With a little temporal leeway, mightn’t we find the potent fantasy-figure emerging from the interaction of Jane Austen’s imagination with her cultural moment? If so, it might not be too huge a leap to think of Darcy as well as Byron and Byron’s heroes as some of the ancestors of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre?Are you with me?Let me take another jump to du Maurier’s Maxim de Winter (and, less plausibly, to Bram Stoker’s Dracula). These “men” share with Darcy the “implacability” of resentments and his “unforgiving temper.” There are differences: the arrogance of Austen’s hero isn’t as thoroughly assaulted and humbled as that of most of his successors—many ending up dead or mutilated. Also they have women who love their tyranny, and each, from Mr. Rochester to Maxim de Winter, is encouraged in his sadism by experience with a first angry, masochistic or “mad” wife. (I saw this when I read Millett’s enraged prose—and that most disconcerting of spinoffs, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which introduced us to the misery Mr. Rochester hides in his attic.)Few of Austen’s first readers noticed Darcy. They enthused over her heroine and the minor comic characters. An exception was Annabella Milbanke. She found the interest of the novel “very strong, especially for Mr. Darcy.” Like poor Isabella Linton, who, irresistibly attracted to the would-be abuser, becomes Mrs. Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Annabella paid for such “interest” when she married rather than fantasized about such a man. She lived out the rest of her life as the estranged Lady Byron.The line of avatars has insinuated itself into cinematic history. Laurence Olivier, who played Darcy in the 1940 adaptation, was also Du Maurier’s Maxim de Winter in the same year; in the previous one, he played Heathcliff. In the 1952 BBC adaptation Darcy was Peter Cushing, best known for his roles in Hammer Horror vampire films. In the book Mr. Darcy startles Elizabeth by emerging from the stables just as she’s leaving his house, but the encounter with wet Colin Firth draws also from Heathcliff’s emergence from the shadows and of Jane Eyre’s first sight of Rochester, galloping into sight on his horse, his great white and black dog running with him. Firth’s Darcy is Austen out of the Brontës.
To the editor,There is a certain relief in knowing one’s life has been "Great Expectations" rather than "Wuthering Heights." Dickens, for all his moralizing, offers a path of transformation. Pip, though foolish in his youth, learns, adapts, and ultimately finds meaning beyond illusion. His journey is one of disillusionment, but also survival. Brontë’s world, by contrast, is a storm without end. "Wuthering Heights" is obsession, revenge, and self-inflicted torment. There is no redemption, only ghosts circling the past.To live a "Great Expectations" life is to have been misled by youthful ambition but not destroyed by it. We all begin as Pips, dazzled by false idols, but the fortunate among us emerge wiser. Heathcliff never does. His tragedy is one of stagnation, of passion curdled into vengeance. He is the embodiment of those who cannot let go, who live as if their suffering grants them nobility rather than proving their own self-destruction.A life of "Great Expectations" may be one of setbacks and disappointment, but it allows for growth. It acknowledges that while reality often falls short of our illusions, we are not doomed to wander the moors, howling at what was lost. The world is filled with Heathcliffs – those who believe their torment is proof of some grand tragedy rather than their own refusal to move forward. There is no nobility in clinging to ghosts.We do not always get the lives we expect, but we can be grateful that we are not trapped in an endless cycle of regret. If nothing else, that is its own small victory.Joe CozartGrand Forks
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