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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
sus said:
Incredibly handsome strapping but not like a himbo, intellectual seeming too, somehow giving off a sense of wisdom and strength and elegance simultaneously?
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And yet, despite all that, more modest than anyone else you've ever met?
 
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sus

sus

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Austen is obsessed with card games, carriages, conversation, cotillions & quadrilles. The books’ primary seasonal rhythm is social, the oscillation between the public and the domestic life. Home is where “teams” (families, friends, business allies) process past (public) outings & plan future ones. The carriages—obeying specific customs, and communicating depths about their occupants (e.g. one character gets cold-shouldered for arriving at a ball in a hack chaise)—cart the players from their private to their public arenas, where they engage in game-playing with real stakes: alliance-building, marital pledges, business deals—much of which happens through the bowerbird-like performance of sexual and class fitness (a la piano recitals, witty repartee), or in the conversations that pepper otherwise low-stake card games. And the players, organized as they are in these seasonal-social rhythms, occupy strategic macro-orientations in the stream: personalities, or masks, or “ecosystems of heuristics” which become Austen’s titular subjects: Pride, Prejudice, Sense, Sensibility.
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Dance is the ultimate example of these dynamics: part performance, part coordination exercise—a test of two potential mates’ ability to read and react to one another in real-time—a test of whether their orientations and play styles jive. Dances are the ultimate locus of conversation among the domestic team, when they retire from public play and speak more freely: who danced with whom; how many times; who upheld a sense of honorable propriety (fittedness, appropriateness) in subtle, continuously graded displays of both their skill at—and inclination toward (recall Mr. Darcy)—coordinating. Society is a teaching machine, whose primary pedagogical instrument is language. Censure is passed (privately and publicly, as gossip) against norm violations and undesired behavior; praise is awarded to norm-observance and desired behavior; and the whole macro structure is an extended explicit metaphor for courtship—love and war being dance’s primary subjects.
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