1. Pride and Prejudice – Lecture 2
Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet in the BBC dramatisation.

2. For a lively downloadable reading of highlights from Don Juan Canto 1, click here:

3. Shape of lecture
Genre Romance Novel Character Voice Closure: How plotting generates happy end of romance. Detours.

4. Genre Romance Tragedy Comedy
No text is a perfect representation of a genre. But they have a great deal in common – character types, plot structures, beginnings and endings

5. Romance
Romance, then, with R: Pictures the world as better and worse than it is. Pits ‘good’ against ‘evil’ characters. The good characters are more heroic/better than we are; the evil characters are worse than we are.
Romance (r) market/book shop romance: A form of narrative in which the world of the characters are recognisably ours, but where the characters and actions are recognisably unreal. The reality we find in the world of romance is so glamourised that actions and their consequences correspond not so much to real experience but to wish-fulfilment dream.
[See Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture]

6. Fredric Jameson grounds his conception of genre in society – determined by a kind of cultural as well as literary agreement. In modern romance, generally speaking, happiness is achieved in an intense union with another, as an idealised reflex of human experience.

7. Textual Elements of Romance Narrative
Romance structure
Characterisation – Individualised
Psychological Profile
Narrative – Linear drive (tightly constructed narrative)
Double narrative – private/public
Retardation devices
Tightly constructed
Commonly, end of a particular episode is to reduce the disorder with which episode begins.
Usually omniscient narration, with hierarchies of knowledge that seem more or less closely associated with the narrating voice
Closure + Reassuring happy ending (common)

8. Aristotle’s Poetics: crucial dimension of story is plot Bildungsroman: novel of formation coming of age novel plot serves character

9. Character – what sort of person do we find
Character – what sort of person do we find? Elizabeth is witty, playful, teasing. Darcy is sardonic, patronising, etc.
Characterisation – How that person is produced? How do we know Elizabeth is witty, etc, and Darcy is sardonic? No one in a novel is fully as they are in real life – so we must note the details that generate a character.
Example: Mr and Mrs Bennet
‘You must came and make Lizzy marry Mr Collins’, he replies with the somewhat over-emphasized politeness of “I have not the pleasure of understanding you.”

10. [Elizabeth’s views on her father]
“Elizabeth, however, had never been blind to the impropriety of her father’s behaviour as a husband. She had always seen it with pain, but respecting his abilities, and grateful for his affectionate treatment of herself, she endeavoured to forget what she could not overlook, and to banish from her thoughts that continual breach of conjugal obligation and decorum which, in exposing his wife to the contempt of her own children, was so highly reprehensible.” [Vol 2. XIX]
[Elizabeth’s views on her father]
Kenneth Gwenn
Mr Bennet, Mr Bennet, Mr Bennet, Mr Bennet, Mr Bennet,

11. Peter Brooks on Narrative
The sense of a beginning, then, must in some important way be determined by the sense of an ending. We might say that we are able to read present moments – in literature and, by extension, in life – as endowed with narrative meaning only because we read them in anticipation of the structuring power of these endings that will retrospectively give them the order and significance of plot.
[Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative]

12. Protonarrative
Day to day activity is not particularly noteworthy unless these activities are attached to an incident. eg. Driving to work day by day is of no particular interest. If, however, someone crashes into us, that ordinary, insignificance activity, becomes important and has a narrative attached to it. Protonarratives are also affective. We read incidents with inevitable bias -- in so far as they support our sense of ourselves.

13. ‘she [Elizabeth] is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.’
[Darcy to Bingley at first dance]

14. Revision of earlier incidents
“No; hatred had vanished long ago, and she had almost as long been ashamed of ever feeling a dislike against him, that could be so called. The respect created by the conviction of his valuable qualities, though at first unwillingly admitted, had for some time ceased to be repugnant to her feelings. . . above all, above respect and esteem, there was a motive within her of good will which could not be overlooked. It was gratitude. Gratitude, not merely for having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough, to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection.” Elizabeth [Vol 111, chpt II]

15. “Mr Darcy, I am a very selfish creature; and, for the sake of giving relief to my own feelings, care not how much I may be wounding your’s.”
[Vol III, Chpt XVI]
‘These recollections will not do at all. I assure you, that I have long been most heartily ashamed of it The feeling of the person who wrote, and the person who received it, are now so widely different from what they were then, that every unpleasant circumstance attending it, ought to be forgotten.
[Same Vol & chapter]

16. Bakhtin – Russian theorist of language and literature
Bakhtin calls this process ‘ventriloquation’ – that is a process through which we see ourselves through the eyes/voice of others. ‘heteroglossia’ : [many] different voices

17. “I see what you are feeling
“I see what you are feeling you must be surprised, very much surprised, -- so lately as Mr Collins was wishing to marry you. But when you have had time to think it all over, I hope you will be satisfied with what I have done. I am not romantic you know. I never was. I ask only a comfortable home; and considering Mr Collin’s character, connections, and situation in life, I am convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as far, as most people can boast on entering the marriage state.” [Vol 1, chpt XXII] [Charlotte to Elizabeth]

18. Narrative
In fictional narrative, the textual play, an anticipation of an end, is an aspect of the hermeneutic (textual interpretation) speculation into which the text invites us.

19. Detours
Elizabeth’s possible husbands: Collins, Wickham, Fitzwilliam, Darcy. Seducers: Bingley, Wickham. Marriage: Charlotte, Lydia [do not conform to the highly valued concept of marriage]