Bridget Jones' Mark Darcy Is Dead,
But His Archetype Lives On
Madeleine
Davies | Jezebel – September 30, 2013
©
BBC
The literary world was rocked — ROCKED — this weekend when author
Helen Fielding released excerpts from her newest Bridget Jones novel Mad
About the Boy to reveal that Mark Darcy — the best/creepiest Colin
Firth homage to actually eventually be played by Colin Firth — is now
dead.
It’s easy to say who cares, but the fact is that lots of people care.
Even I care in the way that I went “No!” upon reading the news and
then went back to whatever it was that I was thinking about before I
read it (bagels, probably). Like it or not, Mark Darcy’s
dickish-turned-loving behavior to Bridget spoke to a lot of people.
Particularly, it spoke to a lot of straight women people. Particularly
particularly, it spoke to a lot of straight women people’s vaginas.
It’s nothing new, of course. Darcy has been making women hot under the
corset for centuries — since he was originated in Jane Austen’s Pride
and Prejudice. If anything, he’s the character who launched a
thousand characters just like him — stern, stoic men who treat the
story’s heroine with indifference or disdain until the true reason for
his jerkiness is finally revealed. That reason, it turns out, is because
he is overwhelmingly in love with her and being a dick is the only way
he can contain his feeeeeeeelings. Once that’s all out in the open, he
stops being an asshole and starts being the romantic he was meant to be
all along.
If that explanation was too sloppy/had too many swears in it for you,
here’s the trope as described by Janice A. Radway in Women
Read the Romance:
The Interaction of Text and Context: In conducting an analysis of the
plots of the twenty romances listed as “ideal” by the Smithton
readers, I was struck by their remarkable similarities in narrative
structure. In fact, all twenty of these romances are very tightly
organized around the evolving relationship between a single couple
composed of a beautiful, defiant, and sexually immature woman and a
brooding, handsome man who is also curiously capable of soft, gentle
gestures.
She adds:
The narrative in the twenty romances chronicles the gradual crumbling of
barriers between these two individuals who are fearful of being used by
the other. As their defenses against emotional response fall away and
their sexual passion rises inexorably, the typical narrative plunges on
until the climactic point at which the hero treats the heroine to some
supreme act of tenderness, and she realizes that his apparent emotional
indifference was only the mark of his hesitancy about revealing the
extent of his love for and dependence upon her.
This narrative is everywhere, particularly in film and literature
directed at women. (See Pride and
Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Dirty Dancing, Love Actually,
or Twilight for examples.) A
high status man bestows love on low status woman and the pair lives
happily ever after, but not before they engage in a good old fashioned
hate you-love you back-and-forth.
This is what I like to call the Darcy Complex, mostly because I can’t
come up with a stock character name quite as catchy as Nathan Rabin’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl. But speaking of the MPDG, the Darcy Complex
is just the opposite side of the same coin. Whereas a man’s female
ideal has been painted — in fiction — to be a whimsical flake who
exists merely to brighten the life of her male lover, the woman’s male
ideal — again, IN FICTION — is a brooding hero desires the heroine
in spite of public opinion or even his own reservations. Either way, the
love interest is somewhat obsessed with the main character and sometimes
(See: Wuthering Heights) this
is creepier than others.
I understand the appeal of the Darcy trope. In fact, if you pick up my
high school copy of Pride and
Prejudice and drop it, it will always fall open to the same
well-read page — the one containing the passage where Darcy finally
confesses his love for Elizabeth, saying, “In vain have I struggled.
It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to
tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” This line is circled
several times in red pen, underscored and, to really drive it home,
surrounded by tiny hearts.
Why? Because as a late-blooming, lonely high schooler, the idea that
some mysterious, popular, handsome boy might secretly be in love with me
was one of the most appealing thoughts in the world (this, I think, is
why Twilight is so popular among young girls). As far as fantasies go,
it’s not too difficult to understand.
Interestingly, in Bridget Jones:
Mad About the Boy, Bridget’s new love interest is a 29-year-old
named Roxter (that’s right: Roxter) who she meets on Twitter. So maybe
the scope of love interests for women in mainstream fiction is
broadening — though not a lot. Bridget, from what I can tell, is still
a white lady who dates white dudes, which is very limited when you
compare it to the scope of real life relationships. But does it still
say something about a shift in mass appeal? Personally, “a brooding,
handsome man who is also curiously capable of soft, gentle gestures”
still sounds more appealing than — as The
Guardian puts it — a “29-year-old toyboy” who our heroine
meets on Twitter, but, hey, as Sly and the Family Stone once put it,
different strokes for different folks.
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