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YES.
— Mel · 15.04.08 ·
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lol. it’s time someone confronted this issue. and with good terminology: bizarre and sad, emotional porn, etc. so true ladies, be rizzle
— lily · 15.04.08 ·
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That’s definitely a blue steel he has going on up top.
— Jen · 16.04.08 ·
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Excellent article! Although there’s probably an appropriate balance.
— Thomas · 16.04.08 ·
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While I must say that I do understand where you are coming from, and agree with quite a bit of what you are saying, I think there is a way to appreciate Mr. Darcy (and the great works of Jane Austen) without devaluing it into the point of a shallow obsession. Mr. Darcy is far and away my favorite literary hero, and I don’t think it is unhinged to hope I can find my very own “Mr. Darcy.” However, the “Mr. Darcy” I seek is not a cliche that matches up with everything written in Pride & Prejudice. You are right that Darcy had flaws and quite a few of them. What I have always appreciated about that character is that he realized them, admitted them, and tried to be a better man. He was honest, even if it came across as rudeness, and he maintained his integrity. I am not looking for a cookie-cutter-Darcy to fulfill me, but I am interested in finding a man who embodies several of those qualities. I don’t think honesty and integrity are too much to ask of “real” men. And neither is it faulty to look for a man who always strives to be better. I think that is imperative for both men and women.
So, that is the flip side I’m offering. I know the women you describe exist, and take it too far, but I think a healthy balanced can be achieved.
— Amanda · 16.04.08 ·
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I’ve always enjoyed austen’s stuff, but I don’t really consider her work that much of a chick flick type, more so a satire of life from the times in which she lived. I think chick-flick minded females exstrapolate mr. darcy or mr. knightly or capt. wentworth into as you said, emotional porn. The different actors they get for the parst no doubt add fuel to the flame. But great article. Though I could never say austen isn’t great, even when swooners take out things from the books that aren’t really there. Also the books capture a tiny segment of social life in the times, as fanciful and frivolous as that echelon may have been.
— david · 17.04.08 ·
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soo true. I like P&P as much as the next person, but Mr Darcy WAS a rude, arrogant, and boring. When people create an idol out of Mr. Darcy, they miss the beauty of the original story. Mr. Darcy WASN’t perfect, or anywhere close, and it was still a beautiful story. I know a lot of guys who leave Mr. Darcy in the dust.
— ben · 21.04.08 ·
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Quite. I’ve never really understood the fascination—make that obsession—with imaginary men of a different era and culture. Granted, I’ve only ever read one Austen (Sense and Sensibility, a gift-book from an aunt I was obliged to read), but this seems to represent a genre and era-crossing phenomena: creating a rosy, airbrushed view of some other place, time, or person and decrying all life and people who do not measure up to our fantasy. Insert “Celtic Ireland,” “Medieval Europe,” “Victorian England,” or “50’s America” and you’ll find similar idealists in denial.
— E. Holmes · 22.04.08 ·
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I completely agree about the overwrought idealization of “Mr. Darcy.” But it is probably best to separate the actual writing of Jane Austen from the movie/popular understanding subculture that has developed around misunderstandings and simplifications of her work.
— Ally · 2.05.08 ·
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Whereas I don’t agree that fictional world should overlap reality in any way, what most women love about Mr. Darcy IS an idea, not some emotional porn, but it is a longing for something better than what the garbage we have now a days. If men were more confident, more chivalrous, more like gentlemen of old, there wouldn’t be a huge gaping hole in the hearts of women everywhere. Mr. Darcy is not real, but there is no reason why men can’t strive to BE like him. Is that so much to ask? I’m not talking perfection, I’m talking common chivalrous action. Men suck now days. No ifs ands or buts about it. And I hold women responsible for that as well. Feminism killed masculinity!
— Maid at the Well · 29.05.08 ·
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Maid at the Well,
I would be very careful about how you talk about men. Frankly, when someone says things like “men suck now days,” I can’t say it inspires me or makes me want to be more virtuous. If anything it has the reverse effect. Furthermore, if men, as a whole, were all more “chivalrous” you would simply complain because they weren’t even MORE chivalrous. If you want men to be men, I strongly suggest you quit tearing them down and start building them up.— Jacob · 4.06.08 ·
He’s a dead white man, already. Let’s get over him, ladies.
Last weekend, people from my former college threw a Fitzwilliam Darcy Ball. This should be no surprise considering the fact that every couple of hours, someone from my former college invites me to take the “Which Jane Austen Heroine Are You?” Facebook quiz. And that should be no surprise considering the fact that Jane Austen is ubiquitous these days—on billboards, in movies, on bookshelves—tired out, twisted and shrunk to cliché.
“It seems you could make anything Jane Austen wrote—a captioned doodle? a grocery list? a penmanship exercise?—into a box office smash,” said the Washington Post last summer when Jane Austen Book Club and Becoming Jane were hitting the box office. PBS just readapted every Jane Austen classic for its Masterpiece series. Upcoming spin-offs include Sense and Sensibilidad, a Latina version set in Los Angeles, and Jane Austen Handheld, which retells Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of a documentary crew.
The Boston Globe gushed that Austen approaches the genius of Shakespeare and that we must adapt her stories again and again for each generation: “It should be reimagined for a variety of mindsets—cynical, superficial, innocent, hopeful. As we define Austen, so, to some extent, do we define our time and ourselves.”
But the passion is a little cloying—embarrassing enough to force former Jane Austen fans into hiding. There’s a difference between someone who appreciates Jane Austen and someone who wants to be Jane Austen. It’s good to use literature as an occasional escape from reality, but when fiction spills over into real life and we start to want to inhabit it—when we start assuming that life is a series of F. Darcy Balls and proposals from Colin Firth—it’s a problem.
It’s a problem some people actually have. Search for Mr. Darcy on Facebook and you’ll find hundreds of groups full of hundreds of girls who seem to expect Mr. Darcy to materialize out of mist on the moor. They range from demure to downright terrifying: Waiting for Mr. Darcy, Looking for Mr. Darcy, Forever in search of our own Mr. Darcy, I refuse to settle for anything less than Mr. Darcy, I’m not looking for Mr. Right, I’m looking for Mr. Darcy, I wish men were more like Mr. Darcy!, I have Mr. Darcy Syndrome and it’s f——-g up my love life, and D****, Mr. Darcy! I just wanna rip those sexy pants right off of you!”
You may think these Lizzy Bennet-wannabes are not in earnest, but some men are fully convinced that Mr. Darcy—and other idolized fictional characters—are serious competition.
Jacob Douvier, founder of Real Men Against Mr. Darcy, says some men express secret support of his group but fear a feminine backlash if they join. Douvier finds girls’ “overwhelming obsession” with Mr. Darcy both “bizarre and sad.” Douvier quotes Kierkegaard, who says that it’s dangerous to take snippets of different people’s characters and mishmash them all into a universal ideal. “Ultimately, all you can love is this ideal rather than a real person,” Douvier says. “Women are setting themselves up for disappointment.”
It’s called emotional porn. When men glut their physical lust with pictures of airbrushed girls pumped full of silicone, they become dissatisfied with real women’s bodies. When women plug their emotional caverns with chick flicks and chick lit, they become dissatisfied with the real men they know because they can’t measure up to the guys from The Notebook or Pride and Prejudice or Walk to Remember.
Me and Mr. Darcy explores this tragedy with the usual chick lit vapidity. The heroine, Emily Albright, journeys to England on a lonely quest for Mr. Darcy, described as “sex on a stick.” After falling for an obnoxious journalist in a plot that sounds vaguely familiar, she makes a startling discovery about Mr. Darcy:
I was in love with the idea of him and what he represented, but not the reality. … How can anyone live up to the airbrushed vision I’ve created in my head all these years? He can’t. And he shouldn’t be made to.
Austenites airbrush Austen’s Darcy himself. They forget that the man in the book is arrogant, rude and in the end, stable and good but a little bit boring. They miss the whole point when they refuse to give second chances to the stable and boring (or sloppy or impoverished or slightly vain) men in their own lives.
After all, it’s much easier to complain that he’s not Mr. Darcy than to admit that, despite what the “Which Jane Austen Heroine Are You?” quiz claims, we might not be Elizabeth Bennets. In fact, we may be Mary Bennets instead—supercilious bores with an overweening love of literature.
Alisa Harris is a reporter for World on the Web. She doesn’t find Colin Firth all that hot.
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