So Odd a Mixture: Along the Autistic Spectrum in ‘Pride and Prejudice':
Perhaps it is high-functioning autism or Asperger’s Syndrome that provides an explanation for some characters’ awkward behaviour at crowded balls, their frequent silences or their tendency to lapse into monologues rather than truly converse with others.
Ok, I think this is a serious claim that Mr. Darcy has Asperger’s.
Excuse me, but when did personality become pathology? There’s nothing clinically wrong with Darcy – he just doesn’t like frivolous balls populated with airheads, and if he’s slightly self-occupied, it’s probably because he’s the cleverest one around. Who wouldn’t lapse into a silence or a monologue when forced to make conversation with Bingley?
According to a Yahoo story, the author also thinks Lydia has ADD.
Via Serendipities
AAAAAARGH!!!! This reminds me in a most unwelcome way of the infamous job candidate who made us “diagnose” the ailment that afflicted Yeats’s narrator with a fire in his head. The social scientists should just leave literature alone, dammit.
Those incorrigible social scientists! They’re as bad as. . . uh-oh, I was going to say lawyers. . .