This
is a followup to my previous post about the startling parallels I outlined
between the playful witty banter (about the attributes and accomplishments of
an ideal woman) engaged in by Iago and Desdemona in Othello, on the one hand, and by Darcy and Elizabeth in Pride & Prejudice, on the other. In
that post, I showed how those parallels were, collectively, a giant hint by
Jane Austen pointing to deeper, pervasive parallels between the characters of
Iago and the Darcy of the shadow story of P&P that I have sleuthed out:
both of them brooding, brilliant, enigmatic, stage-managing masters of
deception.
Darcy
is an enigma, in no small part because we only have two or three brief
opportunities to hear his private thoughts during the entire novel; and few
Janeites have ever freed themselves from the tyranny of the naïve Elizabeth’s
confused perceptions, in order to see Darcy as he is. It is no surprise that
two very different Darcys can be detected in the novel.
Whereas
Iago is an enigma for a completely different reason. His is the focal
consciousness of the ironically mis-titled Ohello;
and yet, Iago’s sometimes cryptic asides, regularly shared with the audience,
leave us far from certain in the end as to what really makes Iago tick. I.e., perhaps
we can no more safely believe the accuracy of his statements to us, when we see
the suffering that Othello, Desdemona, Cassio, and Roderigo all undergo, caused by their believing what “the honest
Iago” says to them!
Today,
in that same vein, I’d now like to point out three additional parallels between
these two enigmatic protagonists----the last of which is, I hope you’ll agree,
a true smoking gun deliberately left behind by Jane Austen in order to give her
alert readers a better chance of spotting the Iago hidden in Darcy.
FIRST,
Darcy, like Iago, repeatedly makes a big deal about being scrupulously “honest”,
and both of them also liberally use the words “abhor” and “despise” with
suspicious hyperbole. Combining the two
words, Darcy poetically and memorably epitomizes this predilection, when he
avers that “disguise of every sort is [his] abhorrence” .
This
is essentially the pose that Iago repeatedly and insincerely adopts with every
other major character in Othello. And when Eliza teases Darcy with “now despise
me if you dare” and Darcy wittily replies, “Indeed! I do not dare.”, JA means
us to hear another echo: that of Iago saying to Roderigo, “If ever I did dream
of such a matter, abhor me.” and “Despise me, if I do not”.
SECOND,
Darcy, like Iago, works hard at, and succeeds in, destroying the reputation of
a charming but irresponsible younger man (Wickham, Cassio) who lacks control
over his impulses, and therefore is very vulnerable to manipulative temptation
placed in his path by a satanic opponent.
When
Iago decides to turn Cassio into a villain in Othello’s eyes, he plies Cassio
with booze and exploits his drinking problem. When Darcy decides, after Eliza
rejects his first proposal, to turn Wickham into a villain in Elizabeth’s eyes,
I suggest to you that Darcy takes no chances, and has his own trusted double
agent, Mrs. Yonge, lead him directly to Wickham and Lydia in London, so Darcy
can then play the hero who rescues the Bennet family from ruin, earning Eliza’s
undying gratitude and shame.
THIRD,
last, and most telling of all, please now note the uncanny (and, I suggest, not coincidental) resonance between the
following speeches spoken by Darcy and Iago:
[Darcy]
“I HAVE BEEN a SELFISH being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.
As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my
temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and
conceit. Unfortunately an only son (for many years an only child), I was spoilt
by my parents, who, though good themselves (my father, particularly, all that
was benevolent and amiable), allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be SELFISH
and overbearing; to care for none beyond my own family circle; to think meanly
of all the rest of THE WORLD; to wish at least to think ;meanly of their sense
and worth compared with my own. SUCH I WAS, FROM EIGHT TO EIGHT AND TWENTY; and
such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do
I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most
advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of
my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please
a woman worthy of being pleased."
[Iago] O villainous! I HAVE LOOKED UPON
THE WORLD FOR FOUR TIMES SEVEN YEARS;
and since I could distinguish
betwixt a benefit and an injury, I never found man that knew how to love HIMSELF.
Darcy’s
speech to Elizabeth is four times as long as Iago’s to Roderigo, and unless
studied closely, they can superficially appear unrelated. However, upon closer examination,
these speeches are seen to be eerily similar in two specific, interconnected
aspects:
A: Each
speech purports to be a philosophizing retrospection on life experience in “the
world” with respect to self-love, albeit from opposite ends of the telescope. Iago
speaks of the problem of man’s (meaning Roderigo’s) not loving himself enough,
whereas Darcy reverses that logic, confessing to his own lifelong excess of self-love, until cured by a
dose of Eliza’s miraculous truth serum.
But behind
the apparently opposition of meaning, both such speeches cynically and
ironically deal in the same currency of subtle flattery of the self-love of the
listener. Iago works his black magic on the gullible Roderigo, giving his ego
some major stroking about his chances of winning the hand of Desdemona, so that
Roderigo will continue to unwittingly perform the valuable services that Iago still
requires of him.
Darcy
plays a very different card, which however is perfectly suited to his gull. What is Eliza’s greatest
vulnerability? It is revealed early in the novel in the following exchange
between Lizzy and Bingley, which Darcy joins in:
"That
is exactly what I should have supposed of you," said Elizabeth.
"You
begin to comprehend me, do you?" cried he, turning towards her.
"Oh!
yes—I understand you perfectly."
"I
wish I might take this for a compliment; but to be so easily seen through I am
afraid is pitiful."
"That
is as it happens. It does not follow that a deep, intricate character is more
or less estimable than such a one as yours."
"Lizzy,"
cried her mother, "remember where you are, and do not run on in the wild
manner that you are suffered to do at home."
"I
did not know before," continued Bingley immediately, "that you were a
studier of character. It must be an amusing study."
"Yes,
but intricate characters are the most amusing. They have at
least that advantage."
"The
country," said Darcy, "can in general supply but a few subjects for
such a study. In a country neighbourhood you move in a very confined and
unvarying society."
"But
people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in
them for ever."
Darcy’s
dry comment about the deficiency of Eliza’s education as a “studier of
character” is actually spot on—Eliza is a 21-year old country girl, whose ego has
distorted her own native quickness into a grandiose belief that she perfectly understands
even deep, intricate characters. Darcy, on the other hand, has actually been around
the block many times in both the country and the town, and therefore we may
guess that he files away, for future use, his detection of Eliza’s unfounded narcissism
about her own psychological acuity.
Then,
40 chapters later, after Darcy has softened Elizabeth up with Pemberley, Mrs.
Reynolds, and finally Darcy-to-the-rescue, he’s ready to complete his campaign
of Iagoesque deception, by giving Eliza an Oscar-calilber “confession” that
will play perfectly to her idea of herself as master ‘studier of character”.
B: Both
Iago’s and Darcy’s speech include the corroborative citation of the lofty perspective
of age whence such retrospection and generalization is being made. And on this
point, Austen tracks Shakespeare in deploying the identical irony. I.e., such a
speech should properly be spoken only by a person of no younger than 50 years
of age, after accumulating a vast amount of life experience. But as it turns
out, the self-important, grandiose Darcy and Iago are both still quite young
men, even by the standards of their eras---and what’s remarkable is that they
both just happen to be exactly the
same age: 28!:
In
closing, then, I ask you---what are the odds that this degree of parallelism
between Darcy and Iago, as I’ve outlined in both of these recent posts, might
have occurred by accident? I suggest to you that this would occur only once in
eight-and-twenty (or, if you like, four times seven)…..centuries!
Sincerely,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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