"You began the evening well, Charlotte," said Mrs. Bennet with civil self-comman to Miss Lucas. "You were Mr. Bingley's first choice." "Yes; but he seemed to like his second better." "Oh! You mean Jane, I suppose, because he danced with her twice. To be sure that did seems as if he admired her - indeed I rather believe he did."
"The cognitive awards of reading fiction might thus be aligned with the cognitive rewards of pretend play through a shared capacity to stimulate and develop the imagination. It may mean that our enjoyment of fiction is predicated - at least in part - upon our awareness of our 'trying on' mental states potentially available to us but at a given moment differing from our own."
Pride and Prejudice has an interesting quality of being a fantastic novel while at the same time having characters that irk me beyond explanation. The state of society in the novel is dismal and backwards and it baffles me how it is okay to think so low of oneself just because one does not have a man in their life. I applaud Austen for so easily evoking such emotions in me because I know she in no way was part of that society and I like to think that since the book was so well received by that very same society, that she was poking fun of them without them even realizing.
In the quote above we can see the lack of class and self-worth in Mrs. Bennet just by looking at the seriousness in which she talks about men. One dance or two and whom he admired the most and most of all of how agreeable he was - just things that are so very important to care about and they form the basis of the objectives that these women have in life.
What Austen's overarching objective was with this novel, however, is not very much related to why people read fiction, the question that Zunshine tries to answer. Nevertheless, it is interesting to read to wrap one's head around why people genuinely enjoy Darcy's story in a day and age where the society portrayed in the book is thankful declining. This quote offers just one explanation.
