Past, Present and Future

After finishing the novel Pride and Prejudice and our class discussion today I felt that there are a lot of things open for discussion or debate depending on the individual. I would like to start with the marriage of Wickham and Lydia and how for the times the fact that they ran away together not even to elope but to run away and stay together in sin as it would have been referred to was looked on as a black mark on the family and makes them or Lydia at least look bad and shameful. As a reader it would depend on the time period that you lived in how you would look upon what they did whether it is shameful or acceptable. In my eyes I didn't look at what they did with shame but then in the day and age of today what they did happens all the time and young people do not have to run away to do it. You could look at it as some sort of preview into the future of how things change and adapt over a period of time. That one thing that is socially unacceptable at one time over the years becomes accepted. I mean if you think about it if people still believed the way they did in the time Pride and Prejudice was written could you imagine what it would have been like in the 1960's free love period all the families that would have been black marked? I mean the opposition was there and it was socially unacceptable but there was no way to stop them from doing the things they were doing because there were too many of them and it wasn't just locally oriented; yes Height Ashbury was a big breeding ground but the movement was happening all over.

Which leads me to another example of show casing future events or traits? The type of woman that Elizabeth was a strong and an independent woman is what the women in the 1960's began coming into. Elizabeth was trying to be in control of her life, mind and who she was in the time she lived. The young women of the 1960's wanted the same thing they wanted to break free from the stereo type of marrying your high school and be a homemaker (the Ozzie and Harriett) and having babies. They began pursuing a college education, joining the work force, taking the pill (birth control) which was very taboo then because you just should not be having sex until you are married so these young women began to take a stand for who they are and what they wanted to do for themselves as women. Which you can see in Elizabeth they may not be the same traits but they are a form of her either wanting to or by accident becoming an independent women. You see it in the was that she speaks to Darcy and in the other things she does for example in the beginning when she walks to see Jane who is sick and gets all covered in mad and the women of the Bingley house look down upon her for what she did. I see it as a show of independence in that you won’t take me to see my sister and I don’t trust you I will make the walk on my own just to know that she is ok. That is a great example of very head strong independent women.

So as you see you could take many of the situations out of the novel and tie them into everyday life for the time period in which you live. The situations may be examples of the time it was written in but there are also many examples of how things have changed and progressed and that these novels may have helped to pave the way for those changes. They may not have downright contributed but they may have planted the seed.