Goodly Creatures: A Pride and Prejudice Deviation
Read Goodly Creatures: A Pride and Prejudice Deviation Online
Authors: Beth Massey
Copyright © 2012 Beth Massey
All rights reserved.
ISBN:
ISBN-13:978-1470045340
DEDICATION
For Bill with gratitude and love. To paraphrase my beloved Stylistics: You were there when I needed a friend. You believed in me through thick and thin. This book is for you. If I knew magic like Prospero, my first act would be to make you feel brand new.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
PART ONE - LONDON, FEBRUARY 1806
5 Can I See Another’s Woe, and Not Be in Sorrow Too?
8 Don’t They Know It’s the End of the World?
9 I’d Rather Be a Hammer than a Nail… if I only Could
13 The Unsinkable Elizabeth Bennet
14 Lizzy Gets by with a Little Help from her Friends
20 An Ideal Husband and Father
21 The Portrait of Lord Wolfbridger
22 There is No Place Like home
PART TWO - HERTFORDSHIRE, SEPTEMBER 1811
23 What the World Needs Now is Love, Sweet Love
24 Where is it Now the Glory and the Dream?
27 A Riddle wrapped in a Mystery inside an Enigma
28 A Good Woman is Even Harder to Find
29 Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered
30 Blessed Be the Tie that Binds
34 By the Pricking of Her Thumbs
35 Such a Brave New World of Possibilities
36 Dancing with the Green Eyed Monster
37 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
39 The Talent of Writing Agreeable Letters is Peculiarly Female
41 Oh, Tell me the Truth about Love, War and Depravity
43 Trains of Trust and Golden Dust
48 Good Wombs have Borne Bad Sons
49 We Will Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascals You
50 Just Give Me Some Kind of Sign
51 It is the Laughter We will Remember
53 Something Wicked this Way Comes
54 In What Furnace was thy Brain?
55 Truth is the First Casualty
56 The Pursuit of Love in a Cold Climate in the Time of Measles
57 Take These Chains from my Heart
59 Dance Me to the End of Love
Epilogue
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is a truth universally acknowledged that aspiring writers in possession of a fervent love of literature, music, art, theatre, history and the struggle of humans for a better world have many people to thank. My first task is to give credit to those who most inspired this work. Some I will not mention as their influence can be seen throughout the text—snippets of lyrics I have loved, images I have seen, novels I have read, historical texts that have taught me and political writings I have embraced—all demanded to have their share in the conversation. That being said, there are some who were the cultural inspiration for this tale.
As my Fitzwilliam Darcy says in a letter to his Elizabeth—
‘I will start at the beginning… with Shakespeare.’
In my life, the love affair began when I joined the Chattanooga Little Theatre Company in Chattanooga, Tennessee at eight. There are nods to many of the bard’s works, but it was his final play that gave my tale its premise and title. I first became enamored of
‘The Tempest’
when I played Trinculo at nineteen. I admire the play’s optimism, and as the state of Arizona accuses—its themes of ‘
race, ethnicity and oppression
.’
Layer upon that foundation, a group of paintings of the ingenue from
‘The Tempest’
that captured my imagination. They were done by George Romney. His most frequently painted subject, outside all the portraits of wealthy patrons, was the infamous Emma Hart/Lady Hamilton, and she was the model he chose for this series depicting Miranda. What I responded to was the haunted look he captured in her eyes. Both the dramatic character he painted (the castaway daughter of the usurped Duke of Milan) and his muse (Emma Hart—then a sixteen year old mistress to a second wealthy man) lived precarious lives fraught with hardships as does my heroine. One of Romney’s images of Miranda became my cover. A more sedate painting of a
‘Young Girl Reading’
by Fragonard became the juxtaposed alter persona for my Elizabeth.
Throughout the tale there are other contemporary to Austen artists’ works that provided me with images to illustrate my vision. One in particular, Francisco de Goya, was outraged by what was occurring in his home country of Spain at the time of my tale. He left a profound legacy that allows us to see the impact of war and occupation on a civilian population. Goya was as ground breaking as Jane Austen was—taking painting, as she took the novel, in a new ‘modern’ direction. Though a court painter for The Spanish Crown, he broke through those confines and chronicled life around him—as did Miss Austen. Their observations of everyday life were starkly different, and I chose to combine both their outlooks in Goodly Creatures. Goya’s series
‘The Disasters of War’
graphically depicts the horrors of the conflict raging around him. In particular, I have always been moved by his
‘The Third of May 1808.’
A description of what is shown there was a major inspiration for one of my chapters. I first became aware of that painting and experienced its powerful vision of a retaliatory firing squad and the diverse emotional response of the participants, as an art history student at Monticello College in Godfrey, Illinois. The faces of those being killed for daring to object to the occupation of Spain by Napoleon’s troops and those same troops carrying out the ordered sentence have haunted and inspired me as an anti-war activist for close to fifty years. I was introduced to the painting by a very astute Iranian professor, painter and poet, Hannibal Alkhas. It was at a time when combatants dubbed guerillas (the actions of the insurgents in Spain during the Peninsular War gave us the word) were fighting U.S. troops in South East Asia. Very few courses during my college career had as profound an effect on me as his.
In addition to Goya’s depiction of the terrors of war, I must thank Georgette Heyer in
‘Spanish Bride
’ for giving me a verbal feel for the horror experienced by both soldiers and civilians (especially women) during the storming of Badajoz.
As becomes obvious early in my story, Charles Perrault’s fairy tales were a major theme throughout. Elizabeth Bennet was a contemporary of the brothers Grimm so she would not have had benefit of their compilation of folklore. Perrault’s would have been available though and could have been a great tool for teaching English speaking children the French language. In addition, I have often believed that much of
‘Pride and Prejudice’
fan fiction is far from Austen’s style and instead reflects a fairy tale view of literature’s iconic couple. I suppose, my use of those tales which still entertain and influence us today (the recent
‘Puss in Boots’
movie as an example) could be classified as my attempt at an inside joke.
Another stylistic conceit I used sporadically in Part One was something I had seen in Kurosawa’s
‘Rashomon.’
It too dealt with rape. From the first viewing of the film, I became fascinated with watching the major characters’ differing memories and evaluations of such a personal and life altering event.
The French Revolution rocked Jane Austen’s world. Though she barely mentions it, there is plenty of historical evidence to support its importance to the politics of her day and her own family. My appreciation for its legacy, particularly with regard the role and aspirations of women began when I read Marge Piercy’s
‘City of Darkness, City of Light.
’ The controversy of how to evaluate the French Revolution raged for decades—through years of war with Napoleon and beyond. Two of the polemics that I reflect on are from Mary Wollstonecraft and Edmund Burke. One burning question that was so hotly debated was the terror. I reject Dickens’s (‘A
Tale of Two Cities
’) and embrace Mark Twain’s
(‘The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
’) view. My Elizabeth’s struggle to make sense of her misfortune is placed in the context of much bigger tragedies that existed in her world. Thanks go to Laclos and Moliere, as well, for giving me a tone with which to approach my story. I drew heavily from their writings with regard how to portray the hypocrisy and corruption that threatened my protagonist. William Blake as both poet and artist lent me a hand in helping to craft her thoughts on those subjects as well.