Is Elizabeth Bennet fat?
Some time ago a friend and I were talking about the fact that “Pride and Prejudice,” one of my favourite books, was being turned into a film starring Keira Knightly.
“That’s terrible casting. She can’t play Elizabeth Bennet. Elizabeth Bennet is fat,” my friend said.
I remember being taken aback at how certain she was. My Elizabeth Bennet was not fat. Truth be told, my Elizabeth Bennet looked remarkably like me.
So who was right?
Jane Austen famously didn’t describe her characters (or indeed, her settings) in great detail. When it comes to Elizabeth Bennet, there are mentions of ‘fine eyes’ and a ‘pleasing figure’. The most detailed description comes from Caroline Bingley who is insulting Elizabeth to provoke Mr Darcy so this isn’t a reliable description:
“Her face is too thin; her complexion has no brilliancy; and her features are not at all handsome. Her nose wants character; there is nothing marked in its lines. Her teeth are tolerable, but not out of the common way; and as for her eyes, which have sometimes been called so fine, I never could perceive any thing extraordinary in them. They have a sharp, shrewish look, which I do not like at all; and in her air altogether, there is a self-sufficiency without fashion which is intolerable.”
Elizabeth Bennet’s weight is a perverse version of Schrodinger’s cat as it depends on who is observing or imagining her!
There is a concept called Death of the Author which debates how much control an author has over their property once it has been released. Is the author ‘dead’ i.e. they have done what they can during a piece of writing and anything else is in the control of the reader? Or does the author remain an authority on all things in the world they have created even for things not explicitly in the work?
A good way to demonstrate this is with Harry Potter. J.K Rowling shared that Dumbledore is gay. This was not written in the Harry Potter books and was only mentioned years later. How much control does J.K Rowling have over Harry Potter now that the books have been completed? If the author is ‘dead’ then she is able to say that she imagined Dumbledore as gay when writing Harry Potter however it is up to readers whether they choose to interpret Dumbledore in the same way.
So, is the author dead? For me, yes. One of the wonderful things about reading, which is distinct from TV and film, is how much our imagination kicks in to fill in the gaps. If it’s not contradicting the book, it is correct. Elizabeth Bennet can be whatever weight she is in your imagination!
If you like this concept, Lindsay Ellis has done a really interesting feature on the death of the author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGn9x4-Y_7A
