2.2 The Most Troublesome Romance—Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy
As in many good stories, the lovers must elude and overcome numerous stumbling blocks, beginning with the tensions caused by the lovers’ own personal qualities. The troublesome romance between the second daughter, Elizabeth and the wealthy but arrogant Mr. Darcy is response to one of the Chinese saying goes“Good things are a long time in coming”. In the novel, the writer takes much of her heart to illustrate the love between Elizabeth and Darcy. Their love is the most admirable and successful one among all of marriages in her novel, in which Elizabeth is a typical girl with rebellious spirit, and the writer, puts all her hope on Elizabeth. Both Elizabeth and Darcy leave a bad impression on each other at the beginning of the story. At the first ball, Elizabeth hears that Darcy say coolly“she is not attractive enough to tempt me”to Bingley. This conversation doesn’t endear Mr. Darcy to Elizabeth. However, then Darcy is considered as proud, disagreeable and he is a man who often considers himself superior to country people. Indeed, he never cares about others apart from his family and he always looks at others with a critical eye. While Darcy also looks down upon Elizabeth because of her social class and rude relatives, but he has to admit that Elizabeth possesses charming appearance, slim figure, especially intelligence and sense of humor, which attract him very much. So somewhere along the line, Darcy begins to falls in love with Elizabeth for her special characters and her love to her elder sister. Elizabeth is really a girl out of ordinary. When Collins proposes to her, she says frankly and decidedly that“You couldn’t make me happy, and I’m the last women in the world who would make you happy. And I’m sure that if Lady Catherine knew me, she would find me poorly qualified for the situation.”( 86) The same thing happen again that she refuses Darcy’s propose animatingly and frankly for his arrogant attitude, destructive effect between her sister, Jane, and Bingley’s love as well as Wickham’s slander on him. Later on, Darcy realizes his drawbacks of character and writes a letter to explain the questions that put forward by Elizabeth, but Elizabeth doesn’t know who she should believe before a long time of analysis and observation of Darcy and Wickham. The prejudices still exist between them not until Lydia elopes with Wickham. Elizabeth’s blindness of her faults is opened by Darcy’s letter, she learns to judge others more accurately and not be blinded by first impression, and also realizes that people can’t be judged based solely by appearance and that the character must also be taken into account behind a person’s appearance. Because Darcy speaks out his love and corrects his shortcomings, Elizabeth casts prejudice and accepts him again, so they gain the happiest love in the world. While Elizabeth’s refuse toward the silly Collins and rich Darcy’s propose is a strong resistance and struggle to the principles of marriage at that time. 《傲慢与偏见》中爱情观的分析与比较(4):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_9515.html