For
over a decade after Colin Firth took his famous dip in the pond at “Pemberley”,
he was heard periodically to refer, in a mixture of complaint and wry irony, to
“the curse of Darcy”. By this he meant that his long, distinguished and varied
acting career had come to be completely overshadowed by his one iconic role as
the brooding hero of the 1995 Andrew Davies Pride
& Prejudice film adaptation that launched Austenmania into the
stratosphere, a height it has still not descended from two decades later. Like
George Reeves with Superman, or Carroll O’Connor with Archie Bunker, Colin
Firth will forever be identified with Mr. Darcy in the imagination of millions
of (mostly female) adoring fans.
And yet….you
have to wonder whether that curse has retained a non-trivial portion of its
power, because Firth himself has chosen, if you will, not to swim very far away
from Mr. Darcy, let alone to towel him off. In, fact, upon closer examination,
it emerges as a truth never acknowledged, that he has kept playing some
variation or another on the character of Mr. Darcy, throughout his acting
career since then.
Most
visibly to the wider film audience, he has twice played Mark Darcy in the two Bridget Jones’s Diary spinoffs from P&P. But did you ever
notice that when he gave his breakout, highly acclaimed performance in 2009
that earned him his first serious award nominations, the film he starred
in, A
Single Man , just happened to have as its title a three word phrase which
appears right in the middle of one of the most famous first sentences in
novelistic history:
“It
is a truth universally acknowledged, that A SINGLE MAN in possession of a good
fortune, must be in want of a wife. “. The
“single man” who comes to Janeite minds everywhere upon reading that line is of
course Mr. Darcy! (and I won’t even get
into the plausible shadow interpretation, that Ann Herendeen first presented to
the world in her fanfic Pride(slash)Prejudice, of Mr. Darcy as being attracted to men, as well as women, making the
connection to his role as a gay man in mourning for his dead lover in that 2009
adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s novel even more interesting).
And,
finally, I know I wasn’t the only Janeite to get an unexpected kick out of noting that Firth shares a
poignant scene with his 1995 “Eliza Bennet”, Jennifer Ehle, just before the end
of The King’s Speech, the 2010 role
that earned him the Oscar (she plays the spouse of Geoffrey Rush as his speech teacher).
What a fitting way for Darcy to finally
lay the ghost (and curse) of Darcy to rest!
Or does
Darcy’s ghost still walk? I ask this, because of the following online article
from yesterday:
http://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Colin-Firth-to-Take-On-Henry-Higgins-in-Broadway-Revival-of-MY-FAIR-LADY-# “Reports of an upcoming Broadway revival
of My Fair Lady…continue to surface
and according to Page Six of the New York Post, the lead
role has already been cast…."New generations never saw it. Colin Firth
is already set….”
I was
immediately reminded of the post I wrote more than 2 years ago…
…in
which I suggested that the spirited war of words between Henry Higgins and
Eliza Doolittle in GB Shaw’s Pygmalion (which
of course was adapted into My Fair Lady)
had at least some of its roots in the spirited war of words between Mr. Darcy
and (the much more grammatical) Eliza Bennet in P&P!
So I
figured it was a good day to revisit that preliminary bit of literary sleuthing,
and I’m so glad I did, because (in addition to the passage in Pygmalion I quoted in my 2013 post in
which Eliza Doolittle reverts to Cockney when she says “Not bloody likely!” to
the suggestion that she might take an Eliza Bennet-like walk to her next
destination, instead of a lady-like taxi ride), I found some more textual
echoes, such as these two parallel conversations about civilized culture (i.e.,
polished society) vis a vis savagery:
Henry
Higgins: You see, WE’RE ALL SAVAGES, MORE OR LESS. We're supposed to be CIVILIZED
AND CULTURED—to know all about POETRY and philosophy and art and SCIENCE, and
so on; but how many of us know even the meanings of these names? [To Miss Hill]
What do you know of POETRY?
Sir
William Lucas: "What a charming amusement for young people this is, Mr. Darcy!
There is nothing like dancing after all. I consider it as one of the FIRST
REFINEMENTS OF POLISHED SOCIETY."
[Darcy]
"Certainly, sir; and it has the advantage also of being in vogue amongst
the less polished societies of the world. EVERY SAVAGE CAN DANCE."
Sir
William only smiled. "Your friend performs delightfully," he
continued after a pause, on seeing Bingley join the group; "and I doubt
not that you are an adept in the SCIENCE yourself, Mr. Darcy."
AND
"I
have been used to consider POETRY as the food of love," said Darcy.
And
there are more echoes which popped out at me as I spent a very enjoyable hour
scanning through Shaw’s witty play, which I’ll post about at another time. But
I want to get right to the hint I gave at the end of my Subject Line, regarding
the common literary ancestor I see both Henry Higgins and Mr. Darcy
sharing---Milton’s Satan, the eloquent, seductive hero of Paradise Lost!
First,
Shaw’s allusion to Milton is obvious, as was pointed out first here:
http://brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/688
by Orrin Judd (2000)
“Though
almost universally interpreted as a critical statement on the artificiality of
class and social status, Pygmalion is
really just an update of Paradise Lost and
the Genesis story of the Fall of Man. This is most obvious from the way
that Shaw changes the ending of the classic myth from which he borrows the plot
and title and by his referring several times to Henry Higgins as Miltonic…. Liza
ultimately chooses independence from her creator and marries the dull but
earnest Freddy. As Shaw said in a postscript which was added to later
editions : “Galatea never does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too
godlike to be altogether agreeable.” And
so you have it : God creates a creature in his own image, and is pleased with
it, but wishes it to remain wholly His. The creature, created too well,
wants its independence, more than it wants to bask in the reflected glow of the
Creator, and so rebels….”
And
in a full-fledged scholarly article, “All
about Eve: Testing the Miltonic Formula” [SHAW The Annual of Bernard Shaw
Studies 23 (2003) 65-74] Prof. Rhoda Nathan wrote the following:
“Eve….the
clearly defined mother of mankind in Milton's epic Paradise Lost, who
develops from her first appearance in Book V to her final maturity in Book IX
into a feminist heroine born of a Puritan ethos. Consciously or instinctively,
in his shaping of women, Shaw adapted the Miltonic formula to the formulation
of his own incarnations of Eve……Eliza Doolittle, at first glance an unlikely
avatar, is a prime example. When Henry Higgins, an untamed Adam, picks her up,
she is a cringing, childish, and, yes, dependent prelapsarian Eve. A thorough
prude, she keeps whining: "I'm a good girl, I am." She can be seduced
by a chocolate popped into her waiting mouth by the Satan of the phonetics
hell. She brings her Svengali his slippers, orders his Stilton, sees to his morning
tea. In that famous scene Higgins finally praises Eliza for having become a
"tower of strength" and a "consort battleship," even though
five minutes earlier he was berating himself for having wasted the treasures of
his "Miltonic mind" on her. (What do you think he meant by his "Miltonic"
mind in that context? Probably his Pygmalion role in fashioning her just as Milton
shaped his Eve.) Still, of all Shaw's heroines, Eliza Doolittle appears
to be the truest incarnation of his, and, thus, Milton's Eve. She has been
given the gift of insight—possibly by the serpent—and finally has decided to
use Higgins as a stepping stone to independence. She might be grateful to Col.
Pickering for his kindness, but her instinctive shrewdness informs her that
Higgins is her stepping stone into the middle class and independence….Whether
or not Eliza will marry Freddy is moot. It is Higgins, the clever one, who was
both serpent and savior to her.”
And
to Judd’s and Nathan’s above analyses, I add the following subliminal textual
hint that Shaw hid in very plain sight a dozen times in his play, by not only
having “devil” be Higgins’s favorite swear word, but by also even having Mrs.
Pearce bring it to the audience’s specific attention:
What
a DEVIL of a name…what the DEVIL do you mean?….
MRS.
PEARCE: …I don't mind your damning and blasting, and what the DEVIL and where
the DEVIL and who the DEVIL— ……
And
now, what the DEVIL are we going to talk about until Eliza comes?
What
the DEVIL do you imagine I know of philosophy?
I
wonder where the DEVIL my slippers are!
What
the DEVIL have I done with my slippers?
How
the DEVIL do I know what's to become of you?
Most
men are the marrying sort (poor DEVILs!); and you're not bad-looking; it's
quite a pleasure to look at you sometimes—not now, of course, because you're
crying and looking as ugly as the very DEVIL;
I
must clear off to bed: I'm DEVILish sleepy.
What
the DEVIL use would they be to Pickering?
The DEVIL
he does!
Where
the DEVIL is that girl?
And
then Liza herself calls Higgins out explicitly as a Satan at the very end, when
she gives him what-for very much the way Eliza Bennet gives Darcy a
tongue-lashing at Hunsford:
HIGGINS.
I can't turn your soul on. Leave me those feelings; and you can take away the
voice and the face. They are not you.
LIZA.
Oh, you ARE a DEVIL. You can twist the heart in a girl as easy as some could
twist her arms to hurt her. Mrs. Pearce warned me. Time and again she has
wanted to leave you; and you always got round her at the last minute. And you
don't care a bit for her. And you don't care a bit for me.
To
which Higgins replies: “ I am not intimidated, like your father and your
stepmother. So you can come back or go to the DEVIL: which you please.” which
reminds us of Darcy’s witty reply to Eliza:
“I am not afraid of you”.
But
how do I then make the leap from Henry Higgins as Satan to Mr. Darcy as Satan,
too? There’s a very complicated answer to that legitimate, skeptical question,
but my very short answer is that I read the shadow story of Pride & Prejudice as casting Eliza
in the role of Eve in the Garden (with her aunt & uncle GARDINER) of
Longbourn, a place where a succession of would-be persuaders “whisper” in her
ear, and she must try to choose “the truth” from among their conflicting messages,
like a jury must do in a court of law.
The
conventional reading of P&P is that Wickham (“All Meryton seemed striving
to blacken the man who, but three months before, had been almost an angel of
light.”—Lucifer meaning “angel of light”!) is the Satan who at first convinces
Eliza that Darcy is a bad man, but then Eliza is brought to the truth by
Darcy’s reformation and repentance.
But
in the shadow story I see in P&P, it is Darcy who is the greater Satan, who
uses his enormous powers to demolish Eliza’s resistance to him. And I suggested
five years ago that it is Mary Bennet,
Eliza’s sister, who literally whispers in Eliza’s ear “The men shan’t come and
part us, I am determined. We want none of them; do we?", trying one last
time to warn her to stay away from Darcy, who has shown up to claim her. But it
is too late, Eliza has already permanently taken too large a bite out of Darcy’s
subtly poisonous apple, and is beyond rescue back into the safe, purely
female-centric world (including her secret lesbian admirer, Charlotte Lucas) that was “pre-lapsarian” Meryton.
And,
to conclude, I do believe that George Bernard Shaw recognized this Satanic aura
of Mr. Darcy,, and wove it into the
character of ‘enry ‘iggins---but he lets his Eliza escape with her heart and
mind intact!
So…when
Colin Firth takes the stage next year in My
Fair Lady, keep the Satanic Mr. Darcy in the back of your mind, as well as
the rain in Meryton, which mainly falls, it seems, on Jane (Bennet, that is).
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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