A study on Mr. Darcy (and I've been brainwashed by my friends)

It’s a truth universally acknowledged, that a girl between the ages of 14 and 99 years must be in want of a Mr. Darcy. It’s also universally known that about 4/5 of all texts related to Pride and Prejudice begin with some variation of the novel’s fist sentence, so I hopped in.

I should also explain that, while this generalization works just fine for aesthetic and stylistic purposes, it doesn’t exactly correspond to the truth. There certainly are bazillions of girls who do desperately look for their Mr. Darcy in some sort of imaginary world with which they dress the real one, but there also are quite a few who don’t, and they might or might not be very angry to be mixed in the same bunch as their opposites. In case they do get very angry, they WILL get VERY angry and defensive, something around the lines of not being submissive, being realistic and not following trends (a.k.a. social hysteria), but I’ll get back to this soon.

Anyway, I used to be part of the first group of the second group, the ones who don’t dream about Darcy and don’t get very angry. The thing is: social trends/hysteria is only worthwhile when it’s about the Beatles, and being independent and different can sound very cool, so I guess this accounts for most of the non-Darcy girls. But it was none of that with me.

I simply never managed to fall in love with Mr. Darcy. Two versions of the book read (English and then Portuguese), movie watched some thousands of times and still no sign of the slightest dreamy demeanor or starry-eyed infatuation. Nothing. No empathy shown, no sympathy developed; I guess this was it. Jane Austen, say what you will about her importance (and I won’t deny it), simply failed to create characters that could by any means make you feel drawn to them. At least when it comes to Darcy… Dude was built on nothing but other people’s NEGATIVE opinions of him and then suddenly you’re supposed to like the guy because he was, you know, decent! This changes his image as an asshole, but it doesn’t really suffice to generate instant noodle love. Ok, Colin Firth is kind of a looker, and Lord Larry was hot as, well, Lord Larry, but this still wasn’t enough to bring my head over my heels…

This isn’t totally important, anyway. It merely serves to show my own experience, which led to me writing about Fitzwilliam Darcy and the endless, timeless horde of worshipers that drag behind his wet footprints. There is an undeniable trend among the feminine portion of Modern society that seem to rely too much on the idea that this guy is a perfect prince and their ideal match, no matter what.

No matter how different everybody is, among ourselves and to Elizabeth Bennet, whom we’re left to suppose, by the end of the novel, to be Darcy’s ideal match. Perhaps, then, what was so much of a non-stimulant for me actually works as Darcy’s biggest appeal: he is not really much of a well-defined/developed character. We don’t really look at him as omnipresent buddies of an omnipresent narrator who called his chaps for a glimpse of the story. So not only can’t we trust much of what is said, we don’t get much of restraint. By the time we realized the little that was known of him was actually wrong, even more room appears for us, the readers, to think of him as whatever we want.

Therefore, Austen has created enough space for every girl to project her ideas of what an ideal match should be on an already good canvas (Rich, handsome, faithful, quietly kind, nice house and rich. Uhm.) A timeless, limitless piece of customizable hunk. The perfect guy made to meet your needs, and all that in such a subtle way you won’t even realize that most of him is just a projection of your own desires.
Ok, I might have gone a little too far on rhetoric and forgotten reality. It does sound a little bit creepy, and all girls seem to agree on his best assets: his so perfect and wonderful and like every guy should be. But that’s where I also find ground to my assumption that Darcy is totally customizable: perfect wonderful and desirable are much generalized concepts that exist in different shapes inside individuals’ heads and personalities. And to prove that this is so, I call upon YouTube comments on every possible Pride and Prejudice video, internet forums and many of my friends and family. Including two of my best friends forever (who have decided to marathon me with Darcy overload, btw).

But there are those who still don’t fully trust his gentlemanliness, faithfulness and righteousness. Now this is about the opposite trend, made interesting because it opposes a certain trend (duh), the one of the non-Darcy girls. If he is so easily adapted into perfection, why is it that some people simply don’t care? Well, maybe it is because some people don’t care for romance, or Regency Era, or idle gentry, or books at all. Or maybe these girls have a negative tendency when analyzing Darcy as part of a certain zeitgeist. And I do have a feeling, based on Historical documentation of women’s rights, costumes, clothes, occupation and thin cultural production, that no matter how romantic a man Austen’s narrative can make Darcy seem to very fertile minds, he was not, by any means, the kind of guy a woman of our day would like to have around…

So, being such an inherently patriarchal and perhaps even violent man, how come women get around this and create their own model of perfect prince on the Darcy structure offered by Austen? They don’t care about all what’s socially new and free? They don’t care about their jobs and liberty to do so much? Or do they think that their modern Darcy is not going to be like the Regency Darcy? Perhaps I could ask somebody this, but that would be awkward. Plus, I’m almost positive that no, what they want is someone who combines old-day politeness and smoothness with present-day openness, not a print copy of 200-year-old men.

It certainly is funny for someone to watch all this happen around oneself and don’t quite get it. As someone who didn’t really fall in love with him, who simply didn’t care to project her own ideas of perfection into Darcy (there are, you see, many other fictional characters around… ;) I find it extremely entertaining to feel all the mania that goes on with this old trend, but I can’t say it’s totally bad. Of course, some aspects of such deep idealization can be negative, but that happens with our without Darcy.

Mr. Darcy, plain as he may be, ends up reflecting a certain social spirit, anxiety and belief that is shared by many women at the same time they conserve their individual ideas THROUGH Darcy. And that’s awesomely interesting. Also, it has just struck me that he may be the most feminine of all imaginary creatures around, and somehow it does make sense that a man built by millions of women should end up being a little bit of a weird phenomena.