A Joy and a Duty

Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth

“Don’t worry, Connie,” my seven-year-old nephew Isaac assured me as we watched Elizabeth Bennett berate Mr. Darcy for his arrogance and ungentlemanly behavior. “They will like each other in the end.”

“Don’t tell her!” cried his 12-year-old brother Micah. “Let her find out.”

“It’s okay, Micah,” I said. “I think I know the story.” Their family had come to stay with me in San Francisco for a brief visit. Their parents, my brother David and his wife Rachel, had brought along videotapes of the 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice to watch in the evenings, as respite from ambitious trips walking across the Golden Gate Bridge or climbing Mt. Tamalpais. Two blonde Norwegians from Minnesota, the boys were re-watching it, showing it to me. I was impressed at their decoding of some of the precise, involuted English conversation.

It is hard to know what Isaac made of this grownup drama, but the emotional pain of 

Elizabeth’s rejection of Darcy was not lost on him. Elizabeth herself is taken in by the devious Wickham, and when Darcy repairs the ruin her sister Lydia is about to bring on the family, Elizabeth sees the goodness beneath Darcy’s shell of pride. For his part, Darcy thanks Elizabeth for pointing out his selfish faults. In the course of the six-episode production, we are allowed to see beneath the surface of the characters and the righting of several wrongs. 

Thus literature warms the heart and educates us in the proper relations between ourselves and the world, in values. This dramatization was a big hit in several households in my family and is still acknowledged the best of many. No one made a better Elizabeth than Jennifer Ehle and Mr. Darcy was never better embodied than by Colin Firth.

In 2017, 200 years after her death, the scholar Nicholas Dames (in an article in the September Atlantic Monthly) analyzed what makes Jane Austen such an enduring and beloved literary icon. He concludes that Austen’s characters embody a spiritedness which is “vibrant, quick, sensitive, willing to collide with the world yet also self-sufficient.” It was embedded in Austen’s time, during which revolutions swirled at a distance. It was a “way of understanding oneself as having rights. It experiences those rights as a joy, as a sense of blossoming, of freedom.”

Nevertheless, says Dames, “no one has made spiritedness more compelling, and no one has taken more care to hedge it with such perfect control. At different historical moments, one side or the other of that equation has been emphasized—sometimes the ironic wit keeping characters under surveillance, sometimes the spirited relish with which those characters defend their rights—but the equipoise has demonstrated remarkable durability. The balance between self and society is the core dream of a liberal world: a place where individuals might be both sufficient unto themselves and possessed of rights accordingly, but also bound to one another in a pact of mutual correction. Call it civil society, as both a joy and a duty.”

I am captivated by this idea and have watched several situations unfold in which the balance was disturbed. It seems to be something one must understand at an early age. Not long after the Kronlokkens’ visit, the life of the woman in the apartment next to mine completely unraveled due to such an imbalance. At 2 am one morning, she started yelling and banging on the floor, calling for help. Her downstairs neighbor called 911 and all of us came out into the hall to see what could be done. We knew Myra as a well-off, imperious woman in her eighties who lived alone. In the early days I talked to her as she sat downstairs after a foray into the neighborhood, getting up her courage to climb the stairs to the fourth floor.

The police had no right to break down the apartment door, but the firemen did. When they opened it, we were all horrified to see her sitting in the tiny space in front of her door surrounded by trash to a height of six feet. The firemen lifted her into a small chair and took her down the stairs. “Don’t take me to the nursing home,” she begged. “I don’t do well there.” “You’re not doing well here,” said the young fireman at her head.

It had been obvious things had been going badly for Myra for a while. Mail was piling up in front of her door. I heard her ordering food and a Nehi orange soda every evening. Our landlady had helped clean the apartment several times, worried about fire, in the many years Myra had lived there. Her family paid her rent, but she complained of how little money they gave her. It was clear she had not the least idea of duty, even to herself. We residents stood outside talking before going back to bed. The stench in the apartment was awful, the trash mostly dirty diapers. It was the last I saw of Myra.

Without a sense of duty, there can be little joy. This winter has been longer, darker and colder than we are used to in Los Angeles. I only want to sit on the couch under a blanket! But that won’t do. I get up and complete my small round of duties, which are the same as yours, or Jane Austen’s for that matter. Taking care of myself, my husband, my house and other relationships, I am grateful to have them, to share in the joy in the world.

And, regarding duty, here’s a tip from Mark Twain: “If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first.” See? Where would we be without literature?