@meganphntmgrl and i talked about this endlessly when I was in NYC (and i’m trying to make her read Pride and Prejudice just to prove this point lmao). I’m not even convinced that Elizabeth has this degree of non-interest in him, though. I think she just already has a really big crush on Will and thinks, due to the circumstances of their meeting, their being the same age and everything, that they’re meant to be together. (Is that a convention of modern storytelling? Little bit, yeah, but it’s not unknown to either mythological romances or period romances - the class divide between them, and importantly, Elizabeth’s desire to be with him overwhelming her sense of convention and propriety, is what stands out to me the most as a 21st century detail.) All that said, she doesn’t expect she can actually be with Will at the start of COTBP, and seems to be really considering James’ proposal. He’s not what she wants in life, but she’s not disgusted or rolling her eyes at him. In her words, more or less, she kind of knew he might propose, and knows her father is all for the match, but it still took her off guard. She’s having to decide on a realistic course for her life and to put aside her dreams, because she’s a woman now, whether she feels ready for that or not.
COTBP is a film written by men that thinks it’s a story about a girl being forced to choose between reality and romantic fantasy, and it’s very clear that Elizabeth knows that Norrington is an appropriate match for her. Even though she does, in the story, accept his proposal as a means to an end, her acceptance is still fully serious. (And for all I might joke about her dumping him or whatever - the proposal doesn’t get a big, dramatic rejection. He sees her standing beside Will and asks if this “where [her] heart truly lies”, and she confirms it. The breakup is implicit, but he instigates it, seeing this is what she wants.) Elizabeth’s heart might belong to another man, but there’s no sulking or anger or even too much reluctance when she accepts James; she might even know they could be happy together.
When Will reminds her that her fiancé will want to know she’s safe after the climactic battle, as much as it hurts her, Elizabeth leaves.
tl;dr Elizabeth isn’t so much of a Spunky Modern Heroine Rejects All Trappings Of Period Drama stereotype that she doesn’t compromise on what she wants as society, her family and her fiancé dictate. She accepts James’ proposal and is prepared to marry him; she never tries to run off with Will; it is James who breaks their engagement for her happiness. There is no indication that Elizabeth particularly dislikes him; he just isn’t Will.
Then I just really really love their relationship dynamic in DMC and AWE because it’s not founded on expectation or obligation anymore and it isn’t hindered by propriety. As soon as those things go away, they actually relate to each other like two people who have known each other for ages. Elizabeth isn’t an unfriendly sort of person, but she doesn’t just go around relating to the other characters she doesn’t know very well. The bits of conversation she has with James Norrington in Dead Men’s Chest are more real conversation than she and Will ever have in the entire film trilogy. Will and Elizabeth get these pining, lovelorn speeches and bits of drama, but James and Elizabeth just talk like old friends. You already know about the deleted scene where they casually strike up conversation on Isla Cruces; I love the moment where he makes a comment suggesting his dark mental state, and she gives him a look I can only describe as Suddenly Interested.
And she holds his gaze for a couple of frames!
So, not like, romantic interested. But like. Realizing this guy she’s known since forever has depth, and she wants to see it.
They’re interrupted by Jack, who is in this film particularly (a lot more than I realized, actually, but on the writers’ commentary Ted and Terry cannot stop bringing it up) is hoping to get Elizabeth to himself, and clearly picks up on this moment as infringing on that hope.
Curse of the Black Pearl was consciously written to frame Elizabeth as the protagonist, and when she chooses Will at the end, it’s because he and he alone among her potential love interests embodies her romantic dream. Torn between the reality of Norrington, a man she’s always known might propose to her, a lawful man, a good and honest man, but embodying the smothering sense of obligation that comes with her class and gender role - and the reality of Jack Sparrow, a pirate she’s read about with eagerness who shows her that pirates genuinely are pretty scummy people, dirty and disloyal to everyone - Will appears to offer her a third option: someone who breaks the law, but only for the right reasons; someone who defies social convention, but only to better society.
Except Ted and Terry are men and what seems obvious to me is that the third option Elizabeth really needs is to graduate from the damsel role life appears to have slotted her into and become the romantic hero she dreams of. Sure, I buy that she loves Will, with a sort of infatuated and light-hearted love that could develop into something more but could just as easily not - but most importantly, what Will represents to her is a projection of the life she wants for herself.
And acquires, in the next two films.
Elizabeth’s narrative arc, if it weren’t tucked underneath or behind everybody else’s, is the most well-developed narrative arc in the trilogy, well beyond the first installment which is the only one that they actually wrote to particularly revolve around her. Jane Austen heroine? Maybe. Probably not. But the protagonist we deserved, most definitely.
And as much as I do like Will as a character - I actually think his storyline would have gotten the resolution and impact it deserved if he hadn’t been treated as the protagonist, as much as I think hers would have been, but this post isn’t an excuse for me to air my grievances lol - the character whose storyline most follows hers is Norrington.
Her arc is about finding her place in the world, rejecting the specific oppressive reality she believes is inevitable as a well-bred 18th century female and embracing the heroine swashbuckler she’s wanted to be all her life but projected onto male love interests. And this arc is a microcosm of the larger plot in a way no one else’s is - Beckett’s threat to end the age of piracy and keep the entire ocean under his thumb threatens her specific character growth and reflects the world she’s trying to escape in a way that is not half so resonant for anybody else.
Will’s story is, excepting turns of the plot in which he’s trying to save Elizabeth, entirely about his relationship with his father, and how that affects his identity. It has nothing to do with society beyond the tensions in the first film where he wants to be respectable but has learned his father really was a pirate all along - after that film, there is no thematic or actual connection to society in Will’s plot, which is why it gets so exclusively connected to the supernatural storyline. But Norrington’s arc is also about his place in the world. After the first film, in which he and Jack and Will operate as foils to one another, each of them demonstrating one of the paths Elizabeth may follow as she grows increasingly experienced and consequently disillusioned, Norrington has his fall from grace and subsequent identity crisis. His maintaining the wig and coat while a drunken, miserable wreck on Tortuga, and his willingness to throw everything away to regain his former standing, implies that the role of Naval Officer was the whole extent of his identity. So, yes, the man lacks a viable personality in COTBP - it works out to seem intentional by the sequel, because it becomes clear the role he was inhabiting was the only person he knew how to be, and without it he discovered how little of a person he was. This is a grim inversion of Elizabeth’s storyline. Elizabeth becomes more and more her true self, including symbolically casting off and manipulating her wedding gown, while Norrington symbolically clings to the relics of his former life and wallows in existential despair.
By the time of AWE, Norrington has discovered that his is not, in fact, nothing, without his social role - as evidenced by his willingness to betray all that he must stand for when that role has been resumed, to “choose a side”, and to choose Elizabeth’s. But yes… then he dies.
Both in the substance of their actual conversations, which, owing to their rarely being about love, convey a greater sense of compatibility than Will and Elizabeth’s conversations never being so casual and often running to the dramatic, and the symmetry of their narrative arcs, the story of Elizabeth and James Norrington really would have made a perfect romance.
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