Reviews of the new Pride & Prejudice movie, starring Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen, have been overwhelmingly positive, though the question has been raised – did we need another version, when some people still regularly break out the DVD of the 1995 Colin Firth-Jennifer Ehle BBC miniseries? My answer is hell yeah. Let's have a new version every year, if they are equally well done.
Mr. Darcy was my first love, and it's been an enduring love, lasting through other, more fickle, romances. Some of those were even real. I read Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights – featuring my lesser loves, Mr. Rochester and Heathcliff – at an impressionable young age. More years have apparently not made me less impressionable to the charms of the Byronic hero, the flawed, brooding antihero. More recently, in more modern form, I passed through a mild flirtation with Toby Zeigler, and now Dr. Gregory House is Darcy's fiercest rival.
Do these kinds of men exist in reality? Eh, if I wanted reality, I wouldn't have plunked down $7.50 to see the Pride & Prejudice matinee, or told my friends that Tuesday evening – House evening – is out for volleyball league because I'm ... busy. Very busy. Work is often crazy that day, you know.
House, M.D. creator David Shore told Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times: “I didn't set out to make him sexy. I just wanted him to be interesting."
She responds: “But interesting in a way guaranteed to drive a certain type of pain-tolerant, female literary geek – 'oh Mr. Rochester' – absolutely wild. It is the women who have read and re-read Jane Eyre with its gruff and broken hero, who have sat patiently through countless remakes of Pride and Prejudice in fluttering anticipation of that one teeny tiny moment when granite-faced Mr. Darcy at last gives way who are signing up for their own personal House fantasy camp.”
I feel as though I should object to that characterization. “Pain-tolerant, female literary geek”?! Sigh. I guess the truth hurts. McNamara isn't far off the mark, though I don't think she completely describes the appeal of these characters for all of us geeks. As she says: “The eccentric, emotionally detached genius is a staple of female fantasy – a thinking woman's substitute for the bad boy in leathers.”
Article comments
1 - swingingpuss
Awesome post, as you pointed out Darcy was never the bad boys.
Barbara Cartland's had nailed these guys- of course they were filthy rich lords/american millionares, self- indulgent, chauvanistic SOBs who had mistresses on the side and indulged in all kinds of high society vices but once they met the ever so innocent virgins they became sober house cats.
Ya right, I always wondered why this redundant formula was such a hit with women both in fiction and real life.
2 - SOMONE
HI WHAT DO U LIKE TO DO ?
3 - deekay
SOMONE - I like to read Pride and Prejudice. Bet that's not the answer you were waiting for. Sigh ... this is the last time I use the phrase "bad boy" in a post!
swingingpuss - you're right, THAT'S the kind of bad boy in fiction that makes me cringe when people call the Mr. Darcy's of the world bad boys.
4 - somone
well don"t catch a problem okay
5 - somone
got that
6 - Ink
Reading P&P, Darcy appealed little to no qualities of a bad boy. In fact, he was not portrayed as such. It is however Sir Whickam who may hold true to the "bad boy" image so easily through wooing women by his looks and trifling charms, he tried wooing Elizabeth and now he is on to Lydia, the most naiive of them all? Apart from Darcy being a desired character and lover, he is not a "bad boy". At the beginning, I saw through Elizabeth's mind a crude and miserable man whose character was portrayed with utter dislike, leaving a bitter taste or felling to those around him. Darcy had an unattractive attitude of pompous-ness, this is understood initially, however, as soon as Elizabeth becomes highly acquainted and close to Mr. Darcy she becomes very critical of herself (and a little bit to Darcy) for misunderstanding him. She was blind. In fact they are both blind in their own circumstances. Mr. Darcy is misunderstood and was honest the whole time. He has been a sweetheart throughout, but couldn't bring out these qualities outright (dues circumstances) but as a "bad boy" wooing others through charms deceitfully he is not.