It seems fashionable in the Anglophone literary world to deprecate plots that depend on misunderstanding and I'm not sure why--aren't they a staple of white Anglo classics like the works of #Shakespeare and #JaneAusten? 🤔 I guess there are a ton of cases where the misunderstanding is kind of meh and written in for plot convenience more than anything intrinsic to the characters and the world, but like any other plot element it can be handled well or poorly.
Personally I love a compelling misunderstanding where misinterpretation and crossed signals arise out of circumstances central to the story like "civil blood mak[ing] civil hands unclean," (Romeo and Juliet) or because honest communication about subjects like romantic yearnings is so high-stakes it's basically impossible, especially for women (much of Jane Austen).
And maybe there's a tendency to kind of sneer at this because these stories took place in the Olden Days(TM) of whalebone corsets and slavery and people are supposed to be above all that now. The last time I checked misunderstanding didn't die out with the advent of industrialization, though, unlike passenger pigeons and dodos (too soon?). Despite the enlightenment and freedoms constantly touted to us, how much goes unspoken and undared, dropped, forgotten and (un)missed in the odd spaces that open up between our fragile forms? Which, and whose, silences and misapprehensions do the loadbearing work in our lives?
I think these questions of misunderstanding and miscommunication are worth exploring in any age, especially if books are optimized for exploring inner lives as seems to be another common consensus in Anglophone lit crowds. (Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Beowulf among others might disagree, but hey, they're old news and drawn from oral tradition so they get filed differently maybe? 🤷♀️)
