the thing about the other bennet sister that i dislike is that it's not really about mary bennet, the character from the page - it's an audience's projection onto her from a modern lens. mary is annoying. she is written that way on purpose. she is not ignored by the family - over and over again in the book, in fact, austen makes a point to mention that mary is "too busy" to join her family in activities they do together - and she certainly isn't shy. like!!!
here she is insisting on performing at a party in an effort to quite blatantly show off ("Elizabeth was in agonies" lmfao):
just to pull the most significant line: "such an opportunity of exhibiting was delightful to her" (emphasis mine)
here she is saying that most girls are boring and basic and thus uninteresting to her:
here she is reacting to lydia's elopement with a moral judgment on female virtue:
(for context, this is literally right after they find out lydia's run off and everyone's freaking out about where she is and if they've married or not)
and here's her ending, in which austen basically says that now that she's the last unmarried daughter she kind of has to socialize more, but now that her sisters aren't around to make her feel insecure she's fine with it:
(all text from the gutenberg project)
and i mean. there's nothing wrong with changing a character for your own purposes when you do spin-off/adaptations/reimaginings like this. but i think it's a fundamental misreading of the text to claim that mary is the overlooked, ignored sister, because she's not as pretty or charming as her sisters. austen is very clear that mary herself knows that she's not as conventionally beautiful, and as a result has wildly overcompensated by competing with everyone around her to constantly be the most intelligent in the room. mary is, in her own way, as rude as lydia and kitty. she's portrayed as rather obtuse, insensitive, insufferable. and she's definitely not quiet or shy, which is where the other bennet sister really loses me lol.
it's like the "i'm not like other girls" trope blown up and portrayed as empowering, but that's really still what it is, at its heart. and i, personally, just find that rather boring. like if it were me, i'd want to read a love story about this mary, who's purposefully oblivious to social graces and sort of impolitely blunt and judgmental and antisocial. she's great fun, when she shows up randomly to just say something incredibly insensitive and then disappear again - it's really so funny.
and this is one of my favorite moments, also:
mary thinking that mr. collins would be a fine husband to have because he's definitely smarter than her sisters, but he'd have to study very hard and catch up to her level so he can have a hope to be as smart as she is. like, that's hysterical. she's fucking hilarious. but also think about that for a second: austen is comparing mary to mr. collins, but she's saying mary is worse, lmfao
of course this is a very pointed satire of a very context-dependent sort of personality, which in regency novels are often referred to dismissively as "bluestockings." feminist scholars have debated mary bennet for a long time, over how to take this exaggerated portrayal of a female intellectual, and i think you're free to take your own reading of it from our modern perspective, about a young girl who's acutely aware of her beauty (or lack of it), and how she reacts to the culture she's raised in as a result. i think a feminist reimagining of mary would be amazing, but personally i don't think the way to do it is to round off her sharp edges and turn her into a poor sad neglected nerd girl. (like, if i can think of any direct parallel to mary, it's not elizabeth or charlotte, it's caroline bingley. you know, the other character who expresses her insecurity by projecting superiority constantly?) that's not at all who she is, and i don't think it's particularly empowering to sand down a female character into something more palatable in order to give her her own story. that, on principle, offends me a little.
anyway, that's why i don't like it, since a couple people have asked. no shade though i'm sure it's a very fun show and what room do i have to talk, i've been reading bodice-rippers about georgian-era batman all weekend
