darcy doesn’t sing a single note even during conversations where everyone else is singing at him that is until the argument following his first attempt at proposing to lizzy where you can see his restraint fall away
his first big solo is the letter he writes her
gelsey bell is mary and the unofficial narrator and she sits down at her piano to describe whats going on but before she can ever reveal her feelings on the matter, starting with that gelsey bell scream, mr bennet comes over and does the whole ‘that’s nice dear but give someone else a turn’
mr wickham has this huge ballad about how darcy ruined his life and its super melodramatic and touching
mr collins proposal to lizzy is an absolute bop that he gets so into he forgets for a moment what he’s doing he’s just owning the stage
wickham has a song where he’s trying to seduce lydia but she’s not even listening she’s just monologuing about how excited she is to get laid
during darcy’s second proposal he keeps hesitating waiting for lizzy to interrupt him like she has done every time before but she doesn’t say anything until he’s finished
at the end mary sits down at the piano and right where she’d usually be interrupted, kitty joins her and harmonises
jane and bingley have the adorable upbeat romantic duet which is just them being super polite like ‘oh so nice to have you here’ ‘so nice to be here’ interspersed with their inner monologue which is just them being like fucking jesus I’m so in love
the bingley sisters probably have a really cool mean solo
lady catherine has this terrifying disney villain song in the garden
“Mr. Darcy? I could more easily forgive his vanity had he not wounded mine. But no matter. I doubt we shall ever speak again.“ – Pride and Prejudice (2005)
I must have rewatched this movie fifty times, I’ll never get tired of it. Every frame is a piece of art
Pride and Prejudice takes place in a society where you’re not supposed to talk to/dance with/*cough*proposemarriagetocoughcough* anybody without first going through a highly formalized little “introduction” ritual. This can involve going to someone’s house and leaving your card, and then waiting for them to return the visit, which is what Mrs. Bennet is badgering Mr. Bennet to do re. Mr. Bingley in chapter one, or, if you’re out in public, say at a ball, you get a mutual acquaintance or master of ceremonies to do the honours and vouch for everybody’s good character. At the Meryton Assembly, Darcy refuses to be introduced to Elizabeth or anybody, because he’s a Grade A Snob. They’re all too low-ranking/provincial/unattractive to notice, and he doesn’t care who knows it. Seriously, bro, if you don’t want to dance, just go play cards in the other room with the geezers, or go home and put your grumpy ass to bed. Stop wallflowering and making a spectacle of your arrogance. You have options, here.
A few weeks later, after Darcy has maybe unbent a bit (read: decided Elizabeth is pretty), Sir William Lucas tries to introduce them again. But! Because Sir William is a country bumpkin, he goofs the phrasing in such a way as to imply Darcy is Elizabeth’s superior (“Mr. Darcy, allow me to present this lady…” instead of, “Miss Elizabeth Bennet, allow me to present this gentleman….” If a man and a woman are of equal rank, you’re supposed to introduce the gent to the lady.). Elizabeth doesn’t even let him finish. This time she declines the introduction and skedaddles, flat-out refusing to launch their acquaintanceship on any supposition of inequality.
After that, there’s really no non-mortifying way to remedy the situation, sooooo….these idiots spend the rest of the novel yammering awkwardly and irately at each other apparently without ever having been introduced, which is fucking hilarious and taboo as fuck.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Jane Austen was doing something VERY interesting here.
“The roof constitutes an introduction.”
All that business with Jane being taken ill and Elizabeth essentially inviting herself to stay at Netherfield – after that, Elizabeth is officially acquainted with everyone else who happened to be staying in the house at the time. All of them are now obligated to acknowledge each other’s correspondence and bow when they meet in public. They can quite properly converse.
The ladies at Netherfield start out imagining, and with good reason, that Elizabeth has come to ingratiate herself with them. But Elizabeth really is only there because she was worried about Jane. (In those days, it wasn’t all that unusual for a cough to turn into a corpse overnight.) Elizabeth makes a point of not intruding on her hosts at dinner, or at all, until Jane is well enough to boot Lizzie out of her room. Even after that, Elizabeth has to be pretty much begged to talk to the others there. From here in the 21st century it looks like Elizabeth just doesn’t like them much. From the Darcy/Bingley point of view, she is not presuming on their acquaintance. Elizabeth is signaling as hard as she can that, as far as she’s concerned, all of them can forget they ever met her the minute they leave Netherfield, and no hard feelings. She is not trying to turn her sister’s cold into an occasion for her own advancement.
Mr Darcy, being both shy and the constant target of opportunists of all stripes, is utterly smitten by Elizabeth’s insistence on not presuming or intruding.
Oh ho, I have lured a true geek out of the woodwork! Thank you; I stand corrected; I kind of wondered if that would happen. My source was Helena Kelly – a lecturer at Oxford who has published a decent amount of Austen scholarship – whom I hoped would have researched to hell and back before making such an audacious claim!
The Bennet women have already visited the Bingley sisters by the time Jane falls ill, so Elizabeth wouldn’t be out of bounds in showing up on their doorstep (early hour and her hair, Louisa! aside). So the piece Kelly missed is that as soon as Elizabeth spends the night at Netherfield, she’s acquainted by default with all the gentlemen too.
It’s worth noting that none of this has happened when Elizabeth first addresses Darcy. She notices him staring at Sir William’s party and cheekily demands an explanation before Charlotte dives in to extract her and hustle her off to the piano. So their relationship still begins with a bit of boundary-pushing. But your explanation of her behaviour at Netherfield is really cool, and applies neatly to both her initial appearances and that amazing bit in the garden where she refuses to “ruin the picturesque.”
I am reading scholarly works about Jane Austen and having hearteyes about obscure details in the Pemberley chapters of P&P that indicate Mr. Darcy’s sustainable land management praxis.
Okay, let’s talk about Pemberley!
Austen, as a rule, doesn’t spend many paragraphs describing locations. There’s often information to be gleaned from their names (Sense and Sensibility is full of lurking references to sexual scandals and Mansfield Park to slavery), but Longbourn just means “long stream” or “long boundary,” Netherfield means “lower field,” and Rosings’ original owner was a redhead. Meryton, a pun on “merry town,” is kind of fascinating, given the installment of the militia and the threat to stability and serenity they represent. Partying and shenanigans. Possibly a Shakespeare ref.
Longbourn barely gets any description at all. From the get-go, everyone who lives there is obsessed with other places, with getting out (except Mr. Bennet, who never wants to leave his library, never mind the house). Lady Catherine deems it small and mildly uncomfortable, which is in keeping with the theme of confinement, but also it’s Lady Catherine talking. Netherfield can’t tell us much about Bingley, who is only a tenant. Rosings is expensively, ostentatiously modern and gaudily furnished, though it has a handsome park that Lady Catherine and her stifled daughter never set foot in but Elizabeth and Darcy both frequently escape to during their stays.
So it’s notable and wonderful that Austen goes out of her way to describe Pemberley as an old-fashioned, highly successful, working estate. Its practical old Anglo-Saxon name means “Pember’s clearing.” A pember is a man who grows barley. Darcy most likely still does. As Elizabeth and the Gardiners approach and tour the house, they notice and admire its beautiful surrounding woods, and then when they wander outside, the specific word Austen uses is coppice woods. A coppice is a woodland filled with tree species that grow new shoots from their stumps when you chop them down. Darcy probably has oaks on a fifty-year cycle as well as faster-growing species such as hawthorn and hornbeam for firewood, timber and cattle fodder. Coppice forestry is functional and sustainable, and provides habitat for beasts and birds.
Darcy is the anti-John Dashwood (Dashwood, srsly), the brother in Sense and Sensibility who inherits Elinor and Marianne’s childhood estate of Norland, whose wife immediately starts making plans to hack down trees (not even coppice trees, but big, gorgeous, venerable hardwoods) to make way for a folly. Jane Austen hated follies. Also, it ought to be noted that timber was so valuable in Britain at the time that estates often had inheritance clauses that detailed who was and wasn’t allowed to chop down what.
Darcy’s a food producer and land conservator, prefers nature over fussy, ornamental landscape design, his servants and tenants like him, he gives money to the poor… and… he’s a trout fisherman! He shoots, too, as do Bingley and Hurst and Mr. Bennet, but it’s a particular mark in his favour that Austen singles him and Mr. Gardiner out as anglers. It’s a pastime that signifies a taste for contemplation and quietness and appreciation of nature, as blissfully described in The Compleat Angler; or, The Contemplative Man’s Recreation, a hugely popular travel book first published in the 1600s and reprinted often for 18th C libraries. The plot of The Compleat Angler is about the conversion of a hunter (pastime of the ultra-rich) to a fisherman who learns to love the peaceful sport. We receive ample evidence elsewhere that Darcy is a man capable of swift, decisive action and formidable effectiveness. But at Pemberley, Austen takes care to show us how he’s balanced.
Most of the information in this post comes from Margaret Doody’s Jane Austen’s Names.
You are too generous to trifle with me. I believe you spoke with my aunt last night and it has taught me to hope as I’d scarcely allowed myself before.
Molly's Monsters 