Pride and Prejudice takes place in a society where you’re not supposed to talk to/dance with/*cough*proposemarriagetocoughcough* anybody without first going through a highly formalized little “introduction” ritual. This can involve going to someone’s house and leaving your card, and then waiting for them to return the visit, which is what Mrs. Bennet is badgering Mr. Bennet to do re. Mr. Bingley in chapter one, or, if you’re out in public, say at a ball, you get a mutual acquaintance or master of ceremonies to do the honours and vouch for everybody’s good character. At the Meryton Assembly, Darcy refuses to be introduced to Elizabeth or anybody, because he’s a Grade A Snob. They’re all too low-ranking/provincial/unattractive to notice, and he doesn’t care who knows it. Seriously, bro, if you don’t want to dance, just go play cards in the other room with the geezers, or go home and put your grumpy ass to bed. Stop wallflowering and making a spectacle of your arrogance. You have options, here.
A few weeks later, after Darcy has maybe unbent a bit (read: decided Elizabeth is pretty), Sir William Lucas tries to introduce them again. But! Because Sir William is a country bumpkin, he goofs the phrasing in such a way as to imply Darcy is Elizabeth’s superior (“Mr. Darcy, allow me to present this lady…” instead of, “Miss Elizabeth Bennet, allow me to present this gentleman….” If a man and a woman are of equal rank, you’re supposed to introduce the gent to the lady.). Elizabeth doesn’t even let him finish. This time she declines the introduction and skedaddles, flat-out refusing to launch their acquaintanceship on any supposition of inequality.
After that, there’s really no non-mortifying way to remedy the situation, sooooo….these idiots spend the rest of the novel yammering awkwardly and irately at each other apparently without ever having been introduced, which is fucking hilarious and taboo as fuck.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Jane Austen was doing something VERY interesting here.
“The roof constitutes an introduction.”
All that business with Jane being taken ill and Elizabeth essentially inviting herself to stay at Netherfield – after that, Elizabeth is officially acquainted with everyone else who happened to be staying in the house at the time. All of them are now obligated to acknowledge each other’s correspondence and bow when they meet in public. They can quite properly converse.
The ladies at Netherfield start out imagining, and with good reason, that Elizabeth has come to ingratiate herself with them. But Elizabeth really is only there because she was worried about Jane. (In those days, it wasn’t all that unusual for a cough to turn into a corpse overnight.) Elizabeth makes a point of not intruding on her hosts at dinner, or at all, until Jane is well enough to boot Lizzie out of her room. Even after that, Elizabeth has to be pretty much begged to talk to the others there. From here in the 21st century it looks like Elizabeth just doesn’t like them much. From the Darcy/Bingley point of view, she is not presuming on their acquaintance. Elizabeth is signaling as hard as she can that, as far as she’s concerned, all of them can forget they ever met her the minute they leave Netherfield, and no hard feelings. She is not trying to turn her sister’s cold into an occasion for her own advancement.
Mr Darcy, being both shy and the constant target of opportunists of all stripes, is utterly smitten by Elizabeth’s insistence on not presuming or intruding.
Oh ho, I have lured a true geek out of the woodwork! Thank you; I stand corrected; I kind of wondered if that would happen. My source was Helena Kelly – a lecturer at Oxford who has published a decent amount of Austen scholarship – whom I hoped would have researched to hell and back before making such an audacious claim!
The Bennet women have already visited the Bingley sisters by the time Jane falls ill, so Elizabeth wouldn’t be out of bounds in showing up on their doorstep (early hour and her hair, Louisa! aside). So the piece Kelly missed is that as soon as Elizabeth spends the night at Netherfield, she’s acquainted by default with all the gentlemen too.
It’s worth noting that none of this has happened when Elizabeth first addresses Darcy. She notices him staring at Sir William’s party and cheekily demands an explanation before Charlotte dives in to extract her and hustle her off to the piano. So their relationship still begins with a bit of boundary-pushing. But your explanation of her behaviour at Netherfield is really cool, and applies neatly to both her initial appearances and that amazing bit in the garden where she refuses to “ruin the picturesque.”
My family is from Nigeria, and my full name is
Uzoamaka, which means “The road is good.” Quick lesson: My tribe is
Igbo, and you name your kid something that tells your history and
hopefully predicts your future. So anyway, in grade school, because my
last name started with an A, I was the first in roll call, and nobody
ever knew how to pronounce it. So I went home and asked my mother if I
could be called Zoe. I remember she was cooking, and in her Nigerian
accent she said, “Why?” I said, “Nobody can pronounce it.” Without
missing a beat, she said, “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and
Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.”
I’ve worked with many exchange programs on campuses, and they still “encourage” Chinese students to choose English names for their stay in the US. I’ve adopted a rule for myself, I won’t address them with their English name until they’ve told me to stop trying their real name on at least three different occasions. My family is largely immigrant, and while we’ve never had this problem, I don’t think anyone should have to change who they are when them find a new home, even a temporary one. So far, only two exchange student actually wanted to keep their English name, and one of them, Alice, had had Alice for a nickname since she was little.
Don’t know if it’s okay to add this here, but I used to work with a Chinese woman who had changed her name to Angelina for the sake of ease. When she first told me that was what she’d had to do, I asked her for her real name and if she minded me calling her that. She looked so frikkin happy, and it only took about two minutes for me to say it right. It’s not that people can’t pronounce these names, it’s that they won’t. It’s lazy and it’s rude.
It’s also RACIST.
Say ‘racist’.
They pronounce Tchaikovsky and Schwarzenegger just fine.
This rings truer to me than the spoiler going around that some of the film will take place around the fall of the KGB, because Nat was under ten, and while kids can absolutely have moral crises that impact them throughout their lives, it doesn’t really fit what we’ve seen so far, with Nat being sterilized in the Red Room as the implied culmination of both her “studies” there and her adolescence. Teenage Red Room Nat being behind something that was supposed to be a huge thing in the world and then wasn’t rings true, whether she was on the side starting the problem or solving it before we ever heard about it.
I really don’t know that they can possibly de-age Scarlett that much
without going into the uncanny valley (it’s not like she was an unknown at the time; we’ve all seen Ghost World), but the idea that Nat was involvd in a Y2K plot actually deepens her
storylines in at least three films:
Iron Man 2: If they’d
shown her tech skills early in this movie, she would have seemed like a
bigger threat to Tony, which still seems like one of their biggest
missed opportunities out of MANY missed opportunities in this movie. But
we do see her hack the systems in Iron Man 2 to get Rhodey’s armor back
to Tony, which would be a way she’s using computer skills for the ‘good
guys’.
Captain America 2: We see her use her tech skills
several times here: getting info on the Lemurian Star, to triangulate
the source of the file in the Apple store, in the hidden Hydra office
within the hidden SHIELD office in Jersey, and taking down Pierce by
releasing information online. This was kind of held up as generic “spy skills” but Nat specifically being tech-savvy would retroactively make this movie feel more balanced in a few ways. For one, it makes the things she accomplished more impressive if it required that level of skill; for another, it shows she really was putting all of her skills on the line.
Age of Ultron: That whole thing where Ultron captured her (and the internet’s ensuing debate over whether she was actually stuck or whether she was biding her time to bring everyone back to her) becomes more nuanced.
It also plays into the way that Marvel wants to emphasize its female characters’ connections to STEM. They’re clearly not erasing Nat’s history of ballet- we saw that in Ultron and it was iconic enough imagery that they won’t undo it- but making young Nat interested in both ballet and computers may appeal to the way they’ve marketed, e.g., Thor.
Molly's Monsters 