Darcy’s behavior at the ball scene has the capacity to shock me every time I read it. We know that he is misunderstood, that he is shy, and that he has the awesome responsibilities of his estate to consider. And yet, on every read, I am offended anew by his treatment of Elizabeth. Here is the moment from the 1995 series:

Getting this thoroughly unpleasant, early Darcy right is a major challenge for dramatizers. We have an entire novel to get used to his transformation, but making it plausible over a movie or TV series is a different matter. We have to dislike him, but not so much that we put down the book, leave the cinema or don’t bother to tune in the following week. Here is how Darcy’s offish exterior was treated in the 2005 movie and 1995 series:

Colin Firth (1995)

Colin Firth explains his character’s behaviour as follows:

I agree to go to this party with my friend Bingley. He encourages me: ‘Come on, it’ll be a great party with lots of women.’ I arrive. I’m terribly shy – terribly uneasy in social situations anyway. This is not a place I’d normally go to, and I don’t know how to talk to these people. So I protect myself underneath a veneer of snobbishness and rejection. Bingley immediately engages with the most attractive girl in the room, and this makes me even less secure.

As Firth explains, Darcy was, by the terms of the day, Bingley’s superior. Therefore, having his friend suggest that the he make do with the plainer sister would have compounded Darcy’s foul mood.

Matthew Macfadyen (2005)

Director Joe Wright’s explanation of Lizzy and Darcy’s early relationship is a little simpler:

In the beginning, Darcy can’t deal with the fact that he fancies Lizzy. They are like children in the playground – in the way that kids pull hair because they don’t know how to express their feelings. He needs her to tease him and to be able to lighten up with her.

In Matthew Macfadyen’s own take on the early Darcy, he mentions the proposal scene, set of course in the pouring rain in the 2005 film:

He is a serious young man, with huge responsibilities for his estate, and he has never met a young woman like her. When he proposes to her, first explaining how unsuitable a match she is, he makes that explanation out of integrity, not arrogance.

It’s interesting that in each of these explanations, there is an attempt to justify (or at least rationalize) his behavior, to link the early Darcy to the gentlemen that Lizzy bumps into at Pemberley. By contrast, Jane Austen was content to paint a pretty simple picture of his character after the ball scene:

[Mr Darcy's] manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud; to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.

So this is how Darcy’s apparent inconsistency has been explained by dramatizers. Please add your thoughts below!