crosspost: UST! [Oct 2017]

[anghraine]

An anon on Tumblr asked:

Your p&p posts have such fantastic nuance. I've read them all! What are your thoughts on the sexual tension between Elizabeth and darcy in the book? When do you think the physical attraction starts? Also - who kissed who first? I suppose propriety would have demanded it be Darcy?

Thank you! That takes dedication ;)

I think the sexual tension between Elizabeth and Darcy is absolutely present in most of the book, though Elizabeth’s motives are so confused and her own awareness of them so flawed that it only emerges in little scraps on her side.

For instance, after the proposal and letter, she realizes that she was secretly offended by Darcy’s “neglect,” which fed into her susceptibility to Wickham. I don’t think Elizabeth had the slightest expectation, at any level, of Darcy being in love with her. And insults aren’t a matter of neglect, either. It’s a failure of passivity, a failure to pay obligatory attention. At some level, Elizabeth wanted Darcy to pay attention to her and felt she was being unfairly denied it.

There’s also the debatable (but I think suggestive in a literary sense) stuff around resemblance. Like … at Pemberley, Elizabeth is somewhat reassured of Bingley’s feelings for Jane, because he looks at her and she (I think correctly) concludes that he’s looking for a resemblance to Jane in her face. Which is obviously a sign that he’s still interested in Jane!

There is exactly one other time this happens in the book: when Elizabeth meets Lady Catherine. She eagerly looks for a resemblance to Darcy, and finds some (both physically and in mannerisms). Obviously it’s just because Lady Catherine is objectively unlikable and it’s satisfying to have her dislike of Darcy validated through her! Proxy hatred!!

…I mean, that’s what Elizabeth tells herself, or would if she let herself consider her motives at all. In fact, her instant response to everyone related to Darcy is to judge their physical attractiveness. So Lady Catherine might have been handsome once, her face and manners are sort of similar, and she’s tall and big like Darcy (and is horrible so OK).

Elizabeth’s initial response to Colonel Fitzwilliam is that he’s not handsome, but the most truly gentlemanly of the two. While she doesn’t explicitly compare his looks to Darcy’s, and instead just makes an absolute judgment, it is packaged into the comparison. IMO, the clear implication of “not handsome” is “not handsome, unlike Darcy,” given that it transitions straight into but the most gentlemanlike! She doesn’t let herself outright think of Darcy as handsome then, but the implication is there.

It’s at Pemberley when we see her make that kneejerk judgment without any uncomfortable dissonance. She doesn’t judge whether Georgiana is good-looking or not in an absolute sense (as she did with Lady Catherine’s “might have been handsome” and Colonel Fitzwilliam’s “not handsome”). She just makes the comparison that (IMO) has been implied all along: not as good-looking as Darcy. But tall!

(I’ve always been a bit /eyeroll at people making Colonel Fitzwilliam handsome to level him up as a love interest or w/e, but ngl I would find it kind of hilarious if he, Lady Catherine, and Georgiana were in fact reasonably attractive all along and just didn’t benefit from comparison.)

There are other ways to interpret all that ofc, but that’s how I do. In any case, Elizabeth’s reaction to Lady Catherine is the only other time we get a character actively trying to see someone in a relation, as Bingley does with Jane via Elizabeth, and it’s hard not to see a deliberate parallel there.

Swerving a bit—

Elizabeth realizes that she’s in love with Darcy after she leaves Pemberley but before she discovers what he’s done; the timing there is important. The implication of becoming “tolerably well acquainted” with her feelings isn’t that they changed after leaving Pemberley, but that she became aware of what she already felt. That means that she was already in love at Pemberley, and the ~she could have loved him~ was, uh, A+ self-awareness striking again.

And Elizabeth’s experience of love is full-on pining/blushing/longing glances/sleepless nights stuff. (Yeah, so ironic and unsentimental and Austen didn’t even want to write romance blah blah blah.) It’s not dispassionate appreciation and fondness. So either Elizabeth went 0 to 100 in a handful of awkward conversations (possible), or it involved factors from before (much more probable IMO). My view is that going from dislike/disapproval to consciously liking him as a person didn’t create those … less rational factors, but rather activated them.

Like, it turns out that Elizabeth has been aware of Darcy’s physical attractiveness. She’s been aware of him smiling at her (and not sardonically or w/e; she recognizes it as the same smile he had before his parents died haha cool). But we only hear about her awareness at Pemberley, when her discoveries about him make those things acceptable to her conscious mind.

To be clear, I do not think Elizabeth was secretly in love with him, or even secretly liked him. But I absolutely do think that Elizabeth felt weirdly entitled to his attention, wanted him to be attracted to her, and tended to overreact and be irrationally preoccupied with him.

So, my opinion is that Elizabeth felt some kind of visceral attraction (def including physical attraction) the whole time. In fact, I could probably put it under the unpop opinion meme—I think Elizabeth was attracted first and most strongly, continued to feel that attraction, and was vastly more repressed about it.

Not that Darcy didn’t repress his feelings, obviously, but they always seem to scale with her general appeal to him; e.g., her attractiveness and her intelligence are wound up together even in his initial attraction. He eventually says that he didn’t find her attractive at first because he didn’t really know her. Elizabeth, otoh, has to repress her attraction out of her own consciousness because it operates independently of what she thinks and feels about him as a human being.

Tl;dr: I think the physical attraction is there all along, but that there’s very little cognitive dissonance involved for Darcy, despite his issues with it; he’s aware of it from very early on. Elizabeth is also attracted but can’t really deal with it, so subconsciously represses and displaces it onto other things until she perceives him as a safe person to be attracted to.

(Safe in emotional terms, that is—she never thinks of him as physically dangerous, but a callous, selfish husband is a danger beyond the physical. Darcy being a decent, kind-hearted person is what she needed to know to accept her physical attraction to him. And, lbr, if I were the daughter of a marriage like her parents’, I’d be skittish about it too.)

As for the first kiss and propriety, *shrug*. Both Darcy and Elizabeth are concerned with propriety, but not rigidly so, and primarily in terms of public, social behaviour. And neither seem to care much about strict adherence to gender norms in particular. This is obvious with Elizabeth, and Darcy repeatedly grumps about society expecting him to be different than he is. A lot of their mutual misjudgments come down to applying general assumptions about men and women without considering the specific person that the other one is.

So it could be either who takes the initiative. I headcanon Elizabeth because I see her as less cautious, but also just because I prefer my het with the woman being more assertive. Okay, and because (at the time) I was perpetually irritated with Darcy always being the more sexual and aggressive with a naive Elizabeth, so I tended to go the other way out of pure contrariness. But there’s no way to know.

That aside, nobody will ever convince me that their first kiss didn’t happen on the walk after their engagement.

Comments

[mosylu]

I’m loving all this P&P content! Having just restarted the book on audio, I have to ask if you ever wrote anything about the functionality (or lack thereof) of the Bennett marriage and/or family?

[anghraine]

Thanks!

I think as close as I got was this post about Mrs Bennet being every bit as unreasonable as she seems.