However, no sooner does he say this than he realizes there is actually more to Elizabeth than his first impression of her. Only pages before, Darcy had remarked to his friends that Elizabeth was "barely tolerable," or hardly pretty at all. Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness." (Chapter 6) To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. "But no sooner had made it clear to himself and his friends that she hardly had a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. Not only does it establish the central concern of the novel-marriage-but it also establishes a sarcastic tone that will resurface at many points Jane Austen makes this statement as a rather tongue-in-cheek observation, laughing at the idea that a man with money could only ever be thinking of marriage.
The opening line of the novel, this sets the tone for everything that follows. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." (Chapter 1)
0 kommentar(er)
