Some things never go out of fashion. One of those things is Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Netflix has just announced yet another screen adaptation of the novel in this 250th year of Austen’s birth — for yet another generation of women to fall for the brooding Mr Darcy. The simple answer to why women have been swooning over Fitzwilliam Darcy for over 200 years is this: he is a man who listens. As if this were not fantastical enough, he goes on to (sort of) acknowledge his mistakes and attempts to make amends. While it is true that traits such as these can perhaps only exist in a fictional man, Mr Darcy, unfortunately, might be as much of a ‘red flag’ as his real-life counterparts.
The professor and author, Rachel Feder, argues that to get to the heart of why Mr Darcy is a ‘red flag’ — Gen Z-speak for warning signs in a person that can lead to an unhealthy relationship, lack of trust or even emotional or physical harm — one must remember that Austen was, like many women of her time, a fan and a voracious reader of Gothic fiction. Dark tales of the Gothic tradition written for a largely female readership served as a form of (patronizing) diversion and a veiled social critique of a world that was filled with dangers for women. Not every woman in a Gothic story thus makes it out alive. Some women must die so that others of her ilk can be saved from the horrors of the world.
If Pride and Prejudice were a work of Gothic horror, Lydia would be this proverbial cannon-fodder and Mr Darcy the cannoneer. Lydia, the youngest of the Bennet sisters, a recipient of her father’s lifelong apathy — even cruelty — is brought up believing that finding a partner using her bodily charms is the goal of a woman’s life. All of 16 years of age, she is led astray by the unscrupulous Mr Wickham, who clearly has no intention of marrying her and every wish to take advantage of her. This is not the first time Mr Wickham has tried to exploit a young woman; he has done it before with Mr Darcy’s beloved younger sister who was then the same age as Lydia.
Now consider what the dashing Mr Darcy does: when it came to his sister, he ensured that Mr Wickham disappeared from her life but did not expose his debauchery out of regard for his “sister’s credit and feelings”. Lydia, though, was not cut such slack. Mr Darcy chases down the predatory Mr Wickham and pays and forces him into marrying Lydia. In doing so, he kills two birds with one stone: first, he ensures that the Bennets are not socially ostracised for Lydia’s romantic escapades, making them too disreputable a family for him to marry into and, second, he ensures that his only love rival in the book — after all, it is Wickham that Elizabeth is first attracted to — is firmly out of his way. This from a man who had a princely £10,000 a year and could have easily chosen to support Lydia instead of chaining her to her predator.
While this may be the most grave of his offences, it is by no means the only one. He dismisses his outright rudeness by calling it social awkwardness. He is controlling to the very end, taking it upon himself to run the lives of everyone, from his malleable best friend and his sister to his lady love and her sister, under the guise of paternalistic concern. He is also incurably classicist and has double standards on morality. Even during his so-called ‘redemption’ in the end — the rare miracle of a man acknowledging his mistakes — he guilts the heroine into apologising repeatedly for having chastised — absolutely rightly — his boorish behaviour before.
For over 200 years, Mr Darcy’s transformation — the very thing that redeems him — has encouraged in women the misguided belief that love involves reforming (or at least trying to) a problematic partner. Recalling Austen’s love for Gothic horror may remind modern readers that her writing, too, was full of secret monsters. In loving Mr Darcy, we might just have got horror mixed up with romance.