Sarah Cardwell

DARCY'S ESCAPE

An icon in the making

Darcy constitutes a curious icon for our times. Originating in Andrew Davies's 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, Colin Firth's Darcy escaped the bounds of the serial and, lusted after by millions, became a 'free-floating signifier' as icons are wont to do. Darcy's appeal is primarily sexual, as in the case with 'traditional' icons. Yet it is the ways in which he differs from those predecessors that make him such a curious and important example of iconicity, and that, indeed, guarantee his salience in contemporary popular culture, despite the apparent hindrances of is fictionality and his 'birthplace' (television). What is also intriguing in this case is the role played by the text itself (Pride and Prejudice, 1995) in signalling Darcy's potential for escape into iconicity.

'Mr Darcy – sorry, Colin Firth - looks great in jodhpurs' (Brown 1997:6) and a 'translucent Regency shirt' (Billen 1997:6). Indeed he does. Colin Firth-as-Darcy was born to wear period costume: it flatters his figure, drawing attention to his muscular legs and his broad, though hairless, chest. In Pride and Prejudice, glowering, brooding, shooting icy looks and disdainful sneers all around, Darcy's near-silent display of manly characteristics means that we can gaze upon him without being distracted by having to listen to what he has to say. Lisa Hopkins notes that 'Pride and Prejudice … is unashamed about appealing to women – and in particular about fetishizing and framing Darcy and offering him up to the female gaze' (Hopkins 1998:112).

Of course, the appeal of Darcy is inextricable from his physical presentation within the text. Darcy without the trappings - the thigh-skimming jodhpurs; the high collars that determine Darcy's haughty, aloof air, the dark curly hair, complete with sideburns, implying an unruly, wild streak – is Colin Firth. As Alison Graham writes:

'as Mr. Darcy in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice he was lusted after by millions of otherwise sensible women. All it took was for him to smoulder on a staircase, or rise, dripping and fully clothed, from an impromptu dip in a lake, and women across the nation - and later the world - melted like toasted brie. And there's the rub. It was Mr. Darcy they were swooning over, not necessarily Colin Firth… Firth would be the first to admit that he doesn't turn heads when he walks into the pub. And even at the height of Darcymania, he was rarely stopped on the street.'

(Graham 1997a:22-3)

Graham's unbecoming comparision of the rather average-looking Firth with his attractive, brooding alter ego Darcy verges on the offensive; to add insult to injury, the piece finishes with the note 'Turn to page 126 for the second and final token for your Darcy poster' (Graham 1997a: 23). Obviously there cannot be the clear separation intimated by Graham between the dull Firth and the sexy Darcy, for they are inextricably physically linked in the unique way that actors always are with the roles they play. Yet Graham's comments suggest the importance to 'Darcymania' of maintaining a distinction between the performer (Firth) and the performed (Darcy).

'Herein lies the first fundamental difference between Darcy and traditional icons. In an important sense, Darcy clearly does not exist. Although it is true that the veneration of an icon idealises and objectifies him/her, requiring a refusal to accept the existence of an ordinary, flawed human being behind the image, Darcy is even more obviously a fiction. Notably, critical and popular discourse flaunted an awareness of Darcy as fictional and overtly recognised his fictionality as a source of his appeal. Another contemporary, equally popular fictional creation, Bridget Jones, offers an intriguing ongoing analysis of the Firth/Darcy (real/fiction) distinction. On comparing her potential boyfriend Mark Darcy with Mr Darcy, Bridget observers that 'Mr Darcy was more attractive because he was ruder but [his] being imaginary was a disadvantage that could not be overlooked.' (Fielding 1996: 247).

Further, on seeing a photograph of 'Darcy and Elizabeth' (actually Firth and Jennifer Ehle) in the Evening Standard, she notes that she feels 'disoriented and worried, for surely Mr. Darcy would never do anything so vain and frivolous as to be an actor and yet Mr. Darcy is an actor. Hmmm. All v. confusing' (Fielding 1996:248).

Whilst iconic film stars bring their own particular 'star person' to the roles they play, their renewed iconicity overshadowing the roles they perform, the Darcy phenomenon reversed this familiar process. Colin Firth was overtaken by Darcy - Darcy became more famous, more significant than Firth. Indeed, Firth's exorcism of Darcy in later roles such as that of Paul Ashworth in Fever Pitch (1997) revealed Firth's body and identity, now uninhabited by the spirit of Darcy, to be rather dull and very ordinary.

The differences between Firth and Darcy, and the relative superiority of the latter as an icon, are central to the public's imaginative engagement with the Darcy phenomenon. Bridget Jones's problematic subordination of Firth by Darcy, and her excessive hero worship of the latter, continues into the sequel to her Diary, aptly named The Edge of Reason. This later book, published in 199, is a testament to the enduring mythic power of Firth's Darcy, and to the extent to which his iconic status requires a misrepresentation or denial of the 'real' and a celebration of fictionality. When Bridget is assigned to interview Firth about his forthcoming film Fiver Pitch (1997), she must finally overcome her desire to subsume Firth under his alter-image Darcy and instead recognise the fictionality of the latter and the personhood of the former. This is not achieved without a struggle. Bridget insists on referring to Firth as Darcy in the days preceding the interview, and their meeting itself constitutes a battle of wills as Bridget repeatedly questions Firth/Darcy regarding his intentions towards Elizabeth, his political beliefs, and (most frequently) the 'wet shirt' incident mentioned by Graham, above. Meanwhile Firth wrestles to reclaim himself from Darcy's identity, eventually pleading 'Can we talk about something that isn't to do with Mr Darcy?' The close of the interview sees Bridget finally vocalise her confusion between Darcy and Firth, and Firth deny any meaningful links between the two:

BJ But do you think you're not like Mr Darcy?

CF I do think I'm not like Mr Darcy, yes,

BJ I think you're exactly like Mr Darcy.

CF In what way?

BJ You talk the same way as him.

CF Oh, do I?

BJ You look exactly like him, and I, oh, oh...

[Protracted crashing noises followed by sounds of struggle]

(Fielding 1999: 178)

As Bridget recognises that her worship of the iconic Darcy is based only on superficial features of voice and appearance, her clumsy expression of desire and confusion – 'protracted crashing noises followed by sounds of struggle' – echoes the destruction of her long-admired icon through her failure to maintain any level of belief in his independent existence.

The 'Darcy phenomenon', noted by popular writers like Graham and Fielding and explored by academics like Hopkins (1998), extrapolated Darcy/Firth from his place within a text and placed his as a 'free-floating signifier' within a wider cultural context. Darcy 'enter[s] a moment of autonomy, of a relatively free-floating existence, as over against its former objects' (Jameson 1991: 96). This post-modern aspect of the Pride and Prejudice experience undermines Jonathan Miller's assertion that:

The fact that someone is in a novel… does not mean that they are in the novel in the same way that someone else might be in Birmingham or in a cubicle. They cannot be taken out of the novel and put in a film of it.

(Miller 1986: 238-9)

Darcy, by contrast, was not only concretised in the 1995 adaptation to the extent that Firth-as-Darcy became a more familiar Darcy than Austen's one, but was also freed from the programme to reappear elsewhere (such as in the BBC TV licence and Heineken adverts): in other words, he gained the freedom necessary to become an icon.

As suggested at the beginnings of this chapter, Darcy's birthplace was also untraditional. Unlike most icons, who arise within the glamorous fields of cinema or fashion before bursting into a wider cultural sphere, Darcy was born in the domestic medium of television, which one might imagine would limit his potential for iconicity, the latter commonly implying a rejection of the mundane, the domestic, the quotidian. Yet it is the specificities of television that ensured (or at least increased the likelihood of) Darcy's release into the extended cultural community as an icon - not just because of the particular nature of our attachment to television and to 'television events' like Pride and Prejudice. His appearance in a programme marked as 'special' - as a 'television event' (Graham 1997b: 122) – enhances his cultural significance. Fan Bridget Jones recounts:

Just nipped out for fags prior to getting changed ready for BBC Pride and Prejudice. Hard to believe there are so many cars out on the roads. Shouldn't they be at home getting ready? Love the nation being so addicted.

(Fielding 1996: 246)

Thus she articulates a desire for a shared national viewing experience, dependent upon a simultaneity of broadcast possible only in the televisual medium, which also endows Darcy with a 'presentness-to-us' not available to icons born and existing elsewhere.

Darcy is thus a man struggling for release – a feat he accomplishes quite spectacularly and on many levels, succeeding, as an icon, in escaping textual boundaries, and even the actor who plays him. Finally, Pride and Prejudice appears deliberately to construct Darcy as a potential icon – not just by making him very 'sexy', but by figuring in the text his desire to escape the text(s), medium and the actor playing him. Pride and Prejudice (1995) could have been subtitled 'Darcy's Bid for Freedom'. The overwhelming sense garnered is of a man struggling to contain his passion, trying to resist the urge that drives him to express the wealth of emotions he feels.

Darcy, the real Darcy, it is suggested, longs to escape the bounds of conventional behaviour imposed upon him by 1800s society; within the framework of a traditional classic novel adaptation, this desire for escape is reconfigured in generic terms. Darcy's attempts to gain his freedom here require his escape from the limitations imposed upon him by the genre itself. His struggle against the expectations of generic character is represented directly as he determines to escape conventional codes of behaviour, traditional modes of representation, and even his clothes.

Textually, Darcy is frequently represented as imprisoned. Taking the place most often designated for women in these adaptations, he is often physically confined. Traditional classic novel adaptations are 'organized around the viewpoint of bourgeois female characters who are both actually and metaphorically “housebound”', and display the 'woman at the window', ever gazing out from her confined space (Pidduck 1998: 382). Pride and Prejudice offers a reversal of this convention, as Darcy gazes longingly out of windows, or from a distance, at Elizabeth, unable to follow his instincts and express his feelings for her; in addition, he is frequently shown in profile, particularly during the early stages of the adaptation, emphasising the containment of his viewpoint within the text (Hopkins 1998: 113-14). Darcy is a man frustrated by his confinement, whether that confinement is configured as physical or emotional. The effects of this imprisonment, and of Darcy's struggle to escape it, are manifested in and displayed by his body. Darcy displays an excess of sexual energy, through scenes of him jousting, horse-riding, pacing restlessly, and so on. Specifically, as Hopkins observes, during salient moments 'the visual imagery is structured by a heady mingling of two leitmotifs: heat and sex' (Hopkins 1998:116).

Darcy's escape is a slow one, building to a moment of release from the text-as-adaptation, generic norms and Darcy's own repression of his desire. In the moments when Darcy lets his guard down, and releases some of the pent-up energies described above, he is literally shown to be cooling down his heated passion. We see Darcy taking a bath, and the removal of his formal period costume emphasises his vulnerability, his emotional being, under the clothes the genre places him in. Later, as he expresses in a letter to Elizabeth all that he has been longing to say, the emotional exertion of breaking down his own restrictive behaviour necessitates the action of splashing his face with water to cool down his overheated desire for expression. Finally, and most famously, Darcy's desires build to such a degree that he find himself impulsively, and symbolically, flinging off his outer garments, tearing open his shirt and diving into the lake at Pemberley, emerging 'in a state of some blousoned transparency' (Billen 1997: 6). As Hopkins writes, 'the fever-heat of his passion, it seems, is still in need of cooling' (Hopkins 1998: 188).

However, this scene has significance beyond this diegetically related concern. Thus divesting himself of the manifest vestiges of restrictive nineteenth-century clothing and modes of behaviour – at least in so far as they are commonly depicted in traditional classic novel adaptations, Darcy simultaneously discards generic convention. In addition, in breaking away from the book (in all three instances, but so vividly in the last), Darcy also breaks free from the dogma of fidelity that underlines faithful adaptations, cutting himself away from the source novel, from Austen's text and her characterisation of his character. The importance of this famous lake incident is thus revealed: it marks Darcy's escape to iconicity.