Sad, Bad Business

Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, Chapter Fourteen: So What Happened?

We again take a detour into the Derbyshire underclass, such as it is, and visit poor Abigail. She has managed to travel north to her hometown, fleeing her abusive husband and more abusive boyfriend, and can only find work in an ambiguously respectable tavern. She reflects on her downfall and the Darcy family’s complicity in it, is violently raped by Tom Reed, and then drinks herself to death only to be found by her loyal and devastated son John. This is, probably, the ugliest chapter in the book.

What’s Obviously Wrong Here?

I could reiterate the weird way travel seems to work here, how a woman and boy with no money likely traveling on foot would not have made it from London to Derbyshire so fast, how even someone as evidently dim as Abigail would have realized that rural Derbyshire in the middle of winter would not be a great place to find work, that there were and are cities between London and Kympton where she could have settled with less time and expense, etc. That it’s unlikely that fallen Abigail would have ended up in London in the first place when she originally fled Pemberley - the City of Derby, York, Nottingham, and Sheffield were all closer and would have had plenty of opportunities to disappear and find employment. 

Berdoll has a recurring issue with underestimating the time and expense involved in travel in the early 19th century. There were no trains, no paved highways, and no cars. You got somewhere far away if you had a carriage available, or knew somebody who was willing to take you in theirs. Remember - Elizabeth in P&P has to remind Darcy of this; that a journey of fifty miles is a very long one to most people, as most people do not have money. Abigail and John do not have money, and they don’t seem to know anyone who does. They would have had to walk to Derbyshire, which would have conservatively taken weeks, and they would have had to somehow feed and shelter themselves on the way. Add to this - it’s winter. There’s likely snow on the ground, and more of it the farther north they go. It would have been a simply miserable trip, not worth it on any terms. As laid out by Berdoll, it is completely reasonable that Abigail would have wanted to run from her husband, but all this way? London was, and is, an enormous city - people disappeared there all the time. She could have avoided her husband just by switching neighborhoods and not telling anybody.

Well, consider that matter reiterated I suppose. Like I said in this space once before, this is what no material analysis does to a motherfucker. Berdoll is reacting to a common - and not entirely unfair - critique of Austen, which is that her novels are clean and sanitary, that they neglect physicality, that they lack an earthiness essential to the human condition. Nobody in Austen fucks, or shits, or sweats. Nobody gets drunk - not on page, anyway (though I’d argue that most of the dumb shit Tom Bertram says makes more sense if you assume he’s always at least half lit). It’s a fine critique, and I think it’s a fine thing to expand the world of Pride and Prejudice by correcting that deficiency.

But Austen, see, she had a material analysis. You can read her work through a Marxist, or feminist, or postcolonial lens, and many have done it because she was, despite not being concerned with describing earthy reality in detail, deeply concerned with the material basis of society - how people make and keep a living, how they pay for their lifestyles or not, what money can do or what it can’t, and how people and objects get from here to there.

Think about how many conversations in Austen are about who has, or uses, or lends a carriage. So many plot lines depend on the material reality of travel, of who can do it and who can’t, on who needs help to travel and who is left stranded, of how some travel in comfort and some in precarity or danger. Jane takes a horse to Netherfield because only one can be spared from the farm; the Bennets don’t have separate horses just for the carriage like the Darcys would - or like the Bingleys, who don’t have a farm, would. The shape of the story depends on that material reality. Emma is stuck in a carriage with Mr. Elton because he does not have one of his own. Fanny’s changing status at Mansfield is signified by a carriage being sent for her convenience, and we are constantly reminded at the cost on Fanny’s body of lack of exercise and exposure to heat. Mary Crawford is fascinated by the many stages of communication and numerous transfers that are involved in getting her harp to her, and in her description of the process we can see Austen’s delight too. That is the stuff of life, the material stuff - the economic and environmental realities that determine how we all live. It’s all there in Austen - there would be no Austen without it.

Berdoll isn’t interested in any of this. Poverty is only understood as a kind of aesthetic degradation - we know the poor characters are poor because they are dirty, because they are subject to violence without any defense, and because they have a seen-it-all, blase attitude to sex. But the material realities of poverty - the lack that makes it up - is of little concern. Abigail fucks and drinks, but she never worries about food on a long journey. A woman like her could not have afforded to be this impulsive, and wouldn’t have been so.

Purple Prose: The Worst Line in the Chapter

All of the sex jokes enjoyed by the tavern denizens are tiresome and unfunny, obviously, but the most uncomfortable, prurient and honestly gratuitous passage has to be the rape of Abigail. I’m not going to quote it - if you want to find it, you can. Here’s the thing: rape happens. It happens to poor women and rich women, smart women and stupid women, drunk women and sober women, women who were careless and women who were as careful as they could be. It happens, importantly, to women and people who aren’t women. It is, sadly, one of the most common terrible things that happens.

Of course people should write about rape - it is, sadly, a part of life, and nothing in life should be off limits for art. I really do believe this. I don’t think it’s misogynistic, at all, to write rape scenes. Some of the most meaningful and powerful and beautiful feminist art deals with rape directly, in all its ugliness. Explicit rape scenes aren’t necessarily offensive to me, either - sometimes (often) it’s more offensive to sanitize such an ugly and violent thing, to let your reader or audience pretend rape is anything but what it is.

That’s the problem with the rape scene here - it is at once explicit in its suggestions (Berdoll makes sure we know that Abigail is on her stomach for the entire event and that Reed did not duplicate “a single degradation”) and vague in the particulars. We know just enough to know that Abigail is used and degraded, and that she knows it. We know that her son was just outside the door while it happened. It’s over fast - the description of the rape takes a paragraph, and you might miss it if you’re reading quickly. Very little care is given to Abigail’s pain and terror - she seems, heartbreakingly, to expect what’s happening to her.

This might be due to a certain delicacy on Berdoll’s part, were it not for the lovingly detailed description of Abigail’s day which follows - a day in which she drinks herself into a stupor and then to death. We see every drink she takes, from every source. It is clearly meant to be sad, and more sad for John, but Abigail is never given any dignity. She’s stupid, and she suffers, and she dies.

Asshole Award: Who Acts the Most Like a Jerk, or the Least Like Themselves?

Well obviously it’s difficult to pick anybody but the rapist. But that kind of violence, as we have already seen and will see more of, is pretty much par for the course with Tom Reed. The real asshole has to be the flashback Mrs. Reynolds, who kicks pregnant teenagers out of work without making sure they’re alright. 

Mrs. Reynolds is a rather shadowy character in P&P; she is devoted to the Darcys, and is down to earth and friendly to Elizabeth and the Gardiners. Elizabeth quickly clocks her as sensible, but we don’t know anything about her inner life or thoughts. It’s not out of the question - far from it - that a woman like that would show a very different face to her lower level employees than she shows to her employers or his guests. That doesn’t shock me. What’s surprising is that we are specifically told - not only by Mrs. Reynolds but by Mrs. Gardiner’s local friends - that the Darcy family has an excellent reputation with the servants and tenants on the estate. Of course they are still landlords, and landlords all go to hell, but you don’t get a reputation like that if your housekeeper throws young girls in trouble out on the street. 

Noblesse oblige would have been important here; something would have been done for Abigail, another position found for her, her child adopted out, something. It wouldn’t have been especially kind, and Abigail would not have been given much respect or many choices. But it would have been handled differently - more circumspectly, if only to keep gossip down. The Darcys’ reputation was important to Mrs. Reynolds; she would have been delicate with the Abigail situation in order to keep protecting it. Servants were overlooked and dismissed and treated poorly, but these people weren’t that stupid - they (the housekeepers at least) were perfectly aware that servants talked. I just don’t buy the way it goes down here.

Hey Look, a Lower Class Person: How Are Class Differences Portrayed in This Chapter?

This chapter is nothing but working class people, and there are only so many ways I can describe Berdoll’s perpetual dehumanizing attitude to them - they have no interiority, are incapable of embarrassment or shame, do nothing but drink, and are obsessed with the upper class people who live near them. That’s the thing that bothers me most about this whole book - there’s never a working person who just doesn’t care about Darcy and Elizabeth because they have their own problems, joys and fears. They never get to be real people. It’s getting annoying.

Hey Look, a Plot: Does Anything in This Chapter Move the Story Forward?

Poor Abigail needs to be dispensed with so that her son John can go to work at Pemberly. She was only ever a plot device, and though she’s not a real person and is thinly written, I still think she deserved better.