A Kiss Is Not A Contract (But It's Very Nice)

Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, by Linda Berdoll. Chapter 4. So what happened?

After our brief sojourn with Mr. Wickham, we return to our heroine, still reeling from the revelation that not only is sex between married people expected, but they actually enjoy it. Elizabeth spends the rest of the evening staring at Mr. Darcy’s crotch because this is a serious novel. Jane spends the rest of the evening apparently convinced that Mr. Bingley will attack and ravish her any second, because Jane is an idiot for the purposes of this story:

Poor bewildered Bingley attempted conversation with her, but Jane was so spooked she could hardly respond to her baffled fiancé. Had she thought she could whisper it without losing her countenance to mirth, Elizabeth would have liked to reassure Jane. For she was certain that, regardless of what Lydia told them, Bingley’s privates were unlikely (especially in company in the parlor) to burst from his inexpressibles as if an enraged squirrel.

Elizabeth herself is so distracted that she bites Darcy’s lip while kissing him the next day, which initiates some torrid Regency necking. Darcy is appalled at his own behavior, apologizes, returns with Elizabeth to Longbourn, and unexpectedly leaves for London with no explanation and no stated return date. Romance!

Inaccuracies: what was obviously wrong here?

Very little happens in this chapter. Elizabeth and Darcy make out and that’s about it, so there is little opportunity to get much wrong (apart from the usual and by now expected affronts to characterization and the English language.)

The characterization problems I will tackle elsewhere. Here, I’ll only say that according to my OED the word “fiancé” did not enter the English language until the middle of the 19th century, so if Jane couldn’t respond to hers it’s probably because she didn’t have one.

Purple Prose: what's the worst written line in the chapter?

Competition is getting stiff (that's what she oh forget it) now that we’re fast approaching the sexy parts of the book, but I’ve got to give it to this for grossness and unnecessary euphemisms:

Elizabeth studiously inspected her shoes until he sat down again, quite determined that her gaze would not alight upon that explicit bulge in the fork of his unhintables (of which one was not even to speak, let alone stare at).

I don’t think something can be at once “explicit” and “unhintable” but what do I know, I don’t have a copy of Linda Berdoll’s Sex Thesaurus.

Asshole Award: who acts the most like a jerk or the least like themselves?

When we get to an upcoming chapter, I’ll talk a bit about the really abysmal mischaracterization of Jane, but this Asshole Award belongs to Elizabeth, and it’s because of this:

It was difficult to concede any issue to Lydia, but Elizabeth knew she would have to reassess her heretofore unwavering stance against Lydia’s imprudent, unmarried cohabitation with Wickham in London. She yet believed it impossible of herself to expose her family to the same degradation and ruin as had Lydia. It was now, however, much easier for Elizabeth to understand the very violence of the compulsion to do it.

This isn’t Elizabeth. It can be hard for modern readers to get, because we typically don’t care about unmarried sex (I mean, I don’t), and Austen was not a particularly moralistic writer, but Real Elizabeth Bennet did not have a problem with Lydia’s actions because they were imprudent. She believed them to be imprudent and wrong. Not just dangerous to her reputation, not just potentially ruinous to the family, but morally wrong. Here is a relevant passage from Pride and Prejudice, as Elizabeth reflects on the Wickham’s marriage:

How Wickham and Lydia were to be supported in tolerable independence, she could not imagine. But how little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue, she could easily conjecture.

This comes after Elizabeth has mused on hers and Darcy’s suitability, and has despaired at ever marrying him or even seeing him again. Marital felicity is on her mind, and we are told what her values are. Elizabeth is by this point in love with Darcy, and attracted to him, but look at the word choice. “Virtue,” not “prudence.” Elizabeth does not condemn Lydia for being irresponsible. She condemns Lydia and Wickham for behaving immorally (and in stronger terms than the allegedly uptight Darcy, who by his own actions in Pride and Prejudice seems to regard Lydia as a victim rather than guilty party). She condemns them, and she condemns their marriage. Elizabeth’s own parents were brought together by passion, and she has no reason to think it a good foundation for anything.

Lydia’s elopement was about scandal, but only partly. This is a common failing in modern readers, I think; we want to believe that living with those limits of behavior was constant agony. It was for a lot of people; but some people just got on with their lives. It isn’t that we shouldn’t judge a novel’s characters or a prior century’s denizens by our own values, but it is important to remember that they actually believed the things they claimed to believe. Elizabeth Bennet would have disapproved of pre-marital sex, morally, and it would not have made her a prude or a puritan or at all uncommon for the time, and it wouldn’t have been because she just hadn’t considered it fully. You can disagree with her; I do, and I suspect that if she had somehow been given a 20th/21st century upbringing she'd think and behave very differently. You can write her as attracted to Darcy, you can write her as impatient to be married; Austen tells us that she was both of those things. But we know what her values were; those are the parameters of the character as she was written. Real Elizabeth probably wanted to have sex with Darcy, but Real Elizabeth also believed in social conventions as morally worthy in themselves.

By the way, Austen wrote a female character who views pre and extra marital sex as just a matter of “imprudence,” and who considered the sole crime in one of those as the exposure of the family to degradation. She was Mary Crawford, and she is my favorite, and you can tell Austen loved her, but Mary’s moral opinions are treated by the narrator and other characters of Mansfield Park as horrifying.

Hey Look, a Lower Class Person: how are class differences portrayed in this chapter?

I want to highlight one brief passage, which is one of the first hints at a motif of Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife which I find particularly offensive. Pod Elizabeth, who as we explained does not share the moral code of Real Elizabeth, is musing to herself that she doesn’t at all mind it when Darcy gets handsy:

Elizabeth did not grant Darcy clemency that day. There was no culpability with which to hold him, for she was not affronted. They were promised. Lessers with such an understanding would have been hockling merrily in the hayloft as soon as the match was made. Those weddings often occurred when a baby was too high in the belly to be denied. Granted, they were not lesser and merry bouts were out of the question.

This begins a troubling trend: the portrayal of lower class people as indiscriminately sexual, with no regard to consequences. There will be a series of inarticulate, often entirely voiceless lower class women to come who will serve as sexual initiators for upper class men. They’ll be happy to take whoever wants them, they won’t ask for anything, they have no needs or agency of their own, and they’ll usually die when they’ve outlived their usefulness. It's misogynistic, classist and altogether revolting.

Hey, a Plot: does anything in this chapter move the story along?

Yes, in that the real story of this novel is The Story of E, and she’s moving down the path of sexual awakening at due and irritating speed. There’s much more making out and euphemisms to come!