Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, Chapter Seventeen. So What Happens?
We take a break from the story of our heroes to spend a little time with the people who are obsessed with them and make their lives function. It’s time to meet the Darcy servants.
First up is Hannah, a young woman who works as a serving maid at the Lambton Inn and who met Elizabeth briefly when she stayed there with the Gardiners. Elizabeth requests that she come to Pemberley to be her personal maid, which Hannah is happy and honored to do. Everyone is happy to work for the Darcy’s, and they evidently have many more servants than they need. Specifically, they have an old, blind, senile butler who wanders around the house lighting candles or putting them out all day, with other servants who seem to do nothing but follow him around and clean up after him. This eccentricity is evidence, apparently, that the Darcys very kindly won’t throw him out on the street.
We also learn that the servants are perfectly aware of Darcy and Elizabeth’s active sex life, and seem to regard it with some amusement and not a little awe. They do not appear to have sex lives of their own, nor do they appear to want them; the servants, like us, are an audience to the Darcys and live vicariously through them.
So What’s Obviously Wrong Here?
Once again, I do not believe that Linda Berdoll had at this point ever read a book, let alone Pride and Prejudice. This is the offer that greets Hannah when she comes to Pemberly:
Lady-maid to Mrs. Darcy! At that thought, two bright red splotches coloured high upon Hannah’s cheeks. She flushed with pride and pleasure. She had no notion of why Mrs. Darcy would ask a person such as herself to hold such an important position. Even Hannah knew that most great ladies insisted on a French lady-maid. She had seen one from Whitmore following the Earl’s wife with more disdain upon her face than the great lady wore herself.
OK, first of all, this is so fucking stupid: Hannah cannot become Elizabeth’s “lady-maid” because there’s no such thing as a “lady-maid.” That’s not real. It’s “lady’s maid,” as in, Elizabeth is a lady and the maid is her maid. There’s no such thing as a “lady-maid” and if you think about it for two minutes you’ll understand why. The maid is not a lady. She does work for a lady. There was also no expectation of French maids. That came later. England was at war with France. Travel was difficult. Nobody had a French maid.
Lady’s maid was a pretty prestigious position, as far as servants’ positions went anyway. You got paid a little more, you might get to travel with your mistress, and most importantly you were typically given your mistress's old clothes, which you could keep or sell (and clothes were extremely expensive at this point). It was competitive. It makes sense that Hannah would be both proud and surprised that she was asked. That's n0t an issue.
The vocabulary mistake is annoying, but minor – it mostly indicates that Berdoll didn’t do any basic research. The really odd thing is why this particular young woman was approached for this particular job. There’s nothing wrong with her, she could probably do it. But for all that a lady’s maid was a good job for a servant, if Elizabeth just wants any woman she gets along with to take the job (reasonable) why this one person that she encountered for a few days on vacation? She would have been waited on by a number of people at a number of inns while traveling with the Gardiners, and at other points in her life. There were servants at Longbourn who would have done the basic work of a lady’s maid for all of the Bennet sisters: primarily helping them dress or undress or fixing their hair. Why this one?
Well, we know why. This happens in chapter forty-two of Pride and Prejudice:
When she retired at night, she asked the chambermaid whether Pemberley were not a very fine place, what was the name of its proprietor, and, with no little alarm, whether the family were down for the summer? A most welcome negative followed the last question; and her alarms being now removed, she was at leisure to feel a great deal of curiosity to see the house herself.
This chambermaid is not given a name by Austen, but in the 1995 miniseries, we see Elizabeth speaking to the maid, we see the maid answering, and the maid is addressed as “Hannah.” There isn’t much of a point to the scene, except to add a little dramatic interest to something Austen just tells us about, and to show that Elizabeth is a nice person who is nice to servants. But Linda Berdoll saw the 1995 miniseries, even if she didn’t read the book, so she used an existing character. Hannah is the only nice servant we know by name if we watched it, so she must be the only nice servant Elizabeth knows by name too.
It’s a recurring issue in the novel; it attempts to broaden Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s world but it only makes it seem smaller. They don’t have any friends, and don’t seem to know anyone. We’re told by Austen that Mrs. Gardiner grew up in Lambton and knew people there (hence the visit), and that the Gardiners and Elizabeth socialized with those people. But Elizabeth never indicates an interest in seeing them, or seeing anyone else. Darcy’s relatives were apparently close enough that they could be there to welcome the new couple home, but we haven’t seen them since and Elizabeth does not seem especially concerned with getting to know them. She thinks about the servant from the inn, because we saw that person on screen.
Similarly, Austen tells us that Georgiana lived with the Darcys full time after their marriage:
Pemberley was now Georgiana’s home; and the attachment of the sisters was exactly what Darcy had hoped to see. They were able to love each other, even as well as they intended.
But in this chapter, Berdoll writes that Georgiana returned with her companion to her separate establishment in London. Transparently, this is because Berdoll can’t think of anything to do with her; nothing kills a sexy mood like a kid sister you have to look out for. But again, you lose the sense that Elizabeth has not just married a guy but married a whole family. The purpose of the scene in P&P where Elizabeth faces down Lady Catherine isn’t just to let Darcy know her feelings. It lets Darcy – and the audience – know that Elizabeth is capable of handling Darcy’s difficult relatives. We get precious little of that here. Lady Catherine will show up again, but mostly to torment Elizabeth and allow Darcy to rescue her. We don’t get any of Elizabeth’s savvy diplomacy; nothing of Austen’s implication that she acts as a family peacemaker. The Fitzwilliam family might as well not exist. The servants in the Bennet house, that Elizabeth would have known and grown up with, who she might have wanted to accompany her to her new life, might as well not exist too.
Also, one maid is referred to as a “charwoman,” when charwomen were part-time cleaners who came in by appointment as opposed to live-in maids. The Darcy family would not have used charwomen; they were rich enough to have full-time staff. If they can afford to keep on a retired butler who doesn’t do anything, they can afford to keep a few regular maids (and Berdoll explicitly tells us they do.)
Purple Prose: What’s the Worst Written Line in This Chapter?
We’re in danger of repeating ourselves in these sections. The prose is generally bad, as per usual, but since there are no sex scenes and nothing really serious, there isn’t much that’s truly embarrassing. We’re treated to more overwrought poor person dialogue, as the charwoman tells Hannah all about catching the newlyweds in the act. But what annoyed me most this time is the sort of thing that is constantly annoying me about this book: Berdoll uses an old-fashioned word for no reason.
She was not unwitting of what went on betwixt men and women, married or not.
The phrasing here is awkward, to start with: if I were the editor I would have gotten rid of the double negative. “She knew what went on…” would be stronger. It’s the “betwixt,” though. It’s not incorrect, and I know what she means. But there’s no reason to use it instead of “between,” except that it sounds kind of old-timey. Berdoll keeps doing that.
Asshole Award: Who Acts the Most Like a Jerk, or the Least Like Themselves?
It’s gotta be Darcy, again, which is interesting because he hardly appears in this chapter at all. We only hear about him, from the Pemberley staff, but what we hear shows that they know just about all of his business, and that he lets them know it. It’s odd; Darcy in this novel zigzags back and forth between micromanaging elements of the estate management that the real Darcy probably would have let the staff get on with, and seeming oblivious that he has staff at all. He has no problem getting caught en flagrante with Elizabeth, though elsewhere in the novel he is barely capable of discussing their sex life. He allows the servants to have detailed knowledge of everything he and his new wife do together, but doesn’t seem to realize he’s doing it.
This isn’t really Austen’s Darcy, who we are explicitly told is a conscientious employer who treats his staff respectfully, and who is also – importantly – away from his estate for half the year. My view on aristocrats and bosses is that you do not, under any circumstances, ever have to hand it to them, but Darcy does seem to be the best of both worlds as a boss: he’s supportive when you need him, but he trusts you to do your job without his constant oversight. Berdoll’s Darcy is the opposite, as we see in this chapter and previously: he’s constantly “seeing to things” but he doesn’t seem to know what those things are or why he needs to see to them. He’s oblivious to the presence of his servants, but he also needs to show off how many he has. To Berdoll, Darcy’s status as a good boss is demonstrated by the servants applauding when he comes home. Austen wasn’t a communist or anything, but she had a much clearer view of the material nature of relations between different classes. A good boss doesn’t embarrass his staff (or his wife) by having sex where they can find him.
Importantly, Darcy in P&P is just too self-conscious to be doing any of this. Austen’s Darcy is constantly embarrassed, and afraid of embarrassing Elizabeth. He cares about her reputation, and doesn’t want to harm it. I suppose that’s not passionate enough.
Hey Look, a Lower Class Person: How is Class Explored in This Chapter?
We’ve already talked about this a bit, so I won’t repeat myself. I do think there is an attempt at a class critique building here, which would be interesting in the hands of a more skilled and politically astute writer. Jo Baker’s Longbourn was a very fine variation on Pride and Prejudice, which worked by showing that the goodness of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy ultimately didn’t matter much to a servant, and that all of that goodness couldn’t undo the class tension inherent to the master/servant relationship. Being a servant at Pemberley was better than being a servant somewhere else, but that didn’t make it a great life. Mr. Darcy may have been a good boss for his time, but he was still a boss, and so was Elizabeth. Berdoll seems to want Darcy to (eventually) learn a lesson about overlooking the lower classes, but when that lesson is learned they will still be the lower classes and he will still be on top.
And even if Berdoll wants Darcy to learn this lesson, she keeps undermining that with her desire to keep him nice and appealing. The treatment of the aging Darcy butler is a case in point: it is clearly present to make us think the family is so kind, in a goofy eccentric way, to keep on an old man who can no longer do his job. The reality is that servants grew old all the time, and families like the Darcys had lots of methods of dealing with that which were far kinder but less ostentatious. A man who had served the family for decades would almost certainly be given a cottage on the estate to grow old in, with a servant employed by the family to care for him when he could no longer care for himself. There would be no expectation that he continue working; a butler had extensive duties including managing the other household staff: a well run house would not keep up a pretense that he could still do it if he couldn’t. Letting him wander about confused is not kind; it’s only obvious. It requires an explanation which dignified privacy will not. Austen’s Darcy is an intensely private person; it’s wrapped together with his pride. He does not like to do his good deeds in public.
Hey Look, a Plot: How Does This Chapter Move the Story Forward?
It doesn’t. Some characters - Hannah, specifically - show up who will stay in the story, but they don’t ever do much. Hannah mostly exists to be an audience surrogate. She serves and thinks about Elizabeth. She has a kind of story line of her own, much later, but it never amounts to much, nor does it ever really intersect with the main plot.