What Is He Doing

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

It had to end some time. It’s sad, isn’t it, when the fire goes out of a romance? Especially for one of the great romances of literature; sure we’d want to imagine that Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet would be passionately devoted forever, but it’s more realistic if things do eventually start to fade. And they start to fade here, as Mr. Darcy is finally able to stand upright and leave his bed for a couple hours to do his fucking job.

Just what Darcy’s job is is kept vague, but he goes out to “see to things” with his overseer. They make a detour to a local inn, where the Darcys’ wedding night sheet is displayed for all to see as evidence of the local gentry’s virility. Darcy, naturally, is not amused, but he fails to follow through on the obvious: that someone in his own household stole the sheet and displayed it.

Inaccuracies: What’s Obviously Wrong Here?

Darcy simply has to ride out to “see to things.” But does he? Berdoll (finally) acknowledges that it is now midwinter, and very little farming is going on. What would Darcy, when he’s at home after a presumably significant absence, do all day?

Here he bugs his “overseer,” who seems like a combination steward and personal servant. He asks a few questions about “lambing.” He ignores a suggestion that he host a fox hunt. He visits an inn to personally pay for its wedding day celebration. And then he goes home. This seems to be the extent of it. We’ll see in the next chapter that he’s back with Elizabeth in time for lunch and more sex.

This is one of the times when the seams are really showing in this novel; Berdoll seems to have remembered from P&P (or from an adaptation) that Darcy is a good and attentive master of his estate, and she wants to portray that, but doesn’t really care what that means and doesn’t feel like she can just gloss over it. She knows, of course, that Darcy must be seen to be doing something, but what does not matter that much. The problem is that what she does show isn’t quite right.

Berdoll seems to envision Pemberley as a very large farm, with its influence on the surrounding countryside being mainly cultural or emotional - the peasant families who might frequent the inn in Kympton are heavily invested in Darcy’s marriage and family, and there is a vague sense that their lives are dependent on his in some way, but the details are blurry. There’s no indication of the material dimensions of that dependence.

If Pemberley is a large farm, and Darcy is the owner, then it is true there would be little for him to do in the midwinter months. The overseer mentions “lambing,” and the culling of foxes through hunting that would be necessary to keep herds safe. But in reality, if we are in late November or December (as the timeline of P&P indicates we must be), then lambing season is a few months away anyway. There’s no planting or harvesting going on. Winters in Derbyshire in this period were harsher than they are now; the Little Ice Age hadn’t ended yet. Farmers, in this season, would be mostly hunkering down, living off of the proceeds of the fall and waiting for spring. The wealthy gentry - of which Darcy is one - would have so little to do that most of them would decamp for the London season for most of the winter.

But Pemberley is not just a farm - though it certainly would have contained farmland. The park itself has a circumference of ten miles, and Wickham talks about the Pemberley “estates,” plural. The modern analogy would be more to industrial agriculture than to a large family farm, and much of the land owned by the Darcy family would probably be farmed by tenants. There would likely not be a single man who oversaw all of the farming on the estate - it would be too big a job. Even more than he is a farmer, Darcy is a landlord.

There would actually be plenty for a landlord - and we are told in P&P that he is an attentive one - to do when he arrived home after a long absence. His steward would tell him which tenants were behind on their rent and why, which cottage needed a new roof, which estate buildings needed repair, which supplies needed to be bought for spring, what profits had been made from the fall harvest. For estates this large, a steward would have a great deal of autonomy in these matters, but an attentive master and landlord would be interested.

Austen was always contemptuous, particularly in Pride and Prejudice, of people who offloaded their decisions to others. Darcy is, foremost, a boss to a lot of people, and the main work (we Marxists would say the only work) of being a boss is making decisions. P&P is, in its way, a novel about power and how to responsibly wield it. Mr. Bennet and Lady Catherine and Mr. Gardiner and Darcy are all variations on that theme, and Elizabeth's love for Darcy grows out of her respect for his eagerness to shoulder his own burdens.

Berdoll is not especially interested in this; I think it serves her fancy more to imagine Darcy as something like a wealthy mid-west rancher who owns a lot of land that he farms himself. This, of course, doesn’t square with the portrayal of him as an almost deified figure to the peasants in Kympton, who celebrate his virility as essential to their well-being and are terrified of seeing him in the flesh. This Darcy is at once too small and too large: he floats above the material reality of his power, and seems all the more powerful for it. In reality, if the Kympton villagers were so concerned about the future of Pemberley, it would be because they were its tenants, or because they worked as hands there during planting or harvesting seasons, or because they bought products made from its crops. Berdoll understands Darcy is powerful, but doesn’t seem to understand the source of his power. The result is a view of aristocracy that seems both tawdry and oddly sanitized.

Purple Prose: What Is The Worst Line in This Chapter?

This chapter is pretty boring, and has little sex - though some talk of sex - so the prose is comparatively inoffensive. But this sentence did bug me:

“Undoubtedly, it was pilfered from his nuptial bed, for it was bespattered and bedewed with the denouement of numerous carnal infusions.”

Linda, Linda, Linda. You can just say “stolen.” You can just say “marriage.” I’m not sure what you mean by “denouement” but it seems like you mean result or something, which is not what it means. This woman and her thesaurus, I swear to God.

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

We covered it above, but Darcy is the only character of note who appears in this chapter, and he really does seem like a pod person. It’s mentioned that he makes his overseer wait for several hours before meeting with him, which doesn’t even makes sense as we’ve been with Darcy since he got home and he didn’t even have time to make an appointment that he could then miss. Which means that the appointment was simply standard practice the morning after Darcy’s arrival, and his missing it (or failing to reschedule it) is even more obnoxious. Surely Rhymes the overseer has other things to do even if there’s no farming going on in Derbyshire in December.

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

The drunken Kympton villagers don’t make much sense. The only reason they’d display the Darcy Bedsheet would be, I think, to make a joke out of it. I can see people wanting to do that, but if Darcy is as powerful and terrifying as everyone in this book seems to think he is, I can’t see them daring.

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

We will kind of solve the mystery of the stolen bedsheet, before Linda gets bored and forgets about it. We will also shift seasons abruptly more than once in the next few chapters, so the lambing in December episode will not be the last oddly timed event.