Mary the nerd
A fellow’s written a book about nerds (how cute) that, we think, includes Mary Bennet. At least the article about the book included Mary Bennet.
Like Mary Bennet, the bookish, priggish younger sister in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” and Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie Wooster’s newt-obsessed chum in P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, these boys fit neatly into Mr. Nugent’s machine category. Their passions don’t “revolve around emotional confrontation, physical confrontation, sex, food, or beauty”; their speech is oddly formal; they favor “logic and rational communication”; they are rule-bound, code-bound life forms.
They also are meant as comic characters with rather stunning personality flaws (at least Mary Bennet; we are rather fond of Gussie Fink-Nottle).
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Funny, I had always thought of Gussie Fink-Nottle as more of a dork than a nerd. I’ll have to get out my Wodehouse omnibus and give it another go!
May 23rd, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Yay for Gussie! “I wish the world was a newt!!”
May 24th, 2008 at 3:01 am
Let us not forget that Jane Austen though ironised some characters in her novels had ever done this with no harm and anything unkindly meant. In P&P while the top heroines Lizzy and Jane are holding our attention with their dealings and prospects for marriages for love and men of good fortunes, some others, of inferior taste, are fighting their own way in the world. Mary Bennet did all in her power to draw Mr. Collins’s attention and with little encouragement perhaps….. Mrs. Bennet got the idea of the match, but because of her negligence of the case it was too late and she was outstripped by always watching for and hunting husbands Charlotte Lucas.
If the author of this “nerd “writing has not noticed any such nuances in P&P we should probably paraphrase the Edward’s remarkable words from Miss Austen Regrets:
”If that’s all what you think it’s about, perhaps you should read it again.”