Did the Audience Understand the Bit About Lydia Running Off with Wickham in 2005's Pride & Prejudice?

I recently remarked the extreme truncation of the subplot about Lydia Bennet's running off with Wickham in the 2005 Pride & Prejudice. Whatever one thinks of the filmmakers' decision from the standpoint of Austen "purism," or any other artistic grounds, their commercial instincts were probably totally sound on this particular point.

Simply put, in the still far from thoroughly modern world Jane Austen presented in her novels what people thought of one's family mattered enormously to that individual's prospects--while in turn what an individual did affected the standing of their whole family, with this most certainly going for those matters of chastity, "virtue," "honor" and reputation at stake when a young woman runs off with a man. (Lydia's dishonor would have been the family's dishonor--and ended not just Lydia but her sisters' hopes of a decent marriage, social acceptance, their holding on to or bettering that bare minimum of gentility the Bennets had, and in general anything for which they might ever have hoped.) It meant so much that it would probably not have been difficult for Austen to hold the readers of her time in suspense through the whole, long, stretch of the novel devoted to it (fifty pages in my paperback edition of the book).

But what about holding the attention of today's audience?

Some people tell me they think the audience would "get it." However, I have to admit myself skeptical of that. My experience is that the public isn't terribly literate historically. This is not only a matter of its not knowing facts in that way with which those who want to scandalize the school systems in the name of privatization efforts and kulturkampf love to make headlines doing. ("Half of Britons don't know what the Battle of Britain was!" they tell us.) It is also a matter of their lacking any grasp of how the past is not the present, and however one explains them, the differences in lifeways between the people of their immediate circle, and their not too distant countrymen. (Teaching, for example, Guy du Maupassant's "The Necklace" you are likely to hear the students ask of the socially frustrated Mathilde Loisel "Why doesn't she just get a job in order to get what she wants?"--betraying not only a profound obliviousness to the lifeways and realities of nineteenth century France, but a profound misunderstanding of the way the economy they were being prepared to enter works and their chances of realizing their own ambitions in it, for you don't get the kind of wealth, luxury, leisure of which Mathilde dreamed by "getting a job" and "working hard," and by virtue of working certainly don't get to enjoy the leisure that is so much a part of it.)

That may go especially for such sensitive matters as "reputation," which in such a context may be just a word to them. Seeing Lydia's action and her parents and sisters suffering in the aftermath they would just see a family aggrieved that one of their daughters had run off with a rake--a terrible thing to be sure, but a far cry from the virtually irreparable catastrophe that it would have been for a whole family like the Bennets in those times. To make it "work" within their movie the filmmakers would have had to not just explain all this to the audience, but make them feel the weight of the situation, all of which would have been entirely contrary to the spirit of the light, brisk, romantic (and visually beautiful) storytelling they preferred to present, as they unavoidably deviated from the source material in some manner in explaining what Austen's contemporaries all understood "without saying," and in the process given the audience a history lesson about a very un-romantic side of the past, to which they would have likely been less than open. Especially insofar as they belong to a generation raised on that anti-historical blend of feminism and Orientalism that prefers to identify an eternal "West" with individualistic personal freedom and respect for the rights of women in eternal conflict with an eternal "East" eternally standing for the opposite, they likely equate a concern for "honor" with countries of "brown" people that for all their purported "wokeness" they see in the same terms as a Lothrop Stoddard, and which they prefer to go on equating with them as they cleave to their stereotypes. (Emmanuel Todd has argued the issue is not a "clash of civilizations" but a clash of traditional lifeways with a modernity spreading unevenly throughout the world, but spreading nonetheless. Mainstream opinion makers do not encourage their listening.) Indeed, it does not seem unreasonable to say that they prefer their Jane Austen adaptations have the same cultural politics as that movie that just a little while before this one was filmed helped put this film's Elizabeth Bennet on the map, the "empowerment"-minded Bend it Like Beckham--all as the expectation seems to prevail that those espousing "progressive" contemporary mores manifest themselves not in a critical stance toward the past, but rather bowdlerizing that past into something more comfortable for the mainstream viewer in that fashion taken to its logical conclusion in that much more recent piece of . . . Regency romance, Shonda Rhimes' Bridgerton, the past made over as "feel-good" entertainment for the bourgeois of today, spared anything that would interfere with the self-satisfaction as much as ever a defining trait of the type.