anghraine

An anon on Tumblr asked:

I love darcy, but it really does grate on me how he just assumes Elizabeth has a thing for him. Wondering if Jane's cold was severe enough for her to have really come for Jane's sake! Also, when do you think he starts flirting with Elizabeth in earnest? what do you think is the turning point for him - when does he decide to marry her? Love your blog!

Thank you!

I’ll admit that … probably to the surprise of no one, that’s not how I see it. I do not think that Darcy believed Elizabeth had a thing for him personally. That would suggest that he actually thought about it, which tbh I don’t think he did.

At Netherfield, Darcy simply assumes that Elizabeth would want to marry him if the opportunity presented itself. In fact, he gets concerned that he might have given the impression that the opportunity could present itself, which of course Elizabeth would hope for if possible. It’s not “of course” because he assumes that he holds an attraction for Elizabeth as a human being, but because he assumes that the advantages he brings with him—birth, connections, power, wealth, name etc—would make any woman want him as a husband.

I also don’t read his reaction re: Jane that way. There’s no indication, as far as I recall, that Darcy suspects some ulterior motive on Elizabeth’s part. He doubts that Jane is sick enough to justify the impropriety of Elizabeth’s five-mile walk in the mud, not whether she’s sick enough to be Elizabeth’s real motive for doing it.

In fact, we know he was positively impressed by Elizabeth’s affection and concern for Jane despite that ambivalence. Later on, he argues that it made for evidence of her goodness when he fell in love.

In any case, it’s at Rosings that he jumps off the denial train and starts actively (if incompetently) courting Elizabeth. We don’t actually see the specific moment when this happens, just as we don’t see the moment when Elizabeth realizes she’s in love with Darcy (we’re just told that it happens during Lydiagate and heavily contributes to her misery). But he’s gone from struggling against his feelings to accepting that he’s in love and making increasingly overt overtures, which he believes are being accepted and encouraged by Elizabeth.

This belief is sometimes justified or unjustified by specific instances (nobody’s going to take “here’s my walking schedule” as “so we can avoid each other”), but I firmly believe that it’s rooted in his general assumption that anyone would be eager to marry him.

John Wiltshire has a great discussion of this, btw—about how neither Darcy or Elizabeth are quite “real” to each other at this point. On her side, we hear less and less of what he’s actually saying, and more of what Elizabeth hears: we have to extract clues through the Elizabeth-filter. On his side, Darcy makes zero attempt to ~win her heart~ or anything like that—to even consider her emotions, really. He just goes to some (minimal) effort to gauge her receptiveness to marriage. In the circumstances, those are very different things.

So the proposal scene is mostly them just seeing what they want to see and projecting their assumptions onto each other, not recognizing each other’s autonomy as human beings.

I actually think that, for Darcy, the very idea of Elizabeth loving him was borne out of her rejection. From where he was standing at the time, her acceptance would have been fairly meaningless because he wasn’t thinking about her feelings except in the most superficial way. But afterwards, he knows that she won’t accept him unless she seriously likes him—hell, he thinks she’d be completely upfront to anyone about not accepting him. That’s why it becomes a blinking neon sign to him when she refuses to altogether rule out marrying him at some point.

But Darcy’s hope that Elizabeth might love him comes later. IMO it’s not even a factor at first.