Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, Chapter Sixteen. So what happened?
Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy return from their middle-of-winter picnic to find Colonel Fitzwilliam hanging around for some reason. Nobody in this book has anything to do. The men decide it’s time to teach Elizabeth how to ride a horse, and her lessons commence once she finds a perfectly fitted and beautiful new riding habit waiting in her dressing room because her husband loves dressing her like a doll. Our heroine and hero encounter John Christie in the stable asking for work; Darcy wants to get rid of him but Elizabeth embarrasses everyone by asking her husband to be nice for once in his life. Darcy tells her to never correct him in public again, but guiltily finds John later and gives him a job as a groom. The rest of the chapter is taken up by Elizabeth feeling embarrassed about her period, and Darcy wanting to keep having sex with her regardless.
What’s Obviously Wrong Here?
There’s actually a lot that I’ll talk about when we get to class issues, and the fact that Linda keeps forgetting it’s the middle of winter is an ongoing problem. But for now, let’s talk about horses.
Does Elizabeth know how to ride? It’s unclear. Austen states pretty definitively that she “was no horsewoman,” which means that Elizabeth goes to see Jane at Netherfield on foot. It’s very clear that Elizabeth is a great walker, full of energy and fond of exercise. For a character who is characterized as lively, outgoing and extroverted, she has a conspicuous preference for time alone and seems to need time alone outdoors whenever she can get it. We know the Bennets keep horses, and that Jane at least knows how to ride. If Jane was taught, it is likely Elizabeth was as well. If Elizabeth is “no horsewoman,” it is likely because that is her preference.
The thing you have to remember, that Linda has trouble remembering, is that the Bennets are extremely wealthy. They are not so wealthy that they never have to think about money at all, but Mr. Bennet’s income from Longbourn (which is just slightly lower than Mr. Bingley’s income) puts them in a much higher economic tier than the vast majority of people living in England at that time. They are landed gentry who do not work. If there was a Bennet brother, even Caroline Bingley would consider him a catch. They don’t have house in town money, and they don’t have dowry money, but that’s mainly because Mrs. Bennet spends everything they bring in. Their future, if the girls don’t marry before Mr. Bennet dies, is bleak, but their present is very comfortable indeed.
The other thing you have to remember is that Longbourn is itself a country estate. It is extensive enough to give a family of seven an income without any other source of funds. It is large enough to support farm land and wilderness. Crucially, it contains farm animals and animals for hunting. There are horses at Longbourn.
All of this together means that horses are not new to Elizabeth.They would not have been. Austen tells us she is not a rider, but that was not for want of opportunity. She had plenty of opportunities; she is a part of the leisure class with money in the countryside where horses were common. If she had wanted to learn to ride, she would have done it already as Jane did. Berdoll states that neither Elizabeth nor Jane ever had much of an opportunity, as they did not have access to a true riding horse:
“Our father keeps no hunters, Colonel, only one saddle horse, Nellie. She is disproportionately fat. Jane and I once spent half a day just urging her into a trot. So wearied were we by this endeavor, we quite gave it up.”
We know, from Austen, that this is incorrect, as Jane at least does ride in the novel.
It’s a minor inaccuracy, a very minor one, and I only bring it up because going forward horses will be a big part of Elizabeth and Darcy’s relationship, in a way that I don’t really buy. Gone is the Elizabeth of the novel who walks everywhere, and who seems to need that time walking alone for her emotional well-being. Linda seems to be one of those people who loves animals a great deal (perfectly fine) and judges others by whether they love animals, so she wants her heroine and hero to be animal lovers as well. Austen’s heroines and heroes, interestingly, do not seem to think about animals at all, regardless of where they live. Mansfield Park is the only Austen novel in which animals figure prominently, and they are not prominent in the way they are here. Horses are important in Mansfield for their utility; they provide exercise, and transportation, and they signify status (as all forms of transport do in Austen), but they are not companions and people do not have feelings about them. There is a dog lover in the novel, but she is a frivolous, selfish woman, and her love for her pug is deliberately contrasted with her lack of care for any of her children. It is not a flattering portrait of a dog person; one wonders what Linda would make of it.
This inaccuracy points to something a little more interesting than the sloppiness which characterizes most of Berdoll’s mistakes. She must have noticed that Elizabeth never rides in Pride and Prejudice, and it is important to her that Elizabeth and Darcy love horses, so she wrestles the facts into fitting that characteristic. The possibility that Elizabeth is “no horsewoman” out of preference, that she might have plenty of experience with horses and still not enjoy them, is something Berdoll could not accept.
Purple Prose: what’s the worst written line in this chapter?
There’s something that Berdoll does often, that I’ve highlighted often: she uses a long word when a simple one will do, and usually uses it incorrectly. See the line quoted above, about the Bennet horse Nellie “she was disproportionately fat.” What Berdoll means here is “really” or “very” fat, but “disproportionately” is used when you are making an implicit comparison to something else. Nellie was fat compared to…what? Other horses? What a horse ought to be? It’s imprecise. Berdoll should have just used a regular intensifier.
There’s another line that bothered me. When Elizabeth is agonizing over how to tell Mr. Darcy that she can’t have sex with him because she has her period, the narrator reflects “‘Sorry my dear, we cannot make the beast with two backs for I am riding the red stallion,’ was not a part of her vernacular.”
Look.
“Riding the red stallion” is one I, admittedly, am not familiar with, so I’m happy to suppose Elizabeth also didn’t know it. “Beast with two backs” is in Shakespeare, and was probably older (it shows up in other texts, and in other languages). This was before the Victorian era when nice girls weren’t allowed to read Shakespeare. Elizabeth would have read the phrase before.
Asshole Award: who acts the most like a jerk, or the least like themselves?
It really is incredible that Linda insists on making Darcy an unlikable, stuffy, pompous prick when the entire narrative of Pride and Prejudice hinges on Elizabeth realizing that he isn’t one. There’s a very old and cliched romance-novel characterization that’s providing the pattern here, rather than anything Austen wrote: the gruff, broody, scary guy reveals his true romantic nature only to the one woman who can soften him. Elizabeth is confirmed as special because only she can bring out his good side. What’s interesting is that Austen herself was familiar with the stock character of the oversexed bad boy in love, and several of those guys feature in her novels, and they are always bad news.
The Darcy of Austen likes Elizabeth because she’s funny, because she’s clever, and because she isn’t afraid of him. The people who already know him confirm him to be particularly kind and caring, and his friendships with both Bingley and Colonel Fitzwilliam confirm that he likes lively, outgoing people who are willing to give him shit. So it’s weird that in this sequel he’s constantly getting irritated with Elizabeth, and she is constantly afraid of irritating him. It’s also weird that he doesn’t really take his obligations as a boss and landlord particularly seriously except in fits and starts, or when she reminds him to do so.
We’ll talk about this more in the next section, but again, we’re told in Pride and Prejudice that Darcy is a conscientious master. He would not need to be persuaded to find a job for an orphaned kid. The Darcy that Austen wrote never needs to be persuaded or embarrassed into doing the right thing; what he learns is that “being basically cordial to strangers” is included under the umbrella of “doing the right thing.” His greatest crimes in Austen’s novel come from not caring about social niceties. He’s polite to people he considers intellectual and social equals. He is generous to social inferiors. Everybody else he just ignores. He would give John Christie a job, because John Christie is a poor person and Darcy is a rich one and he takes the obligations of his rank seriously.
I also don’t buy that he would just go out and have a riding outfit ready for Elizabeth, made to measure and to her taste. It’s creepy. I’m sure he would give her plenty of gifts, but by the time of their marriage Darcy is almost overly cautious with assuming things about Elizabeth; he has learned not to go too far with her. And I can’t imagine that the independent Elizabeth would want somebody else selecting her clothes for her. When Austen’s Elizabeth is timid, it is presented as highly unusual – the result of an unusual level of emotional confusion. She expresses herself openly and clearly when happy or angry, and again, Darcy particularly likes that about her. This is a woman who has her own taste and wants to follow it. I can’t help but think she’d consider the riding habit gift a little odd and presumptuous. And Darcy would consider it presumptuous to give it without first consulting her on what she liked.
Hey Look, a Poor Person: how is class portrayed in this chapter?
I find it really common in contemporary American depictions of the upper class, in particular when they are meant to be in some way aspirational, that the privileges of wealth seem kind of lopsided. It’s part of the way American society is one mostly organized around consumption; the wealthy in these stories have an infinite supply of really expensive stuff, but you don’t see any of the ways wealth smooths the way for them, the ways that it allows them to transfer the labor of life to others. One recent example is in the Sex and the City sequel And Just Like That (it’s the worst show ever made and I’ve seen every episode) – there’s a character who wears up-to-the-minute couture in every scene, but she also has to send out her own paperless post invitations for big parties and make the family dinner from scratch every night. A woman like that, with that kind of money, would have a maid and a personal assistant; the fact that she doesn’t is probably supposed to make her relatable. It only makes me wonder what she’s doing with all that money if she won’t use it to make her life easier.
A thing you have to remember about Austen’s England, and England of much of the 19th century, is that stuff was really expensive and most labor was really, really cheap. In late 20th and early 21st century America, it’s the opposite. People like Elizabeth and Darcy would have had fewer clothes and personal possessions than I do (though their things would have likely been of higher quality, meant to last). They also would have been so used to being waited on by servants that it would have been completely unremarkable to them.
There would have been, conservatively, dozens of people working at Pemberly alone, leaving aside anyone working for the Darcy family’s many tenant farmers. If a young man showed up at the estate looking for work, he’d have found it – even if it was just mucking out the stables or running errands. If it was planting or harvesting season there would have been plentiful field work. On the small chance there was no work at Pemberly proper, again, there were plenty of tenant farms around. The kid would be helped and Darcy probably wouldn’t even be aware it had happened, until his steward gave him a weekly update or something.
Once again, Linda Berdoll seems to see Darcy as something like a large western rancher who farms his own, extensive, lands, when a better analogy is something like a modern CEO. The CEO of a large company does not know every time someone is hired or fired; he has people who take care of that for him. If he’s good at his job, he makes sure that those decisions are generally ones he can stand by and defend, as they are ultimately his responsibility. We are told by Mrs. Reynolds in Pride and Prejudice that Darcy is a particularly good landlord and boss. He would have hired responsible, considerate people because he knew that their behavior reflected on him. Moreover, he would not have been making any decisions about how to treat orphan children alone. As discussed in our last installment, every parish would have an existing process for dealing with charity cases; since Abigail was buried, the parish rector would know about John and would have also made it his business to help him. Of course that help may not have been what John wanted, but it would have happened before Darcy even found out about it.
This is all to say that these people were living in a society; a profoundly unequal one, one that was not kind to the poor or the parentless, but still a society with vast networks of people interacting to keep things basically running. There were people who considered it their job to help the poor, and they tried. Large landowners like Darcy saw the people living off of their estate as their ultimate responsibility, and they had entire systems of people to help them manage that responsibility. That is what wealth meant – it didn’t mean that he could buy Elizabeth lots of stuff, though he could buy her more stuff than most people could. It primarily meant, instead, that he had a lot of people under his power and he knew it. This is something contemporary Americans are especially uncomfortable with.
Hey Look, a Plot: how does this chapter move things forward?
John is now at Pemberly, and his presence will lead to revelations. Elizabeth will also become a passionate horsewoman – she will spend more time riding in the chapters ahead than she spends doing anything other than having sex with Darcy.