Darcy

Finished Pride and Prejudice for the 2nd time.
Again a chore.
Most of it I wasn’t into. I was barely into the last twenty pages. The problems of two, young people in love—one filthy rich, the other comparatively well-off—misunderstanding each other, seems painfully trivial.
My real problem with the book, however, is two-fold:
First, Darcy, the hero, is an insufferable phony.
Second, I cannot believe that chicks fall for him.
Darcy is a jerk. Three reasons why:
1. He’s a propertied zillionaire who has never worked a day in his life (unless you count work as strolling the grounds to count the poached geese)—and this in a time when the vast majority of people on earth were eking out a subsistence on farms and in shops.
2. He spends nearly the entire novel at balls and young-people get-togethers and walks through his property, and pining reveries over the magnificent, and far-worthier Elizabeth.
3. He is a prig and a fop, even more so because he tries so hard not to be. Like the nerdball in high-school with the penis-head haircut, who was still a loser and everyone knew it.
4. He never jokes, even at the end when he and the adorable Elizabeth get engaged. Darcy, you sap, lighten up!

Women dig Darcy. They are stuck on him because he is rich, handsome, shy. The shyness covers, Austen makes clear, destructive pride. He disdains Elizabeth because a) he is not at first attracted to her and b) she is lower class—though in Austen’s world the lower classes live in huge houses, with gardens and lawns and don’t work and spend their free time either hiding in the den or attending balls or playing cards.

Nevertheless, Darcy’s shyness, his hurt puppydog shtick (though he apparently has none of the usual reasons for turning into a hurt puppy dog—a history of abuse, a fiancé who jilted him, and incurable disease, a crazy mom) serves him well. All the girls, excepting the perspicacious Elizabeth, want to mother him.

But to me he is so boring. And uptight. And, in contrast to Elizabeth Bennett (whom I love nearly as must as I love Sandra Oh), he has no sense of humor. Isn’t a Sense of Humor the sine non qua of all women-searching-for-men Craigslist listings? Instead of cracking jokes, he festers and broods and writes long creepy letters and is eaten up inside by his long-running beef with Wickham.

Wickham is another problem. Yeah, he lies, he womanizes, he cheats and gambles—an all-around ne’re-do-well—and he betrays Darcy. But he’s got reasons. His dad worked for Darcy’s dad; he and Darcy were boyhood chums. But from the start it was clear to him that he was never Darcy’s equal. Unlike Darcy, he’d have to work for a living because he was born lower than Darcy. Worse, Darcy’s family pushed him into the clergy, a profession Austen trashes through the character of Mr. Collins. Call me a Marxist, but this situation strikes me as unfair.
Speaking of class, having servants gush to Elizabeth their love for Darcy gives me a serious case of the creeps. As if they who spend their time cleaning and polishing and showing the obsequiousness that befits their stations would truly admire their master. Yeah, right.
It’s okay to write fantasy, but I get the feeling Austen was inventing the perfect husband she lacked.
Not that I fault Elizabeth for marrying a handsome, rich, humorless, useless fop. Given her situation—aching as we all are for love, facing dispossession by the unctuous Mr. Collins—who wouldn’t do the same? I fault her for loving him. Real love is more complex. One doesn’t fall for the guy who saves your life (see the end Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights), one falls for the bad boy, the guy with thee hint of danger.
Another big problem: Darcy’s Brithishness, every American (and, I increasingly discover, Asian) girl’s wet dream. The pinched smile that hides—as I found during some extensive hitchhiking through England in 1977—a population that thinks incessantly, perversely, hungrily about sex. The most disgusting modern example of this human illusion is Pierce Brosnan who, with a boyish face, rose all the way from a second-rate TV gig (Remington Steel) to a James Bond impersonation that was embarrassing (made more so by the silly whiskers he grew) and got more than a few young (and, I assume, retarded) girls to fall for him—one even told me, and I’m not making this up, that Brosnan is preferable in the role to Sean Connery.
I like Connery because a) he’s aged well and b) managed, despite being required to bed numerous women, to show genuine fear on screen, and to shine in other films.
Darcy hasn’t aged well and he shows no fear. But the thing I really hate about Darcy is that he’s the anti-Jew—uptight, disdainful, devoid of onions or lox or money-grubbing self-depredation. Not a hint of ethnic self-hatred. He is ashamed for pre-judging perfect Elizabeth at the beginning of the story, but to the delight of every woman who has deigned to forgive an oafish husband, who has fantasized about a Darcy with the same fever as an eight-year-old fantasizes about Barbie, he spends the rest of the novel—hundreds of pages—patiently, silently, steadfastly trying to make up for his initial priggishness, going so far as to pay off arch-enemy Wickham’s debts.
Which brings me, unexpectedly, to Jackie Mason, who once quipped that the closest thing to a Japanese wife is a Jewish husband; a whipped, demasculated, guilt-ridden, knows-his-place obsequiant, who, in real-life time, makes Darcy look like the epitome of hedonism. Real Jewish men eat quiche.
Ergo, Darcy is the anti-Jew, a de-ethnicized hero (and we know how those 18th and 19th century British writers loved to mock the Jews) and Pride and Prejudice is, implicitly, an anti-semitic novel.
And Darcy, the progenitor of Tyrone Power, Montgomery Clift, Hugh Grant, Clive Owen, Laurence Olivier etc. is as vapid as Wonder Bread with mayonnaise.