When my children were six, I mistakenly let them watch Twilight, on the advice of another mother, who couldn’t stop raving about the movie, and how romantic it was.
About a quarter of the way through, I paused the CD.
“I’m going to let you watch it till the end,” I told them. “But I want to explain what you’re watching. This is one of a long line of movies that tell women they should fall in love with dangerous men. I mean, look at Bella’s choices here: one guy, who is going to take away her humanness - and her ability to choose later in life - so she will stay with him forever; and another guy, who has to stifle his impulses to be violent with her. Neither of these are healthy. Both are forms of abuse.”
They stared at me, saying nothing.
“Do you understand?” I asked.
They nodded.
“OK,” I said, “Keep that in mind as you watch and as you see other stories like this. Stories shape how we see the world, and how we let others see us.”
This was something I repeated over and over as they were growing up.
They nodded again. I re-snuggled myself between them, and pressed play.
About six years later, when they were getting into my car after Hebrew school, my taller daughter (they are twins, and are 5 inches apart, so if I’m not using their names, it’s just easier to refer to them as taller and shorter)… my taller daughter got into the car angry. There was a boy in her class who was an asshole. And his assholeness was directed primarily at her.
She was furious with this kid, whom she had complained about before. But she was more upset with her female Hebrew school teacher, who laughed and told her the boy was just doing that because he liked her.
“I don’t buy into that shit where you accept someone being mean to you as romantic,” taller daughter said.
I drove away thinking, “Seed planted. Flower blooms.”
About six years after that, taller daughter raved to me about the movie she had just seen - the Keira Knightley remake of Pride and Prejudice.
OK. I vaguely remembered the book and had never seen any of the previous movies - though clips I’ve caught over the years made them seem brooding.
So I watched this version.
At first, it was very clear Darcy was a pompous asshole and I couldn’t quite figure out how my daughter could think he was dreamy. Nor could I figure how we were going to get from asshole to “I love you” at the end. This guy was a jerk. She should have had nothing to do with him. And if she did have to marry him for security, then she at least should be wary.
I will admit that by the end, it was hard not to get caught up in their barely contained passion. Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen - who played Darcy - looked for all the world like they might combust if they didn’t kiss. And soon.
It was sweet, how he declared his love for her on a stone terrace that might have been a ruin from centuries before. But with a beautiful, sweeping view.
Yet, what should have been her triumph (“You ruined my sister’s life, I can’t trust a man like you”) turned out to be a disappointment for the audience. It made her look like a cold bitch. A cold bitch who was obviously struggling with her feelings, but a cold bitch nonetheless.
I yelled at the screen, “JUST TELL HIM!”
But the first word in the title is “Pride,” and it was her pride - what we viewers were meant to think was silly and stupid - that came after his prejudice that Jane Austen meant to comment on.
Pride keeps us from true love.
But is it really pride? Or is it seeing something horrible in someone, knowing who they really are, and making the healthy choice?
Which is why I was happy to see a piece in The Washington Post last week on the new book “The Darcy Myth,” by Rachel Feder, which “argues that Darcy is a monster in disguise who has convinced generations of women that men who appear to be jerks are, like him, redeemable.”
Yes, I breathed. Yes.
Elizabeth Held, who reviewed the book for the Post (and who runs the eminently fun “What to Read If” Substack), doesn’t necessarily agree with the idea that Darcy was a monster. But she does agree with Feder’s premise that the societal systems in which Darcy and Elizabeth find themselves - where women couldn’t inherit their father’s estate, and had virtually no rights not conferred upon them by a husband - were pretty monstrous.
Yes, Held argues, Darcy does marry Elizabeth’s younger sister off to a man who is a rogue and has defamed her. But that defamation triggered a kind of “you break it, you buy it” mentality that was the only recourse in 1813.
“In my reading of ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ it is not Mr. Darcy who is the monster but the patriarchal system ruling the Bennet women’s lives,” Held writes.
Whether you agree that Darcy is an asshole or that he is just shy and misunderstood, he was undeniably a prototype for the stories that came later - like the Twilight series.
Writes Feder:
“Darcy helped codify the dominant expectation that potential romantic partners — especially heterosexual men — are not only still eligible but in fact more appealing when they play a little hard to get, even if playing hard to get involves cruelty, insults, expressions of disinterest, ruining your beloved sister’s chances of happiness, and other red flags.
“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?”
That’s what I was trying to portray to my daughters almost 15 years ago - that they will encounter stories and situations that teach them to conflate romance with danger. I wanted them to make better choices. But I failed to note that having that awareness would not protect them from dangerous men who didn’t like their choices when they rightly turned away from them. This terrifies me. But it is, as Feder notes, a societal problem. We need more people like her pointing out to people like the mom who recommended Twilight to me, how the existence of this trope harms all of us. We need to plant more seeds - in our daughters and sons.
It was a truth universally acknowledged by teenage boys in the Valley of the mid-sixties that chicks dug bad boys, preferably with motorcycles. Roaring down the freeway at 90mph lane splitting while riding on the back without a helmet certainly qualified as dangerous. That wisdom probably derived from the effects of West Side Story and Rebel Without a Cause on popular imagination.
Lizzy's universal truth had more substance in the world of England's propertied class--marriage or inheritance were the only occupations available to women as a means of subsistence other than remaining dependent on (and subject to the authority of) parents. By 1800, convents had long since disappeared as a generally available alternative. Other occupations involved a loss of social standing and material well being as well vulnerability to exploitation. It's hard to imagine that an independent bar maid, washer woman or fish wife wouldn't welcome entry to the marriage marketplace patronized by Darcy and Bingley.
Mrs. Bennet has a sound understanding of these fundamentals, even if her approach to marketing is somewhat forward. Charlotte Lucas is extraordinarily clear-eyed, to the extent of accepting the least romantic character in the story, the insufferable toady Mr. Collins. Even Mary wouldn't take a run at him. Jane and Lydia seem to have assumed the inevitability. Jane's purported goodness will make her content with whatever arrangement she takes. Lydia is just in it for the sex, it appears. Marriage was a bonus for her. Who knows about Kitty.
Even Elizabeth the free spirit accepts her ultimate fate but insists she wants a love match. Is Fitz a wooden jerk? No matter, because his boorishness is a built-in excuse for failing to land him first cast. When it eventuates that the jerk has feelings that his snobbery would prefer he not, Elizabeth might call it even, thinking "good match, he loves me and I can pretend to love him." How each reassesses the marriage over the years is interesting to think on.
So, yeah, the whole brooding simmering danger thing is outmoded, the brand of feminist guy has never gotten much beyond owning up to structural patriarchal guilt, and we have yet to develop much in the way of relationship models of any kind that are based on rough equality of standing. I wish that I would live long enough to see things play out from here. My first understanding was along the lines of "he's got a wife to support." That changed to "why shouldn't a woman do ____ if she wants to, but I'm still going to be a gentleman about it." That phase I now think of as soft patriarchy, bestowing the boon of not being a jerk because I've got so much going for me. It took a nearest, dearest to explain how that comes across as patronizing.
Once perception is adjusted to discount differences in physical size and upper body strength, the sexual fires are banked by advancing age in the observor and, just recently, looking at photos of women with dead pan expressions, I got another jolt. Women are really very formidable people and there's no apparent explanation why they need men.