To illustrate how you might apply the Greimas Square to literature, I thought
we would have a look at Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Now, none of the
ideas in this video are original with me. All the credit here goes to Nancy
Armstrong, who wrote a fabulous short article on this very topic, and so i'm
borrowing heavily from this. In any case, in the novel we have our main character
Elizabeth Bennet, and she of course has to choose between a number of men in her
life. There's Mr. Darcy, Mr. Wickham, [and] Mr.
Collins, and each of them presents certain advantages and disadvantages,
ranging from economic security to romance and adventure. What we
have here is a kind of conflict between the self and society. Society suggests
that women should do certain things and then Elizabeth Bennet may have her own
desires as well. So as we start reading the text then we get a kind of initial
impression of what the options are, and if we look at A1 here (so the
prescribed kind of thing) then what is prescribed is a kind of ideal marriage.
Women should get married ... so we have an ideal marriage, and in fact
we have an example of an impending marriage, one that's that seems like it's
going to be realized soon. That of course is between Jane and Mr. Bingley
So Jane and Bingley, and as Nancy Armstrong points out, there's a wonderful
kind of coming together here of a genteel lineage with Jane (she comes from
a good family) and then of course Bingley has lots of money, which of which is
exactly what you want! This seems to be the prescribed marriage. On
the other hand, there's also something that's forbidden, and what's forbidden in
this text is to be a spinster. You're not supposed to stay single. You have
to get married. Then if we think about what's not
forbidden ... here we have a kind of economic marriage.
This is more mercenary. It's a marriage where you want
to be secure. You do it for financial reasons. It's not necessarily ideal. There
might not even be much love involved, but it is not forbidden. It's acceptable and
the example here would be a relationship with Mr. Collins -- so not forbidden.
Then if we look at what's not prescribed, but what in this case is
desired (so not prescribed, not approved) this would be
Wickham, the soldier, who seems like a romantic option for Elizabeth Bennet, but
this is not necessarily a good option as we keep reading the text. That's
where we start in a sense, and there's something not satisfying about
this because the ideal marriage is right away inaccessible for our protagonist.
What she seems to be stuck with is a second best option, the economic marriage
to Mr. Collins, so we really see here how the novel analyzes these kinds of
marriage options that are open to women, particularly if you're not the firstborn ...
if you are the second in line in a sense. What can you do? What are your
options? And so the novel tries to bring together the desires of the individual
(in capitalist society this is an important thing) but then also the needs
of society. That's our first impression. How are we going to make this
a square that's more resolved, that's going to make us happier? Well, the first
thing to recognize is that as the novel progresses it tries to capture some of
the individual desires that Elizabeth Bennett has. And if you remember in our
previous video, in part two, we talked a lot about three different kinds of
models that we have to think about these kinds of relationships. We have the
personal model (my personal values), and then we have the
economic model, and then we also have the social model. In a
sense we already looked kind of at the social model just now, talking about how
society wants people to get married. So let's focus a little bit more than on
the personal model and the economic model, and then we'll come back at the
end to see how the social model incorporates these things at the end of
the novel and has kind of reconciled the tensions. So on a personal level, then ...
we'll just call this P1 here. We're going to have P1, P2, and then of course
negative P2 and negative P1. While we're at it we'll just make the economic
model here as well. So E1, E2, negative E2, and negative E1. And then of course we can
put in some arrows to show that these are contradictory terms, and we'll do
that here as well, and if you wanted to you could put in the axes as well. The
axis shows what is contrary as opposed to contradictory. In any case, let's
not waste time over this. What does Elizabeth Bennet desire? Well,
she desires Wickham! So she desires Wickham, at least at first, until she
finds out what a scoundrel he really is. But that's the initial desire and
Greimas suggested that personal desire tends to be transgressive. It goes
against what society wants you to do. So these squares tend to be kind of at
loggerheads with each other. What does she fear? Well, she fears Mr. Collins.
It's definitely not something that she wants. So what before was a secondary
possibility -- not something she wanted but maybe what was okay for society -- on a
personal level she really doesn't want Mr. Collins. What does she not fear -- well,
she does not fear spinsterhood, being single. That's not a problem
for her necessarily on a personal level. And then what does she not
desire ... she does not desire (guess who) Darcy! He's too proud. She does not desire
Darcy, at least not at this stage, until she sees his true qualities and then
that's of course what the novel is about. Now the fact that she does not desire
him here suggests that there is an opportunity for him to move elsewhere in
the square, because he's simply not desired, not feared. It's almost as if she kind of
holds out on him a little bit. Well, she does get very angry at him as well, but
perhaps this is a good description. Okay, then we have the economic model. and
rather than write this out I'll just very quickly summarize this for you.
If we think of profit (E1), what is profitable in this society?
Darcy would be the most profitable. You, know we'll just write a D
here for Darcy. What is unprofitable? Turns out that
Wickham is unprofitable. He tends to waste money, runs away, he he's not
reliable. And so in the economic model he's going to be over here. Then if we
think of what is not unprofitable, that's gets kind of confusing. It's like a
double negative: what is not unprofitable. Well, this would be somebody like Collins.
There's some profit there, there's economic security, but it's it's not a
great level of profit necessarily. And then if we think of not profitable (I
know all these terms start to sound kind of the same) here we might put the
spinster again -- staying single. That's not necessarily a good economic investment.
There you go! I said I wasn't going to write it out, but I ended up sort of
sketching it in nevertheless. Well, we have three different models then as this
story unfolds. We have our initial kind of impression, then we start to explore
some of these personal desires, and we start to get to know Wickham in more
detail, we get to know how Collins is really abhorrent ("mortifying") and we start
to really get a sense of Elizabeth Elizabeth's independence. How is all of
this resolved then? What is the final model that resolves it all, as these
different personalities kind of spin around and move around beside the square.
Let's have a look at our solution, and let's just call this S for
solution. We're going to have S1 of course, S2, the contrary, and then we'll take
the contradiction. so S2 in the negative version and S1 in the negative
version. Alright, right let's have a look at this. How can we resolve this? Well, in
the end we're going to have somebody who is desired, profitable ... okay, this is
going to be profitable, and we're going to have marriage on this side. In fact, we're
going to have a desired profitable marriage with Darcy. You can see that the
personal value, the economic value, and the social value, these things all
coalesce at the end, and Darcy is the one who represents this. Then if we think
over here about what is not prescribed what is forbidden, then we have something
that's [an] unprofitable, feared marriage and that would be with Wickham.
He's the one who runs away and he really has none of these things. Collins
at least ... is a little bit profitable, but that's not the case over here. So if
we think then about the bottom left side of the square we can say that what is
over here is not forbidden in the end. This would be to be a
spinster, so even though we kind of started with this as what society fears,
as we reconcile the personal and the social we find out that it's
okay to be a spinster. It's not great necessarily, but it has become more
acceptable. And then in the bottom right, and this one is a bit messy
(so sometimes we kind of fudge this square a little bit) but this is what's
not prescribed. ... This would be something like an
economic marriage. You're just doing it on mercenary
grounds. That would be with Mr. Collins, let's say. There we go, that is
how we get to some kind of solution. And you can see how the novel works through
these different relationships to get to this particular stage. Final thoughts
here. Why does this work so well? Because it seems actually kind of surprising,
like it seems almost common sense at this point. It seems to flow so logically.
Nancy Armstrong suggests (and I think is a good suggestion) that what
we're dealing with in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is in a sense a
realist novel. It's a realist novel. It really talks about actual kinds of
economic relationships. That's an interesting claim because the novel may
seem to us like a romance. So how realistic is it really? And I think
thinking about genre, thinking about tone -- these things are going to affect how we
read the Greimas Square. To what extent does it really reflect reality?
The reason it seems to work so well is that Greimas's three levels ...
we talked about these three levels: the individual, the social,
and the economic ... these of course are three values that are particularly
important to a capitalist society. These are three dominant values,
and if that's the case then it shouldn't surprise us that a realist text that
deals with very direct kind of capitalist concerns (or middle class
concerns, or whatever you want to call them) is going to reflect these tensions
and is going to try to reconcile them somehow. What would happen, on the other
hand, if you try to analyze a poem, let's say, or what if you analyze something
like Wuthering Heights which is much more extreme, which doesn't doesn't seem
to fit into these equations quite so easily? Could you do this kind of
analysis with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland? Those are the kinds of
questions that Nancy Armstrong asks, and I think these are really fascinating
questions. Does the model work so well because the model has been created to
reflect something that's already inherent in capitalist society.
Lots to think about there, but I hope at least you can see that the Greimas
Square can be very useful at at the very least crystallizing some of these
tensions, allowing you to see clearly how a novel works through a particular
problem.