i have a question for you: what’s one (1) thing you dislike about pride and prejudice (2005)?
It ends…
that’s a very good point! but the correct answer is actually this:
@highwaydiamonds plz explain
Hah! Well, ok, I can list off SEVERAL things about this production that annoy the pants off me (nevermind the fact I wasn’t wearing pants to START with) but I will do m’level best to actually answer this if I can Ness (even if you were joking… In for a penny, in for a pound? Here we go!)
So, this production of P&P, rather than being set (style wise) more clearly into maybe the end of the first decade of the 19th century, or even up into the 1810s is a bit more ambiguous. Austen really wrote the first draft of P&P in latter end the 1790s, and THAT is when this is set stylistically. That’s why not everyone is wearing all the high waisted later regency period dresses that so many people think of as being synonymous with Jane Austen. In addition, this production makes some clear demarcations that some people with means and in the right social milleu would have been ala mode, and others would not. So, the Bennets, and the people at the assembly in Meryton (which is where this above still is from) would be country people, not city dwellers, not people going to the most fashionable modistes. They would be a bit behind the times, and wearing less fashionable fabrics. The Bingleys and Darcys are more likely (especially Caroline Bingley - you can really see this in her in full effect) are the ones who are looking like the most au courant fashion plates.
ANYWAY - that’s all about the clothes. Now, this hair business! So, working from the assumption that this is someone at the Meryton Assembly and they’re wearing a more old fashioned style per the 1790s, what can we say? A fair bit really. The 18th century hair styles that people like to think of with giant boats in their hair and poufs high enough that god could bump them if he moved his elbow were mostly caricatures. Yes, women did use puffs and falls and all kinds of things, and in some cases wigs, to get high hair, BUT by the time this movie is set, the higest of high hair was already passé. (This is partly why the main person with big, high hair is Lady Catherine. She has the money and connections to be ala mode, but she’s a stick in the mud, stuck up old biddy, and she’s more about reflecting back on her own power and thus possibly her youth, so the character is taken in a different direction.) When we get to the late 1780s there is another style that comes into vogue. It’s a sometimes frizzier style - with more emphasis on width and curls at the sides as well as some at the top. Rolled curls are still worn too, to be sure, but it’s less of the elaborate pulled high and back, smooth row upon row of rolls and curls that we’d seen before. It’s gradual, just like some fashion change is now, and as we transition into the 1790s there is a move toward more tousled, closer to the head styes. By the time we get more on top of 1800 then we’re really seeing more of the neo-classcally inspired hair styles that we think of as being classic regency. This all means that even if that hair style in the picture seems far fetched, at least the curly frizzy bits part, it’s still on target for a population that’s meant to be provincial and a bit stylistically outmoded for the late 1790s.
I know, I know. You’re thinking, “But Meg, COME ON! The heinous pony tail! That’s what’s really at issue here!!” To that I say, “GOB BLUTH is reading my blog!!!??? I AM TASTING THE HAPPY RIGHT NOW,” and also, “I have an answer for that too, my sweet summer child.” (Yes, I mixed fandoms. Suck it up. I don’t just spend my time on Jane Austen related stuff. I am an obsessed nerd about other things too.)
The pony tail isn’t as far fetched as you think. First and foremost, we’re not used to seeing the backs of most of these 18th C. hairdos. Most of us haven’t looked at fashion plates and magazines of the times showing these period styles. We’re used to seeing portraits in museums, or online, if we see any original source material in general. And let’s be honest - people do not tell a portraiture artist, “Hey, you know what’d be SUPER GREAT?! Instead of me paying you a carriage load of the moneys to paint my face, how’s bout you just paint the back of my hair instead. Two-hundo years later all the nerds will be like YAAAAAAS KWEEEN thx for yer historical style lookin’ out!” Or if they did, that was some SICK prescience I haven’t heard about yet. What I have been able to find are some examples from 1790s and late 1780s fashion plates (all sourced off @damesalamode who has a kick ass catalogue of fashion plates - even arranged by decades. So go look at all the rad stuff. There is a BUNCH of it.) I’m only going to put one example here, but there definitely are others you can find. Sometimes the long hair might be gathered up onto a long loop at the back, or put in soft curls, but it’s also sometimes left long as seen below.
Now, this obviously has more of a day cap on, and is more of a daytime ensemble generally I’d say, but the hair style notes stand. We see the curls of the wider rather than higher style of the 1790s, and then there’s in the long hair in the back. We can’t quite see how high up the long straight hair begins, but if all we’re quibbling about is a few inches where the long hair hangs down from, then maybe we’re splitting hairs in this discussion. (Insert rimshot here for terrible hair pun.) While I haven’t been able to find anything, in my short perusal, to suggest that this style was commonly worn with the hair tied off in a pony tail for evening like in the movie, I do think it’s possible! This is supposed to be a person who isn’t super in the know about fashion or current styles, and she’s less likely to be well to do. She’s honest country folk, perhaps of the lower gentry, or perhaps part of a family in trade, at a public assembly. She’s not someone elevated, and so her style should and does show that. We’re not supposed to find her glamorous. She should be a bit rough around the edges, a bit of a bumpkin. That’s exactly what we’re supposed to see… Exactly what Bingley’s party will see when they go to the assembly and into Hertfordshire society for the first time, a public assembly with fun loving, genuine people, but people far more plebeian and unrefined than they usually associate with.
So, while I can cope with this goofy looking hair… What I simply CANNOT with is the ending of this movie. That’s my one thing I dislike about the 2005 P&P. The facts that Lizzy is outside in her flipping nightdress, and Darcy, the-only-just-beginning-to-get-the-FIRMLY-LODGED-stick-up-his-ass-OUT-of-said-ass Darcy, is nearly half undressed, are both SO WRONG. We’ve spent so much fucking time in this movie getting used to the social mores of the period, of what is acceptable and what isn’t, what matters and what doesn’t, what these people cared about and saw as good and right… And then we see them just casually out strolling in a way that would have been almost akin to walking naked across a meadow?! (Not even to mention some kind of nearly psychic connection that they’d both be out there - which is also just “woo-woo” and totally antithetical to what is a firmly NON-spitirual-supernatural kind of story) Does Lizzy hike across fields and get a petticoat six inches deep in mud earlier in the plot? Yes. Does she do it in her nightgown?! FUCK NO. Would she? FUCK NO. Darcy is just barely learning to fucking really relax in his life at all, and we’re supposed to buy that he walks out of his friend’s rented estate half undressed probably past servants who are getting the house in gear in the early morning? WTF is this nonsense?! That dude would never do that. So, to find them walking out across the misty morning meadow en deshabille is just plainly stupid. Romantic, yes, but stupid and inaccurate. Jane Austen was not a capital R romantic, and this movie badly wants to make her one. She wrote books with romance in them, but they weren’t Romantic ala Byron, Shelley, or the Brontës. Austen would NEVER have written an ending like the 2005 film shows. That ending is akin to making this Emily-Brontë-Lite in style, as though someone just wanted Heathcliff and Cathy to get a happy ending, and so cobbled this kind of hybrid-shit together for it. Welp, while I think the film is very pretty, and I appreciate many of the general stylistic choices made in it, this ending is a HUGE FAIL.
So, there you go Ness! That’s my story and I’m sticking to it! Hope you aren’t too dazed by the long ass response.
TL;DR: The weirdo hairstyle is pretty period accurate even if it’s not what we’re used to, and it works with the vision of the film. The real fuck up on P&P 2005 is in the choices at the end of the movie because those are totally anachronistic and wrong for the style of the novel itself. And I am longwinded AF.
