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!

The famous ‘Rain Scene’ from the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie is where Matthew Macfadyen’s dripping-wet Mr. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth for the first time. The ‘Lake Scene’ from the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice 1995 is the moment after Colin Firth’s Darcy has taken a swim in his lake at Pemberley, and is surprised to bump into Elizabeth. Neither scene has much in common with the book, but both have – for obvious reasons – been generously forgiven for their inauthenticity!

As Lost in Austen’s Amanda Price would put it, which scene ‘floats your boat’? Here are video clips of each scene for you to ponder. We’ve shown them both before at My Pride and Prejudice but never on the same page, for fear of causing over-excitement. Please take a look and cast your vote by leaving a comment!

Pride and Prejudice 2005 – The Rain Scene

The Lake Scene in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice 1995

It’s important to note that Darcy’s transformation is only abrupt in the sense that we don’t see it taking place gradually. It does occur over many months, but Jane Austen famously refused to write scenes involving men by themselves, or men in purely male company. The precise details of the change in Darcy are not documented minutely – indeed Darcy himself is unable to tell Elizabeth when he first fell for her (BBC Pride and Prejudice screenwriter Andrew Davies has other ideas!) – but this doesn’t mean it happened quickly or arbitrarily. It’s just that we were following Elizabeth, so didn’t get to see it taking place.

Also, while Mr Darcy is unarguably altered morally by his relationship with Elizabeth, we do not see him return to a situation like the Meryton town ball to see the change in his social character. When he returns with Bingley to Netherfield he is once again cold and difficult to read, so he hasn’t suddenly developed an ability to recommend himself to those outside his usual social circle. (Admittedly he has to listen to Mrs. Bennet’s thinly-veiled insults.) The easy manner he has with the Gardiners is displayed, of course, from the comfort of Pemberley, his own estate. In other words, some of the change in Darcy is in fact a change in the context in which he is seen by Elizabeth. The transformation is not, I think, as abrupt and extreme as critics have argued.

Nevertheless, actors playing Darcy have had to display both sides of his character while retaining Mr Darcy’s basic believability. In the 1980 BBC Pride and Prejudice series, David Rintoul’s Darcy never completely sheds his aloofness. When he greets the Gardiners at Pemberley he is friendly but retains his seriousness and something of his offish-manner. His love for Elizabeth has of course transformed him, but he remains the stiff English gentleman, rather than suddenly inhabiting the body of an overly tactile Californian therapist.

The BBC’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice series approaches Darcy in a more radical manner. Through Colin Firth’s characterization we are shown his transformation. Andrew Davies said that, in Jane Austen’s novel, we never find out much about the men, and he wanted to rectify this by exploring the male characters, most obviously Mr Darcy. Darcy’s emotional struggle is actualized physically, rather than through dialog (except for the iconic ‘I shall conquer this. I shall!’ after his fencing session.) His change isn’t minimized in the name of believability, but presented starkly and explicitly, as painful and violent.

The 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie is in a sense the opposite of the 1980 TV series. Matthew Macfadyen’s Darcy, from the first scene, appears uncomfortable and rather vulnerable. His co-star Keira Knightley said ‘on the page, Darcy reads as being very cold, but Matthew is so vulnerable through his big manliness that he gives Darcy extra qualities.’ Socially awkward and snappy with Bingley at the town ball, rather than obviously superior and cold, it is obvious from the beginning that we are not seeing the gentleman at his best. Condensing Pride and Prejudice into a single movie of course requires compromises, and the choice here appears to have been to present Darcy as a more-than-meets-the-eye character from the start.

This is, in any case, how these matters appear to me. All dispositions tend to a particular evil and mine – I confess – is to give my opinion a little too decidedly at times. Hearing others analyze Darcy is, to many, like listening to someone reviewing your kids and them giving them a score, so feel free to disagree most ardently with my account!

Lovers of the 2005 movie, or at least its leads Matthew Macfayden as Mr Darcy and Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth, can get wallpapers and screensavers from the official Pride and Prejudice movie homepage. The site is a little awkward to navigate and seems to cause problems in Safari, but if it opens properly, you can then run your mouse around the bottom-right corner. The word DOWNLOADS will appear, which you have to click in order to see a menu of delightful Pride and Prejudice screen savers and wallpapers. You can also find buddy icons and printable stationary designs to help you make an art of procrastination.

Your procrastinating friend,

Lizzy

Davies’ explanation for Darcy’s stiff manner was something he wrote in the stage direction:

‘[Darcy] sees [Elizabeth] for the second time when she’s come running across the fields because her sister’s been taken ill at Netherfield, and she wants to see how she is. And so they come face to face, and there’s Elizabeth who’s got kind of muddy up to the ankles, and her face is flushed from the exertions. And to his surprise he finds that he’s got an erection.’

How shall we punish him for such a speech? Was this a practical joke played on this proud, upstanding gentleman, or was it a genuine tool for Colin Firth to help his performance? According to Andrew Davies, it was a bit of both:

‘I just wrote this in the stage direction. It was not [a] direction to the cameraman as to where to focus his camera. But it was really just to make him laugh, I suppose. But it was also for Colin to choose this as the moment, you know, when he’s just to got to act being tremendously turned on.’

Davies also provides an interesting – and slightly more serious – explanation for his expansion of the male roles in Pride and Prejudice 1995. Jane Austen refused to write scenes in which men were either alone or in exclusively male company because she wouldn’t presume to know what they talked about or how they behave. According to Davies, ‘what that means is that we never get to understand anything about the men.’

He returned to his typical sauciness soon enough however, telling us that we wanted to remind people of the physicality of the people in the story. He therefore ‘quite shamelessly took every opportunity to get them out of their kit, whenever I could see a valid excuse for it.’

Take a look at screen shots of the scene and let us know what you think. Is he just pleased to see her?

Your unashamed, tone-lowering friend,

Lizzy

The Lake

Firstly, we should begin with some vaguely academic justifications for the 1995 Pride and Prejudice team’s showing of Colin Firth swimming in his undies, taking a bath and indulging in a sweaty fencing session. According to literary critic Cheryl Nixon, these famous scenes symbolize the emotionally tortured Mr Darcy’s ‘[chastising] the flesh for its desires.’ That’ll do nicely! Here is the lake scene again for your drooling pleasure. Wait, I mean, here it is again for your studied observation and analysis.

Andrew Davies’ ‘fleshing out’ of Darcy’s character might have even been taken further had the writer had his way. “The idea was that Darcy would jump stark naked into the lake, as chaps did back then,” Davies said back in 2003. Firth apparently vetoed the idea, sticking to the performers’ golden rule: always leave them wanting more.

The Longing Looks

The second reason why Colin Firth’s role has remained so memorable is for the long smouldering looks that gather in intensity throughout the series. Another academic, Lisa Hopkins, argues that it is not Darcy in the abstract that we want to see (not sure about that, Lisa!) Rather, we want to look at him looking at Elizabeth, and at those images that remind him of her absence. We are all, it seems, craving to be craved with an intensity that real men seldom feel. Here are some screenshots to remind you!

The Serious Stuff; Colin Firth’s characterization of Mr Darcy

Colin Firth’s great achievement was to solve what many critics have considered the central inconsistency in Mr Darcy’s character. As Cheryl Nixon put it, Firth’s Darcy is ‘a brooding loner who can neither physically contain nor verbally express his emotional battles.’ The so-called inconsistency becomes a struggle in the core of his character which is played out in full for the viewer, rather than a problematic part of the story to be skipped over. The actor explained his approach to his first ball scene thusly:

‘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 behind a veneer of snobbishness and rejection.’
Firth said that Darcy was guilty of ‘silliness’ in the form of a ‘foolish, superficial social snobbery.’ Given a sheltered and in most ways privileged upbringing, he inherited a series of assumptions about the world outside of his own small circle and, when confronted by Elizabeth, these assumptions begin to crumble. Firth agreed that Darcy is profoundly changed by his love of Elizabeth, but disagreed that the change is implausible or problematic. He was therefore able to play Darcy as the perfect romantic hero – well, at least according to voters in the Regency Awards.

References are from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: A Sourcebook, available from Amazon.

Your drooling friend,
Lizzy