REVIEW: The Reward for Reading Jane Austen is Not Mr. Darcy

On a Saturday morning, I run into the bookstore on 69th and Broadway where I work part-time, unusually tardy because of my staying up late to finish both a reading for my grad school course and a campaign proposal for the literary marketing and PR firm where I also work. I think: It should feel like a privilege that I am able to surround myself with books, yet the academic and publishing worlds I yearn to join are absolute monsters. Higher education has become increasingly less accessible because of rising tuition costs, and the trade publishing world because of mass conglomeration. Like with an emotionally unavailable situationship partner, I keep waiting for these two worlds to call me first so that I can help “make them better.” This perhaps explains my exhaustion on this Saturday: It is mere disillusionment of the landscape for reading. But, upon my entrance into the store, on the new paperback releases table in the front, I see a new book with a cover that immediately wakes me up.

On the front cover of English Professor Rachel Feder’s recent part-literary criticism, part-self-help book The Darcy Myth, there is a white silhouette of Michelangelo’s David sporting Regency Era attire. His face is unmistakable, his gaze as entrancing as ever, yet there appear to also be pink devil horns drawn onto the top of his head. The symbol of youthful beauty, one of the most iconic works of Italian classical antiquity, has been transfigured into a devil by a University of Denver faculty member! It may be reasonable to wonder if, had it indeed been the intention to create a problematic figure out of what is an object of apparent perfection, this portrayal would completely sully or ruin the image of Michelangelo’s David. I posed this as a question to the first customer of the day to purchase this book, another young woman trying to enter the academic and publishing worlds.

“No!” she exclaimed. “If anything, I think it makes him look even hotter.”

This is precisely the issue that Feder addresses in The Darcy Myth: Generations of people, primarily women, have been conditioned to be attracted to and to love a Devil figure by our favorite pieces of art and literature, especially Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, while those figures function to propagate the patriarchal, capitalist structures that bind us, such as in limiting access to the forums where, for example, changes to academic policy are being made. The most dramatic claim that Feder puts forth is that the ongoing belief in the myth created by Austen puts women’s bodily autonomy at constant risk, as we remain faithful to the misogynistic boundaries of the Regency. While the relationship at the center of the novel between the characters Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy remains a source for our shared cultural conception of romance, from which countless other popular books, TV shows, movies, and songs that talk about love draw inspiration, Feder notices in the set-up of their relationship the stuff made of gothic horror stories.

Generations of women have paid the price for embracing semi-toxic love or emotional and physical abuse in the hopes that their patience and adoration will, in the end, reform the rakes, turn them into “Mr. Darcy.” This distracts us from the real social change necessary to heal our communities, or so Feder claims. In Feder’s attempt to make these difficult conversations that are usually reserved for academic settings and Reddit discussion boards (looking at you, r/janeausten) accessible to everyone—in a way, facilitating a type of public forum—she argues we can begin to divest from the hold that Pride and Prejudice’s central archetype has on our shared cultural understanding of love by rereading it.

I won’t lie: This works as more of an entertaining self-help book than a serious work of literary criticism to reference in academic papers when considering new takes on rereading classic literature like Pride and Prejudice through the lens of its modern adaptations. (Sidenote: How would you even cite a section of the book that features an “Are You Chasing a Darcy?” quiz?) This is not the first book to argue for the advantages of investigating the impact that Mr. Darcy has had on contemporary romance: In 2020, Dr. Gabrielle Malcolm published her book, There’s Something About Darcy, which also touches on Mr. Darcy acting as a literary predecessor to other “bad boys” like Edward Rochester, Heathcliff, and even Dracula, as well as on the echoes of him to appear in pop culture today. Among other Austen scholars who have started mining the uncomfortable and even violent sides to Austen’s texts, Professor William Galperin published a wildly entertaining essay in 2011, in which he was able to clearly depict the dark, multilayered, and complicated reality that Austen’s women lived in, and how faithful film adaptations like Clueless can help us in seeing Austen’s original arguments about that reality. Rereading through new media can lead to different rewards, we are shown time and time again.

What distinguishes Feder is that she chooses to draw observations not only from her academic research but also from her personal experiences rereading Pride and Prejudice while acting as a professor, mother, and confidante to young women who grew up internalizing the “Darcy myth.” These young women are to some degree familiar with the myth, even if they have never read Pride and Prejudice themselves. They are also likely to have seen new twists on Austen’s archetype appear in popular twenty-first century television shows, like Chuck Bass on Gossip Girl—who in the pilot attempts to rape not one but two girls, only for him in the rest of the series to be considered somewhat redeemable, even if he remains somewhat devilishly powerful and sexy, and for those attempted rapes to never be mentioned again. The young female students in Feder’s class are reminded constantly by pop culture and by experiences in their own lives that they are, to some extent, trained to spend their time, energy and emotions pursuing emotionally unavailable men. This is the content that Taylor Swift’s songs cover often. “If,” as Feder writes, “we are trained from childhood to invest ourselves in men who treat us poorly, aren’t we more likely to end up in abusive situations and under threats of assault?”

There is an urgent need to reread Pride and Prejudice, should this be the case, and an even more urgent one to rethink our high school and university curriculum that has endorsed this disheartening interpretation of love in modern culture.

The most compelling parts of The Darcy Myth that focused on rereading came when Feder explored Pride and Prejudice as a Gothic novel rather than as a comedy of manners. Feder carefully documents Austen’s love of the genre, noting her reference to author Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho in Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Unlike Austen, Radcliffe’s books frequently featured the supernatural, but both writers were concerned with a culture that left women with little control over their lives. Mr. Darcy may not have been leading that culture or been the one dictating the laws that prevented Lizzy and her sisters from inheriting their father’s estate. He may not have even been a “bad boy” in the way that we use that term today, since part of the plot for Pride and Prejudice is that Lizzy eventually sheds her prejudice and sees goodness in him. What earns him the moniker of a “bad boy,” even after all of that, is that Mr. Darcy is an emblem of the patriarchal culture that subjugates women.

The overly colloquial (as opposed to academic or pompous) language used in this book suggests that Feder hopes to offer a space where the field of public humanities can be introduced to younger people—or, rather, where the lines between the arts and humanities and research, teaching, and service can be blurred to achieve social and racial justice reforms. This way, literary scholarship becomes more interactive for non-scholars who consume the same media but do not have as much access to the university. Let’s just admit: Wouldn’t it be kind of funny if a project as serious as what I describe, over which academics and organizations have been laboring for decades, were to be practiced and to work most effectively on a platform like TikTok?

Already, on the publisher Quirk Books’ TikTok account, Feder has contributed to a video series where she offers her “3 Tips to Help You Survive Halloween Without Falling in Love with a Monster,” which seems like an example of public humanities occurring. If Feder’s book marketing campaign were truly successful, in my opinion, she would be able to reach more of her target audience—i.e., young, critically literate readers who are perhaps dealing with a toxic relationship they were taught was romantic—over social media apps like Instagram and TikTok, who would likely repost her original content or create their own. The interactive readers would probably share their own encounters with people who embody “the Darcy myth,” or they would share their edits of pop culture moments when the myth was propagated. On social media, where algorithms can pair users with the content they are interested in, such as Austen fans with The Darcy Myth, art hypothetically becomes more public and community-based. In the book, Feder explicitly states her desire for discussions to develop between students and higher education faculty members to cover how we should rethink or ameliorate our English syllabi across the country so that while we are reading and analyzing Lizzy and Darcy’s relationship, for instance, professors and students can address the social justice issues like relationship abuse and abortion rights that persist from when Austen was writing.

That is too much to ask from a book like this, where an English professor as author does not even teach readers how to properly read Austen. The issue in Feder’s set up, or more generally in her composition of this book, is that it doesn’t guide her target audience back to books as the source of their ideas for romance or to the scholarship that may help them deconstruct the harmful tropes that the “Darcy myth” perpetuates. Instead of teaching us to look beyond the characters as cultural objects, Feder places a lot of faith in readers’ ability to be more critical about the popular content they consume on a day-to-day basis and not buy into the status quo, despite having demonstrated that “anything popular [] has the ability to reinforce the status quo, sometimes even while subverting it.” In other words, the type of public forum this book promotes does not have the power to change the university or even the humanities. Feder is a writer who excels at speaking to a mainstream audience. As a professor, I am sure that she also excels at speaking to an academic audience. In The Darcy Myth, however, she has not demonstrated that she is a writer who can bridge these two audiences and initiate a discussion between them.

In the weeks since The Darcy Myth first appeared on the new paperback releases table, sales for the book have doubled, at least in the bookstore where I work. I see customers of all ages and academic backgrounds have the same glimmer in their eyes as I did when I first saw this book—be it attraction to the devilish David or excitement at the prospect of reading criticism of Austen’s books. The customers and I begin sharing our encounters with the myth or our favorite new twists on it on TV. It is rather uplifting to see a book, or even the idea of a book, generate this much dialogue between strangers. Encounters like this, books like this, remind me of the promise in the landscape for reading.