Maureen Sabine
Department of History, Hong Kong University
Abstract
Film and
literary critics are sharply divided over the merits of Joe Wright’s 2005
Austen film adaptation, Pride &
Prejudice. My essay bridges this divide by suggesting that the director
projects an erotic vision which simultaneously draws on venerable literary
sources and popular youth culture. Wright’s stated intention was to make “a
youth film” that captured the spirit of youthful excitement he felt in reading
Austen’s novel for the first time. However he highlighted the theme of young
love and at the same time gave his Pride
& Prejudice poetic depth and gravity by alluding intertextually to the
erotic tropes that were immortalized in Romeo
and Juliet and that had their roots in ancient myths and tales of romance.
This essay situates Wright’s filmic vision within a wider feminist cultural and
theological project of speculation on erotic desire, sexual embodiment and “the
holiness of the heart’s affections.”
[1] Joe
Wright, up-and-coming, young director of the 2005 feature film Pride & Prejudice, made the engaging
admission, “I put my heart into
this film and I thought about nothing else for two years from the moment I woke
up to the moment I went to sleep.”[1] While press
reviews of his film have been good overall, literary critics complained that he
popularized Austen’s celebrated romance and brought her novel to the screen as
an easy visual read for an undemanding mainstream audience. Special interest
groups such as representatives of the Jane Austen Society of North America
(JASNA) took exception to the film’s sexually crude imagery and regarded its
Hogarthian realism—especially in depicting the Bennet family and
home—as an unbecoming vulgarization of Austen’s elegant comedy of social
class and manners.[2] In this
essay I argue that Wright’s Pride &
Prejudice projects an erotic vision in which sexual desire strikes like
sudden, transformative grace and devoted readers of the novel are invited to
see the lovers with fresh eyes as a new creation. This erotic vision continues
the emotional and sexual illumination of Darcy’s character evident in the 1995
BBC miniseries, but gives greater gender attention to Elizabeth’s psychosexual
awakening. However I wish to situate Wright’s 2005 film within a wider feminist
cultural and theological project of reflection on how “the soul speaks” through
sexual embodiment and erotic longing, and thus to suggest that romantic love is
a subject that should not be lightly dismissed as soft porn for women readers.[3] In thus contextualizing the film, I am
not disputing the director’s secular interpretation of the novel. Yet I am proposing that he depicts the
erotic passion that stirs between Darcy and Elizabeth as a drama that engages
them body and soul, and so brings romance into the domain of religious meaning
by showing how sexual attraction can precipitate spiritual development.[4]
[2] The
director’s own personal statement of passionate feeling and engagement with Pride & Prejudice is my starting
point because it illustrates how eros may inform film-making as well as
lovemaking and be perceived more expansively as “that creative energy
empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our
language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”[5] Lorde’s comprehension of the erotic as a creative and dynamic force that
extends into many different aspects of life has become a frame of reference,
particularly for feminist body and liberation theologians who have questioned
Christianity’s traditional separation of sexuality from spirituality and
differentiation of erotic from religious love. Lorde liberated the erotic from
narrow-minded definition as the core desires that enunciate and enhance the
whole self, and that inspire all forms of human aspiration and
connection—“those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is
deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions
of love, in its deepest meanings.”[6] Lorde’s
understanding of the erotic seems particularly apt for Austen’s heroine
Elizabeth Bennet whose lively mind, wit and movements certainly demonstrate
that “the lifeforce of women” can be a source of erotic power and magnetism.[7] Traditional literary emphasis has been on the “language” and “history” of eros
in Austen’s novels.[8] For as Jill
Heydt-Stevenson has recently pointed out, the critical view persists that there
is no sex in Pride and Prejudice and
that Austen “discounts the physical …
accentuating mental constraint and repression over bodily excess” in her novel.[9] However film adaptations have allowed us to see the body in motion expressing
the energy of eros through looking, appreciating, “dancing,” longing, and finally
“loving.” Indeed the Meryton Assembly and the Netherfield Ball give dynamic
momentum to Wright’s erotic vision. In these mise-en-scène, Darcy will acquire the carnal knowledge that dancing
with Elizabeth can indeed be what he politely acclaims—which is “most
invigorating.” As I will show,
Darcy’s final early morning declaration that he loves Elizabeth “body and soul”
is much more than a romantic cliché.
It articulates Wright’s overarching filmic vision of the erotic as
dawning holistic awareness that love is a response of the deepest self to what
Keats called in 1817, the year that Austen died, “the holiness of the Heart’s
affections and the truth of Imagination.”[10]
[3] Hostile critics have dismissed
Wright’s Pride & Prejudice as
another filmic example of “the harlequinization of Jane Austen’s novels.”[11] Harlequinization brings Austen to the screen as a mass-market romance, with
soft sexual focus on a photogenic hero and heroine who display obvious physical
attraction for one another despite initial antagonism. It is certainly true
that the gaze of Wright’s camera is absorbed in the courtship of Darcy and
Elizabeth, to the detriment of the character development of other key figures
like Wickham, Jane Bennet and Bingley. Yet the film opens with a clever
reminder that Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice was an early prototype of harlequin romance and of the erotic
longings that are about to be acted out on screen.[12] It begins as the sun rises and
Elizabeth strolls home, head in a book that she cannot wait to finish. The
camera zooms in on THE END, like the sun shining on the page, as though it is
moment of sudden illumination for this golden girl. Elizabeth will no longer be
seen on film wholly engrossed in a book. It is now time for “Lights, Camera,
Action”; and the director’s take on this scene was that she has been reading “a
story about to happen to her in the opening” (AC). Wright’s conceptual opening is not only visually pleasing but
textually acute because, as Rachel Brownstein noted, “young women like to read
about heroines in fiction so as to rehearse possible lives and to imagine a
woman’s life as important.”[13] In the
novel itself Elizabeth wistfully imagines how she might have become the heroine
and not by default the vicarious reader of romance had she only accepted
Darcy’s first proposal (PP III.viii.252).
Thus the closing of the book is a necessary phase not only in the psychosexual
development of the romantic heroine but in the film’s erotic projection of her
as a young woman passionately searching for the life story that will embody her
spirit and animation.[14]
[4]
Unlike Elizabeth, the director could not be called “a great reader” (PP I.viii.34). “I’d never read Pride
and Prejudice when I was sent the script, so I went away and read the book
and was shocked to find it really excited me. It felt like a youth novel that
had been reappropriated by the fusty literary people—and I wanted to make
a youth film of that youth novel.”[15] Wright’s
decision to make a film that was more youthful, ebullient, and accessible would
determine the overall erotic shape of Pride
& Prejudice. For one thing, it led him to set the film earlier than
usual, not in the Regency period of 1813 when Pride and Prejudice was eventually published, but in 1797 when
Austen herself was a young woman close in age and sympathy to Elizabeth and
Jane Bennet. Significantly, the 2007 biopic Becoming
Jane which turns the author’s early life into the raw material for her
later romance Pride and Prejudice, is
set in the same period.[16] For another, it led Wright to imagine
the first pivotal dance as a scene evocative of teen movies in the ’eighties.
The seating in the Meryton Assembly hall was designed to be reminiscent of a
school auditorium and allow Elizabeth and Charlotte Lucas to sit unobserved under
the stands where they overhear Darcy boast to Bingley, “she is tolerable; but
not handsome enough to tempt me” (AC, PP I.iii.13). Elizabeth is thus visually situated and verbally dismissed as
beneath him. However in a socially competitive setting where youths strive to
impress their close, admiring circle of friends, Darcy’s insult to Elizabeth is
represented less as a gratuitous snub than as the callow bravado of a man
afraid of risk. Lorde realized that the erotic can arouse great fear before it
is recognized as the source of the deepest desires and meanings for the self.
This is because, as the theologian David Carr explains, the erotic is a push
beyond safety, “a fundamental spiritual impulse to reach out from ourselves for
connection, to become vulnerable, often against our other instincts.”[17]
[5] On the whole, film critics reacted
favourably to the fact that Wright’s Darcy and Elizabeth convey a more youthful
and tentative impression of Austen’s characters, and indeed “seem to be of
another generation” to Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle’s mature lovers, with one
wag entitling his review “Pride and Post-adolescence.”[18] Wright breathed fresh new life into Pride
and Prejudice by reconfiguring Darcy and Elizabeth as vulnerable,
confused—and in Darcy’s case morose—young lovers who have not yet
fully managed the psychosexual transition from adolescence to adulthood. He
gave their dilemma dramatic intensity by alluding intertextually to Romeo and Juliet, another literary
template for popular romance with its representation of lovers as very young,
beautiful and sexually attractive, and with its leitmotif of rash and risky
love at first sight. In a
sustained study aiming “to reclaim for religious experience great areas of
human encounter with the divine that have been either marginalized in
contemporary Christianity or almost wholly ignored,” David Brown argued that
the beautiful and sexualized body has been celebrated in art as touched by
divine grace and suggested the ways in which it can inspire religious intimations
in viewers.[19] The romantic tropes Romeo and Juliet immortalized have
become so commonplace that the extraordinary reality they once pointed to has
been forgotten; but they are interpolated in Wright’s film and help to make his
erotic vision intelligible. These tropes are an important reminder of the
dangers of unequivocally romanticizing eros, as Lorde does, and so disregarding
its dark and violent manifestations that destroy Shakespeare’s lovers and that
erupt through the laugher and grief of Austen’s novels.[20] As in Romeo and Juliet, the
conflicted relationship between Darcy and Elizabeth is established at the
outset as one of “loving hate,” and Elizabeth will learn to “love a loathed
enemy.”[21] Moggach made this explicit at the Netherfield Ball by giving Elizabeth a line
in which she mischievously asks her friend Charlotte Lucas how she can be
expected to dance with a man she has “sworn to loathe … for all eternity!”
Indeed it is already evident from the mise-en-scène at the Meryton Assembly—where Jane warns, “one of these days, Lizzie,
someone will catch your eye and then you’ll have to watch your tongue,” and
Darcy obligingly does a double take as he makes his grand entrance past
Elizabeth in the crowd—that the director wished to dramatize their exchange
of glances as a foreseeing of fate akin to Romeo and Juliet’s love at first
sight. Unlike the obtuse Mr. Collins, Darcy has
truly—intuitively—“singled (her) out as the companion of (his)
future life” (PP I.xix.89). In fact
his subsequent refusal to dance with Elizabeth and insult to her person may be
a deliberate effort to resist his strong, involuntary pull towards her by
looking only to see the worst (PP I.vi.23). For as Margaret Miles perceptively observed, “because the level of
threat and the potential for pain in intimate relations is very high,
representations of the other are used to reduce her to manageability.”[22] Wright suggested through the mysterious flash of recognition between them that
eros is not only about sexual attraction but also the dangers and hazards of
deeper desire where Darcy and Elizabeth catch an unnerving glimpse of their
future life together—and spend much of the film running for dear life
from the sight.[23]
[6] The
young, beautiful, sexualized body is at its most graceful in dance; and Brown
has suggested how the erotic activity of dancing preserves its ancient
religious intention which was to lift men and women out of themselves and
momentarily move them beyond their limitations towards a state of expanded
consciousness.[24] Wright staged
the scene where Darcy and Elizabeth finally dance at the Netherfield Ball as a
reflective moment of intense, if unwelcome, connection where all the other
human activity in the ballroom dissolves and the lovers are left alone at the
still centre where opposites come together and where man and woman gracefully
spin the helicoidal dance of life itself. What makes this beautiful interlude
even more meaningful is its evident intertextual allusion to the scene where
time stops for Maria and Tony as they dance in Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise’s West Side Story (1961), the film
version of Leonard Bernstein’s modern youth musical inspired by Romeo and Juliet. Wright made it clear
from the abrupt end to their duet, Elizabeth’s huffy walkout, and Darcy evident
disconcertment that the erotic grace of the dance may not be recognized as a
gift. This is because “sexual desire can cause our heart to ‘belong’ to
another, even if we do not want it to, even if we wish our desire were
otherwise.”[25]
[7]
While their dance is measured, Wright’s film is generally fast paced, with the action over in but “two hours’
traffic of our stage” (RJ prologue.12).[26] Although this runs counter to the slow
literary build-up in the novel, it allowed Wright to convey the impetuosity of
youth, the urgency of first love, and the way in which speed and coincidence
are the medium of erotic fate as in Romeo
and Juliet.[27] One of the
most dramatically thrilling scenes in the film is Darcy’s first proposal to
Elizabeth which Wright has taken out of the sedate parlour room and set during
a downpour in Rosings Park. Gardens are evocative landscapes for courtship,
foreplay, and lovemaking, but Wright’s rain-soaked couple plays out a wet dream
that does not climax in passionate jouissance.
The hand-held camera used in this scene conveys Darcy and Elizabeth’s emotional
volatility as sexual attraction and resentment, blame and shame blight the
physical desire for intimacy that the camera itself captures close up. The
sickening velocity with which Darcy’s ardent declaration of love goes horribly
wrong is a dramatic reminder of the heartbreak and devastation that can be
caused by eros.[28] Karen Newman reminded readers in the
strongest possible terms that social tragedy haunts Austen’s realist writing.
“In Pride and Prejudice, everything
about Elizabeth—her poverty, her inferior social position, the behaviour
of her family, her initial preference for Wickham, and her refusal of Darcy’s
first offer of marriage—all these things ideologically should lead if not
to death, at best to genteel poverty and spinsterhood.”[29] Indeed in Moggach’s film script, Mr. Gardiner states that he “will join Mr.
Bennet and find Lydia before she ruins the family forever” in order to make it
clear to a modern audience that the search for the unmarried runaways is a race
against time, with the likelihood of sexual scandal putting Elizabeth’s
eventual chance at erotic reconciliation with Darcy at grave risk.
[8]
Romeo complained that he was “fortune’s fool” (RJ III.i.138), and it is Darcy’s great fortune that makes him act
like a fool, blind to how the presumption stemming from ten thousand a year
colours his foolhardy proposal to Elizabeth. In the heat of the furious
argument that ensues, both are oblivious to their surroundings. Wright has been
castigated for making a “Masonic-temple-like structure” the setting for this
proposal scene when it is, in fact, an English folly—decorative garden
architecture which reifies the foolishness of both lovers.[30] Moggach first drew attention to this
structural trope in the Netherfield Ball conversation where Elizabeth exclaims
that if Bingley cannot see Jane’s regard for him, “he is a fool,” and Charlotte
retorts, “we are all fools in love.” Darcy and the Bennets do not occupy “two
households both alike in dignity” (RJ prologue.1), quite the reverse, but the differences between the two families
provide central and time-honoured grounds for the lovers’ conflicted
relationship. However Wright also suggested that Darcy and Elizabeth feel
increasingly cornered as they are pressured, like Romeo and Juliet, to marry
within a tightening noose of relatives and friends. At the same time, the
director took pains to suggest what an uncanny or strangely familiar experience
it is for Darcy and Elizabeth to fall in love. The music Elizabeth hears when
she later penetrates the private family quarters of Pemberley, sees Georgiana
playing her pianoforte and, to her horror, intrudes on Darcy’s affectionate
reunion with his sister, is first heard when Elizabeth enters Longbourn at the
beginning of the film and maladroitly replayed when she visits Rosings. This
music subliminally reassures her that love is like homecoming, and tells the
film audience that she and Darcy are harmoniously attuned at last.[31]
[9]
Freud famously speculated that romance arose from early familial attachment to
the father and mother who are the “noblest and strongest of men” and the
“dearest and loveliest of women,” the latter phrase a remarkable echo of
Darcy’s declaration of love in the novel for “dearest, loveliest Elizabeth” (PP III.xvi.297).[32] Darcy’s awkward meeting with Elizabeth at Pemberley not only lays the grounds
for their erotic homecoming to one another at the end of the film, but is
represented as an extension of his family reunion with his sister—a
tender, nurturant moment where he lifts her up in his arms as a father would a
child.[33] The unfinished sentences that hang in the air between them—‘I’m very fond
of walking.” “Yes, I know”—convey
their body knowledge of one another. Macfadyen’s vocal skills as an actor come
to the fore here in conveying feeling too powerful for words and registering
the not-said in the embarrassing gaps and silences of their
exchange—which is his persistent desire for greater intimacy with
Elizabeth. The gendered expectation of popular romance is that the woman will
breathlessly say “yes” to the man’s marriage proposal. What Elizabeth now hears
from Darcy is the affirmative and resonant “yes” of the erotic self which the
feminist theologian Carter Heyward declared, “connects us—our erotic
energy: our sensual and sexual yearnings, our openness to sacred movement
between and among ourselves.”[34]
[10] Pride and Prejudice has been rightly
called “the most chaste and the most erotic of courtship novels.”[35] Although Wright was careful to indicate in the credits that his film was only
based on the novel, one of its core achievements is to convey the captivating
interplay of the chaste and erotic in Darcy and Elizabeth’s relationship. There
are remnants of Apuleius’ ancient erotic vision of Eros and Psyche in this
relationship. Darcy is the mystery man who inhabits a splendid palace like
Eros. Elizabeth is blind like Psyche to his true character and forced to embark
on the painful and arduous journey of self-knowledge that will reunite her in
the end—not with a monster of pride and conceit—but the most tender
and charming of husbands. Images of Eros and Psyche were engraved on ancient
tombs as a symbol of the immortality of the soul and, perhaps also, of the
poignant hope immortalized in Romeo and
Juliet that love is stronger than death.[36] Wright tapped into this deep vein of mythic longing when he depicted Elizabeth
studying the voluptuous death throes of the warrior Achilles in Pemberley’s
sculpture gallery before coming across Darcy’s bust and being transfixed by
love for him. Eros’s angry separation from Psyche, her exile from happiness and
eventual recovery of love through hardship shape an allegorical narrative that
has parallels with the tempestuous romance dramatized in Pride & Prejudice. The spiritual intention of this venerable
allegory was to suggest how human beings could be transfigured by love; how the
divine shone through the grace and beauty of their erotic bodies; and how the
beloved could inspire the quasi-religious admiration that Keira Knightley is
accorded as a major star and that has made her a screen goddess.[37]
[11]
Margaret Anne Doody argued that the ancient history of the novel “encodes a
religious experience of birth, trial, acceptance of death, acceptance of sexuality,
ignominious experience of physicality—and with all these things the
possibility of renewal, of resurrection;” and she concluded that in the final
analysis, the novel is “a religion of the Goddess … (who) presides over and
sustains the body and soul in this life of being and becoming.”[38] Doody found avatars and images of the Goddess scattered throughout the long
novel tradition; and Ashley Tauchert has argued that these tropes of the
“feminine divine” still glimmer through the pages of Austen’s romances
articulating a parson’s daughter’s abiding if secularized faith in the
possibility of feminine enlightenment, love and final felicity “in defiance of
everything” (PP III.i.207).[39] These tropes continue to make their
presence felt in Wright’s Pride & Prejudice when Darcy declares that Elizabeth has “bewitched (him) body and soul,” and she
playfully commands him in the film coda to worship her after marriage as
“goddess divine.” While this
language of adoration has become debased by the popular love story, Doody and
Tauchert link it to a history in which romance once communicated a sense of
religious mystery and erotic love was not simply a symbol of divine love but a
potential means of encountering the divine in and through the body.
[12]
Psyche was distinguished by her beauty, a beauty to which Darcy is immune until
he looks into Elizabeth’s “beautiful eyes” which are a mirror of her soul and
is lost in love before he knows he has begun (PP I.x.46, I.vi.23, III.xviii.306). Although Keira Knightley was
the same chronological age as Elizabeth when she made the film, some critics
have protested that she was too much a movie star, too young and beautiful for
the role. However Wright saw a “vital, independent-minded, scruffy tomboy”
quality in the actress that he felt expressed the liveliness of Austen’s
heroine.[40] Kathryn Sutherland has recently damned Knightley’s performance as an Austen
heroine who “has only an outer life, and a gaping inner vacuity.”[41] Yet with her slim body and quick movements, Knightley’s Elizabeth resembles
Artemis-Diana, virgin goddess of the chase, particularly in her delightful
morning walk to Netherfield. Her sudden appearance on foot, “face glowing,”
hair flowing, “windblown and free,” leaves Macfadyen’s glum Darcy dumbfounded;
but her body language also announces that it is good to be alive.[42] Her subsequent resistance to Darcy’s advances and his clumsy effort to
apologize for his initial rudeness does not simply show lingering resentment.
More importantly for the build up of erotic tension in the film, Elizabeth’s
behaviour is a reminder that romantic love derives its power from the sexual
politics of chastity, from the virgin’s insistence that she will exercise
control over her own body, that she will not submit to marriage without love
like Charlotte Lucas, or to sex before marriage like Lydia Bennet.[43]
[13]
When Elizabeth throws down the gauntlet to Darcy at Netherfield and tells him
in Moggach’s film script that his ideal woman “would certainly be a fiercesome
thing to behold,” she further evokes the image of Diana, the virgin huntress,
who personifies her own willfulness, verbal combativeness, and refusal to be
trapped in marriage. Wright chose Groombridge Place, which is surrounded by a
dilapidated moat, as the location for Longbourn. Not only does this site give
Elizabeth’s childhood home the shabby, whimsical feel of Dodie Smith’s popular
postwar romance, I Capture the Castle (1949),
but its moat is also a symbolic outer defence of the self-enclosure that
defines the virgin.[44] One of the
most revealing glimpses of the young virgin’s resistance, not simply to sexual
surrender but sexual contact of any kind, occurs at the beginning of the film
in the Longbourn parlour where the family excitedly gathers to discuss
Bingley’s up-coming attendance at the Meryton Assembly. Suddenly the smile on
Elizabeth’s face gives way to a brief grimace of distaste as she watches her
mother kiss her father full on the lips. This change of expression is easy to
miss because the overall mise-en-scène is so exuberant; but it is a look of repugnance that resurfaces when Elizabeth
comes physically close to Darcy as she and Jane make their farewells at
Netherfield Park. The involuntary body language of this grimace is consistent
with the coolness and hesitation some literary scholars see in Elizabeth’s
eventual feelings of love for Darcy; but it may also register the young
virgin’s sexual fear of the unknown and apprehension of intercourse with a man
“violently in love” (PP III.xvi.295).[45] Yet the erotic murals that decorate Lady Catherine de Burgh’s reception room at
Rosings insist on the presence of sexuality, even in the most unlikely of
places, while the nudes that cavort high above on the ceiling of Pemberley’s
entrance hall hint that sexuality can elevate the spirit.[46] Elizabeth visibly falls for Darcy and hides none of her erotic longing from the
camera when she finally comes to a standstill before his bust in the Pemberley
sculpture gallery. Significantly this pivotal moment occurs after she has
pensively studied the marble statue of a Vestal Virgin and contemplated the
alternative to sexual consent which is a lifetime dedicated to chastity. Yet
the ultimate paradox of the chaste virgin goddess figure—and a source of
Elizabeth’s fascination for Darcy—is that she brings to Netherfield and
Pemberley the untamed and unspoiled quality of a natural world that resists
social artifice and is alive with possibility. Elizabeth is that wild thing who
makes his heart sing. Wright’s film costume designer, Jacqueline Durran,
dressed Elizabeth in rustic colours that would reflect her love of walking
outdoors; but they also signal to Darcy her earthiness—a liveliness of
mind that is grounded in bodily life and its erotic energy.[47] Indeed her dirty petticoat sends a defiant message to Darcy: that the sexual
desire she evokes and the moist, mossy secrets of the female body that she
makes him imagine are not “dirty” pleasures.
[14]
Wright’s erotic vision of Pride &
Prejudice takes into account both the tragic and comic possibilities of
romance. For, as Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, wisely remarked,
“nothing will stop sex being tragic and comic. It is above all the area of our
lives where we can be rejected in our bodily entirety, where we can venture
into … ‘exposed spontaneity’ … and find ourselves looking foolish or even
repellent.”[48] In both the novel and 1995 BBC
production, Darcy embodies the enigma and the unattainability of eros; and the
Austen scholar John Wilshire suggested that this may be why he remains a romantic
object of fantasy and desire for so many women readers.[49] There are still traces of Eros’s mysterious relationship to Psyche in
Macfadyen’s interactions with Elizabeth. The actor’s expressive speaking voice
is able to inflect the soft, caressing tone that Eros used to reassure Psyche
that he was not a monster. Darcy’s protective love for his sister and the
family’s good name obliges him to keep Elizabeth in the dark about the real
cause of his animosity toward Wickham.
However when they finally dance at the Netherfield Ball, he does
articulate the hope that draws Apuleius’ ancient tale of Eros and Psyche to a
happy end—that he will afford her “more clarity in the future.” Critics
have repeatedly noted the tenderness that Macfadyen gradually brings to the
role, a tenderness which readers of popular romance value as an enhancement of
the hero’s sexual attraction.[50] Tenderness
also signals an erotic yielding and spiritual receptivity that can open
individuals up not only to the possibility of romance but to religious
experience, to both self-disclosure and divine revelation. [51] Indeed in his discussion of the theology of the Protestant companionate
marriage, Wilson Yates argues that one of its chief characteristics was a
willingness to be open to sexual and emotional self-revelation.[52] Elizabeth is blind to Darcy’s
underlying tenderness in the film until she studies Darcy’s sculpted bust at
Pemberley. Surrounded by godlike nudes, his features chiseled in white marble,
Darcy appears more naked and more wanting in the embodiment that only Elizabeth
can give him. Darcy’s utter exposure to her full gaze in this pivotal scene
shows the risk that Rowan Williams sees inherent in the desire for sexual
intimacy—of being rejected, laughed at, looking foolish or worse, as Darcy
bitterly exclaims in his letter to Elizabeth, “disgusting” to the beloved (PP II.xii.162).
[15]
Colin Firth’s representation of an emotionally bottled up Darcy laid the
foundation for Macfadyen’s tense, moody, yearning portrayal of the character.[53] Those who complained that Macfadyen turned Darcy into “a young Heathcliff,”
wooing Elizabeth in the rain and striding across a dewy meadow, voiced no
similar objections to Firth’s Byronic interpretation of the romantic hero in a
dripping wet shirt. In line with the more youthful feel that Wright gave to his
film, Macfadyen played Darcy as younger than his chronological age, less
sophisticated in looks, personality and sexuality than Firth or the figure
depicted in the novel. In an interview with The
New York Times, the actor envisaged Darcy as “a young man who doesn’t know
who he is yet. Even though he’s 28 and comes from this ancient family and has a
huge estate, he has that adolescent quality of taking himself very seriously
and being very passionate.”[54] Indeed Shakespeare’s “gentle Romeo”
gave early modern shape to the romantic figure that he described here—the
sensitive, melancholic, lovelorn youth who is driven by “a troubled mind … to
walk abroad” before sunrise as Darcy will do at the close of Wright’s film (RJ II.ii.93, I.i.116-18).
[16]
While Firth’s taciturn Darcy used his body to express the passion for Elizabeth
he was unwilling to put into words, he still had a command of repartee that a
more tongue-tied and strangulated Macfadyen often lacks in Wright’s film. The
novel’s daring, erotic battle of wits between the couple has become unequal in
the Moggach screenplay, with Macfadyen’s Darcy on the whole reacting to or
enduring Elizabeth’s barbs.[55] Knightley’s
prickly, sharp-tongued Elizabeth has the psychological whip hand over
Macfadyen’s Darcy and loses no opportunity to pick a quarrel with him. She
savors the pyrrhic victory of reducing him to sullen or bemused silence, all
the while unaware that she is only further arousing his interest and desire. After
she outwits Darcy in the Netherfield drawing room, Macfadyen had the idea that
“he should be on the verge of tears of frustration, because she wins the
encounter … and would go back to his room and lock the door and collapse in
fits of hysterical laughter, he’d be so infuriated and tickled at the same
time.”[56] Although Macfadyen’s Darcy is no verbal match for Elizabeth, his air of
helpless infatuation when in her company erodes the image that Firth projected
in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice of
the strong, silent ruling-class male, and furthermore deconstructs the romance
of erotic domination that uneasily clings to the lord and master of Pemberley
in the novel. Marcia Landy has pointed out that women’s film romances often
rely on the technique of male splitting into two opposing types, “the
omnipotent, domineering, aloof male and the gentle, but passive and fairly
ineffectual male.”[57] The
friendship of Darcy and Bennet is a classic embodiment of this split. However
Firth also accentuated the conflicted identity of private vulnerability hidden
beneath social invulnerability that would come to “torture” Austen’s character
(PP III.xvi.296). While Macfadyen’s
Darcy has the outward trappings of this seemingly impregnable alpha
male—the height, the big physique, the carriage, and the dress—his
youthful insecurity suggests that he is not yet fully acculturated to the
superior mindset on which not only male splitting but the male and female, body
and soul division is predicated. A popular audience is divided over whether he
is handsome enough for the role, in part because his looks alter visibly over
the course of the film, as though
he is growing into his face, as erotic longing fleshes out and enhances his
features. Indeed Macfadyen plays Darcy as a young man who is still grieving
over the sudden death of his parents and has had greatness thrust reluctantly
upon him, though it will be Elizabeth who turns his “mourning into dancing” (Ps. 30.11).[58] She spots the misery that makes his features appear so stolid when he makes his
first appearance at the Meryton Assembly—his large frame filling the
doorway, dominating the room, and imposing an awed silence over the revelers
which speaks volumes about his great fortune. However she sees only his social
disdain and not the heavy heart which makes him poor company, even with his
closest friends.
[17]
Wright conceded that Darcy is “unlikable at first,” but conceived his
“openness” as the key to his erotic transformation.[59] Jacqueline Durran’s costumes chart his erotic refashioning into a vulnerable
male lover as emotional susceptibility, a softening of mood, tenderness, and
transparency come to govern his feelings for Elizabeth. The clothes he wears at Meryton and
Netherfield when he is on his guard are stiffly tailored, high collared, and
formal. Those worn at Rosings, Hunsford and Pemberley are softer and less
structured, mirroring his need to disclose more of himself as well as the
sexual desire to be/come close to Elizabeth. “I came to Rosings for the single
object of seeing you. I had to see
you.” Neither rain nor rejection dampen his longing for a woman who always
seems one step ahead of him, just out of reach, as we can see from the
involuntary movement of his body and lips, “forever panting,” towards her in
Wright’s electrifying proposal scene (Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” III. l.
27). Finally the undone shirt and coat he wears in the film’s closing love
scene show radical openness, “body and soul,” to Elizabeth, and willingness to
expose himself a second time to rejection.[60]
[18]
Macfadyen’s Darcy conveys the ardor of a man who is not only stupefied but
electrified by eros so that his hand tingles from even the briefest contact
with Elizabeth’s skin and his voice quavers with desire when he speaks to her.
Significantly, Elizabeth will realize how much she loves Darcy when gazing at
his bust, but only after she has perceived her power to wound him to the quick
while standing before the vulnerable, fallen figure of Achilles in the
Pemberley sculpture gallery. In following the sinuous lines of Achilles’ marble
flesh she will also instinctively recognize her capacity to give him the
“violent delight” that counteracts the “violent end” of eros in Romeo and Juliet (RJ II.vi.9, PP III.xvi.295, xvii.304). Macfadyen’s
Darcy demonstrates how eros is born out of the psychosexual need to touch and
be touched. His somatic longing for deeper connection is illustrated at its
most simple and seductive in the film scene where he unexpectedly hands
Elizabeth into the carriage that will take her from Netherfield. Although his
first proposal to Elizabeth will misfire, it is characterized by a devastating
honesty which substantiates Heyward’s assertion that eros “depends upon our
desire to see and know one another as we really are, in our woundedness, fears,
and mistakes as well as in our wholeness, courage, and delights.”[61] Indeed it is only when they have seen each other at their worst, that they are
able to call forth the best in each other.[62] Joan Timmerman regards this capacity to be “wholly and deeply touched” by
another as a sign of an indivisible spiritual and sexual maturity.[63] Darcy’s personal growth through an eroticism in which he finally withholds
nothing of himself is marked in their later filmic meetings at Pemberley and
Longbourn by a new tenderness linked to forgiveness and a need in his own words
to “make amends,” to put things right with Elizabeth, and so to become mindful
of the gender and social disparities that can turn romantic love into an
erotics of domination and submission.[64] This all-absorbing desire for intimacy arose in the first instance from the
unhappy recognition that it is not good
that man should be alone and stirred deep within the avowal he will
formally make to Elizabeth in marriage: that with my body I thee worship as bestower not only of sexual
fulfilment but a surpassing joy of mutuality (Gen. 2:18, BCP 1559).
Romeo used the language of religious pilgrimage to describe his intimation that
when he beheld Juliet for the first time at the Capulet ball he entered another
realm, sacred and apart from the other revelers, a space of stillness and grace
that Darcy and Elizabeth also discover, but do not recognize as exalted, during
their dance at the Netherfield Ball (RJ I.v.92-108).
They must learn to be gracious, to show one another remorse, forgiveness,
reparation, reconciliation, gratitude, and generosity of heart—enabling
attributes not only of their romance but of spirituality—before they can
turn round and face each other again as partners.
[19]
Wright’s film closes with a love scene in which Darcy and Elizabeth recover
their sacred space together outdoors, in a dawning world as fresh, unspoiled
and prelapsarian as the first morning. The shot of Darcy striding across this
meadow world to Elizabeth “mean(t) a lot” to the director and was conceived as
the real end of the film, the kind of end that would certainly have caused
Elizabeth to sigh with satisfaction and caress the cover of the book she closes
at the beginning of Wright’s film.[65] Despite the
loveliness of this scene, film viewers have expressed disappointment that the
lovers do not exchange the passionate kiss that marks the closure of popular
and harlequin romance. However as William May rightly points out, “the cult of
romantic love locates passion in the teased imagination;” and it is animated by
longing for someone beyond reach and something out of the ordinary.[66] While Wright’s Pride & Prejudice is
not altogether faithful to the novel, I have argued here that his film does
focus on the exultant expansion of self that both romance and religion
celebrate, that is a source of delight for readers, and that is represented on
screen as an intensification and magnification of life. Thus finally Wright
projects an erotic vision in which Elizabeth and Darcy embrace something
passionate and profound—their future life together. Darcy walks towards
Elizabeth from the far horizon, plighting his troth with every movement closer
of his body that he will no longer be a distant reality to her, and finally
articulating his deepest wish “never to be parted from (her) from this day on.”
As the sun rises and bathes them in light, the lovers are illuminated by
Wright’s film as a new creation—and are content simply to stand at the
still center of the frame and “let the warm Love in” (Keats, “Ode to Psyche”
l.67).
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Notes
[1] Joe Wright, “Audio Commentary,” Pride
& Prejudice, DVD, directed by Joe Wright (Universal Studios Home
Entertainment, 2005) (hereafter cited in text as AC).
[2] Anthony Lane, “Parent Traps: Pride &
Prejudice and Bee Season,” The New Yorker, November 14, 2005; Gina
Fattore, “Pride and Pathetic,” Salon.com,
December 21, 2005; Kimberly Maul, “Pride
and Prejudice fans in uproar over new Keira Knightley movie,” The Book Standard, November 23, 2005;
Natasha Walter, “Unrealistic, but undeniably real,” Guardian Unlimited, September 6, 2005.
[3] James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis:
Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992),
141, quoted in Margaret R. Miles, Desire
and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine’s Confessions (Eugene, OR:
Wipf & Stock, 1991), 76; Cheryl
L. Nixon, “Balancing the Courtship Hero: Masculine Emotional Display in Film
Adaptations of Austen’s Novels,” in Jane
Austen in Hollywood, ed. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield (Lexington: The
University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 23-35; Elizabeth Langland, “Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen and Her
Readers,” in A Companion to Jane Austen
Studies, ed. Laura Cooner Lambdin and Robert Thomas Lambdin (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2000), 52-53; Ashley Tauchert, Romancing Jane Austen: Narrative, Realism and the Possibility of a
Happy Ending (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 159-69;
Sandra M. Schneiders, “Feminist Spirituality: Christian Alternative or
Alternative to Christianity?,” in Women’s
Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development, 2nd ed., ed.
Joann Wolski Conn, (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1996), 31-43; Nicola Slee, “The
Holy Spirit and spirituality,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology, ed. Susan Frank Parsons
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 179-82.
[4] In her secular reading of the eroticism in the novels, Jill Heydt-Stevenson has
recently argued that Austen “acknowledges a close, even indissoluble,
connection between mind and body.” See Austen’s
Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 2.
[5] Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” 1978, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by
Audre Lorde (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), 55.
[6] Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” Sister
Outsider, 56. See David M. Carr’s discussion of Lorde’s significance for
religious thinkers in The Erotic Word:
Sexuality, Spirituality, and The Bible (New York: Oxford University Press,
2003), 9-11, 87, esp. 144-47; and Julie Hopkins, “Radical Passion: A Feminist
Liberation Theology,” in Swallowing A
Fishbone? Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity, ed. Daphne Hampson
(London: SPCK, 1996), 67-79.
[7] Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” Sister
Outsider, 56; Jane Austen, Pride and
Prejudice, 1813, ed. and introd. Vivien Jones (London: Penguin Classics,
1986), I.iii.13, III.xvii.303, xviii.306 (hereafter cited in text as PP).
[8] Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (London:
Macmillan, 1986), 130-32; Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1988), 90-91; Robert M. Polhemus, Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D. H. Lawrence (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1990), 1-6, 28-34; Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 359-86.
[9] Heydt-Stevenson, Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions, 70.
[10] John Keats, “Letter to Benjamin Bailey,” November 22nd, 1817
(references to Keats hereafter cited in text).
[11] Kaplan, “Mass Marketing Jane Austen: Men, Women and Courtship in Two Film
Adaptations,” in Jane Austen in Hollywood,
178.
[12] Judy Simons further reminds us that “Austen was fascinated by popular culture”
and keenly followed the popular novels of her day. See Simons, “Classics and
Trash: Reading Austen in the 1990s,” Women’s
Writing 5 (1998): 29-31. Margaret Anne Doody and Deirdre Lynch also make it
clear that she “shamelessly enjoyed” romantic best-sellers. See Doody, “Jane
Austen’s Reading,” in The Jane Austen
Handbook, ed. David Grey, (London: Athlone Press, 1992), 357-62, and Lynch,
“Introduction: Sharing with Our Neighbors,” in Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees, ed. Deirdre Lynch,
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 23n.13.
[13] Rachel M. Brownstein, Becoming a Heroine:
Reading about Women in Novels (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),
xxiv.
[14] Screenwriter, Deborah Moggach, remarked that while her first draft of Pride & Prejudice was faithful to
the novel, her final script involved laying the book aside as Elizabeth does at
the start of the film. See David Benedict, “What We Do: Pride & Prejudice, A Masterclass with Deborah Moggach and Joe
Wright,” The Script Factory.co.uk,
September 13, 2005.
[15] Joe Wright, David Belton and Richard Hawkins, “I loved it—but it’s
painful,” Guardian Unlimited,
February 15, 2006.
[16] See Benedict, “What We Do,” The Script
Factory and Kathryn Sutherland, “Muddying the hem: How to make the great
Jane Austen movie—from makeover to minimalism,” TLS, April 13, 2007, 20-21.
[17] See Carr, The Erotic Word, 147 and
Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” Sister
Outsider, 57-58.
[18] Jason Anderson, “Pride and Post-adolescence,” Eye Weekly, November 10, 2005.
[19] David Brown, God & Grace of Body:
Sacrament in Ordinary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1, 11-14.
[20] Heydt-Stevenson suggests how Austen explores the comic and tragic potential of
sexuality. See Austen’s Unbecoming
Conjunctions, 16, 19, 26, 65, 88, and Carr, The Erotic Word, 12, 39-40, 60, 83-86, 121.
[21] William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet,
c. 1595, The Arden Shakespeare, ed. and introd. Brian Gibbons (London: Methuen,
1980), I.i.174, I.iv.140 (hereafter cited in text as RJ).
[22] Margaret R. Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female
Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1989), 10.
[23] Paul Ricoeur, “Wonder, Eroticism, and Enigma,” in Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection, ed.
James B. Nelson and Sandra P. Longfellow, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John
Knox Press, 1994), 83.
[24] Brown is interested in how the dancing body figures forth the divine. See God & Grace of Body, 15, and his
chapter on “The Dancer’s Leap,” 61-119.
[25] Thomas Breidenthal, “Sanctifying Nearness,” in Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed.
Eugene F. Rogers Jr. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 345.
[26] Stephanie Zacharek astutely observes in “Pride & Prejudice,” her November 11,
2005 film review for Salon.com, that
Wright’s “Pride & Prejudice moves
fast—it doesn’t unfold languorously, the way many adaptations do, as if
they were desperately trying to mimic the experience of reading.”
[27] In his Script Factory conversation,
“What We Do,” with Benedict, Wright indicated that “the first edit was forty
five minutes longer. But it was a bit boring. … I wanted that speed and energy
running through it. I wanted that youthful telling of it.” See Brian Gibbons’s
introduction to Romeo and Juliet, 76.
[28] See Carr’s excellent discussion of the Garden of Eden story in Genesis, The Erotic Word, 27-44, and his view on
43 that this is a story about the potential and the tragedy of eros.
[29] Karen Newman, “Can this marriage be saved: Jane Austen makes sense of an ending,” ELH 50 (1983): 705. This view is echoed by Heydt-Stevenson, Austen’s
Unbecoming Conjunctions, especially in her discussion of the fallout from Lydia Bennet’s
transgressive sexuality on 87-88 and 93-101.
[30] Fattore, “Pride and Pathetic,” Chris Hastings, “Colin Firth was born to play
Mr. Darcy. So can anyone else shine in the lead role?,” Telegraph.co.uk, August 28, 2005.
[31] Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” Sister Outsider,
55, notes that in Greek myth Eros was born of Chaos and personified harmony.
[32] Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” 1909, In On
Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, ed.
Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey, The Penguin Freud Library (London:
Penguin Books, 1991), 224-25.
[33] Janice Radway observed that the readers of harlequin romance regard the tender
intimacy between the parent and child as a paradigm for the hero’s psychosexual
attachment to the heroine. See “The Readers and their Romances (1984),” In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory
and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 567-570.
[34] Carr, The Erotic Word, 36-37,
Heydt-Stevenson, Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions,
72, Carter Heyward, Touching our
Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God (San Francisco: Harper Press, 1989), 22.
[35] Edward Neill, The Politics of Jane Austen (London: Macmillan, 1999), 52.
[36] Doody, True Story, 364-65.
[37] See Brown’s discussion of the divine aura that the ancient Greek artist and worshipper
beheld in the human body, God & Grace of Body, 22-26.
[38] Ibid., 170, 458.
[39] Tauchert, Romancing Jane Austen, x,
14, 16, 25, 74, 91, 145.
[40] Ibid. See as well Stephen Holden, “Marrying off those Bennet sisters again, but
this time Elizabeth is a looker,” The New
York Times, November 11, 2005.
[41] Sutherland, “Muddying the hem,” 20.
[42] The quotes are from PP I.vii.30 and
Doody on the goddess Diana in True Story,
447 respectively.
[43] Doody observed in True Story, 78 that “one is struck by the simple
fact that what we call ‘romantic love’ is not possible … without an idea of
chastity of a fresh and personal—not institutional—nature. That
chastity, too, must apply to both sexes. And it must be chosen, existentially,” she concludes, because “the sexual act is
sanctified by a personal love, freely willed, which sees the other person as
distinct and irreplaceable.” See also Amanda Craig on “The language of love” in
Austen, Telegraph.co.uk, February 12,
2006.
[44] Miles, Carnal Knowing, 153.
[45] See the discussions of Polhemus, Erotic
Faith, 48-49, Tauchert, Romancing
Jane Austen, 163, and John Wiltshire, Recreating
Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 114-117.
[46] I am indebted to Brown, God & Grace
of Body, 40-43, for helping me see the function of these murals in the
film.
[47] Tim Robey, “How I undressed Mr. Darcy,” Telegraph.co.uk,
February 3, 2006.
[48] Rowan D. Williams, “The Body’s Grace,” Theology
and Sexuality, 314.
[49] Wiltshire, Recreating Jane Austen,
122.
[50] Radway, “Readers and their Romances,” Feminisms.
570, 580.
[51] Brown, God & Grace of Body, 11,
22.
[52] See Evelyn Eaton Whitehead and James D. Whitehead, “Marriage Becomes a
Journey,” and Wilson Yates, The Protestant View of Marriage,” in Perspectives on Marriage: A Reader, 3rd ed., ed. Kieran Scott and Michael Warren
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 155, 446-50.
[53] See the remarks of Wiltshire, Recreating Jane Austen, 121 and Nixon, “Balancing the Courtship Hero,” Jane Austen in Hollywood, 24-35
[54] See Sarah Lyall, “Mr. Darcy has a mullet: A Jane Austen hero for the 21st century,” The New York Times,
November 6, 2005, and Marianne Macdonald, “Mr. Darcy on Screen,” Telegraph.co.uk, September 12, 2005.
Like Wright, Macfadyen had not read Pride
and Prejudice before making the film.
[55] Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and
the Novel, 90-91, memorably commented: “the rapport between these two from
start to finish is intimate, even racy. … The fact that Darcy and Elizabeth
form and pursue most of their relationship in secret and alone not only
electrifies this intimacy, but also pushes it to the verge of an impropriety
unique in Austen’s fiction.”
[56] Lyall, “Mr. Darcy has a mullet.”
[57] Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and
Society, 1930-1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 197.
[58] See Macfadyen’s discussion of Darcy with Daisy Garnett, “Prince Charming,” Telegraph Magazine, June 4, 2005 and
audience discussion with Wright, Benedict, “What We Do,” The Script Factory. I am grateful to Brown, God & Grace of Body, 65 for the psalm reference.
[59] Garnett, “Prince Charming,” Telegraph
Magazine.
[60] Robey, “How I undressed Mr. Darcy,” Breidenthal, “Sanctifying Nearness,” Theology and Sexuality, 344-46.
[61] Heyward, Touching our Strength, 147.
[62] Barbara Sherrod, “Pride and Prejudice:
A Classic Love Story,” Persuasions 11
(1989): 67.
[63] Joan H. Timmerman, “The Sexuality of Jesus and the Human Vocation,” Sexuality and the Sacred, 100-01.
[64] See Beverly Wildung Harrison and Carter Heyward, “Pain and Pleasure: Avoiding
the Confusions of Christian Tradition in Feminist Theory, Sexuality and the Sacred, 133, and Wiltshire’s discussion of the
erotics of domination in the novel, Recreating
Jane Austen, 119-21.
[65] Benedict, “What We Do,” The Script
Factory.
[66] William F. May, “Four Mischievous Theories of Sex: Demonic, Divine, Casual, and
Nuisance,” Perspectives on Marriage,
188.
