Defending Darcy

Historical romance newsletter takes the stand

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’ve grown tired of Mr. Darcy. The fan-favorite hero of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice seems like he’s reached the apex of popularity centuries after the book was published—the 2005 Joe Wright adaptation has secured Darcy a new home in TikTok fancams and tweets—but Darcy’s ubiquity has spawned more than my boredom: his familiarity makes him a convenient villain in Rachel Feder’s new book The Darcy Myth: Jane Austen, Literary Heartthrobs, and the Monsters They Taught Us to Love.

Feder, an avowed Pride and Prejudice fan, sets out to lovingly “ruin” the novel, and the result is a mish-mash of character archetypes erroneously aligned with Mr. Darcy—a fictional man whose faults are rendered irredeemable—and the oft-repeated sentiment that young women are taught to excuse bad behavior through fictional heroes.

Are we really still doing this in 2023? Right in front of my salad?

You have a lot to answer for, buddy.

Part of the reason this argument feels so familiar is because women are learning bad lessons is a critique that has been dogging genre romance for decades. In the 1970s and 80s, the genre promise of a happily ever after was frequently critiqued by feminist scholars as regressive, rather than restorative. “I find the present romance novel a most pernicious influence on the life of women.” Patricia Frazer Lamb told Ted Koppel in a 1980s news segment entitled “Romance: Appealing or Appalling?” She later continued, “Women are sold on romantic love and courtship as just about the only adventure they can expect life to offer them.” 

“Now let me be clear. I love genre fiction,” Feder hedges in The Darcy Myth, “I don’t think there’s any shame in saying that Sally Rooney books are highbrow romance novels, or that romance novels have a lot in common with Jane Austen.” Through a series of Buzzfeed-style character cards labeled “Meet a Darcy,” Feder aligns fictional literary characters with the Austen’s most famous hero. The Sally Rooney book in question, Normal People, is not a “highbrow romance novel” because the main characters, Connell and Marianne, have an ambiguous ending, possibly separated by Connell’s academic career and the Atlantic Ocean. The only thing that seems to align Normal People with a romance novel here is through Connell’s tenuous connection with Darcy: he mistreats Marianne at the beginning of the book because he is embarrassed to be seen with a girl who his classmates find alienating. (From Connell’s character card: “Turn-ons: Intellectual conversations, weird girls. Turn-offs: Being mocked by his peers.”)

“Herein lies the Darcy myth,” writes Feder. “The fantasy that the person who at first seems arrogant and insulting will in fact become your soulmate once you put in the work, and might in fact ultimately be more of a catch because you had to convince them.” Feder argues that Austen’s gothic influences like Ann Radcliffe actually render Pride and Prejudice more interesting through a horror lens. Darcy’s initial obnoxiousness to Elizabeth and her family (namely the infamous assertion that Elizabeth is “not handsome enough to tempt me”) is a warning sign for what is to come: when Elizabeth’s younger sister Lydia runs off with the plotting charmer Mr. Wickham, Darcy resolves the problem of Lydia’s impending ruination (not to mention the rest of the Bennet sisters, who would be tainted by proxy), by paying off Wickham’s debts and encouraging his marriage to Lydia.

Feder’s interpretation of this action is bizarre: Darcy telling Elizabeth that he did this because “I thought only of you” is manipulated through strategic emphasis: “I thought only of you.” The horror in this, Feder asserts, is Darcy tying Lydia to a predator for life in order to render Elizabeth a more marriageable prospect, saving “his brand.” As Elizabeth Held notes in her mostly positive review of The Darcy Myth for The Washington post, this is an uncharitable reading; Elizabeth had thoroughly rejected Darcy at this point, and Lydia wanted to marry Wickham, and would have been ostracized if she hadn’t.

This is an insurmountable flaw of The Darcy Myth: the women in these stories have motivations that are frequently overlooked so they can be collapsed into categories of victim or potential victim.

The Byron in the Room

“If you’re looking for a frolic with the most iconic, genius fuccboi poet of the nineteenth century, bad boy Byron might be your man!” declares Byron’s “Meet a Darcy” character card. Byron is the only real person to get this treatment — the other nine cards are reserved for TV and literary figures.

I think Feder, who says she’s not a Janeite but Mary Shelley fan, might have been more comfortable writing a book dunking on Byron. Mary and her sister Claire, along with her future husband Percy Shelley, joined Byron and his physician, John William Polidori, for the infamous Lake Geneva stay that helped spawn Polidori’s The Vampyre.

The Vampyre’s murderous villain, Lord Ruthven, is commonly perceived to be a potshot at Byron’s rakishness. Feder ties The Vampyre to her Darcy myth through Twilight’s Edward Cullen and a didactic warning about a threatening lover: “The problem is that this still teaches young women that a man who restrains himself from hurting you when he wants to is a good guy.”

I’m not going to argue that Byron was a good guy, but he isn’t Lord Ruthven, and he while dismissing him as a “fuccboi” is a joke I often see on TikTok, his reputation as a ruthless lothario and predator is complicated by the fact that this is likely cyclical: it’s largely understood that he was sexually abused as a child. This is not exactly something you can put on a character card, though, which is why it’s messy to include real people in this framework.

Despite the fact that Byron looms large in this book, the Byronic hero, namely from the poems The Giaour and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, are only afforded brief mentions. This is because, thematically, the Byronic hero has less to do with predation than it does with a wandering ennui. The Byronic hero is a traveler, oscillating between veneration and ostracism, but love works as a grounding force. “Love creates a dwelling place in space and time, filling it up so that it becomes reachable, permeable, pliable.” writes Deborah Lutz in The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth Century Seduction Narrative. “One of the most obvious reasons for the appropriation of the Byronic figure by love narratives and romance is the Byronic hero’s sweeping belief in the possibility of love as the most important force for defining being itself, and for locating the transcendental home.”

But this has no place in The Darcy Myth: if a Byronic hero is to be the boogeyman, he can’t simultaneously be relatable. For a woman to feel that way — that would be a bit queer, wouldn’t it?

Lord Byron. Portrait by Richard Westall.

The Androgynous Reader

Like Feder, I don’t consider myself a Janeite, but that didn’t stop me from visiting the Jane Austen Museum in Bath earlier this year. After the tour lead by a chipper young woman who introduced herself as Harriet Smith (of Emma fame), I wandered to the costume section downstairs to try on an ill-fitting waistcoat, jockeying for mirror space next to women decking themselves in bonnets, fichus, and gowns.

“We should note that, in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, there were people who today would likely identify as gay and asexual and trans and nonbinary,” writes Feder. Despite her attempt to allot for queer and gender-nonconforming people like me into her argument, it ties together about as well as my cravat in front of that crowded museum mirror— that is to say, not at all.

No caveats can erase the fact that The Darcy Myth is predicated on gender essentialism — that women reading romance novels self-insert as the heroines in order to absorb these negative messages about predatory men. This argument is extremely dated, and has already been convincingly rebuked by romance novelist Laura Kinsale over three decades ago. “It is a commonly accepted truism that when a woman reads a romance, she is “identifying” with the heroine.” Kinsale wrote in her essay, “The Androgynous Reader.” “Feminists need not tremble for the reader— she does not identify with, admire, or internalize the characteristics of either a stupidly submissive or an irksomely independent heroine. The reader measures up the heroine by a tough yardstick, asking the character to live up to the reader’s standards, not vice versa.”

Unlike gothics, a lot of genre romance is dual POV, so in a heterosexual romance the reader spends time in both the hero and heroine’s minds: absorbing their motivations, their desires, and their insecurities. Kinsale’s early 90s essay is not perfectly adapted to modern ideas about gender but she was ahead of the curve on one crucial front: women can identify with, and relate to, the men in these stories.

In a later chapter, Feder quotes a gay man named Zachary on how a lack of queer role models may lead gay men to seek out their own toxic Darcys. In a book packed with pop culture references (Taylor Swift’s lovers? Darcys) it’s bizarre that she would entertain this connection without referencing a recent popular gay Pride and Prejudice adaptation, Hulu’s Fire Island. If anything, Fire Island’s queerness makes the Darcy character— starchy, uptight Will— even more relatable. His palpable discomfort in a party environment lends itself to rudeness, just like Darcy’s does at that ill-fated country ball. Sure, Will is gay, but that’s not the same as being partying all night in Fire Island gay.

Everyone Is Darcy

Mr. Darcy does have flaws — he’s proud (ha!), he’s awkward, he can come off as a high-handed boor. If he didn’t have these traits, if he behaved magnanimously at that country ball and immediately won Elizabeth’s heart, we wouldn’t have much of a story, would we?

I don’t think Feder would rewrite Pride and Prejudice this way, but I’m also not sure what to make of singling out romantic stories as being improperly instructional. Romance novels are largely character studies, focusing on the interpersonal conflict between the main couple that must be overcome before they get their happily ever after. If everyone makes the right decisions, if no one is ever nasty or boorish or naive, then what is the point?

A rake is typically an aristocratic womanizer, and Mr. Darcy is not a rake, but what Feder calls a “rake whisperer.” His ability to ferret out Wickham’s intentions and location is enough to damn him by proxy. By aligning Darcy with actual rake characters, the scope of The Darcy Myth becomes so wide that it sweeps up every real-life and fictional man who has ever mistreated a woman.

At one point, Feder ponders over the scandal of Adam Levine and Sumner Stroh. Levine, frontman of Maroon 5 and 2013’s People’s Sexiest Man Alive, DM’d Stroh on Instagram and began a flirtation that blossomed into an affair. As Stroh relayed in a series of viral TikTok videos, the very publicly married Levine implied his relationship was over in order to get her buy-in to the sincerity of his courtship.

"Was Stroh sold a fairy tale by Levine?” muses Feder. “We can't really know, but if we take her at her word, we get a bit of a Darcy myth gone wrong: the tall, dark, by some accounts handsome, rich celebrity figure telling you that nobody really knows his marriage is over, but you're special, and you understand, and also you're hot."

According to Stroh, she was lied to and manipulated by Levine, but she is not solely Levine’s victim — because she wasn’t sufficiently sympathetic on a public stage, she became what Rayne Fisher-Quann called a “morally justified target for mass misogynistic harassment.” No matter how often The Darcy Myth brings up the patriarchy, Feder makes no attempt to accommodate the systemic inequity that allowed Stroh to be Internet pilloried into her argument. Instead, misogyny is an interpersonal trade: what we buy into or what we are sold vis a vis romantic relationships.

The Gift of Fear

Mr. Wickham. Pride & Prejudice dir. Joe Wright.

“If we zoom out, we see that the Darcy myth also helps to prop up and fortify a very Gothic, patriarchal universe that is, and always has been, scary for anyone who is not a very particular type of man.” writes Feder. “After all, if we are trained from childhood to invest ourselves in men who treat us poorly, aren’t we more likely to end up in abusive situations and under threat of assault?”

Feder doesn’t elaborate on this line of thinking, but she doesn’t have to. From Stephanie Meyer to Colleen Hoover to Jackie Collins, we’ve been hand-wringing about books warping women’s brains as far back as I can remember. It’s patronizing to suggest that by throwing in a little kissing, suddenly women are unable to divorce fiction from reality, and it’s alarming to correlate media consumption with the likelihood of assault, no matter how jocular the delivery is.

In the late 90s Gavin de Becker published The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence. The book was a smash-hit and earned de Becker a spot on Oprah, where he further coaxed women to listen to their instincts in order to look for signs of potential violence. For the most part, the warning signs de Becker wrote about were deliberate acts of boundary crossing: over-inquisitiveness, ignoring a hard no, appealing to politeness to maneuver women into uncomfortable situations — all things that we should be wary of. But de Becker’s sometimes sensible advice was laced with an undercurrent of paranoia and victim-blaming—he posited uninterrogated gut reactions as a viable indicator of danger.

When I was coming of age on the Internet over a decade later, a popular advice columnist I read regularly recommended the book, saying it was liberatory. For me, it was the opposite: The Gift of Fear predated the true crime podcast boom that had young women jumping at shadows and suspiciously eyeing their neighbors, but it was a canary in the coalmine for the wave of anxiety-wrapped-in-entertainment that would make the My Favorite Murder podcast (whose tagline is “Stay sexy, don’t get murdered”) such a cultural phenomenon.

This is my main struggle with The Darcy Myth: Feder’s friendly approachability is entertaining and at times amusing, but if I think real-life tragedies framed as a warning are isolating us, what am I to make of fictional characters who get this treatment?

“You should know, as my students once chirped in unison, to watch out for Wickhams.” writes Feder, “and yet the fairy tale that teaches you how to keep your eyes peeled for wolves also shows you a safe path through the woods that was never really there. His name is Mr. Darcy, and he is a promise the patriarchy will break again and again and again.”

This might have been convincing when I was a decade younger, but now I see it for what it truly is: the equivalent of a suburban woman’s deep-seated belief that she’s going to be kidnapped from a Target parking lot. If Mr. Darcy—a fictional character who makes mistakes and tries to amend them—is a broken promise, who can we trust? It’s a paranoia that divorces ourselves from our humanity, our community, and has us looking everywhere for shadows. Fear will not protect us and it is not a gift—we don’t have to live like this, if we don’t want to.

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~ Me, Elsewhere~

I’ve talked a lot about Barbara Cartland in this newsletter, but now I have a more definitive guide: The Barbara Cartland episode of Reformed Rakes is out now! Thanks to this episode, I know too much: Ask Me about Barbara Cartland’s Ankles.

We’re also currently doing a series on Patricia Gaffney’s Wyckerley trilogy, which are three historical romance novels that I think are, essentially, perfect. To Love & to Cherish and To Have & to Hold are out now. (I’m leading the upcoming Forever & Ever episode, out on December 19th!)