angelofhermusic

Growing up, I saw far more of myself in Mary Bennet than I ever did in Elizabeth. I was never a Lizzie. I was not quick-tongued or luminous, not the kind of woman who enters a room and alters its atmosphere simply by being seen. I was much closer to Mary: the girl pressed quietly into the background, trying so painfully hard to become acceptable and still failing at it anyway. The girl who reads too much because books are easier than people. Who speaks at the wrong moment, says the wrong thing, lingers too long afterward in the humiliation of it. The girl who feels embarrassed not by what she does, but by the simple fact of existing where others can witness her.

And perhaps the cruelest thing about Mary is that Jane Austen never intended for her to be extraordinary. She exists partly as contrast. Jane is soft beauty, Elizabeth wit and vitality, Lydia chaos wrapped in youth, and then there is Mary: earnest, awkward, forgettable. A daughter shaped more by absence than affection. Even her parents seem uncertain what to do with her beyond hoping she might marry respectably enough to avoid becoming an inconvenience.

Which is exactly why so many women recognize themselves in her.

Because most people are not dazzling. Most people are not chosen the instant they enter a room. Most people live and die as supporting characters in other people’s stories. And fiction has always been kinder to average men than to average women. Men are allowed to be strange, mediocre, socially graceless, insecure, invisible. Entire genres are devoted to their fumbling search for meaning, dignity, love. Women, meanwhile, are expected to remain desirable even in their suffering. Even their awkwardness must be charming. Even their loneliness must be aesthetically pleasing. They may be “different,” but never so different that they become truly difficult (to love).

There is always reassurance hidden somewhere in the narrative. A reminder that she is still beautiful after all. Still wanted. Still worthy of being chosen. Someone always secretly desires them in the end! Someone notices what everyone else somehow missed! Someone arrives to confirm that they were special all along!

Mary Bennet receives no such mercy. And that is where the show slightly loses me.

Because I don't think it fully allows itself to inhabit the reality of what it means to be someone like Mary Bennet. One of the clearest examples is how quickly it offers her romantic validation. Almost immediately, there is a man who sees her, wants her, understands her. And I see why stories do this. We are conditioned to believe loneliness must eventually be rewarded or it becomes unbearable to witness. But I think that reassurance weakens the very thing that makes Mary so painfully recognizable.

Because for many average or unattractive women, the wound is not confined to family. It follows you everywhere.

The world responds differently to beautiful women. People soften around them without even realizing it. They are listened to more carefully, forgiven more easily, approached more warmly. And when you are ordinary-looking, or worse, visibly undesirable, you learn the inverse of that truth very early.

You learn what it means for conversations to slide past you as though you are not fully there. You learn the peculiar humiliation of standing inside a group while somehow remaining outside of it. You notice when people make eye contact with everyone except you. Eventually, you stop expecting attention at all, because hoping for it and being denied hurts far more than resignation ever could.

That kind of loneliness alters a person slowly. Quietly. It settles into the body like sediment.

And Mary represents that experience in a way fiction almost never permits women to inhabit honestly.

Which is why parts of the adaptation frustrated me — not because I hated it, but because it sometimes feels afraid to let Mary remain truly lonely for even a moment. Take the assembly scene. Mary arrives already expecting invisibility, yet almost immediately she is rescued from it by male attention. A man notices her. A man dances with her. A man confirms that her fears about herself are not entirely true.

But realistically? She probably would have spent most of the evening standing awkwardly at the edge of the room, pretending not to care. Hoping someone might ask her to dance. Maybe one person would. Maybe no one would. Maybe a man would approach her only to ask after one of her prettier sisters before drifting away again.

And that sounds cruel, but cruelty is often made of moments exactly that small.

Not dramatic humiliations. Not theatrical rejection. Just tiny repeated confirmations that you are less visible than other women. Less wanted. Less anticipated. Until eventually you begin arranging your entire personality around the expectation of being... overlooked.

(That is why I also think the adaptation makes Mrs. Bennet too overtly cruel at times. Real damage is rarely inflicted so loudly. Mothers do not have to sneer like storybook villains to wound their daughters permanently. Sometimes neglect is almost tender in its subtlety.

It is praising one daughter a little more enthusiastically. Looking at one child with excitement and another with weary obligation. It is unconsciously deciding which daughter has a future worth imagining and which one merely needs managing.

And the terrible thing is that the overlooked daughter always knows.)

That is the sort of thing that erodes a person quietly over years. Not all at once, not dramatically, but slowly enough that by the time the damage fully settles into you, it already feels indistinguishable from your personality. And I think the story would have been far stronger if it had trusted that kind of quiet devastation more.

I just wish the story had allowed her to exist on her own for a while before tying her growth so quickly to romance.

I wanted to watch her become comfortable with herself first. Slowly. Painfully. I wanted to see confidence arrive in uneven fragments rather than all at once through the gaze of a man. I wanted to see her discover that her worth could exist independently of being chosen.

Because there are countless women like Mary Bennet.

Women who are overlooked in subtle ways so constant they begin to feel natural. Women who are average enough to become almost invisible beside prettier sisters, louder friends, more charming women. Women who know exactly what it feels like to enter a room and realize nobody’s expression changed when they arrived.

And those women deserve stories too.

Not stories that eventually reveal they were secretly beautiful all along. Not stories where loneliness evaporates the moment one handsome man finally notices them. But stories that understand the particular grief of quietly disappearing inside a world that measures women so ruthlessly by desirability.