The Romantic Hero..

Women across generations have loved him and have voted for Mr. Darcy as the man they would most like to go on a date with. He is also the fictional character women would most like to invite to a dinner party - which strikes me as odd, as surely Mr Darcy would spend the evening either gazing at the ceiling grunting with boredom or glowering at the guests.

Mr. Darcy is the perfect feminist romantic hero. Mr. Darcy is sexy and compelling because he is a strong and powerful figure and also because he respects the strength and power of Elizabeth Bennet. Despite the fact that Elizabeth Bennet is rather unglamorous (with very embarrassing relatives, looks not quite up to par with her sister’s, and very little wealth), Mr. Darcy sees her true worth. Elizabeth Bennet is Mr. Darcy’s equal in intelligence, wit, sense, and character, and Mr. Darcy loves her for it. The fantasy is to win the utter respect, admiration and passion of a man of great intelligence and great character, especially a man who is not easily won….

The smear on Darcy's character made by Mr. Wickham's misrepresentations are exactly what the emerging middle class (to which Austen belonged) would think abhorrent. The rich are free to do as they please, but the middle class heroines of Jane Austen's novels always reserve the right to judge them by their own standards. Often the very fact that a man belongs to the upper classes can make him fall short of these moral standards - as is the case for Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park.

Gone are the ties to the Grunge Era, when girls swooned for the slightly unshaven, plaid-wearing skaters playing hackly sack in the quad. Now, a man is never more attractive to most women than when standing mildly aloof in his white button-down shirt and prep-school tie, copping his smart-guy attitude.

Here is the rub - Austen leaves us to assume her heroines' marriages are happy despite portraying very few idyllic marriages in the rest of her texts. Also, Austen's deification as a novelist is such that one hardly dares to point out that when it comes to marriage and what goes on behind the bedroom door, she herself had no first-hand experience.

But as modern women with their wealth of relationship experience and all the benefits brought about by feminism, shouldn’t they know better? The fact is dark, smoldering, moody, charismatic, arrogant Darcy types, whom they hate at first sight and later fall in love with, often - particularly after they have married them - turn out to be rigid, dominating and controlling.
What message is this Darcy fixation sending to men? On the one hand, women say they want men who are emotionally intelligent, sensitive, flexible, who enjoy sharing equally and are fun to be with. But these same women are swooning over a fictional character who is the epitome of the dominant patriarchal male. No wonder men are confused.

And as for Gurinder Chadha, she need to revisit Pride and Prejudice again cuz’ I doubt a young Martin Henderson will ever fit as a handsome Mr. Darcy in his early 40’s. I will leave you all with my favorite words by Mr. Darcy, that I doubt any man in the world would ever say:

“My object was to show you by every civility in my power that I was not so mean as to resent the past; and I hoped to obtain your forgiveness, to lessen your ill-opinion, by letting you see that your reproofs had been attended to.”