Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, Chapter Eleven. So what happened?
We last left the Darcys as they got down to business at his London townhouse, and we rejoin them as they get down to business in the carriage approaching Pemberley. It took them only a few hours to get there, but I’m not going to complain about that anymore. Darcy’s closest relatives and an army of servants are there to meet them, but Darcy and Elizabeth ignore all of these people in favor of going straight to the bedroom with their Irish wolfhounds. They have dinner with the family, though Elizabeth doesn’t speak to anyone she doesn’t already know. Then they go back to bed, where Darcy is determined to finally concentrate hard enough to remember that his wife should enjoy sex too:
As a man of considerable self-control, he had perfected coitus reservatus to his own particular art form, orchestrating each of his assignations with self-assured precision. With the single woman he cared most to please, his loins refused to awate her pleasure. He was unable to muster more restraint than a pubescent schoolboy. And that thought was most abhorrent. It would not do.
Darcy does manage to (finally) show Elizabeth a really good time, but they are interrupted by the wolfhounds, both of whom expect to share both Darcy’s bedroom and his bed. They answer Elizabeth’s sex noises with howls of their own, before they are thrown out into the hall.
Inaccuracies: What’s Obviously Wrong Here?
For one thing - the Irish wolfhounds. They shouldn’t be there. I gather, from parts of the book that come later, that Linda Berdoll is an animal lover - and all power and respect to her. But she seems to be one of those animal lovers who insists that the characters she likes must also be animal lovers, and that they must be animal lovers in the same way she is. And this seems to mean big friendly dogs that go everywhere you go and sleep on your bed.
I’m not against this myself - I mean, no dog is coming on my bed, but they can be in the bedroom - but there just isn’t anything to indicate that Darcy or Elizabeth has this kind of relationship with animals. Animals are infrequent in Austen; the only dogs we really see as pets are the pugs belonging to Lady Bertram, and they are of a piece with her slow, shallow silliness. Other dogs in Austen seem to be hunting dogs - pointers, hounds, and the like. Owned by men, rarely seen by women.
And that makes sense for the time. English people of this class, in the early 19th century, didn’t really think of their dogs the way we do. Of course they kept dogs, they named them, they had affection for them. But dogs, especially hounds, and especially in the country, were working animals. Dogs caught rodents, they helped with hunting, they herded sheep. It is almost vanishingly unlikely that they would be allowed inside Darcy’s bedroom - they would be more likely to sleep in the stable with the horses. They might be let in the kitchens during cold weather. Maybe into the study or library. Of course some upper class people were eccentric and behaved in all sorts of ways. Of course some people of the time would bring a hound into bed, but there’s nothing to indicate that Darcy would.
Silliest of all though, is this:
My father sent them to me as pups my second year at Cambridge. I was seriously interested in literature and suffered the resultant melancholia. Homesick for Pemberley, I suppose. My father sent them to cheer me.
That is, frankly, a ridiculous gift - as it would be a ridiculous gift now. There is nothing that Darcy could do with two hounds in the middle of a university town. The college would have its own animals for hunting vermin, and Darcy wouldn’t be doing any hunting outside the country. I don’t know much about what kind of housing he would have been living in, but I doubt it was as lavish as his country estate. Where would he even keep them? Hounds need space and activity or they go nuts, and Darcy’s father would surely know that. Two young working dogs would not be a gift to a college student, they’d be a chore - either for him, or more likely for the servants waiting on him. There would be nothing for the dogs to do, and they and Darcy would only be more miserable than they had been before.
But the biggest knock against the dogs being there is this: they didn’t exist. No, really: the wolfhounds native to Ireland went extinct by the 1790s, and they were quite rare in the decades before that. Darcy’s father would not have been able to get a hold of one puppy, let alone two. They weren’t even kept in England before they went extinct; an Englishman would just get a mastiff if he wanted a great big dog. The Irish wolfhounds we have now were invented in the mid-1900s, and were bred by mixing a variety of large British hunting dogs. It’s hard to say how much they are like the original Irish wolfhounds, but what we do know is that in between, there was no dog that anyone - then or now - would have called an Irish wolfhound. They did not exist. Why Berdoll picked this breed I couldn’t tell, but even if Darcy kept dogs in his bedroom, even if he had them in college as puppies, they would not be these dogs.
A couple of minor points of inaccuracy: Darcy is referred to as one of the richest men in England. He very much would not have been. $10,000 a year would make him squarely average for his social class (landed aristocracy). He’s richer than the vast majority of people in England at the time, true. But so was Mr. Bennet.
The other point is tricky as Austen gave us very little definite character description. But Berdoll describes Georgiana Darcy as “ethereal,” when all that Austen tells us is that she looks like Darcy, and that she is taller and larger than Elizabeth. So, unless Darcy is also ethereal and Elizabeth even more so, this vision of Georgiana as a light, wispy young girl is not quite right.
Purple Prose: What’s the Worst Line in the Chapter?
There isn’t quite as much to choose from this time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all bad, and Linda continues to abuse her thesaurus, but comparatively this chapter is toned down a bit. I do, however, find something oddly icky about the phrase “he began an undulating search for the pins in her hair.” Undulating? I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean but I know I don’t like it. It makes Elizabeth’s hair sound like it’s slimy.
Asshole Award: Who Acts the Most Like a Jerk, or the Least Like Themselves?
It has to be Darcy again, and I’m afraid this will not be the last time. He ignores his guests (several of them elderly, all of them family that he has not seen in months at least), is rude to servants (in P&P Mrs. Reynolds says he was always unfailingly polite to them), and shows off how wealthy he is. There is simply no reason for the army of servants to great them at the door and give a standing ovation except that Darcy apparently expects that, because he wants Elizabeth to know what a big deal he is. Darcy knows he’s a big deal; he’s arrogant, but not insecure. He doesn’t need to show it off like this.
Likewise, there’s no reason to think Austen’s character would be this rude to family members. We know that he dutifully visited Lady Catherine every year, even though he clearly couldn’t stand her. There is no way he would leave his guests, his family, to fend for themselves so quickly after his arrival. Similarly, Austen tells us (through Colonel Fitzwilliam) that Darcy is generally good-humored when he is with people he likes and knows well. This is one of the reasons Elizabeth is so anxious to be married at the end of the novel - she wants to go to Pemberley where Darcy can be with family and relax. She realizes, by then, that she had generally seen him in places where he was uncomfortable, and that she had also misjudged his reserve as anger or disgust. Nowhere does Austen - or Elizabeth - call him gloomy. So this is just wrong:
Darcy played his part in this re-enactment of the previous April’s circumstance as well by glowering at Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth the entire time they conversed. So conspicuous was his disapproval, Elizabeth was quite uneasy. She made more progress bidding Georgiana talk than her brother, and the awkward evening played out with excruciating forbearance on the part of Mr. Darcy’s new wife.
No way. Elizabeth knows him better by now - she knows to help him through awkward situations if she can, and even more she knows that he is not disapproving when he looks at her. Where has all of her confidence at the end of P&P gone? Berdoll apparently wants us to think of this “disapproval” as unbridled lust that Elizabeth only misinterprets, but that only makes both Elizabeth and Darcy look worse: she looks like an idiot, and he looks like an asshole.
The business with the portrait of Elizabeth he apparently had painted from memory is bizarre, too. It’s more creepy than flattering, and we know from P&P that Darcy was content to leave Elizabeth alone for good when she told him she wanted nothing to do with him. It’s one of the most likable things about him, that he easily took a firm no for what it was. It’s strange that Berdoll wants to pretend that didn’t happen.
Hey Look, a Lower Class Person: How Are Class Differences Portrayed in This Chapter?
Once again, it’s hard to ignore the glaringly anachronistic army of Pemberley servants - apparently ten different maids take off Elizabeth’s traveling clothes, and there appear to be dozens more doing other things. I’ve talked about the phenomenon of invisible servants that was popular among Darcy’s class at the time; far from impressing anyone, having the help so ostentatious would have been seen as pretty tacky. In any case, Darcy is quite rich but not at the highest level of wealth; domestic labor was cheap, but it wasn’t that cheap, and there was no point employing that many people whose sole responsibility seems to be waiting around for you to need your hat taken off.
More importantly, it reveals something of the apologetic politics of this book; if there are servants who don’t do anything but stand around in teams of ten to take Mrs. Darcy’s gloves off, then none of the servants can be working that hard. Therefore, being a servant at Pemberley doesn’t suck as much as it actually would have in real life. We are told in P&P that Pemberley servants are treated well, but being a servant of any kind sucked at this point. They were poorly paid, had ridiculous hours with no time off, and no benefits of any kind other than meager free housing and board. There was a reason so many people fled to factories, and it’s not that factories were awesome. It was because being a servant was objectively worse.
Hey Look, a Plot: Does Anything in This Chapter Move the Story Forward?
Fitzwilliam’s interest in Elizabeth, and Darcy’s jealousy over it, will show up again. However, the A plot is still Darcy and Elizabeth Do It, so it makes sense that we’re still mostly on that.