This essay was adapted from Chels Upton’s newsletter, The Loose Cravat. Subscribe here.
I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’ve grown tired of Mr. Darcy. The fan-favorite hero of Pride and Prejudice seems as if he’s reached the apex of his popularity, centuries after Jane Austen’s book was published—the 2005 Joe Wright adaptation, starring Matthew Macfadyen as Darcy, has secured the character a new home in TikTok fan cams and tweets—but Darcy’s ubiquity has spawned more than my boredom. His recognizability shapes him into a universal villain in Rachel Feder’s new book, The Darcy Myth: Jane Austen, Literary Heartthrobs, and the Monsters They Taught Us to Love.
Feder, an avowed Pride and Prejudice fan, sets out to lovingly “ruin” the novel. The Darcy Myth is light in tone and accessible—reading it feels as though you’re speaking with a friend—and it incorporates visual elements that make the pages look like a snazzily designed print magazine. But the message of the project is, for anyone who’s followed the conversation around readers and romance novels at all, pretty dismaying.
The Darcy Myth offers discussion of a mishmash of character archetypes and people, fictional and real, that (I’d argue) it erroneously aligns with Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, the initially reticent and standoffish hero who marries Elizabeth Bennet at the end of Austen’s beloved novel. But probably worse is the book’s well-worn sentiment that young women are taught to excuse bad behavior through reading about fictional heroes. Are we really still doing this in 2023? Right in front of my salad?
These Can’t All Be Darcys
For a book to be genre romance rather than a love story, it ends with the main couple together in a “Happily Ever After” or “Happily for Now,” commonly referred to by romance fans as the HEA or HFN, respectively. In the 1970s and ’80s, feminist scholars critiqued the genre promise of an HEA as regressive, rather than restorative. “I find the present romance novel a most pernicious influence on the life of women,” Patricia Frazer Lamb told Ted Koppel in a 1980s news segment entitled “Romance: Appealing or Appalling?” She later continued, “Women are sold on romantic love and courtship as just about the only adventure they can expect life to offer them.”
“Now let me be clear. I love genre fiction,” Feder hedges in The Darcy Myth. “I don’t think there’s any shame in saying that Sally Rooney books are highbrow romance novels, or that romance novels have a lot in common with Jane Austen.” Through a series of character cards labeled “Meet a Darcy,” which appear as design elements throughout the book, Feder connects fictional literary characters with Austen’s most famous hero. But the Sally Rooney book in question, Normal People, is not, in fact, a “highbrow romance novel,” because the main characters, Connell and Marianne, have an ambiguous ending, possibly separated by Connell’s academic career and the Atlantic Ocean. The only thing that seems to make Normal People a “highbrow” romance novel in this argument is Connell’s tenuous similarity to Darcy: He mistreats Marianne at the beginning of the book because he is embarrassed to be seen with a girl his classmates find alienating. (From Connell’s character card: “Turn-ons: Intellectual conversations, weird girls. Turn-offs: Being mocked by his peers.”) “Herein lies the Darcy myth,” writes Feder. “The fantasy that the person who at first seems arrogant and insulting will in fact become your soulmate once you put in the work, and might in fact ultimately be more of a catch because you had to convince them.”
Feder’s most ambitious argument is probably that Pride and Prejudice has a lot in common with a horror story, pointing to Austen’s gothic influences, like Ann Radcliffe. Darcy’s initial obnoxiousness to Elizabeth and her family (remember the infamous assertion that Elizabeth is “not handsome enough to tempt me”?) is a warning sign of what is to come: When Elizabeth’s younger sister Lydia runs off with the plotting charmer Mr. Wickham, Darcy resolves the problem of Lydia’s impending ruination (not to mention that of the rest of the Bennet sisters, who would be tainted by proxy) by paying off Wickham’s debts and encouraging his marriage to Lydia.
Feder argues that this action is suspect, putting strategic emphasis on Darcy telling Elizabeth that he did this because “I thought only of you”: “I thought only of you.” The horror in this, Feder asserts, is Darcy tying Lydia to a predator for life in order to render Elizabeth a more marriageable prospect, saving “his brand.” As Elizabeth Held notes in her largely positive review of The Darcy Myth for the Washington Post, this is an uncharitable reading; Elizabeth had thoroughly rejected Darcy at this point, and Lydia wanted to marry Wickham and would have been ostracized if she hadn’t.
This is an insurmountable flaw of The Darcy Myth: The women in the stories Feder identifies as containing “a Darcy” have motivations that get frequently overlooked so they can be collapsed into categories of victim or potential victim.
The Byron in the Room
“If you’re looking for a frolic with the most iconic, genius fuccboi poet of the nineteenth century, bad boy Byron might be your man!” declares Byron’s “Meet a Darcy” character card. Byron is the only real person to get this treatment—the other nine cards are reserved for TV and literary figures.
I think Feder, who says she’s not a Janeite but a Mary Shelley fan, might have been more comfortable writing a book dunking on Byron. Mary and her sister Claire, along with her future husband Percy Shelley, joined Byron and his physician John William Polidori for their infamous 1816 Lake Geneva stay, when Mary began to write Frankenstein and Polidori wrote his short story “The Vampyre” (eventually published in 1819). Latter-day critics perceive “The Vampyre” to be a thinly veiled potshot at Byron’s rakishness.
Feder ties The Vampyre to her Darcy myth through Edward Cullen, saying that Twilight is “a direct descendent of Polidori’s story.” Cullen’s resistance to giving in to the impulse to devour his love interest (a resistance that is part of Cullen’s appeal, and that the murderous Lord Ruthven was unable, or unwilling, to muster) prompts a didactic warning from Feder about a threatening lover: “The problem is that this still teaches young women that a man who restrains himself from hurting you when he wants to is a good guy.”
I’m not going to argue that Byron was a good guy, but he wasn’t Lord Ruthven, and while dismissing him as a “fuccboi” is a joke I often see on TikTok, jokes about his reputation as a ruthless lothario and predator are complicated by the fact his behavior was likely the continuation of a cycle of abuse: Some Byron biographers argue that he was sexually abused as a child by his nursemaid. This is not exactly something you can put on a character card, though, which is why it’s messy to include real people in this framework.
Despite the fact that Byron looms large in this book, the Byronic hero, namely from the poems “The Giaour” and “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” is afforded only brief mentions. This is because, thematically, the motivation of the Byronic hero has less to do with predation than it does with a wandering ennui. The Byronic hero is a traveler, a polarizing figure who’s alternately venerated and ostracized, but for him, love works as a grounding force. “Love creates a dwelling place in space and time, filling it up so that it becomes reachable, permeable, pliable,” writes Deborah Lutz in The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative. “One of the most obvious reasons for the appropriation of the Byronic figure by love narratives and romance is the Byronic hero’s sweeping belief in the possibility of love as the most important force for defining being itself, and for locating the transcendental home.”
But this has no place in The Darcy Myth: If a Byronic hero is to be the boogeyman, he can’t simultaneously be relatable. For a woman reader to feel that way—that would be a bit queer, wouldn’t it?
The Androgynous Reader
Like Feder, I don’t consider myself a Janeite, but that didn’t stop me from visiting the Jane Austen museum in Bath earlier this year. After the tour, led by a chipper young woman who introduced herself as Harriet Smith (of Emma fame), I wandered to the costume section downstairs to try on an ill-fitting waistcoat, jockeying for mirror space next to women decking themselves in bonnets, fichus, and gowns.
“We should note that, in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, there were people who today would likely identify as gay and asexual and trans and nonbinary,” writes Feder. Despite her attempt to shoehorn queer and gender-nonconforming people like me into her argument, it ties together about as well as my cravat in front of that crowded museum mirror—that is to say, not at all.
No caveats can erase the fact that The Darcy Myth is predicated on an idea that doesn’t work without gender essentialism—that women reading romance novels self-insert as the heroines in order to absorb these negative messages about predatory men. This argument is extremely dated and has already been convincingly rebuked by romance novelist Laura Kinsale, over three decades ago. “It is a commonly accepted truism that when a woman reads a romance, she is ‘identifying’ with the heroine,” Kinsale wrote in her essay “The Androgynous Reader.” “Feminists need not tremble for the reader—she does not identify with, admire, or internalize the characteristics of either a stupidly submissive or an irksomely independent heroine. The reader measures up the heroine by a tough yardstick, asking the character to live up to the reader’s standards, not vice versa.”
So much of genre romance is dual POV, so if the book is about a heterosexual romance, the reader spends time in both the hero’s and heroine’s minds: absorbing their motivations, their desires, and their insecurities. Kinsale’s early ’90s essay is not perfectly adapted to modern ideas about gender, but she was ahead of the curve on one crucial front: Women can identify with, and relate to, the men in these stories.
In a later chapter of The Darcy Myth, Feder quotes a gay man named Zachary, who argues that a lack of queer role models may lead gay men to seek out their own toxic Darcys. In a book packed with pop culture references (Taylor Swift’s lovers? Also Darcys), it’s odd that Feder would entertain this connection without referencing a recent popular gay Pride and Prejudice adaptation, Hulu’s Fire Island. If anything, Fire Island’s queerness makes the Darcy character— starchy, uptight Will—even more relatable. His palpable discomfort in a party environment shades into rudeness, just like Darcy’s does at that ill-fated country ball. Sure, Will is gay, but that’s not the same as being “partying all night in Fire Island” gay. He’s a modern Darcy: not a villain, but an awkward fish out of water who has to overcome his resentment to make a connection.
These Really Can’t All Be Darcys
Mr. Darcy does have flaws—his pride is legendary enough to provide half of an all-time iconic book title, he’s awkward, he can come off as a high-handed boor. If he didn’t have these traits, if he behaved magnanimously at that country ball and immediately won Elizabeth’s heart, we wouldn’t have much of a story, would we?
I don’t think Feder would rewrite Pride and Prejudice this way, but I’m also not sure what other argument comes after singling out romantic stories as being improperly instructional. Romance novels are largely character studies, focusing on the interpersonal conflict between the main couple that must be overcome before they get their Happily Ever After. If everyone makes the right decisions, if no one is ever nasty or boorish or naïve, then what is the point?
In his book The Lives of the English Rakes, Fergus Linnane describes a rake as a man who is “a cynical exploiter of women, often a reckless gambler, sometimes a touchy egoist quick to take offense and to seek redress in duels.” Mr. Darcy is not a rake, but what Feder calls a “rake whisperer.” His ability to ferret out Wickham’s intentions and location is enough to damn him by proxy. By aligning Darcy, who is not a rake, with actual rake characters, the scope of The Darcy Myth becomes so wide that it sweeps up every real-life and fictional man who has ever mistreated a woman.
At one point, Feder ponders the 2022 scandal of Adam Levine and Sumner Stroh. Levine, frontman of Maroon 5 and People’s 2013 Sexiest Man Alive, DM’d Stroh on Instagram and began a flirtation that blossomed into an affair. As Stroh relayed, in a series of viral TikTok videos, the very publicly married Levine implied that his relationship was over in order to get her buy-in to the sincerity of his courtship.
“Was Stroh sold a fairy tale by Levine?” muses Feder. “We can’t really know, but if we take her at her word, we get a bit of a Darcy myth gone wrong: the tall, dark, by some accounts handsome, rich celebrity figure telling you that nobody really knows his marriage is over, but you’re special, and you understand, and also you’re hot.”
According to Stroh herself, she was lied to and manipulated by Levine, but she is not solely Levine’s victim. Also, because Stroh wasn’t sufficiently sympathetic on the public stage, she became what Rayne Fisher-Quann called a “morally justified target for mass misogynistic harassment.” No matter how often The Darcy Myth brings up the patriarchy, Feder makes no attempt to accommodate the collective misogyny that allowed Stroh to be pilloried on the internet. Instead, in Feder’s analysis, misogyny becomes an interpersonal trade: what we buy into or what we are sold vis-à-vis romantic relationships.
Wickham Watch
“If we zoom out, we see that the Darcy myth also helps to prop up and fortify a very Gothic, patriarchal universe that is, and always has been, scary for anyone who is not a very particular type of man,” writes Feder. “After all, if we are trained from childhood to invest ourselves in men who treat us poorly, aren’t we more likely to end up in abusive situations and under threat of assault?”
Feder doesn’t elaborate on this line of thinking, but she doesn’t have to. From Stephenie Meyer to Colleen Hoover to Jackie Collins, we’ve been hand-wringing about books warping women’s brains as far back as I can remember. It’s patronizing to suggest that by throwing in a little kissing, suddenly women are unable to divorce fiction from reality, and it’s alarming to correlate media consumption with the likelihood of assault, no matter how jocular the delivery is.
Feder argues that a certain type of media primes us to accept violence. Either way, the onus is not on the abuser, but on you, the person who was not sufficiently vigilant.
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“You should know, as my students once chirped in unison, to watch out for Wickhams,” writes Feder, “and yet the fairy tale that teaches you how to keep your eyes peeled for wolves also shows you a safe path through the woods that was never really there. His name is Mr. Darcy, and he is a promise the patriarchy will break again and again and again.”
This might have been convincing when I was a decade younger, but now I see it for what it truly is: the equivalent of a suburban woman’s deep-seated belief that she’s going to be kidnapped from a Target parking lot. If Mr. Darcy—a fictional character who makes mistakes and tries to amend them—is a broken promise, whom can we trust? This is a paranoia that divorces ourselves from our humanity and our community, and has us looking everywhere for shadows. We don’t have to live like this if we don’t want to.
