![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crosspost: why men need to stop whining about Darcy
I thought of giving this a more conciliating title, but what the hell.
I see men complaining about Darcy, and women-fangirling-Darcy, all the time. Occasionally it’s “ew, Austen was so brilliant and her idiot fans just go on about how much they love Darcy, I must rescue her from being appreciated the wrong way!” Much more often, though, it’s more like “women expect us to live up to this ideal romance hero, and of course none of us can.”
There a couple of dimensions of wrongness to this. The “Darcy is perfect and no real man could compare” is … no. Darcy is stubborn, arrogant, unfriendly (= actual character flaw), fairly self-absorbed, and occasionally manipulative. Then there’s the slight variation of “Darcy is an unmitigated douche for the first half of the book, then magically transforms into a perfect hero in the second half, which just makes women think they can change us.” In this case, the first half is at least Elizabeth’s own perception, which she comes to realize was mistaken.
What actually happens is that Darcy does three pretty shitty things over the course of six months: (1) he insults a girl at a party, and she overhears him, (2) he gives bad relationship advice to his friend, and when his friend’s sister tells him that the friend’s former love interest is in town, he doesn’t pass the news on, and (3) his proposal of marriage is really condescending (“your social station is sufficiently inferior, and your connections still more inferior, that my family and pretty much everyone I know will disapprove of our marriage, and I kind of do myself, but I love you enough to overlook it” = asshole move).
Yes! This is true! But his worst moments do not constitute the entire of his character–or even the entirety of his conduct. The rest of the time, early!Darcy is often standoffish or argumentative, but polite. It’s Elizabeth who insists on reading everything after his first insult in the light of that insult, seeing contempt, mockery, and general douchery in everything he says or does, even when it is manifestly not there. So if you do the same thing, well,
In that case, this book is actually about your personal failings. Cheers!
But you don’t have to take my word for it! Here are a few examples of the scenes that people point to as examples of early Darcy being a completely different person from later Darcy - “he was such a jerk when they argued at Netherfield” and “why do people see that dance as romantic, he was so rude.”
Here’s the scene at Netherfield that’s most often under discussion, as Darcy angrily lashing out at poor Elizabeth:
“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil – a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.”
“And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.”
“And yours,” he replied, with a smile, “is wilfully to misunderstand them.”
Because nothing says asshole like a smiling comeback. Seriously, though, he’s being staid and pompous through a lot of the discussion, sure, while Elizabeth is pretty clearly prodding him to say something she can can blast from the sky. End result is that Darcy delivers his philosophical position, Elizabeth largely ignores it and snaps at him about his general sense of superiority, and he quickly and to all appearances cheerfully turns it around on her.
Within their debates, Darcy seems pretty consistently the one who is less interested in looking for faults, and more interested in having a substantive discussion. And this fits so badly with Elizabeth’s instantly formed opinion of him that she seems unable to even register it. When she describes the conversation later, she’ll paint his behaviour as considerably worse than it was.
The same thing goes for the dance at the Netherfield Ball:
“I remember hearing you once say, Mr Darcy, that you hardly ever forgave, that your resentment once created was unappeasable. You are very cautious, I suppose, as to its being created.”
“I am,” said he, with a firm voice.
“And never allow yourself to be blinded by prejudice?”
“I hope not.”
“It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion, to be secure of judging properly at first.”
“May I ask to what these questions tend?”
“Merely to the illustration of your character,” said she, endeavouring to shake off her gravity. “I am trying to make it out.”
“And what is your success?”
She shook her head. “I do not get on at all. I hear such different accounts of you as puzzle me exceedingly.”
“I can readily believe,” answered he gravely, “that report may vary greatly with respect to me; and I could wish, Miss Bennet, that you were not to sketch my character at the present moment, as there is reason to fear that the performance would reflect no credit on either.”
The foreshadowing is just about palpable here, and seems quite conscious on Darcy’s part, while Elizabeth is projecting like an IMAX. In fact, it’s Darcy who easily revises his initial opinions when faced with contradictory evidence; he quickly changes his mind about Elizabeth, he picks out her accurate criticisms from the wealth of inaccurate ones at Hunsford; even later, he seems to be initially ambivalent about the Gardiners, but quickly warms to them when it turns out they’re not as uniformly awful as the rest of her family, but actually good, pleasant people.
Now, this does not negate his other faults! And this is not to say that he isn’t generally chilly, standoffish, and inexpressive throughout the early parts. Just that he isn’t usually rude or insulting or offensive. And, even the whole ‘cold civility’ thing turns out to be qualified by circumstances. At Rosings, we hear:
Colonel Fitzwilliam’s occasionally laughing at his [Darcy’s] stupidity [dullness], proved that he was generally different, which her [Charlotte’s] own knowledge of him could not have told her
Later, at his own home, a long-standing retainer says:
“I have never had a cross word from him in my life, and I have known him ever since he was four years old. […] But I have always observed that they who are good-natured when children are good-natured when they grow up; and he was always the sweetest-tempered, most generous-hearted, boy in the world. […] There is not one of his tenants or servants but what will give him a good name. Some people call him proud; but I am sure I never saw any thing of it. […] And this is always the way with him,” she added.—"Whatever can give his sister any pleasure is sure to be done in a moment. There is nothing he would not do for her.“
Mrs Reynolds’ praise is certainly … ah, enthusiastic, but I think she’s being perfectly accurate when she says that she has never seen him behave differently, nor have any of his servants or tenants. It’s for much the same reason that Colonel Fitzwilliam (Darcy’s cousin and best friend) is all 'lolwut’ at Darcy’s behaviour at Rosings, even though that’s perfectly consistent with his general behaviour up to then. Darcy talks later about how he was encouraged to care only for those inside his family circle.
Now, he clearly interprets 'family circle’ in a fairly loose way: servants, tenants, poor people in his vicinity, personal friends, his sister and other relatives, etc etc. But when it comes to all the people outside that circle, his attitude basically comes down to:
What happens through the second half of the book is that he’s now trying to treat everyone the way that he has always treated the people he personally cares about, because even annoying strangers deserve a modicum of effort. So he’s struggling and awkward with Elizabeth, but he’s trying to be more than polite, but actively pleasant - and not just Elizabeth, but her middle-class relatives too. He’s open to the Gardiners in a way that he probably wouldn’t have been earlier, because he’s made the (let’s be real, comparatively small) shift from "inclined to disapprove of people” to “trying to withhold judgment.”
And, even with magically!transformed!Darcy - that is, Darcy who’s just extending his general behaviour to outside-his-tribe - it’s a little … ah, uneven. For instance, when he’s dealing with the Gardiners and Elizabeth isn’t there:
His behaviour to us has, in every respect, been as pleasing as when we were in Derbyshire.
Yay! Yet when he’s dealing with Mrs Bennet and Co when Elizabeth is there:
Darcy, after enquiring of her how Mr and Mrs Gardiner did, a question which she could not answer without confusion, said scarcely any thing. He was not seated by her; perhaps that was the reason of his silence; but it had not been so in Derbyshire. There he had talked to her friends, when he could not to herself. But now several minutes elapsed without bringing the sound of his voice
and
She had ventured only one glance at Darcy. He looked serious, as usual; and, she thought, more as he had been used to look in Hertfordshire, than as she had seen him at Pemberley. But, perhaps he could not in her mother’s presence be what he was before her uncle and aunt.
and
Mr Darcy was almost as far from her as the table could divide them. He was on one side of her mother. She knew how little such a situation would give pleasure to either, or make either appear to advantage. She was not near enough to hear any of their discourse, but she could see how seldom they spoke to each other, and how formal and cold was their manner whenever they did.
Okay, and even though he’s trying, sometimes he just fails. It’s the trying that’s the point. In summary, the 'waaah Elizabeth transforms him’ thing is nonsense. His character growth is significant, but it’s (1) fairly complex and (2) hardly constitutes an overhaul of his entire personality, as you’d think from the way people talk about it.
But there’s something else going on, and I think it’s actually far more important. The question that gets asked quite a bit is why women like Darcy. The one we hear less often is “what about Darcy appeals to (many) women?” But I’ve seen it framed that way now and then, and while answers are naturally varied, there’s one thing that female Darcy fans seem to come back to a lot: his response to the Hunsford catastrophe.
Let’s clarify: we’re not talking about the immediate response to his proposal, where he and Elizabeth have a screaming fight wherein they throw largely accurate insults at each other predicated upon completely mistaken assumptions. But taking all that as one disastrous scene, Darcy’s response is very, very unlike what you get in many other novels of the same period, later ones influenced by it, or the romance novels or films.
Since he completely disappears after Hunsford, and will not be seen in person for several months, I think it’s easy to focus on his change as the only important, particularly appealing thing that’s going on with him there. But there’s something else that’s important, despite the fact that he disappears - or rather, it is the fact that he disappears.
Say what you will about the ultimate ending, his response to rejection is not to (1) apply guilt, (2) shame her, (3) try to talk her into changing her mind, or (4) keep pursuing her regardless of her wishes. These are all things you see a lot in romances, and horribly often in real life. But not in P&P. Here, that guy is Mr Collins, and his behaviour is presented as deeply repellent. When Darcy is rejected, he goes away.
And he doesn’t just leave right then. In his explanatory letter, he tells her that he won’t bother her again and ends with his best wishes. He goes to the work of improving himself because he respects her opinion enough to set aside the things she misjudged him about (which were incredibly insulting), and what Elizabeth calls the acrimony of her manner (he doesn’t need no stinking tone arguments), and accept that yes, he was a douche, and he’s better than that and should act like it to everyone, not just the people he has direct power over.
Elizabeth isn’t even around when he decides to change his behaviour; it is manifestly not for her, but because she opened his eyes to his own character flaws. He doesn’t contact her, he doesn’t look for her, he doesn’t make any attempt to accidentally meet. He just goes back to his own life. The only reason they ever meet again is, in fact, because he’s living his normal life.
Contrary to many fics and at least one adaptation, he isn’t brooding over her before their meeting at Pemberley. He isn’t even thinking about her. He returned ahead of schedule to deal with some business matters and just so happened to run into Elizabeth. And while he’s thrilled at the opportunity to show her that he’s not a douchebag, he makes a point of not being pushy or doing anything that would put her in an awkward position. For the same reason, he will try and hide his rescue of Lydia from her - he doesn’t want her to feel obligated.
And just in case all this might have seemed like a fluke, Austen’s very next book involves a man who is nothing like Darcy, but is in a very comparable situation. Instead of going away, leaving the heroine, Fanny, in peace, and taking a hard look at his own faults, he pursues her, makes extravagant gestures to win her heart, ingratiates himself with her family, and insists that only her purity and good influence can change him. It’s presented as horribly wrong, and also horrible that no one but Fanny can tell how wrong it is.
People who talk about how Darcy’s response to rejection is romanticized and unrealistic and an impossible standard to live up to … are kind of creepy, honestly. A man having the decency to respect a woman’s wishes and accept that she means what she says - and, moreover, that there might be value in what she says - should not be some wild romantic fantasy. It certainly should not be that difficult to find it outside the pages of a two-hundred-year-old English novel.
But it is difficult, particularly within the courtship plot genre. So Darcy’s respect for Elizabeth ends up looking like a major virtue rather than a basic standard of conduct that should be expected of everyone, and it remains a significant part of his appeal. And if y'all can’t live up to that much, the problem isn’t with a fictional character invented in 1796, it’s with you. You might want to think about it the next time you sneer at some woman talking about how she’s holding out for a man like Darcy.
no subject
no subject
But someone who teaches you something about yourself & inspires you to change for the better for your own sake is definitely someone you want to marry if they're down for it.