Darcy’s Shirt

Colin Firth’s dive into Pemberly’s pond is either the highlight or the lowlight of the epic A&E P&P. For newbies, it’s a a highlight; for purists, it represents a capitulation to the standards of contemporary romance and it’s not even in the book!

Alana Semuels presents a lively defense of the dive and the SHIRT. It’s not in the book, but, Semuels argues, it captures an essential dimension of Austen’s fiction, the valorization of the female gaze and the sexual mutuality that implies:

By turning Darcy into a sex object, the series not only captured something essential about Pride and Prejudice, as literature; it also highlighted the extent to which the novel, written in the late 18th century and published in the early 19th, anticipated the pop culture of the 21st. It placed women—their perspectives, their concerns, their humor, their desires, their rich inner lives—at the center of the story. . . . Pride and Prejudice, in particular, is a novel of surveillance. In it, characters—through windows, across the tiny chasm of an open door, through letters and gossip and gradual revelations—watch each other, reflexively and constantly.

Surveillance consisting almost entirely of women surveilling men. Semuels shows that this is a constant in Austen’s novels and concludes that it points to an affectionate ideal of love and marriage: “In Austen’s work, romantic union is seen not as the pragmatic abnegation of the self, but rather as the hopeful realization of it. Again and again, after all, in her stories, women gaze upon men and decide for themselves whether or not the men are worth having.”

Perhaps the most compelling, and amusing, bit of evidence is Austen’s parody of the male leer of Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion. Sir Walter complains:

The worst of Bath was the number of its plain women. He did not mean to say that there were no pretty women, but the number of the plain was out of all proportion. He had frequently observed, as he walked, that one handsome face would be followed by thirty, or five-and-thirty frights; and once, as he had stood in a shop on Bond Street, he had counted eighty-seven women go by, one after another, without there being a tolerable face among them.

Semuels comments: “Here . . . is a nearly textbook example of the male gaze, presented two centuries before that term would have a name—and here, too, is that perspective thoroughly mocked. And here is Austen using her sharpest weapon, the irony honed by her free indirect style, to ensure that the mocking of Sir Walter will be enacted by Sir Walter himself.”

Nearly enough to reconcile the purest purist to the SHIRT.