crosspost: on 'bad boy' Darcy [Jan 2016]
Dec. 15th, 2018 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineAn anon on Tumblr asked:
Why do you think Mr Darcy (in fanon, at least) is perceived as a 'bad boy' that reforms after Elizabeth's rejection? Since the beginning of the novel we know he is often rude with those he thinks 'inferior', but that does not make him really immoral. Even Wickham had good words for him. In the end, we know he is a good man and the hero of the story, but he has his flaws. In your opinion, why is he perceived as a bad boy that needed to reform his character?
Austen question :D :D :D
And this is a good one– thanks, anon! I think it essentially comes down to a lack of nuance, and moreover, a lack of nuance on several fronts.
[NB: This turned out very long, so you can jump to the end for an abbreviated version.]
Jumping back a bit, storytelling is inextricably bound up in retelling. Not always direct retellings, but we recreate patterns with our own takes, or turn them upside down, or go “okay, but what if–” or mix them together in new ways or whatever. Tropes! And that’s not bad. It’s what the greatest literature is doing.
The danger, however, is that when you’ve got a complication of a conventional trope rather than an open subversion, it’s very easy to slot it into the familiar trope and reduce it all to what’s familiar, even where it doesn’t really fit.
And Darcy is particularly ripe for misunderstanding. I think the best description of his characterization is “subtle and difficult” (sadly I can’t find the article it’s from, but it was all about this). He’s not, ultimately, a total subversion of the trope, but he’s a very great complication of it.
So, there’s a story, and it goes like this:
There’s an arrogant, reserved, abrasive guy (but clever, handsome, and rich). He’s a visitor, far from his actual home, so we don’t know what the place under his control is like, or what he himself is like at home–his real self. (Sometimes he is at home, and we’re the strangers, in which case he’s often absent or retreating to some kind of mysterious sanctuary within the home; the effect is the same.) But it’s hard to escape the impression that this intense man who dominates everyone around him is dangerous, and we soon discover that he is. Much of what we see of him supports the idea of a harsh, controlling personality, if with the allure of a ~dark charisma~. Even people who dislike him (aka most people) are intimidated by him.
Except our upstanding heroine, of course, who has the intrepidity of virtue and clear-sighted wit on her side. And consequently he develops an interest in her; though he surrounds himself with weaker personalities he can dominate, he has no respect for them and is drawn to tough, strong-willed personalities like himself.
Usually what happens is that the heroine is, despite her better judgment, drawn by the aforementioned dark charisma. They have thoughtful discussions and she finds there’s an uncanny sympathy between them. Beneath the surface, they’re of the same kind. And eventually he gives in to his passion for her and proposes marriage. (OK, it’s not always marriage. But usually.)
The plot can go in a variety of ways: she accepts and then some disaster (likely from his past) befalls them. She wants to accept but their love can never be. She accepts with reservations, they actually do get married, and she discovers Dark Secrets. But in the vast majority of cases, the end result is that his love for her propels him into a drastic transformation, and simultaneously she comes to love him/comes to realize she loves him and they live happily ever after.
This basic plot underlies everything from Beauty and the Beast to Jane Eyre to Rebecca to Crimson Peak. And a vast quantity of less well-known things. And, for a substantial chunk of the book, Pride and Prejudice.
It’s not that Darcy isn’t presented as That Guy, or that he isn’t That Guy in various significant ways (private, withdrawn, intellectual, abrasive yet fascinating, powerful, intimidating to virtually everyone, contemptuous, weirdly charismatic, inclined to unilateral decisions…). In a way, Pride and Prejudice is deeply concerned with tropes. That’s Elizabeth’s fundamental error, that she makes over and over again with Bingley, Charlotte, Wickham, and of course Darcy: slotting people into types and then confident that she knows everything that matters about them.
Wickham’s story doesn’t just back up her desire to believe the worst of Darcy, though that’s certainly present. (That aspect belongs to a different tropey plot that is simultaneously going on–whispering beneath the surface until it emerges as the real story.) But the other, crucial thing it backs up is the character type she’s already assigned him to. Essentially, pseudo-Gothic asshole that’s only waiting for confirmation before she promotes him to full pseudo-Gothic villain. A sort of scaled-down Lovelace, the type that will become your Rochesters and at their furthest extreme, Heathcliffs.
Now, in fairness to Elizabeth, she’s not Catherine Morland. She doesn’t think she’s actually living in a Gothic romance and plugging her instincts into the exact tropes of that kind of thing. The pseudo- is important here. She’s more like Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland rolled together; she’s thinking in terms of tropes, but since she fundamentally approaches the world in realistic and ironic terms, she translates the tropes into a domestic mode. (She’s also not Catherine in that her instincts are terrible tbh, where Catherine's are actually pretty good.)
Okay, so: sexual predation is intrinsic to the Gothic villain/anti-hero, and that crosses over to the domestic type. So I think that’s what essentially is going on with Darcy’s otherwise-bizarre bad-boy-reformed-by-love image–it’s part of his type, and people instinctively import it in, even though there’s no evidence whatsoever for it.
In fact, again in fairness to Elizabeth, she does not carry the sexual predation over. Nobody actually regards him that way, even though they largely regard him as Villain McVillainy. Rather the reverse; the people repelled by him seem to see him as borderline asexual, and are startled at the idea of him taking any significant interest in anyone (as is Darcy himself!).
Elizabeth does see him him as predatory, however. Just not in terms of gender (although their dynamic is overwhelmingly read that way) but rather along class lines. Thus it seems natural that his principal victim is another man while his oppressive cohorts are women.
Obviously, the domesticized Gothic plot takes a huge swerve at Hunsford. Elizabeth isn’t remotely a Gothic heroine; she’s the Beatrice of the story, not the Pamela. He condescends to her, she snaps at him, he snaps back, and ultimately they’re both upset. But it’s a matter of clashing personalities and values, not a villainous aggressor and virtuous defender. They fight on equal terms; Darcy’s behaviour is shitty but not dangerous, hers is inappropriate, and neither is remotely threatened by the other, just pissed off. He leaves, and apart from handing her his explanatory letter, deliberately keeps his distance from her.
And the letter changes everything. Darcy’s dark secret? It’s a lie. Even the predatory class stuff is limited; the Bennets’ behaviour bothered him, as it bothers Elizabeth herself. Also, Elizabeth sees not just her mistake in assigning Darcy to the wrong category, but Wickham, Charlotte, and Bingley, all of whom she misunderstood in the face of blatantly obvious evidence. But the most monumental error was with Darcy, and the most terrible realization is that there’s no evidence of Darcy being immoral in any way.
Of course, Pemberley is another version. At last we see That Guy’s sanctum, and it’s … super pretty! He has good taste in landscaping and interior decoration! He sticks his sister’s crayon drawings with his weird modern art collections! He’s a huge philanthropist, and a caring landlord, and pays debts that aren’t even his, and just helps people all the time, so how much does it really matter if he’s quiet and private and awkward. Yeah, he can be proud away from home, and that's but whatever, he’s a kind man who’s keeping people from starving.
That’s a pretty direct inversion of our plot: going to the distant manor and discovering ~the truth~, but instead of murder or a secret wife or mysterious tragedy or whatever, the truth is that he’s actually really nice. And from that point on, the “bad boy” image just unravels more and more, and all the things that were wrong about it from the beginning become more and more apparent.
By the end, when he reverts to the same behaviour as at the beginning, it doesn’t (or shouldn’t) read as the bad boy reverting to form. It’s just that he, specifically, is awkward and fastidious, and though Elizabeth continues to misunderstand him through that stage of the novel, it’s by lumping him in with men in general instead of a trope, because changing paradigms is a process and it’s hard and you make mistakes. Darcy, likewise, continues to be secretive and prissy and unbending, but he’s trying, and the novel emphasizes that they’ll continue to influence each other for the better.
It’s not a subversion of the Gothic plot, exactly; there are elements of it in place, and it does involve significant character growth, reconciliation, and happily ever after. But it takes that and complicates it so much that it’s no longer the same thing at all, winding the Beauty and the Beast type story around something that, at heart, is much more of a Much Ado About Nothing.
Their love-story–and P&P is a love story–isn’t about anyone being transformed by love. It’s about choosing the people who bring out the best in you. And I think because of that familiar outer shell, people bring in a lot of preconceptions that simply don’t apply. That is, they make the same mistakes that Elizabeth does herself.
Short version
The plot/character arcs of P&P are set up to look like the Gothic plot, complete with Gothic/proto-Byronic anti-hero, translated into a domestic, realistic mode. To some extent, it is that, but a very limited extent–it veers off the pseudo-Gothic rails halfway through and reveals itself to essentially be a romantic comedy of manners along the lines of Much Ado About Nothing.
The “bad boy” interpretation of Darcy, IMO, comes from registering him as a domesticized Byronic hero (i.e., what he first appears to be) and importing the familiar Byronic tropes with his assignment to the role. It’s somewhat understandable, because he is set up that way, but also a failure to integrate the entire second half of the novel into the interpretation. Ultimately he’s an inversion of the trope–lots of overlap temperamentally, but emerging with increasing clarity as a somewhat straitlaced but kind, affectionate, and intensely scrupulous man.
Original tags:
#i think it’s interesting that darcy has always been wildly popular#austen herself said as long as people liked darcy and elizabeth she was happy; they could hate everyone else in it#like - if you take the perennially popular ~bad boy~ gothic byronic whatever#and strip away the /bad/ and explore what’s left#just the personality: no dark past no danger no immorality#just someone proud and fiercely individualistic (this is a huge deal with darcy) and clever and withdrawn and extremely private#with ~refined taste~ and a certain amount of snobbery that never fits quite right and like#‘the world doesn’t like me? WELL I DON’T LIKE IT EITHER’#etc#deliver all that but packaged as a /good/ person with normal flaws that he’s just got to work on like anyone else#and he’s just as massively popular as the sexydangerous ones if not more so#and despite the importing of silly byronic sex god things - the people that do it don’t really think of it as /bad/ just normal#and while that’s missing a huge point of austen it’s - fans of the novel /do/ register him as a good person#which i think suggests interesting things about what’s really drawing people to the byronic type
Why do you think Mr Darcy (in fanon, at least) is perceived as a 'bad boy' that reforms after Elizabeth's rejection? Since the beginning of the novel we know he is often rude with those he thinks 'inferior', but that does not make him really immoral. Even Wickham had good words for him. In the end, we know he is a good man and the hero of the story, but he has his flaws. In your opinion, why is he perceived as a bad boy that needed to reform his character?
Austen question :D :D :D
And this is a good one– thanks, anon! I think it essentially comes down to a lack of nuance, and moreover, a lack of nuance on several fronts.
[NB: This turned out very long, so you can jump to the end for an abbreviated version.]
Jumping back a bit, storytelling is inextricably bound up in retelling. Not always direct retellings, but we recreate patterns with our own takes, or turn them upside down, or go “okay, but what if–” or mix them together in new ways or whatever. Tropes! And that’s not bad. It’s what the greatest literature is doing.
The danger, however, is that when you’ve got a complication of a conventional trope rather than an open subversion, it’s very easy to slot it into the familiar trope and reduce it all to what’s familiar, even where it doesn’t really fit.
And Darcy is particularly ripe for misunderstanding. I think the best description of his characterization is “subtle and difficult” (sadly I can’t find the article it’s from, but it was all about this). He’s not, ultimately, a total subversion of the trope, but he’s a very great complication of it.
So, there’s a story, and it goes like this:
There’s an arrogant, reserved, abrasive guy (but clever, handsome, and rich). He’s a visitor, far from his actual home, so we don’t know what the place under his control is like, or what he himself is like at home–his real self. (Sometimes he is at home, and we’re the strangers, in which case he’s often absent or retreating to some kind of mysterious sanctuary within the home; the effect is the same.) But it’s hard to escape the impression that this intense man who dominates everyone around him is dangerous, and we soon discover that he is. Much of what we see of him supports the idea of a harsh, controlling personality, if with the allure of a ~dark charisma~. Even people who dislike him (aka most people) are intimidated by him.
Except our upstanding heroine, of course, who has the intrepidity of virtue and clear-sighted wit on her side. And consequently he develops an interest in her; though he surrounds himself with weaker personalities he can dominate, he has no respect for them and is drawn to tough, strong-willed personalities like himself.
Usually what happens is that the heroine is, despite her better judgment, drawn by the aforementioned dark charisma. They have thoughtful discussions and she finds there’s an uncanny sympathy between them. Beneath the surface, they’re of the same kind. And eventually he gives in to his passion for her and proposes marriage. (OK, it’s not always marriage. But usually.)
The plot can go in a variety of ways: she accepts and then some disaster (likely from his past) befalls them. She wants to accept but their love can never be. She accepts with reservations, they actually do get married, and she discovers Dark Secrets. But in the vast majority of cases, the end result is that his love for her propels him into a drastic transformation, and simultaneously she comes to love him/comes to realize she loves him and they live happily ever after.
This basic plot underlies everything from Beauty and the Beast to Jane Eyre to Rebecca to Crimson Peak. And a vast quantity of less well-known things. And, for a substantial chunk of the book, Pride and Prejudice.
It’s not that Darcy isn’t presented as That Guy, or that he isn’t That Guy in various significant ways (private, withdrawn, intellectual, abrasive yet fascinating, powerful, intimidating to virtually everyone, contemptuous, weirdly charismatic, inclined to unilateral decisions…). In a way, Pride and Prejudice is deeply concerned with tropes. That’s Elizabeth’s fundamental error, that she makes over and over again with Bingley, Charlotte, Wickham, and of course Darcy: slotting people into types and then confident that she knows everything that matters about them.
Wickham’s story doesn’t just back up her desire to believe the worst of Darcy, though that’s certainly present. (That aspect belongs to a different tropey plot that is simultaneously going on–whispering beneath the surface until it emerges as the real story.) But the other, crucial thing it backs up is the character type she’s already assigned him to. Essentially, pseudo-Gothic asshole that’s only waiting for confirmation before she promotes him to full pseudo-Gothic villain. A sort of scaled-down Lovelace, the type that will become your Rochesters and at their furthest extreme, Heathcliffs.
Now, in fairness to Elizabeth, she’s not Catherine Morland. She doesn’t think she’s actually living in a Gothic romance and plugging her instincts into the exact tropes of that kind of thing. The pseudo- is important here. She’s more like Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland rolled together; she’s thinking in terms of tropes, but since she fundamentally approaches the world in realistic and ironic terms, she translates the tropes into a domestic mode. (She’s also not Catherine in that her instincts are terrible tbh, where Catherine's are actually pretty good.)
Okay, so: sexual predation is intrinsic to the Gothic villain/anti-hero, and that crosses over to the domestic type. So I think that’s what essentially is going on with Darcy’s otherwise-bizarre bad-boy-reformed-by-love image–it’s part of his type, and people instinctively import it in, even though there’s no evidence whatsoever for it.
In fact, again in fairness to Elizabeth, she does not carry the sexual predation over. Nobody actually regards him that way, even though they largely regard him as Villain McVillainy. Rather the reverse; the people repelled by him seem to see him as borderline asexual, and are startled at the idea of him taking any significant interest in anyone (as is Darcy himself!).
Elizabeth does see him him as predatory, however. Just not in terms of gender (although their dynamic is overwhelmingly read that way) but rather along class lines. Thus it seems natural that his principal victim is another man while his oppressive cohorts are women.
Obviously, the domesticized Gothic plot takes a huge swerve at Hunsford. Elizabeth isn’t remotely a Gothic heroine; she’s the Beatrice of the story, not the Pamela. He condescends to her, she snaps at him, he snaps back, and ultimately they’re both upset. But it’s a matter of clashing personalities and values, not a villainous aggressor and virtuous defender. They fight on equal terms; Darcy’s behaviour is shitty but not dangerous, hers is inappropriate, and neither is remotely threatened by the other, just pissed off. He leaves, and apart from handing her his explanatory letter, deliberately keeps his distance from her.
And the letter changes everything. Darcy’s dark secret? It’s a lie. Even the predatory class stuff is limited; the Bennets’ behaviour bothered him, as it bothers Elizabeth herself. Also, Elizabeth sees not just her mistake in assigning Darcy to the wrong category, but Wickham, Charlotte, and Bingley, all of whom she misunderstood in the face of blatantly obvious evidence. But the most monumental error was with Darcy, and the most terrible realization is that there’s no evidence of Darcy being immoral in any way.
Of course, Pemberley is another version. At last we see That Guy’s sanctum, and it’s … super pretty! He has good taste in landscaping and interior decoration! He sticks his sister’s crayon drawings with his weird modern art collections! He’s a huge philanthropist, and a caring landlord, and pays debts that aren’t even his, and just helps people all the time, so how much does it really matter if he’s quiet and private and awkward. Yeah, he can be proud away from home, and that's but whatever, he’s a kind man who’s keeping people from starving.
That’s a pretty direct inversion of our plot: going to the distant manor and discovering ~the truth~, but instead of murder or a secret wife or mysterious tragedy or whatever, the truth is that he’s actually really nice. And from that point on, the “bad boy” image just unravels more and more, and all the things that were wrong about it from the beginning become more and more apparent.
By the end, when he reverts to the same behaviour as at the beginning, it doesn’t (or shouldn’t) read as the bad boy reverting to form. It’s just that he, specifically, is awkward and fastidious, and though Elizabeth continues to misunderstand him through that stage of the novel, it’s by lumping him in with men in general instead of a trope, because changing paradigms is a process and it’s hard and you make mistakes. Darcy, likewise, continues to be secretive and prissy and unbending, but he’s trying, and the novel emphasizes that they’ll continue to influence each other for the better.
It’s not a subversion of the Gothic plot, exactly; there are elements of it in place, and it does involve significant character growth, reconciliation, and happily ever after. But it takes that and complicates it so much that it’s no longer the same thing at all, winding the Beauty and the Beast type story around something that, at heart, is much more of a Much Ado About Nothing.
Their love-story–and P&P is a love story–isn’t about anyone being transformed by love. It’s about choosing the people who bring out the best in you. And I think because of that familiar outer shell, people bring in a lot of preconceptions that simply don’t apply. That is, they make the same mistakes that Elizabeth does herself.
Short version
The plot/character arcs of P&P are set up to look like the Gothic plot, complete with Gothic/proto-Byronic anti-hero, translated into a domestic, realistic mode. To some extent, it is that, but a very limited extent–it veers off the pseudo-Gothic rails halfway through and reveals itself to essentially be a romantic comedy of manners along the lines of Much Ado About Nothing.
The “bad boy” interpretation of Darcy, IMO, comes from registering him as a domesticized Byronic hero (i.e., what he first appears to be) and importing the familiar Byronic tropes with his assignment to the role. It’s somewhat understandable, because he is set up that way, but also a failure to integrate the entire second half of the novel into the interpretation. Ultimately he’s an inversion of the trope–lots of overlap temperamentally, but emerging with increasing clarity as a somewhat straitlaced but kind, affectionate, and intensely scrupulous man.
Original tags:
#i think it’s interesting that darcy has always been wildly popular#austen herself said as long as people liked darcy and elizabeth she was happy; they could hate everyone else in it#like - if you take the perennially popular ~bad boy~ gothic byronic whatever#and strip away the /bad/ and explore what’s left#just the personality: no dark past no danger no immorality#just someone proud and fiercely individualistic (this is a huge deal with darcy) and clever and withdrawn and extremely private#with ~refined taste~ and a certain amount of snobbery that never fits quite right and like#‘the world doesn’t like me? WELL I DON’T LIKE IT EITHER’#etc#deliver all that but packaged as a /good/ person with normal flaws that he’s just got to work on like anyone else#and he’s just as massively popular as the sexydangerous ones if not more so#and despite the importing of silly byronic sex god things - the people that do it don’t really think of it as /bad/ just normal#and while that’s missing a huge point of austen it’s - fans of the novel /do/ register him as a good person#which i think suggests interesting things about what’s really drawing people to the byronic type