mistress at Longbourn” (332). 
• Susan Morgan: “Raised by a foolish mother and a cynical father who has abdicated all responsibility, encouraged to distinguish herself from her sisters, Elizabeth sees the world as some sort of entertaining game.  She is not silly in the way that Lydia and Kitty are (though she is sometimes surprisingly similar to them), but she cannot imagine that anything could be expected of her” (343).
• Susan Fraiman: “The story I am tracing of Elizabeth’s decline involves not only the interrogation of her judgment but her fall from a “male” impersonation or pride into the vanity of other girls.  John Berger might put it that the heroine shifts from proudly “acting” on her own behalf to merely “appearing” in the eyes of others; from seeing the world herself to seeing only herself being seen by the world” (365). 

 REQUIREMENTS:

• At least 3-4 pages long, double spaced
• You must use one of the 3 passages above as the focus of your paper (so include the quote); feel free to use more of the essay as well
• You must close read a short passage in your paper, using actual quotes from the novel (don’t merely summarize)
• Due a week from Tuesday, on October 9^th in class