Thinking Activity- Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice

This is the thinking activity given by Yesha Bhatt Ma'am on the Novel Pride and Prejudice By the Author Jane Austen.

Which version of the novel is  more appealing? Novel or movie adaptation? Why?

Novel is always the best option than watching movie adaptations of it, because the novel is the main source and will be more elaborative than the movie. In the novel we get more and more about the characters, contemporary society, people's mindset, values, culture, idols, etc. in the movie we see that they compress the three hundred four hundred pages in only two or three hours. 

Movies also have their own advantages. Visualisations of the plot and scenes make things easier for the movie makers. They can symbolise things and make atmosphere for audience to understand the characters, like in the beginning of the movie pride and prejudice we see elizabeth walking while reading a book, that makes audience realise that she is educated, and in that era is she is educated than she might be also resisting of the society and intelligent. One can interpret so much out of a single scene.

We have to also consider the present time.Nowadays people judge books by the page numbers. In the present time people don't prefer to read a book, they rather watch movies. The novel is also very old and wellreaded. So people would like to see it into movie form.

As a student of literature I prefer the novel but also if we consider this time it's best to watch the movie version of the novel. 

Pride and Prejudice movie is the best version of the novel by Jane Austin. But it also makes some changes in the original text. But that also contributes to making a good impression out of the movie. 

Character of Elizabeth 

Elizabeth is the female protagonist and one of the most famous characters in English literature. She is twenty year old and the second daughter of the Bennet family. She is also very intelligent and quick witted.

She is a rebellious woman who does what she thinks is right. She does not believe in the system created by society. She is also a woman with pride, we can see that in the scene when Mr. Darcy says that she is tolerable, her pride gets hurt and she develops prejudice about him. Then she becomes judgemental about  Mr.Darcy and starts to hate him.

Later when she realise that she was wrong about Mr.Darcy than she starts to love him and also admit that she was wrong about him in front of her father. That discribers that she is also honest and can admit her faults.

Character of Mr. Darcy.

Fitzwilliam Darcy is the male protagonist of the novel Pride and Prejudice. In the first view it appears that he is a rich, arrogant and harsh person who does not like anyone except himself and is full of prejudice.

He judges Elizabeth by her family background and also disapproves of Jane for his friend Mr. Bingley. But he passionately falls in love with Elizabeth and starts to understand her, then he also solves problems of Elizabeth and her family like finding her sister and reuniting Jane with Mr.Bingley. With the story we can also see the progress of the character of Mr.Darcy. From introvert and arrogant he becomes a very nice character and a gentleman.

Contemporary time and society depicted in the novel Pride and Prejudice.

The story of Pride and Prejudice is set during the start of the 19th century. We can see the deeply woven social element of contemporary society by the author Jane Austine. 

Theme of marriage and land ownership is connected to the love stories in the novel. We can see the beneficials of the marriage and alliance and inheritance of the wealth and properties. Novel also reflects the class system and standards of the contemporary time. The strong point of the novel is to describe the position of women in society.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

If you were the director or the screenplay writer of the movie what sort of changes would you make in the movie?

I will make the character of Mrs. Bennet more reasonable as a mother than as a matchmaker. And I will give a little more space to the plot of elopement of lydia and wickham because that situation goes unnoticed in the movie. 

Who would be your choice of actors to play characters?

I would like to chose characters

Elizabeth: Nushrratt Bharuccha, Chloe Grace Moretz

Mr. Darcy: Hrithik Roshan, Vicky Kaushal, Gerard Butler, Henry Cavil

Jane: Disha Patani, Emma Watson

Mr. Bingley: Rajkumar Rao, Eddie Redmeyde

Wickham: Vijay Verma, Orlando Bloom

Mr. Collins: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Simon Pegg

Write a note on the scene which you liked most in the movie.

The scene which I liked the most is when Elizabeth confess her feelings for Mr. Darcy in front of her father. That finally she understands Mr.Darcy and realises that she was in love with him all along. She was just being suburb and and was blinded by her pride that she does not see the good side of Mr. Darcy.

"Till this moment I never knew myself."

Compare the narrative strategy of the novel and movie.

In the novel the narration was done from the third person point of view. So the author narrates the story and describes everything by the words, but the movie director does not have to do that, he can describe everything in symbolic way and can represent characters by the actors behaviour then everything  becomes easy to understand. We can see that effect by the presentation of the first scene where Elizabeth comes with reading a book by that we can easily understand that she might be intelligent and educated or the ball scene where we first see Mr. Darcy we can assume by his facial expressions and behaviour that he is an introverted and rude type of person.

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