In Which I Think Too Much About A Bad Book

“You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.” WH Auden.

Jane Austen was dead to begin with. I thought I should begin this project by acknowledging her, and I am ill qualified to divine any universally acknowledged truths pertaining to her genius. Students of Austen should know that irony rules all in any case, and any universal truth is bound to be discovered as nonsense as soon as it is acknowledged. Truth is truth and facts are facts, and this is one: Jane Austen is as dead as a door-nail.

I think it is important to articulate this before I begin in earnest. All authors are dead, even living authors; I believe this. More than that: the better an author is, the deader the author is. Great art admits multiple interpretations, and art needs a reader, listener, audience to become art.

When a Hamlet monologues alone in the forest, and no one is there to hear him, does he make a noise? No more than Hamlet’s own play-within-a-play could catch the conscience of the king if no one saw it. Hamlet, to paraphrase yet another writer, is an actor, the opposite of a person. He exists only by being watched and read; we create him with the play. Each of us gets our own.

Adaptations, alternate versions, unofficial sequels, and unofficial back-stories are critique: they are exploring the text. They are being a reader. The Wide Sargasso Sea, independently brilliant, makes central the unacknowledged but deep and essential racism at the heart of Jane Eyre; it illuminates what was always already there. Charlotte Bronte would have been defensive and horrified. Charlotte Bronte however, is also dead.

I say this because I love Jane Eyre, and I love The Wide Sargasso Sea, and no less do I love Pride and Prejudice. Nothing would please me more than a rich and intelligent meta-text to accompany it, something that deepened understanding of the original work, even if that understanding were critical. I want that book.

This is not that book. It is not the little finger of that book. My primary goal is to mock, but I also want to explore the things that make a bad book bad, and a good book good. To that end, each week I’ll review one chapter of Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, followed by one chapter of Pride and Prejudice itself. Since I doubt I’ll have the stomach for writing this bad after focusing on Austen, we’ll start with the other one. The first chapter of Pride and Prejudice will be discussed tomorrow.

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

I’m skipping the preface. Where to even begin? This chapter is basically in media res; the Darcys have left wherever in London (his house I guess), they have already had their first night OMG, and they’re now stopping at an inn. Both of them get baths drawn by servants but they love each other’s “scent” too much to wash it off. They get back on the road, and don’t have any conversations because it’s not like they are the most hyper-articulate couple in English literature or anything, it’s much hotter to not have anything to say. Elizabeth can’t sit because Darcy fucked her so hard, but she’s too proud to accept an extra pillow and she’s constantly worrying about offending him. He finally admits that he couldn’t wash her “scent” off either. Romance!

Inaccuracies: what was obviously wrong here?

In each of these reviews, I want to include a section for simple factual mistakes, which include historical/geographical errors, or errors in facts from the original text. I could put Berdoll’s poor understanding of the characters in general here, but I feel that’s best left to another category where I’ll talk about characterization more extensively.

Here’s the big one, and what I think sums up a lot of the problems with this book: she has them going from Hertfordshire to London on their wedding night, and then from there to Pemberley, which is in Derbyshire.

Now, London for the wedding night is not out of the question. It’s very close to Hertfordshire. In fact, Hertfordshire is much closer to London than either is to Derbyshire. In fact, Hertfordshire is north of London and far south of Derbyshire. Look at a map! They’re going in a circle! Why would they do this?

I could see them maybe carrying the idiot ball (I mean, I can’t see Real Elizabeth and Darcy carrying it, but I could see these pod versions carrying it.) But here’s the thing: Berdoll explicitly has them leaving London, going north and immediately being in countryside unfamiliar to Elizabeth and familiar to Darcy. But the countryside they’d be in as soon as they got out of London would have been…Elizabeth’s. Darcy even implies that it’s Derbyshire that they’re in. But they couldn’t be. If you go north out of London you have to go through Hertfordshire, look!

Now, Wikipedia wasn’t available when this book was written I guess. But maps sure as shit were. And she didn’t look at a single one. The journey from London to Derbyshire would take days at that time, and they’d probably have to stop at her parents’ house on the way. This makes no sense and it’s happening for no reason. Why couldn’t they just stay at Netherfield or something?

I should say that this is important for establishing a pattern: errors that happen for no reason, and with no good excuse. Write a book taking place in England, you should look at a map of England. Have your characters (lol) go from point A to B to C, there should be a reason that they go that way if A is directly between B and C.

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

This one…it’s tough. Because writing is hard, and I try to write well and don’t always succeed. So I’ll just let this sentence hang out here: “Dignity notwithstanding, the unrelenting jiggle of the carriage demanded by the puddles bade her eye that same pillow wistfully as its soft comfort lay wasted upon the empty seat opposite them.” There's something about "unrelenting jiggle" that I find really distasteful, I don't even know.

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

This is a thing where – how do you define asshole? It covers a multitude of sins. What bothers me here is characterization in general; how the marvelously complex pair from Pride & Prejudice is turned into an unrecognizable couple out of any generic romance novel. Incomprehensible silent brooder meets spunky girl. Who are these people?

What makes Elizabeth the biggest asshole of the chapter is that it’s told from her POV, which means we get to hear all about how she doesn’t understand anything her husband does, she’s convinced he’s going to lecture her on her bad behavior constantly, and she doesn’t know how to make conversation with him. Toward the end of the chapter, Elizabeth “steeled herself for a reproach upon any of her more prevalent personal shortcomings. As punctilious as he could be, she was determined to weather any criticism with forbearance.” Also, “punctilious?” I congratulate you on your thesaurus.

Compare to Pride & Prejudice Elizabeth, who expresses her happiness in laughter, and expresses her love for people by making fun of them. Austen describes Elizabeth’s manner with Darcy as “sporting;” and we get to see several people apart from Elizabeth that Darcy is close to. His male friends make fun of him pretty much non-stop, to his face. Even Bingley, who gets a decent (not undeserved) amount of shit from Elizabeth for being in Darcy’s thrall, isn’t scared of him. He teases him. That’s the kind of person Darcy likes; that’s our first hint that Elizabeth too is the kind of person he really likes, that her manner is the kind he enjoys, rather than Caroline Bingley’s never-ending compliments.

Darcy is moved to propose again when he hears that Elizabeth refused to bow and scrape before his aunt. He told her that. He doesn’t want deference, and she knows that. Why did she forget it? Because this isn't Real Elizabeth. This is Pod Elizabeth.

Conceiving of this book as a Regency version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the only thing getting me through it. Also, Real Elizabeth would have taken a damn bath after the maid lugged the water up there. This was before running water, baths were a serious chore. Also, she probably smells sweaty and awful and the poor maid has to help her dress. Take a bath!

Hey look, a lower class person: how are class differences portrayed in this chapter?

There’s a motif which will recur in this book, and that is Darcy being treated like royalty. The innkeeper and his wife are struck dumb by his very presence: this is clearly the most significant day of their lives. This is…not accurate. Or rather, it’s probably not accurate and is poorly conveyed.

Darcy is a gentleman. He is very rich for the time, much richer than most other people living in England. But then, so is Mr. Bennet. Darcy has relatives in the titled class, and interacts with them on equal terms; Colonel Fitzwilliam is the son of an earl, and is slightly older, but he is clearly the follower in their relationship. Darcy doesn’t want for anything. He is the leading figure in his own community, and the most impressive person the denizens of Meryton and Longbourne are likely to encounter.

But in London, he’s a rich well connected man in a town full of them. There were a lot of people poorer, but in the circles Darcy actually moved in he’s probably about average. There isn’t a place in England that’s closed to him (except the Lords, technically) but he’d be in a lot of places with people who see him as basically normal.

An innkeeper and his wife would be impressed with this guy. There is no reason to think they’d know who he was though, unless the inn was close to Pemberley or had some other connection with the family. We don’t know where this inn is, as the geography in this section is a mess. If they were in Lambton or close to it, I might buy the “whimpering subservience” from a random innkeeper. But as they are evidently barely out of London, they can’t be anywhere near Derbyshire. And that means it doesn’t make much sense. Any inn in London that Darcy would consider, would probably serve people like him all the time.

I can also buy that the level of respect accorded her is new enough to Elizabeth to be remarkable even if it’s not that extreme; it might seem more extreme to her. That’s fair. However, Real Elizabeth would just find it hilarious, would make a joke about it TO Darcy, and he would find her joke hilarious, because unlike the pod versions, Real Elizabeth and Real Darcy enjoy ridiculous things and each other.

Hey A Plot: does anything in this chapter move the story forward?

Here’s the thing, what story. The fundamental problem at the bottom of this book is that it has no reason to exist. There’s an idea: don’t you want to know what happened to Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy after they got together? But that’s not a story. That’s a wish. A (convoluted and unrealistic) plot does turn up eventually, actually half a dozen, but the bulk of the novel is just what we get here. Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy have a lot of sex. Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy have ridiculous disagreements because they’ve been replaced by pod people. Elizabeth and/or Mr. Darcy act stupid. Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy act anachronistically. Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy patch up their ridiculous disagreements with more sex. Linda Berdoll has a thesaurus but no copy of Pride and Prejudice. Repeat.

You know, a lot of stupid people criticize Jane Austen with the charge that nothing ever happens, so I don’t demand much. The thing is, in Austen’s novels things do happen. People get married. Sexist critics love to dismiss the marriage plot as trivial, but Austen wrote about life as people actually live it (still), and a comedy-ending-with-marriage is a convention as old as fiction. Comedies end with marriage, with the promise and possibility of more life, and tragedies end in everybody dying, ask Shakespeare.

Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife isn’t a marriage plot, and it isn’t a comedy of re-marriage, and it isn’t a tragedy. If anything, it resembles in form nothing so much as a retro sitcom look at married life. Wacky Wife does something wacky, Stern Husband disapproves, they’re so different! Repeat every week until no one wants to watch anymore. And I don’t have a problem with that per se. I liked I Love Lucy.

But this is based on Pride and Prejudice, which is a novel especially concerned with marital harmony and compatibility. That novel doesn’t begin with its heroine or hero; it begins with the heroine’s undeniably comic but incompatible and unhappy parents.

Those parents’ lack of understanding of each other only makes them and their children unhappy and even puts those children's futures in danger. This is a couple who married out of physical attraction and nothing else, and it faded, and now they don’t have anything; marriages like that are miserable and dangerous. Marriages like that are what Mr. Bennet warned his beloved Elizabeth away from, and what she herself decried in her younger sister’s choice. But in Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, that seems to be the kind of marriage she’s got. A marriage to a man who apparently terrifies her, but who she definitely loves to have sex with. Real Elizabeth would run.