TOBS is not a P&P Adaptation
I saw a post that was doing a side-by-side comparison about characters from the 2005 P&P adaptation and the same characters from TOBS, talking about how different they were. It frustrates me how people think the characterizations should be the same as what is found in P&P and anything different from that is anathema.
I want to start with the title: TOBS is not a P&P adaptation. It's a complete re-writing of the story from a different perspective.
P&P is narrated from Lizzie's perspective (through a third person limited voice, focalized entirely on Lizzie at least from the Meryton Assembly on), and we all know Lizzie is not a perfectly reliable narrator. That's the point of the book, how her perspective changes from the beginning to the end, how her snap judgements on the limited information that she has leads her astray, and we as readers are right there beside her.
Her perspective of and relationship to the characters around her along with her reactions to events she learns about and experiences is what is written in the book. The movies/miniseries have cut scenes to events Lizzie doesn't experience, but those is not in the book. Those are made up by adapters filling in blanks based on their interpretation of the events Lizzie learns about or experiences.
The first part of TOBS (first 1/3 of the book, 2 eps of the series) is the same events and characters, told through a third person limited voice, but focalized entirely on Mary. Mary's relationships with and perspective of these characters is going to be entirely different than Lizzie's, because they are different people with different experiences and ways of relating. It's entirely possible that Lizzie's ideas about who was the favorite child is false, that Lizzie's perspective of Mary is limited to an older sister's interpretations of a younger sister's behavior without actually knowing anything about her internal world. Saying "Mary (or anyone else) isn't like that because JA said so!" isn't true. "Lizzie doesn't think they are like that!" would be a truer statement. And Lizzie can be wrong!
I know my sister and I may have had the same person as our mother, but we had two entirely different experiences of being mothered. I'm willing to accept that premise for the Bennet sisters, as well. I mean, can you imagine P&P focalized on Lydia and how different the characters would seem? Focalized on Lady Catherine? Focalized on Wickham? Different people will narrate the same events drastically differently based on their own personal experiences. These are the writer's thoughts on how Mary might have experienced those characters as opposed Lizzie. In that way, I super appreciate the differences and the similarities to the characterizations between different books and shows, because it tells a more interesting story about who Lizzie and Mary are than about who the other characters are.
Now, as for Mary, she is also wrong about a lot of things, a very unreliable narrator in the book. She gets to experience more growth as a person, in her internal world, in the book than in the series, which is an artifact of the medium. In the series it is very hard to show her thoughts changing and the occasional voice-over isn't enough. The show is third-person, but not limited or focalized, because we as viewers can see and notice things happening that Mary doesn't notice, and we're not seeing Mary's interpretations of events but the events themselves. It's a different medium, a different lens both figuratively and literally.
As a visual medium, the show can only show her behavior changing, through her different clothes, different posture (Brucolleri talked in interviews about how she tightened and loosened the stays she was wearing to change her posture throughout the show), standing up to her mother, standing up to Tom, things she would not have done in the first five episodes, or perhaps even the first eight or nine episodes. It couldn't take us on the thoughtful journey (again, both figuratively and literally) she went on in the book, so it changed the order of events, added characters (Oh, Ann, whoof those choices. The casting is both brilliant for matching incredible actors to the characters and a nightmare for representation/misogynist tropes/racism), gave lines to different people, and generally tried to bring in the spirit more than the letter of the book.
Is the show a product of perfect writing with Mary a perfect character with a perfect arc and Tom the perfect man? Hell no. I appreciate the TOBS series for what it is, and I acknowledge its flaws. I have my critiques of the show's writing and changes from the book, and I have read some very good ones that I both agree and disagree with, but the "TOBS characters aren't like the P&P characters!" is the least interesting criticism possible, and I'm tired of it coming back over and over and over, especially by people pulling from adaptations (where they already are interpretations and not like the characters in the book) rather than the book itself.
vaporwave
blakekathryn
kianamaiart
izzy806
germansingergirl
romaincrisis
gummygunk
