Love in Pride and Prejudice and Beyond

A topic of interest in Pride and Prejudice is the representation of love in the novel versus how it is represented in remakes or spin-offs such as The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. As in Little Women, Jane and Elizabeth end up with the husbands they need. Bingley encourages Jane to open up more and they grow together as a couple. Furthermore, they are both kind and compassionate people, so their pairing is ideal. As for Darcy and Lizzie, at the core they are very similar people. When Darcy first proposes, Elizabeth tells him that "From the very beginning—from the first moment, I may almost say—of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry" (221). Her utter disdain for Darcy is clear in this statement, though her feelings are truly more complicated. She believes Darcy to be arrogant, conceited, and uncaring; however, she later finds that he is an extremely compassion person when he saves her sister Lydia or helps to reunite Bingley and Jane.

Moreover, Elizabeth can sometimes be self-centered and proud as well, which not only shows that the two aren’t that different, but also that she is not an innocent, perfect person. For example, Elizabeth constantly makes snap judgements based on her first impressions of people. She immediately dislikes Darcy because of his rude comment and writes him off for the majority of the novel, but is then completely wrong in her initial assessment of Wickham. In one scene, Darcy remarks that "There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil—a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome,” to which Elizabeth claims that Darcy’s “defect is to hate everybody,” while he replies that hers "is willfully to misunderstand them" (65). Though her view of Darcy is quite skewed towards the negative, his assessment of her is more on the mark. In fact, each of them suffers both pride and prejudice during the novel, whether it was directed at each other, or at a third party such as Elizabeth’s family. In The Lizzie Bennet Diaries though, the representations of love are easier to understand from the perspective of the 21st century, as well as more equal. In the diaries, Bing Lee picks up his life and moves to New York with Jane in order to be with her. Though there is still miscommunication and separation, they still end up happily together. As for Darcy and Lizzie, the Diaries show a more realistic progression of their relationship, especially since Lizzie is more honest with her feelings towards the end. In episode 98, they reenact the scene where Lizzie finally (sort-of) admits her feelings to Darcy. In the novel, Austen fails to tell the reader exactly what Lizzie says when she tells Darcy that she loves him too. However, in the diaries, she tells him that she wants to be with him because of him, that is, she wants to be with Darcy because of who he is, not what he has done for her. Then, thankfully, they kiss and live happily ever after as in the novel. In each representation, the point is made that Darcy and Lizzie truly love one another; however The Lizzie Bennet Diaries representation is probably my favorite.