Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, but for the moment it is tolerable, so let us talk about ‘Pride and Prejudice’ instead.
Ok, no, first a shout-out to the new cartoon show ‘Velma’,
which is a latest reboot of Scooby-Doo, in which Velma is a lesbian or bisexual
and in a relationship with Daphne, while Fred is an oblivious idiot, and Shaggy…
is just himself, because he’s an Afro-American, just as Velma is, and to openly
mock him as in case of Fred is… risky? Bad? Liable to give you a Will Smith
treatment, if you’re lucky?” Well, one of those, anyhow.
Let us try again. The Internet, and especially YouTube,
is full of people who talk how this or that reboot is bad, and how being ‘woke’
is bad, and so on. That is fair, and the other people’s annoyance at them/with
them is fair, and the fact that professional reviewers/critics and lay members
of audiences do not often agree is fair as well. But! “Velma’ manages to hit
all the politically appropriate notes in all the politically appropriate ways,
and the result is a trite, predictable mess, where male WASPs, (such as Fred),
are mocked and belittled with impunity, and everyone else rises up at their
expense. Pause.
Now, some have already been comparing ‘Velma’ to a
different cartoon show – ‘Daria’, a show that was popular during the 1990s. It
starred, well, Daria, a girl from a well-to-do, (semi-Jewish) family, who was smart,
sarcastic, and hopelessly in love with an older ‘bad boy’ – well, a young
adult, (early to mid-20s), Trent Lane, an elder brother of her best friend
Jane, who was a latent lesbian herself, (albeit in denial). Sadly, because the
show was made during the 1990s, this was never acknowledged, and instead, the
showrunners tried to make Daria straight by introducing a character of Tom
Sloane – and this backfired rather badly and after about 5 TV seasons and a
couple of TV movies, ‘Daria’ ended, though it still got a fan base. Now, in
2023, we got ‘Velma’, where Velma and Daphne are like Daria and Jane out of the
closet, Fred is a Tom-like figure, and Shaggy/not Shaggy… well, no one is sure
what he is doing on ‘Velma’, especially since… there is no Scooby-Doo.
…I, for one, care little about Scooby-Doo – the dog
was annoying at best and intolerable at worst… but that doesn’t change the fact
that he is the franchise, and without
Scooby-Doo around, (so far, at least), ‘Velma’ isn’t a variant of ‘Scooby-Doo’;
she is a variant of ‘Daria’ at best, and that just isn’t the same. In addition,
Scooby-Doo isn’t a WASP; he is a Great Dane, so how will the writers of ‘Velma’
explain his absence, especially his prolonged absence? This will be
entertaining, albeit in a sad way, but we became carried away.
So, ‘Pride and Prejudice’. It is a classic of English
literature, well renowned for its’ wicked wit and successful conclusion. What
of it?
For a start, it has a bit of Shakespeare in its’
literary DNA. I don’t know if Ms. Austen ever read Shakespeare, but given that
Shakespeare is THE man in England, and especially in its’ literature, she
probably did, however, briefly and ‘diagonally’, to put it frankly. This
resulted in ‘Pride’ having a bit of ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ in its’ literary
DNA – pause.
Shakespeare might be THE man in England, and especially
in its’ English literature, but his plays just are not equal. On one end we were,
say, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, which is a classic; on the other – ‘Much Ado about
Nothing’, which is EXACTLY what it says on the tin; at the third there’s ‘The
Taming of the Shrew’.
No one is exactly sure what ‘The Taming of the Shrew’
is about. It can be about a man crashing his wife’s spirit for the sake of money
to a point where she turns on her fellow women, (who’re shown as manipulative
and sneaky harpies by the Bard), in a haranguing monologue at the play’s end,
or it can be about finding true love, or it can be about anything else,
(especially since most adaptations tend to dismiss some details from the
original piece). Without going too far, let us just recognize that ‘The Taming’
is a conflict-driven play, and the conflict is generated by Catherine and Petruccio’s
interactions – and now we got ‘Pride and Prejudice’, where the roles of Cat and
Peter are taken over by Lizzie and Darcy, while Wickham makes an appropriate
Shakespearean villain.
…No, wait. Yes, Wickham is the villain of the piece,
but while many fan works tend to make him into this great mastermind, in the
canon, it is the other way around. Wickham might be wicked, (cough), but
otherwise? He is a wastrel, a gambler, and a drunk; he does not plot, he does
not think things through, he just acts and reacts. He wants a rich wife to carry
him comfortably on… so he gets Lydia Bennett, the middle daughter, who doesn’t
have much in terms of a dowry, and who just wants to get married. That is it. In
some spin-offs, such as the ‘Lizzie Bennett diaries’, Lydia is given a
character and a personality of her own, but that is modern apocrypha; in Ms.
Austen’s canon, neither George nor Lydia have much in terms of personality or
intelligence or Christian values…
Oh, yes, there are plenty of those in Ms. Austen’s novels;
in case of ‘Pride and Prejudice’, we got Charles Bingley and Jane Bennett, who
wait, who do their best to do the right thing, and who get their karmic rewards.
Their primary differences from Lizzie and Darcy are the fact that Lizzie and
Darcy are more (pro)-active, while Charles and Jane are more passive instead;
they are more naïve and trusting, while Lizzie and Darcy are more cynical…but
in a modern, positive meaning of the word. What else?
Uh, people tend to hate Caroline Bingley; why? Because
she is petty and selfish as opposed to Lizzie’s greater goodness and generosity,
plus Ms. Austen created her to be a foil to Lizzie, just as Charles Bingley’s
other sister, Mrs. Hurst, is a foil to Jane. Still, a debt is only as good as
its’ payment; these days, Mrs. Hurst is barely remembered in most official
modern adaptations, while Caroline is going strong, and Lydia is… being
redeemed, in some manner of way, just look at the ‘Diaries’ and the like. The
original novel… not so much; I think that the last modern adaptation of ‘Pride’
was back in 2005 or so; since then, ‘Pride’ kind of gotten shoved out of the
spotlight.
Cannot say that I am regretting this state of affairs,
though. ‘Pride’ might have Shakespeare in its’ literary DNA, as well as
Christian values, but it is also an ancestor of the modern Hallmark pieces as
well. See, unlike Catholic and Orthodox Christians, the Protestant Christians,
including the British, hate organized church and try to promote Christian
values via secular manners, such as an enlightening novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’,
where the righteous get rewarded, the wicked get punished, and there’s no
mention of religion, (organized or otherwise), or of God and Devil. Clever,
hah?
No, not really – these days, even modern Hallmark
novels, films, etc. have mostly lost their steam; if ‘Pride and Prejudice’
stood at the beginning of the period and the process where the WASPs such as
Darcy and Lizzie, were beginning to rise to power, then ‘Daria’ stood in the
middle and ‘Velma’, where Fred the male WASP is a comic idiot, and Daphne his
female counterpart is in a relationship with Velma, a female POC, is the end –
but the discussion of this process is another story.
End
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