I know it’s been a while since we’ve posted anything here, we have not given up the blog, but have all been quite busy.  Today I have our first guest review, a review of three stories with a common theme,

By Miss Millicent Bluestocking

 

Being Mrs Darcy by Lucy S

Why someone might want to read it: If they love “angst.” If they enjoy long, complicated sentences with multiple embedded phrases (and parenthetical asides) that still, somehow, remain grammatically correct and mechanically clean. If they like it when an author is ambitious in shooting for some psychological depth.

Why they might not like it: If they don’t like long stories full of turgid prose, with practically no action except for characters’ chewing, grunting, and thinking about things that they then decide not to say. If they don’t like to read about psychological abuse.

Regency AU, FMS, rated MA at AHA

 

A Covenant of Marriage by Colin (cpodom)

Why someone might want to read it: If they like their heroes tall, dark and abusive. If they enjoy sudden genre changes in the middle of a story. If they value a story that clips right along and has few mechanical errors.

Why they might not like it: If they think a magical penis is unlikely to be able to overcome a woman’s anger and resentment at having been sold, like a barnyard animal, by her relatives to a man she hates.

Regency AU, rated MA, dubcon, FMS at AHA & AU

 

A Willful Misunderstanding by Alex9903

Why someone might want to read it: If they enjoy over-the-top melodrama. If they enjoy seeing their heroines suffer from brutality and disrespect at the hands of the men they love. If they like clean prose that keeps on moving forward.

Why they might not like it: They like their P&P characters to stay in character: clever, full of life, and not particularly weepy.

Regency AU, rated PG-13 at AHA and D&L

 

Hello, my loves! Won’t you sit down next to me on the sofa? You can just push the cat over, she doesn’t mind. Tea? I’m so glad you could come by for a chat. There are some JAFF things I’ve been dying to talk to you about, and you know I don’t say that lightly since I’m 103 years old.

We all have our reasons for enjoying Jane Austen’s work and for reading and writing JAFF, of course. Some of us like the romance, some of us like the social commentary, some of us like the humor. And apparently some of us—a lot of us, judging from the warm reception some of these stories receive!—enjoy seeing our spunky, smart Regency heroine tortured sadistically by our normally honorable, upright, willing-to-change-for-love hero, Mr Darcy. Sometimes the mistreatment is psychological, and sometimes it’s physical, down to and including sexual assault. But we’re supposed to think it’s all right because, after all, it’s Mr Darcy. Even though he does loads of horrifying things to our heroine, things for which he sometimes really ought to be locked up, things that degrade, demean, and harm her, we know deep down that it can’t be too serious because underneath all that he’s really a good guy, and it’s nothing some good loving can’t fix. What, you’re surprised I know about that sort of thing? Ha! I was young in the 1920s, you know.

What is going on here? Why do these authors want our heroine brought so low, and why do they want us to sympathize with her abuser, a man who has all the power in the relationship because of his class, his money, and his sex? Oh, I’m sorry, my loves, I know that’s the old-fashioned word for it, sex. It’s just how I learned to say it, you know, when my mother was pushing me in the baby carriage in the Woman Suffrage Parade—Votes for women! “The right to vote shall not be abridged on account of sex!” and that kind of thing. What do we say now? Yes, gender, that’s it.

I don’t really know the answer to that question, my loves, as to why these writers want us to sympathize with the abuser, even though, as I told you, I’m 103 years old and I’ve seen all there is to see. I’ve done all there is to do at one time or another, too! I know you don’t believe that. But please bear with me as I try to think these things through.

Let’s talk about this first story. In Being Mrs Darcy, Elizabeth is forced into a marriage with Mr Darcy against both their wills—the classic Forced Marriage Scenario. He has not had his character transformed yet, been Hunsfordized, so in his contempt for her and her social class, he ignores her, belittles her, and deprives her of contact with her family. Eventually he decides he must have sex with her anyway, and she acquiesces out of duty, in the pathetic hope she’ll have a baby who will love her. At least someone will treat her like a human being, she reasons. Mr Darcy grunts, ruts, and snuffles away in bed like a pig looking for truffles. Don’t you just hate that? But she is resigned to her fate because, after all, she is his property. After months of suffering, during which people chew, snuffle, and grunt a lot more, and think things but don’t say them, finally something  dramatic happens—or better  yet, something finally happens. It has to do with a hair clip, I think, and it all brings to mind the madeleine in that awful man’s book. Oh, that reminds me, cookie? Here, have some more tea, too. Anyway, thanks to the hair clip, Mr Darcy begins to see the error of his ways, realizes he is a terrible person, and resolves to be better. And he is a terrible person, mind you, not just a snob and an insulter of perfectly attractive young women and breaker-up of sweet young couples, but an awful psychological abuser who should never be allowed to have any kind of human relationship. But everything turns out all right because he is Mr Darcy, and he prostrates himself and apologizes repeatedly. Elizabeth has become so beaten down that she has accepted his treatment as normal, in a complete reversal of all we know and love about Elizabeth Bennet. And they live happily ever after, at least once they have tamed his mean, vicious, lying sister. That seems to be another theme in these stories, come to think of it, but we’ll save that for another day.

In A Covenant of Marriage, Elizabeth does not go to Derbyshire, does not see Mr Darcy at Pemberley, and as a consequence the family is ruined when Lydia runs off with Wickham and Mr D is not there to go after her. Also, Elizabeth still dislikes Mr Darcy because he separated Jane and Bingley, the latter having married Georgiana Darcy, who becomes a shrill, vicious matron. Several years after Lydia’s disgrace, the Bennet girls are all still unmarried and bound for the poorhouse whenever Mr Bennet eventually  dies. Somehow Mr Darcy decides that he must have Elizabeth, now. He assumes she still dislikes him, and indeed he is right that she actually does hate him more now than ever, having become horribly and irrationally—very, very irrationally, we are repeatedly told—embittered in the ensuing years. He appeals to her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner for help, and they collude with Mr Darcy in a plan to have Mr Bennet force her to marry him, in order to secure the futures of all the sisters. Why do they do this, you might ask? It is because in her irrational bitterness she is clearly unable to make reasonable judgements about what she wants, what would make her happy, and about her own best interests in general. They also advise Mr Darcy to exercise his marital rights as soon as possible, indeed the very day of their quick marriage. Why, you ask? Just because, but also mainly to break her spirit, because that’s what we love about Elizabeth Bennet, her broken spirit. The author assures us repeatedly that this is what forced marriages were really like, and that the story is historically accurate in every way. Imagine our surprise, then, when the resistant Lizzy is quickly brought to heel first by the judicious use of the great Mr Darcy’s fingers to break her hymen (complete with an orgasm! Hooray! I bet you thought I didn’t know that word, either, did you, my pets?), and then by the wondrous healing power of his magical willy, the application of which transforms her from outraged, rebellious chattel into a lovestruck sex addict within a day or so. Goodness! That’s one powerful John Thomas! And we suddenly shift gears from historical realism to bizarre fantasy. Also, it’s just fine that she didn’t really quite consent at first, because, after all, he’s Mr Darcy, and he knows better than she does what she wants and needs. What a relief! Who knows what awful fate would have befallen her if he hadn’t been there to point that out. Fortunately, they live happily ever after since he’s around to make sure she understands her own desires from then on.

In A Willful Misunderstanding, Elizabeth finds herself cast out by Mr Darcy shortly after their quick and apparently not well-considered marriage when he listens to the vicious lies of his spoiled, nasty sister Georgiana, who first hints and then claims directly that Elizabeth is having an affair with George Wickham. Of course, it is Georgiana who was having the affair with him. Mr Darcy is too proud to ask Elizabeth about it or investigate the rumors independently. Why? He believes Georgiana implicitly because she is a Darcy, and because he hasn’t been Hunsfordized yet. Elizabeth also doesn’t ask him why he’s first ignoring and treating her with contempt, and then canceling all their social engagements as he becomes increasingly controlling and jealous. Apparently they both have a bad case of the stoopids. So he sends Elizabeth off to his sort-of-abandoned estate in Scotland where she is mistreated, barely fed, and ignored by Mrs Danvers the servants, only to discover that she is pregnant. Naturally, she runs away and goes off to work, as one does in such circumstances, as a companion for a rich, understanding, increasingly demented widow who dies and leaves her a bunch of money in return for keeping the dementia a secret. Ah, if only I had a fortune to leave to you, my loves. Meanwhile, Mr Darcy has destroyed her reputation, not asked her for her side of the story, not trusted her at all even after months of blissful marital copulation, and sent her off to suffer while refusing to read any of her letters begging him to take her back and saying how desperately she loves him in spite of his unspeakable cruelty. He finally realizes Georgiana made it all up, sees he has been a truly terrible, awful, despicable person, and spends the next several years trying to find Elizabeth, not knowing she has given birth to his son. In the end, after lots (lots!) more twists and turns and deceit and double-crossing, of course he finds her. She reluctantly agrees to let him see their son, eventually agreeing to take him back because he is reformed and promises to treat her with respect, or at least as a human being, from then on. Of course she really has no choice because they are married, and the boy belongs to Darcy legally. At first that’s why she concedes. Then, of course, she falls in love with him again, as you do after having been treated like that. Through all of this we’re supposed to feel just a bit sorry for Mr Darcy. After all, he recognizes his pride got just a little out of control, and we know he is such a nice man underneath the abusive, jealous, domineering exterior, because he is so very, very sorry afterwards. Sure, he makes some errors in judgment, but, hey, who doesn’t? They live happily ever after.

So, what is going on here, my loves? Why do these authors put dear Lizzy through all this? Part of it is certainly the desire to create that manufactured, artificial drama called “angst.” You have to put the characters through Gothic-level brutality to be entertaining, it seems. Where is this coveted melodrama if you don’t have stabbings, assault, unwanted sexual relations, and psychological abuse? Well, it’s not in the works of Jane Austen, that’s for sure. Is the rest of it some kind of religious allegory of purification through suffering, and the importance of female submission and forgiveness for male transgressions, no matter how serious? In these stories, at least, I don’t really think so because there aren’t any other explicitly religious themes.

In that case, what still mystifies me is why we are supposed to forgive (in the cases of AWM and BMD), and even to sympathize with, Lizzy’s abuser. His name alone signals to the reader that he is, at heart, a good person, no matter what torments he dishes out. If his name were George Wickham, we would know better. The problem is that having Lizzy fall in love with her abuser makes her a victim of the Stockholm Syndrome, unrecognizable as our plucky, independent heroine. Having our sympathies, too, lie with her abuser makes us as readers complicit in her mistreatment. Yay, patriarchy! Do we still call it that? I’m not sure, since my subscription to Ms. Magazine lapsed when I moved into this new assisted living facility. You see, she has to find a way to live contentedly with him in spite of everything he has done to her because, after all, in these Regency stories there is no hope for divorce, no recourse for abused women and children, no escape from psychological and physical violence. She’d better fall in love with her captor and convince herself she’s happy about it, or she’ll be really miserable, right? Honestly, my loves. These Mr Darcys are not simply shy, or misunderstood, or snobby, or afflicted with any of the other character deficiencies to which JAFF usually ascribes his bad behavior. They are monsters you would counsel your girlfriends to stay a million miles away from, and might even be moved to call the authorities on. There is no reasonable way to redeem them, even if they are named Mr Darcy, and no matter how much they may apologize in the end. That’s just what abusers do, of course.

And of course two of these stories bring up some basic problems in many stories of the FMS genre.  Regency-era men had all the power in marriage, even if they weren’t entirely in it of their free will, themselves. Their wives had to submit to them in every way, like it or not. And that’s the stuff of nightmares, not fluffy romantic fiction. I know this because I talked to my great-grandmother, the English one, about it. She lived to be 136, you know. Thirteen children over 25 years, five of them surviving to adulthood! Anyway, what she told me about her life wasn’t so different from when I was a girl in a lot of ways. Why do you think I never married? I wanted to have my own money, get credit from the bank in my own name to buy my own gosh-darn Model T automobile, and not have to give birth to a new baby every two years, ready or not! Don’t go thinking I lived like a nun, oh no. But I do like my independence. That’s why Harold and I decided we would just live together for all those years. Now there was a man who took a woman seriously and understood what real love was all about, even if I never could convince him to clean the litter box. Where was I? Oh, yes. I just think that if we’re going for real historical accuracy, then for goodness’ sake go ahead and have Mr Darcy rape his wife and mistreat her and whatever other sick things an author can think of, because those things did happen in history. But don’t have them fall in love, and don’t pretend he could ever be worthy of her regard. Good grief! He’s a bad person, he’ll treat her badly again, and they will live unhappily ever after, because his actions are unforgivable. Give me my dear Harold or canon Mr Darcy any day over these dreadful fellows. Even if canon Mr Darcy is a bit of a stick-in-the-mud for my tastes.

There must be more imaginative ways to create dramatic tension than to abuse, torture, and beat down our heroine. Let’s go ahead and find some of those ways, all right, my darlings?

More tea?