I am a Jane Austen fan. For decades, I read her novels
— all of them — a couple of times a year or
more. But her six novels have been turned into such excellent
visual productions that I watch DVDs now instead of reading.
The
DVD version of Pride and Prejudice
from A&E/BBC is my favorite (although the lack of
closed captioning is a real flaw).
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You
will learn a lot at this Web site about egocentricity
because you have to thoroughly understand the concept
in order to sort out other people and the organizing
adventures of their lives.
That
is the reason for the emphasis on Jane Austen here.
She was the world's greatest authority on the subject.
She explored and delineated the widest variety of
egocentric behavior in the characters that she created.
Most of the problems that her heroines have to deal
with originate in someone else's egocentric behavior.
She
knew the subject from A to Z, and reading her novels
a number of times is probably the best and easiest
way to get an education on the subject.
You
do, of course, learn things better when you learn
them the hard way. But hard experience is a hard
teacher.
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One
of the most useful things about Jane Austen is that she
makes the driving, habitual mindset of her characters
absolutely clear in terms of the way it affects their
behavior — and she also frequently gives us the rationalizations
that they use to conceal their motives from themselves.
This clarity about the motivating drives of behavior and
the masks of rationalization is important here because
it is the thing that makes it so easy to understand so
many of her characters in terms of the organizing adventure
of their lives.
Applying
the organizing adventure concept to Mr. Darcy, for example,
is very straightforward. In the first part of Pride
and Prejudice, he organizes his life in terms
of the social status adventure. He considers personal
relationships, especially in the matter of marriage, strictly
in terms of social repercussions, family social position
and reputation, and the potential for one to to enhance,
or at least publicly confirm, one's social position.
With this point of view firmly fixed as his automatic
frame of reference, he simply can't wrap his mind around
the possibility that anyone would choose to marry into
a family with the obvious social and economic handicaps
of the Bennetts — not to mention the fact that marriage
to any of the Bennett women would involve becoming related
to the mother of the family, who seems to have a complete
void where one expects to find the social and personal
graces.
Such considerations as how intelligent, attractive, socially
accomplished, and downright decent Jane and Elizabeth
might be are completely irrelevant to Mr. Darcy in the
first part of the work. Indeed, he is astounded and dismayed,
right through his first marriage proposal to Elizabeth,
to find that he is irresistibly attracted to her. His
own actions disturb him.
What
he discovers is that Elizabeth isn't going to have anything
to do with anyone as shallow and insensitive to the needs
of other people as he has become. It is, of course, the
organizing adventure that Mr. Darcy has chosen to guide
him through life that has made him as shallow and insensitive
as he is.
We
see very little of the process of his transformation from
one organizing adventure to another, but the final result
is dramatic. Over a period of some months, he does manage
to change himself. He makes the love adventure
the organizing adventure of his life and comes to terms
with what that means in the way of new attitudes and habitual
patterns of behavior.
Why
does he do it?
It
almost certainly isn't just the fact that he can't get
Elizabeth to marry him in the sorry inner state that he
has fallen into. The source of his transformation is most
likely the concatenation of that fact with other facts:
The fact that Elizabeth so firmly and positively rejects
him, the fact that she so clearly does not regard him
as a decent sort of person and can give him her reasons
in such unsettling detail (misguided as she is in some
parts), the fact that he is profoundly unattracted to
women (like the sisters of his friend Mr. Bingley) whose
perceptions are governed by the same organizing adventure
that he has adopted, and the fact that his organizing
adventure has led him to stoop so such miserable behavior
as actually concealing matters from his friend Mr. Bingley
(specifically, the information that Elizabeth's sister
Jane was in London all winter, where Mr. Bingley was,
too.)
Sorting
through all of these things, Mr. Darcy seems to have asked
himself, "What the hell have I been doing?"
And he seems to come to the conclusion that he just doesn't
want to be the kind of person he is. What
he discovers that he wants most out of life is a woman
to love whom he can respect and admire for her intelligence,
taste, and general good sense, instead of for the superficial
qualities that he has fallen into the habit of focusing
upon.
He discovers upon reflection that he has found in Elizabeth
Bennett exactly the woman who suits him and changes the
organizing adventure of his life to a love adventure
— which in turn changes his attitudes and values
and behavior and the choices that he makes.
As
his new character unfolds, Elizabeth Bennett is in a position
to witness the fruits of his transformation and to benefit
from them. Her opinion of him changes dramatically, he
offers again to marry her, and she accepts his second
proposal.
Elizabeth
Bennett has chosen love as the organizing adventure of
her life long before the story opens. She tells her sister
that she will only marry for love, and she makes the point
absolutely clear in her refusals, first of Mr. Collins
and then of Mr. Darcy. In contrast, her friend Charlotte
Lucas (who married Mr. Collins) is willing to marry strictly
for social position and economic security, which is obviously
the organizing adventure of her life.
Elizabeth also makes it clear in her first attitude towards
Mr. Wickham that she is not insensitive to economic necessities.
As attracted to Mr. Wickham as she is in the early part
of the work, she has no interest in marrying him, purely
as a practical economic matter. Unlike her youngest sister
(who does marry Mr. Wickham), she is aware that a happy
marriage requires a certain minimum of economic resources
to support it. Without that prospect, she is unwilling
even to think about marriage.
She
pursues the ideal of her love adventure consistently
throughout the novel and winds up with what she wants,
once she unwittingly drives Mr. Darcy to adopt the love
adventure as the organizing adventure of his life,
too, and become the sort of person she can love.