There's Something About Darcy by Gabrielle Malcolm

Author:Gabrielle Malcolm [Malcolm, Gabrielle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Quill
Published: 2019-11-11T05:00:00+00:00

Hugh Thomson illustration, 1894

Thomson’s illustrations of Austen were set in an idealised, non-industrial nineteenth-century world without grimness or deprivation. This effect is now light-heartedly known as the ‘Cranfordisation’ of Austen. This is in reference to the 2007 BBC adaptation of Mrs Gaskell’s collection of social sketches Cranford (published from 1851–1853) that depict the idyllic community of Cranford in Cheshire. Based on Gaskell’s childhood, it was a hugely popular series on the BBC running from 2007–2011. Set in the 1840s – the decade in the nineteenth century known as ‘the hungry forties’ due to nationwide famine – the Cranford stories from the BBC contain none of that realism. They are comic and gentle with Christmas-card Victoriana as a backdrop to the tight-knit group of, mostly female, characters. Amongst the cast was Julia Sawalha (as Jessie Brown), after she had come to prominence as Lydia Bennet in 1995.

As Thomson showed with his illustrations, and the BBC reinforced, there is a desire amongst readers and viewers to have an idealised, escapist nineteenth-century idyll. Thomson’s images are still highly popular today, with the 1890s editions highly collectible. Television Darcy began to overtake this idealised imagery with Rintoul’s Regency looks going some way to change it. He is more than just handsome and snobbish. He is given the opportunity to smoulder, with his sharp cheekbones, dark colouring and fashionably kiss-curled hair. Garvie’s Elizabeth is a clear challenge and, as future mistress of Pemberley, is destined to bring something exciting to the position. Will, as Weldon speculates, her reading of Wollstonecraft cause revolution on the estate?

Weldon went on to write controversial works such as her 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil that was adapted for television in 1986 by the BBC. It won the BAFTA for best drama series. Her ‘macabre’ and ‘cautionary’ tale, as the Times called it, about modern marriage and adultery, has a rich and beautiful woman Mary Fisher (Patricia Hodge) victorious in love over the plain and frumpy Ruth (Julie T Wallace), or so it would seem. Ruth, with her large, awkward body and hairy facial moles, decides to exact revenge.

This satire on the risks of adultery and the competitiveness of love and marriage echoes some of Austen’s plotlines, showing Weldon to be a successor in this mode of story-telling and a suitable adaptor of Austen’s beloved novel to the screen. It is because Austen’s novel and her hero are not simple or simply idealised that the drama and variety in them needs to be drawn out for the screen.

Weldon went on to adopt Austen’s archetypes in a distinctly unorthodox fashion with Darcy’s Utopia (1990). In this modern morality tale about marriage, society and money, Professor Julian Darcy is the figure behind the action because the plot circulates around his charismatic wife, Eleanor Darcy, and her social revolution of ‘Darcynomics’. She bases her philosophy on idealised romantic love. But more on this unconventional interpretation of the world of Darcy in chapter eight.

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