Reading Pride and Prejudice with an Adult Brain

(Note: I’m going to assume that you’ve read Pride and Prejudice. If you haven’t, go do it. I’ll wait.)

Our brains don’t stop developing when we turn eighteen. The rest of our bodies have mainly matured to adulthood by then, but our brains don’t reach adulthood until we are twenty five or so. I thought of that a lot when I first started rereading Pride and Prejudice. The last time I read it, I had an adolescent brain.

It has been twenty six years since I last read Pride and Prejudice, and I find myself constantly wondering as I read it again, “What could I possibly have gotten out of this last time I read this? I was such a child.” I’m sure I got a lot out of it, but it feels like I must have been deaf to a lot that Austen does in the novel. It’s the old puzzle of when we finally arrive and become our true selves. It feels like we are now our true selves, but in ten years, or twenty six, we will look back and think that we were babes in the woods, complete innocents who were incapable of deeply understanding complex issues and layered works of literature.

Aging with Lear

By my best estimate, I’ve read King Lear six or seven times. I read it for the first time in my early twenties, before I married and had children, and my assessment of Lear at that time in my life was that of a young man who hadn’t been forced to look hard at himself and his weaknesses. I didn’t see what Lear and I had in common, though with my latest reading, certain uncomfortable aspects of Lear’s personality resonated in a way that they didn’t twenty-plus years ago.

In my first reading of King Lear, I took Lear’s defense of himself at face value. Lear exclaims in the middle of the play, “I am a man / more sinned against than sinning.” (Act 3, Scene 2, lines 59-60). By this point in the play, Lear’s two older daughters, despite their proclamations of love in the first scene, have shown their teeth, and have driven their father and his handful of followers out into a storm with no shelter. Lear’s famous line from the middle of the storm sounds defensive. He’s willing to admit on some level that he has sinned, but his failings are not as great as the failings of others.

Required Reading for My Daughters (If I Had Any)

There aren’t that many books that hold up to multiple readings, but I found Jane Eyre to be one of them. I read it for the first time about five years ago, when my elder son got it for me for Father’s Day. I’d never read it, but it was on my long list of books that I intend to read someday. (That list, by the way, seems to grow longer rather than shorter with each passing year. I just can’t keep up by reading at the same pace that I add books to the list.)

I enjoyed Jane Eyre the first time, but had no intention of rereading it so quickly. However, as part of a study I’m doing of British women authors, I revisted Charlotte Bronte’s classic, and I’m glad I did. That old saying that we can never step into the same river twice really holds true with great works of literature. Bronte’s work hasn’t changed. In fact I read the exact same copy each time, so I wasn’t exposed to new commentary or notes that I’d missed the first time around. Nevertheless, my life experiences as a parent in the last five years influenced my reading of Jane Eyre in ways that I wasn’t prepared to see in my first reading.

Toward the end of Jane Eyre, I was struck with this thought: if I had daughters I would wish them to read Jane Eyre before they married. Bronte paints such a powerful portrait of an intelligent, confident young woman that it is an inspiration. Famously, Jane rejects two suitors in the novel. When we look at her reasons for those rejections, and hear her explain them to herself later, it becomes clear that this young woman has the confidence to know precisely what she is looking for in a spouse, and more importantly, precisely who she is.

Not being the father of daughters, (I am blessed with two 8th grade boys), I still wish for my children to read the novel at some point in their early adulthood. I would like for them to read it for the inspiration coming to know the confident and intelligent Jane Eyre can provide, and for the pleasure of reading a master of the art at her best.

Wuthering Heights

The realization that it has been almost exactly twenty years since I first read Wuthering Heights was a cruel one. I am now old enough to simply forget if an event took place ten or twenty years ago. Perhaps that’s why I find myself compelled to journal or blog about the books that speak to me. I can revisit my notes to refresh my ailing memory, without needing to resort to pulling entire college reading lists off my bookshelves.

I originally read Wuthering Heights without being required by a college professor or high school teacher, which is regrettable. While the narrative isn’t difficult to follow, it is difficult to know how to respond to the main characters, Heathcliff and Catherine. The connection shared by Heathcliff and Catherine often causes Wuthering Heights to be described as one of the most romantic English novels, but this book is not your mother’s romance novel.

In fact, the dark tone set by the novel, in which all of nature seems to echo the tumultuous relationship of the main characters, has proven a real attraction to Japanese readers, who flock to the moors of England in large enough numbers to require some remote road signs to be printed in English and Japanese.

My reaction to Heathcliff was apparently more ambivalent than that of his Japanese fans. Heathcliff’s passion for Catherine seems to require an active hatred for the rest of mankind. His only pleasure seems to be in planning the torment of those around him, and I find myself too easily echoing the sentiments of the less imaginative characters in their condemnation of Catherine and Heathcliff’s actions.

Still, Bronte has created two unforgettable characters in Cathy and Heathcliff, and her affection for them is contagious. You won’t forget them, but you may forget precisely how long it has been since you first encountered them.