We open on three girls, a couch, and Laura Linney looking oddly solemn.
[Frank Churchill proposes a ball]
Miss Osborne: Oh, I do love a ball! (TM Lydia Bennet)
Miss Osborne: Does she not have a ballroom or a dining room in her house?
[Frank sweeps Emma up for an impromptu dance]
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: They would not have been doing that.
Miss Ball: “I would much better be married than right”: words to live by?
[Frank acts like he's going to propose and then doesn't]
Miss Osborne: Why can’t people tell the truth? This is annoying.
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: Like you tell the truth all the time?
Miss Osborne: Well, he’s acting like he loves her.
Miss Osborne: And he has a man-ring.
[Harriet bawls her eyes out]
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: Harriet’s such a modern teenage girl. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have the internet or TV to distract her with a massive gallery of males.
[Mrs. Elton arrives]
Miss Osborne: Ohhhhh, it’s THAT girl. She plays the bitch in everything!
Miss Ball: Like?
Miss Osborne: Like What a Girl Wants, which I only saw because of Colin Firth. And, um, Amanda Bynes.
Miss Ball: No, I saw that, too! With the leather pants! Amanda Bynes is my hero(ine), and I don’t care who knows it.
[Mr. Knightley brought Emma a library book]
Miss Osborne: It’s Twilight.
[Misses Osborne and Ball and Mrs.Fitzpatrick pause to discuss crooked ears, including but not limited to Stephen Colbert and Victor Garber. Mrs. Fitzpatrick has perfect, delicate ears. She's the only one.]
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: I think I’ll start calling Mr. Fitzpatrick “Mr. F”, like Mrs. Elton does.
Miss Ball: Like he’s a substitute teacher with a difficult name?
[Misses Osborne and Ball and Mrs.Fitzpatrick pause to discuss the technical term for Emma's face-framing curls, which Mrs. Fitzpatrick calls "scare curls" but thinks she made that up. Google tells us this.]
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: Now, this is weird, because in the book, Mrs. Elton suggests the whole Box Hill expedition, and Emma doesn’t seem particularly sad about being stuck in Highbury.
Miss Ball: It’s a modern take on the situation, certainly.
[Mrs. Elton has quite a horror of finery.]
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: Too matchy-matchy?
Miss Ball: Bridesmaid quality, definitely.
Miss Osborne: The voice-over is worse than Superman.
Miss Ball: I do miss the choreographed group dancing.
[Frank disses Mrs. Elton's hairstyle]
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: He is a little…dickish.
Miss Ball: Catty.
Miss Osborne: A douchebag.
[Mr. Knightley asks Harriet to dance]
Miss Ball: Mr. Knightley! You’re the dreamiest man the world right now! Such a mensch!
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: Isn’t he?
Miss Osborne: I like the idea of wearing gloves. That way you don’t get sweaty hands.
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: Plus, it’s more sexy.
[Dancing ensues]
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: I think they’re doing the Congress of Vienna waltz.
Miss Osborne: I can do the polka!
Miss Ball: Me, too!
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: I wonder how authentic the dancing in this really is?
Miss Ball: We’re totally ruining the mood of this very romantic dance.
[Harriet gushes about Frank's rescue of her from the scary scary gypsies]
Miss Osborne: Harriet’s so pale, she could be a vampire.
Miss Ball: Don’t say that out loud.
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: There’s already going to be Emma and werewolves.
Miss Osborne: Um, did she just faint?
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: I think Jane had a thing against fainting—it never really works out in her books.
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: If this were a murder mystery, Harriet would be shot dead now.
[The camera cuts, inexplicably, behind Mr. Knightley's coat as he reminisces about Emma's hotness]
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: SIGH.
[Mr. Knightley walks away from Emma and the too-hot fire]
Mrs. F: Well, I definitely liked this chapter better—now that she’s not so incredibly bouncy.
Miss Ball: And now that the story’s picking up, minus Exposition City.
Miss Osborne: Augh, when he yells at her, he’s so right, and it’s so horrible, because we’ve all been yelled at by somebody we care at like that. So terrible.
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: And they’re…following the book. Such a concept!
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: It’s weird how little Mr. Woodhouse is in this version. Usually, he’s in the background of everything.
Miss Osborne: Maybe Michael Gambon’s pterodactyl arms wouldn’t fit in the picture.
Aaaaaaand, scene.
In Thoughts on Mansfield Park, Part 1: Fanny and Mary, I started to talk about this book: Why does it seem so different from Austen’s other books? Why is Fanny so serious? Last week(ish) was about Fanny as a person, and about Mary as a quasi-parallel to Elizabeth Bennet. But now I’m thinking about the novel in general—why does Jane seem so much more serious, and why does it all seem rather forced?
Scholars (such as Marvin Mudrick) seem to see the novel as a penitent rewriting of Pride and Prejudice—the clergyman’s daughter being serious. Mansfield Park was Jane’s first novel after a 10-year hiatus, and while she was writing it, she was seeing Pride and Prejudice through the press, and commented on its “rather too light, and bright, and sparkling” manner, its “playfulness and epigrammatism.” This is more than a little depressing, though published authors will understand Austen’s dislike of re-reading her own work in proofs.
But, rather than think that Austen was now a humorless person, I think that, after 10 years, she was taking herself more seriously as a novelist, and had a deeper sense of observation and storytelling. Mudrick argues that, for the most part, in Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice, Austen doesn’t delve into her characters much. She is content to equate manners with morals: witty people are good, dull or obnoxious people are bad. (Shades of Oscar Wilde: “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”) Even in her early novels, personality and character aren’t the same thing. Just think of Willoughby, Wickham, Isabella Thorpe, even the respectable but self-absorbed Lady Middleton—all these people aren’t what they first seem.
There’s no doubt that Mansfield Park is a turning point, though, and Jane Austen is thinking about all sorts of new things. In Pride and Prejudice, some first impressions are wrong, but it seems like in Mansfield Park, they all are. We’re in the author’s confidence, but the characters (except for Fanny) misjudge each other constantly, and there’s far fewer truly good people. Jane’s gotten much more cynical since we last saw her. Austen told her sister Mansfield Park was to be about “ordination,” that is, one assumes, Edmund’s ordination as a clergyman. This seems to make it revolve around Edmund’s struggles, and the different views about morality and the role of the clergy than anything else. And these views were much in upheaval in Austen’s time. They illuminate the characters, and provide a backdrop. We are meant to judge the characters by their attitude towards serious things (something that changes in Henry Crawford’s transformation) and expect that we will like them accordingly.
Yet in fits and starts there’s something more real about these characters than we’ve seen before. Austen goes into their motives, their psychology even (think of Julia Bertram sulking at Sotherton, a prey to good breeding, but lacking fortitude). In Mansfield Park Austen has also broadened her vision to take in a nature vs. nurture argument that was popular in her day: the beauties of nature and the evils of town, and their opposite effect on people. She tries to explain why Maria Bertram, Sir Thomas, Mary Crawford, and everyone else, are the way they are, based on their upbringing and these outside effects. Really, a startlingly modern idea, but she doesn’t let the real feelings of her characters take her where it might. She still wants to push them around, have the good end happily and the bad unhappily. (“That is what fiction means.” —Wilde again 
) Sometimes the characters feel real to us, and sometimes they don’t. And that’s the tension of the novel, the weirdness that readers react to.
To me Mansfield Park is an experiment that Austen is trying out before she explores her ideas of good and evil in normal society, opposing forces in normal people, in a more natural, complex, interwoven way in Emma and Persuasion. Both these books have deep themes of people not being what they seem, even to themselves, but the characters and plots seem to evolve quite naturally. I think of Fanny Price as more a precursor for Anne Elliot than anything else. Like Fanny, Anne is a quiet, ignored observer, a serious and feeling character, but Anne has her touches of humor, of worldly knowledge, that Fanny, in her innocence, finds it hard to come by.
But for all that, there’s something raw, something out of control, in Mansfield Park, that I find compelling. And that’s why I come back to it.
Photo credit:
Memo, universe: We at Austenacious have had just about enough of this “rain” business. Yes, we’re in California; yes, Minnesota, we feel you staring daggers at the backs of our heads right now. But you’ve got to know: it is the birthright of all Californians to experience 365 perfect weather days a year, and so far 2010 is just a giant vitamin D deficiency waiting to happen. And I think it goes without saying that you don’t want to see us cranky and/or with impaired bone mineralization.
In the mean time, as one does, we look to the grey-weather experience (see what I did there, Anglo-spellers?) of a people so steeped in precipitation, so accustomed to mist and gloom, that anything less than moss-growing conditions may as well be July in Death Valley. Would Jane mope when things get rainy? Would the young ladies of Jane’s novels faint when the sun seems simply gone forever? They would not, because they are English, and the English would never get anything done if they let the perpetual drizzle get them down. The English simply keep calm and carry on being . . . whatever it is they are. Awesome, I suppose?
And so, today, we present the Jane Austen Ladies’ Survival Guide for Soul-Crushing Weather, AKA Tips For the English, From the English (Regency Edition):
Tip #1: Become accomplished.
This is Priority One, obviously, and also blends conveniently with damp conditions. While your skin pales and your muscles atrophy, brush up on your painting! Practice that piece for next week’s ball, so as to avoid Mary Bennet Syndrome! Laziness is unbecoming, and the picturesque (though, of course, visibility-impaired) scene outside your (closed) window isn’t going to sketch itself, ladies, so let’s get moving, shall we?
Tip #2: Freak yourself out with Gothic tales.
This works better when things get truly squally, but with a little imagination, you, too, can slash the fine membrane between fiction and reality! Bonus points if you accuse your future husband’s father of killing his wife.
Tip #3: Matchmake.
Hey, we watched the premiere of Emma too, okay? Social parties and romantic walks are out of the question for now, sure, but bracket charts, Rolodexes, and sheer intuition function just fine under persistent cloud cover.
Tip #4: Go for a walk.
What have we Austenites learned, but that a nice stroll in a driving rain is sure to net 1) the sudden appearance of a dashing young man on horseback (blessing or curse? Discuss!), 2) a muddy hem, 3) brightened eyes (it helps if they’re “fine” already), and 4) a flu the likes of which will let you stay in the home of your crush for as long as you like! Game, set, match, my friends.
Tip #5: Read.
This falls under the umbrella of Tip #1, technically—nothing says “accomplished” and/or “sexy” like a great reader—but we think it bears repeating. Find yourself a soft surface and a cozy blanket and spend a few hours in another world. May we recommend one Jane Austen? You’ll like her. Promise.
The Austenacious sisters are too old-school (so far) to be on Twitter, so we decided to have our own live new-Emma-watching/blogging party. And the opening credits roll . . .
Miss Ball: This is all very Pushing Daisies, isn’t it? There goes Mom.
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: Frank and Jane’s sending-away is so much more emotional than it is in the book.
[Everyone grows up. Quickly. Thank goodness, all this exposition is getting boring.]
Miss Osborne: Who does Emma look like to you guys?
Miss Osborne: Did they really wear big bows on their backs? (Consensus: Not sure.)
Miss Osborne: No cake for the wedding? Well, that’s just crazy. Turn it off! I’m done.
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: The thing about Michael Gambon is, it’s hard to believe he can be as stupid as Mr. Woodhouse after being Dumbledore.
All: Boo hoo! Loneliness and tinkly pianos! SLO-MO CHILDREN! Too cheesy!
Miss Osborne: Romola Garai’s not as stately or graceful as I expected Emma to be.
[Emma visits Mrs. Goddard's school.]
Miss Ball: Gypsies! Ooh, foreshadowing!
Miss Ball: That hat’s like a bell. How is it staying on her head?
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: What? A scene from the book? And only twenty-five minutes in!
Miss Osborne: I’ve got it! Drew Barrymore meets Starbuck!
Miss Ball: It’s the mouth.
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: Who? Oh, Romola. But what about Harriet Smith? She reminds me of someone.
Miss Osborne: She was in something called Lesbian Vampire Killers!
Miss Osborne: Mr. Martin’s got mutton chops to rival Mr. Darcy’s!
Miss Osborne: Gotta love a field trip to see the poor.
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: Well, they’re making much more of deal about it than in the book.
Miss Osborne: I realize that the refusal of Mr. Martin is straight from the book, but it makes me want to barf.
[Painting on the lawn.]
Miss Ball: Oh, Jane. You and your crazy dads.
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: Oh! Harriet Smith reminds me of the chick from Doctor Horrible.
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: I can see Emma’s roots. I can see! Her roots!
Miss Osborne: Check out Elton. Boyfriend’s a close-talker. Three feet, dude.
Mr. Knightley: Robert Martin! Is that you?
Miss Osborne: . . . nobody here by that name . . .
[Emma and Mr. Knightley fight.]
Miss Ball: I like Emma’s yellow wallpaper. Just not in the Charlotte Perkins Gilman sense.
Miss Osborne: Jonny Lee Miller just made a Muppet face.
Miss Osborne: Well, I think Emma’s right. So many men do want pretty and ditzy. So why shouldn’t everyone fall for Harriet Smith.
Miss Ball: I just want to watch him make more faces.
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: She makes the same argument in the book.
Miss Ball: I like Romola Garai.
[Emma and Harriet manage two pages of reading.]
Miss Ball: Two pages of Milton? I think she deserves a cookie.
[Emma explains her life plans to Harriet.]
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: Well, Emma’s ideal situation is Jane Austen’s situation: a well-to-do old maid with nieces.
Miss Osborne: I take umbrage at the “old maid” label. She died at forty-one!
Miss Osborne: I don’t even really understand why Emma’s friends with Harriet. She’s dumb!
Miss Ball: Haven’t you seen Clueless? She wants to better Harriet.
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: It would be like living your whole life with the people you went to elementary school with. Not much of a choice, right?
[Dinner party at the Westons]
Miss Osborne: Michael Gambon has the biggest basketball-player arms in all of movies, and he’s always flailing them around like a pterodactyl.
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: Mrs. Weston has a maid now. She should have better hair. And stop looking defeated. Because she isn’t.
[Elton proposes.]
Miss Ball: I sort of love Elton. I totally know that guy.
Miss Osborne: Wow, that CGI snow is terrible. It’s like a bad screen saver.
Miss Ball: Flying toasters.
Miss Osborne: Why is Elton so sweaty? It’s SNOWING.
[The Great Miss Fairfax Live and In Person!]
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: Hmmm. They changed Jane Fairfax almost getting thrown overboard from a boat to Jane Fairfax almost . . . slipping on a rock? Must have been too expensive.
[Emma and Harriet meet Frank on the road.]
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: Apart from that not being the way Emma and Frank meet, it’s just. . . all wrong. She’s so flirty with him!
[Emma and Frank meet officially.]
Miss Osborne: Dude is short!
Miss Ball: And not much of a looker. Which Frank Churchill should be, right? (Consensus.)
[And . . . the episode sort of peters out. Not much dramatic closure of any type.]
Miss Ball: 3 out of 5 start
Miss Osborne: Meh
Mrs. Fitzpatrick: Can we watch figure skating now?
Overall, it’s not great, but not bad. The scene changes are achingly obvious, and they do love to make a point, then drive it home, in case you didn’t get it the first time. Kind of an Emma for Dummies. Romola’s giving Emma a good go: we couldn’t agree on whether she was acting smart enough, but do think she should be more refined. More conclusions pending the next episode(s). Readers, your gut reactions?
Just a note, readers: don’t let the spam filter get you down!
If you submit a comment here at Austenacious and it doesn’t show up on the post, please drop us an e-mail. Your input gets us out of bed every morning, and although we try to keep an eye on the spam situation, we’d hate to think that we missed anything, therefore eventually becoming glamorous recluses and existing solely in a vortex of silk sleep masks, menthol cigarettes, and dry Cap’n Crunch.
Our senses of personal purpose thank you.
Signed,
Mrs. Fitzpatrick and Misses Ball and Osborne
So, apparently we all voted for Mr. Darcy and ended up with, what, Mr. Collins?
First of all…huh? This woman wants to dance with Obama/Darcy instead of a husband? Is this a War on Husbands? Yeah, man. HUSBANDS SUCK.
Second, what’s with people who use the men of Austen as a shorthand for exotic romantic heroes?
As I see it, there are two options here: either people who do this have not read Jane Austen, or they have read Jane Austen and then had their memories wiped by aliens. Take your pick.
It’s not that the Austen men aren’t romantic; they are. I think we can all (mostly) find common ground in the notion that our heroines’ love interests smolder on at least an occasional, private basis. But Jane is nothing if not consistent: nice guys finish first, and guys with wicked notions of sweeping ladies off their feet finish in disgrace (and, in my imagination, duels). Yes, Darcy scours the countryside in the dark of night, looking for Lydia and Wickham, but he does so because he cares for Lizzy, not because he’s into midnight scavenger hunts—and I wouldn’t call him “dashing” so much as “painfully awkward, yet rich.” Captain Wentworth is a sailor, but he’s been pining for nearly a decade and is ultimately just looking for some monogamy. Both Knightley and Henry Tilney like giving advice to the flighty. Colonel Brandon wears—wait for it—a flannel waistcoat! He’s practically Mr. Rogers! So: romantic, yes, but maybe not quite Romantic in the technical sense.
Furthermore, Jane warns us of the dangers of dashing young men to a degree that borders on silly: in each novel, any man who seems like fun from the get-go, is a hit with the ladies (on purpose), or otherwise seems too good to be true, gets pegged as a scoundrel—by Jane and by the reader, if not by the characters in the novel—at a hundred paces. In Jane’s world, sweeping the ladies off their feet (without a very impressive show of loyalty and/or self-sacrifice, at least) isn’t an indicator of hero status; it’s a giant red flag and a cue to go looking for the faithful guy on the sidelines.
Perhaps this is part of Jane’s point: the difference between romance—true romance—and being swept away by a good horseman with an eye for pretty hat ribbons. It doesn’t lend itself well to use in unthinking literary allusions, but then, Jane probably wouldn’t mind that so much.
So where does this leave us? With a grudging understanding that people don’t understand the difference between Fitzwilliam Darcy and Rhett Butler? With a campaign for public education on the actual, and not assumed, characters in Austen’s novels (please send poster ideas to missb at austenacious dot com)? With a call for a national discussion on the nature of romance? Or maybe just a polite request and a library card. I don’t know.
But if anybody starts equating the President to everybody’s favorite cousin/suitor, I’m writing my representative.
Time for a Very Special Announcement from Austenacious: the newest BBC Austen adaptation, 2009′s Emma, starts its American run this Sunday, January 24, on PBS.
To the ethically minded and/or BBC-less among us—i.e., those who neither got the chance to watch this new adaptation legally nor seized the chance to watch it illegally—let this be a reminder! Sundays, PBS, 9 p.m. Be there.
For those without such geographical or moral barriers—so, those who have already seen it—we have here the San Francisco Chronicle’s review, which seems more positive than most, or at least more positive than many. Critic David Wiegand claims that this Emma is good because it’s subtle: he compares it to the Paltrow version, with Alan Cumming bouncing off the walls and spitting the scenery out afterwards, and compliments this new adaptation on characters acting like…oh, right: actual people. Interestingly, Wiegand mostly addresses the supporting characters, and then skirts around the perpetual dilemma of Emma herself—that is, her inherent, if well-meant, obnoxiousness—by bringing her up and then failing to comment on Romola Garai‘s performance at all. This also begs the question of what makes a successful portrayal of Miss Woodhouse in the first place: how much are we really supposed to like Emma, how much leeway do her portrayers have in the role, and to what degree is Emma’s studied lack of complexity the key to her ultimate appeal?
So, all you torrent heathens (and legitimate Brits), what do you think? Who’s the best Emma of them all, is Jonny Lee Miller have Knightley’s dreamy-yet-stern thing down, and is this adaptation simply finely shaded, or is “subtle” a grand euphemism for “dead boring”?
Just remember, kids: Knowing is half the battle.
I’m always conflicted about this book, and I think a lot of other Austen readers are too. It seems like a complete aberration in Austen’s train of thought: suddenly timid girls who love nature are in and witty girls who know how to party (properly) are out. What’s up with that?
Maybe more than most people, I want to like Fanny. I do like her in theory—why should all heroines be so healthy, cheerful, and strong-willed? It can be positively discouraging to us normal people. Fanny’s a bit sappy, there’s no denying that, but she does get more real and likable as the story goes on, probably because she does finally exert her own will, stand up for herself, take action. All those good things are all the more noteworthy because she is such a timid person. When Eliza Bennet turns down Mr. Collins, it’s just a laugh; when Fanny Price turns down Mr. Crawford, there’s real drama involved—it’s actually a struggle for her. This doesn’t mean I don’t want to kick Fanny into gear sometimes, but it does mean I sympathize with her: if she can overcome her fears about life in general, so can I. Would the things I worry about seem as little in retrospect as the things she worries about do now? Quite possibly.
As to why Fanny’s so timid in the first place—and to modern readers she does seem incredibly passive—I think it’s a natural part of her character, acted on and amplified by practically everyone around her keeping her in her place. All this “equality” and “rights of man” stuff had not come to the Bertram household. Their attitude doesn’t give Fanny’s brother and sister massive inferiority complexes, but they come there only occasionally and when they’re older. I don’t think it’s so surprising that if you take an introverted little girl and tell her she’s not as good as her cousins for 10 years, that she’ll act timid. It’s probably more surprising when she does stand up for herself than when she doesn’t. Without Good Boy Edmund, she might easily have been either a complete doormat or a complete sycophant (Mrs. Norris for a new generation).
All this doesn’t make Mansfield Park a laugh a minute, and it does make us turn with some relief to Mary Crawford, who’s funny and talks like Elizabeth Bennet. Alas, Mary may be witty, smart, and strong, but unlike Lizzie, she has no moral center, and merely laughs at situations that send Lizzie crying into the heart of Mr. Darcy. She’s like Lizzie in some ways, in her wit and her taking things lightly, but she’s a more complex, darker character—she’s nice to Fanny and protects her sometimes, but she also manipulates her and uses her in her half-hearted quest for Edmund Bertram. It’s been noted that Mary Crawford actually talks more like Jane Austen than Lizzie. Did Jane make Mary Crawford a less moral incarnation of herself? And considering that Mary gives up Edmund in the hope of something better, even though she likes him, are we seeing Jane’s regret at her own romantic life or lack thereof? No doubt that’s a stretch. But we’re clearly supposed to sigh with Fanny and not laugh with Mary, and this is disconcerting. Why is Jane so serious all of a sudden?
Next week: Is Mansfield Park a moral rewriting of Pride and Prejudice, or something else entirely?
Photo credit: ©2008 by Heather Dever. All rights reserved.
Given that the ladies of Austenacious think mainly about two things, food and Jane Austen, you’d be surprised at how long it took us to put the two together and think about Jane Austen’s food! Well, now we are, and we have great plans in the works. In the meantime, though, Miss Osborne came across The Supersizers Go . . . and The Supersizers Eat . . . in her researches. This show is hilarious and educational and disgusting! You must watch! We command thee!
If you don’t see the player above, here’s the Regency series on YouTube.
Come one, come all, to the Jane Austen Fight Club, where the very best from Jane’s world and the very best from…well, everywhere else…duke it out for all to see! The prizes: pride, honor, and the adoration of Jane fans everywhere, or a “The first rule of fight club is, we don’t talk about Mr. Darcy” t-shirt and some quality Regency-era medical care!
Today’s contestants: Lydia “Last born, first scandalized” Bennet, youngest and least redeemable sister 
in Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, and Khloe “At least my reality show’s only a spin-off” Kardashian, youngest and least famous sister in the sort-of-not-fictional Kardashian clan. Both have large families full of more-famous siblings! Neither can abide a long engagement! Who will prevail, ladies and gentlemen? It’s a fight! A real fight!
In their corners:
Bennet is, though the youngest of her sisters, also the tallest. She can (theoretically) flirt with six officers at once. She is “untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless,” has the gift of never hearing nor seeing any thing of which she chooses to be insensible, and has the gall to pull rank on her single older sisters when she shows up for dinner. So, basically, bulletproof.
Kardashian is an entrepreneur, socialite, television personality, radio personality, and model, with a nine-carat engagement ring from husband/Laker forward Lamar Odom. Eat that, accomplished ladies!
Handicaps:
Lydia Bennet is stout, a complete mama’s girl at age 16, and doesn’t realize that her husband became her husband practically at gunpoint. (Bennet: “Allegedly.”)
Kardashian got married with her family present. I mean, who DOES that?
Decision:
Bennet. Is this even a contest? Lydia’s total, willful obliviousness about a) men, b) women, c) talking, d) listening, and e) the meaning of the word “embarrassment” lead to an early and decisive defeat of Kardashian and her weak-sauce L.A.-royalty wild-child impression. (Yeah, “jail,” whatever.) In contests of vapidity and poor decision-making skills, she’s simply too skilled to lose and too busy gloating to care.
TKO, Lydia Bennet!
