Your Occasional Butterfly Internet Negativity Collage #3: Pride and Prejudice
by Ellen Redbird

I’m sorry, but I don’t get the fuss.
Why this book is so highly treasured by society is beyond me.
The plot would have been better if it wasn’t
200 years old and so well worn.
I don’t really like stories that take place in the past.
It could have been told in about 8 pages.
There is barely a story to the story, just
mind-numbing balls and dinner parties and
characters like wispy shadows. I hate genteel poverty!
All the characters did was wait around to get married and go for walks.
Nothing happens! They just visit each other all the time.
No one grows or changes.
It’s old people gossiping
and conditioning women to like jerks.
A narrow, unrealistic vision of life.
What about this goes beyond a simple love story?
The characterization has been used too many times since.
I have never witnessed so many intelligible people act so unintelligent.
Who uses the word “vexation” in a conversation?
Did they use those words in everyday conversation in 19th century England?
I am truly vexed as to how this novel became such a classic.

If you like lots of drama, this is for you.
Lots of drama, and nothing interesting at all.
It’s the only book in high school I couldn’t finish.
Eating sand for lunch every day would have been
easier than reading every single page of this book.
Tried to force myself to read it, but the plot
felt so cringy and superficial.
I couldn’t get over the soap opera mentality.
In the modern era, I feel like this would have been
an episode of As The World Turns.
Pretty much a shot-for-shot rip-off
of West Side Story—just based in the early 1800s.
I am sitting here eating a Tootsie Roll, a Halloween leftover,
and I can’t help notice the similarities between it and the novel.

This book is quite possibly the most poorly written,
insipid, saccharine one I have ever read in my life.
So stilted and slow and sappy, it makes my teeth HURT.
I didn’t understand a thing they were saying.
The writing style was too descriptive and led me
more than once to skip over entire paragraphs.
Tedious, shallow, uninspiring, worthless babble from beginning to end.
If there’s one thing I dislike, it’s lack of description.
I find it virtually impossible to read a book when
I know nothing of what the characters look like.

Girl books aren’t generally my thing.
This is a snore—erotic imaginings of an untampered womb.
This isn’t meant as an indictment of women, but it is almost
certainly enjoyed by so many women because it appeals
to their baser appetites such as the ego
and encourages some prevalent forms of wishful thinking.
I just don’t care about women
and their intense desires to get married.

Turgid nonsense.
Deadly, endless.
I’m just glad it’s over.
Do not read this while operating heavy machinery.
Don’t read Moby Dick either, if you know what’s good for you.
To tell you the truth, I read this because I have
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
sitting on my shelf ready to go.
I think the only reason this novel is even considered a treasure
is because it survived a large fire.

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