Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [166]
There is something to this perhaps, yet Brontë’s indictment is not entirely fair. One cannot say that Austen’s novels lack passion. They lack a certain kind of overripe sensuousness, an appetite for the more unfiltered romantic abandon of Jane Eyre and Rochester. Theirs is a more muted sensuality, desire by indirection.
Please turn to page 148, and try to visualize the scene as you read the passage. Darcy and Elizabeth are alone in Mr. Collins’s house. Darcy is gradually coming to the realization that he cannot live without Elizabeth. They are talking about the significance of the distance between a woman’s married home and her parents’ home.
Mr. Darcy drew his chair a little towards her, and said, “You cannot have a right to such very strong local attachment. You cannot have been always at Longbourn.”
Elizabeth looked surprised. The gentleman experienced some change of feeling; he drew back his chair, took a newspaper from the table, and, glancing over it, said, in a colder voice,—
“Are you pleased with Kent?”
Let us return to the aforementioned scene. The insistence in Darcy’s voice is a symptom of his passion for Elizabeth; it emerges even in their most mundane interactions. We can trace the development of Darcy’s feelings for Elizabeth in the tone of his voice. This reaches its climax in the scene in which he proposes to her. His negative persistence, beginning his speech with “In vain have I struggled. It will not do,” becomes almost violent, in part because the novel itself is so restrained and Darcy is the most restrained of all the characters.
Now, please listen carefully to that “you.” Darcy seldom if ever addresses Elizabeth by her name, but he has a special way of saying “you” when he addresses her a few times that makes the impersonal pronoun a term of ultimate intimacy. One should appreciate such nuances in a culture such as ours, where everyone is encouraged to demonstrate in the most exaggerated manner his love for the Imam and yet forbidden from any public articulation of private feelings, especially love.
There is seldom a physical description of a character or scene in Pride and Prejudice and yet we feel that we have seen each of these characters and their intimate worlds; we feel we know them, and sense their surroundings. We can see Elizabeth’s reaction to Darcy’s denunciation of her beauty, Mrs. Bennet chattering at the dinner table or Elizabeth and Darcy walking in and out of the shadows of the Pemberley estate. The amazing thing is that all of this is created mainly through tone—different tones of voice, words that become haughty and naughty, soft, harsh, coaxing, insinuating, insensible, vain.
The sense of touch that is missing from Austen’s novels is replaced by a tension, an erotic texture of sounds and silences. She manages to create a feeling of longing by setting characters who want each other at odds. Elizabeth and Darcy are placed near each other in several scenes, but in public places where they cannot communicate privately. Austen creates a great deal of frustrated tension by putting them in the same room yet out of reach. The tension is deepened by the fact that while everyone expects Jane and Bingley to be in love, the exact reverse is expected of Elizabeth and Darcy.
Take, for instance, the party scene at Elizabeth’s house towards the end of the novel, when she is desperate to find private time to talk with him. The whole event is spent in a state of anxiety. She