As if to indulge the glittering and fanciful dreams of the young, adolescent girls of the world—they’re out there, they’re hiding, they often can’t help themselves and really, I can’t see the harm in it—the long fluttering coattails of the gallant and half-savage Mr. Darcy make this man into a mythical creature. That long-drawn-out approach at dawn is so superb, so dreamlike, so perfect a romantic image that it brings the whole film to a sweetly quiescent ending. Mr. Darcy has been made by this moment, in all his rarity as the wild creature that Elizabeth has long been dreaming about; he is like a black swan scudding across the…
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In his snarky and incisive polemic satirizing the American class system, Class, Paul Fussell provides a tour-de-force panorama of what most Americans, especially those marinating in our current postmodern zeitgeist, would never acknowledge in polite company: that although all citizens in this Western democracy are equal under the law, possessing rights to life, liberty, and property, they are nonetheless different and thus unequal, inferior and superior as determined by the myriad attributes that humans can exhibit. Each of us has attributes constituting our strengths and weaknesses, and we all know this; but the exigencies of postmodernism are such that digressing from a philosophy of egalitarianism containing no nuance is tantamount…
