"Pride," observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, "is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and Pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us (16)."
This is a conversation between Mary Bennet, Miss Lucas, and Elizabeth Bennet as they discussed about Mr. Darcy's extensive amount of pride. Interestingly enough, Mary states that human are prone to pride, that this trait is common. The differences made about pride and vanity stood clearly about how pride is viewed based on our own beliefs versus vanity is a depiction based on the impression we want to showcase to others. The title of the book revolves around this concept of Pride, boasting one's noble status and degrading other people's status and Vanity is the opposite of prejudice in which one wants people to view them a certain way gets the other way around of being judged by the people based on the people's opinion by one's action. This excerpt is quite interesting way of putting pride in perspective as I had previously thought that pride is just to be proud for the things you stand for, but yet this a new way of thinking about pride in terms of how we want to think of ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment