Mark Darcy’s Ex-Wife: A Sympathetic Anti-Heroine?
*Warning this may use casually racist language and discuss anti-Asian discrimination, especially in regards to women, I put this here in case any traumas may be brought up, I’ll start off with a awesome video*
“Oh! Did I mention Malcolm and Elaine are bringing Mark with them to Una’s New Year’s Day Turkey Curry Buffet? He’s just back from America, apparently. Divorced. He’s looking for a house in Holland Park. Apparently he had the most terrible time with his wife. Japanese. Very cruel race.” Bridget Jone’s Diary (The first fucking page!)
In this time of #TimesUp, the #MeToo Movement, Black Lives Matter, and news of anti-Asian racism and hate crimes; this needs to be brought up, like yesterday or forever-ago. I’m not bothering to link here but there is an exploration in recent years, including ham-fistedly by the author, of the sexism inherent in the films and novel and of the characters and how they’d operate in this new age. But there is one big thing missing from this discussion: the casual racism of the franchise, especially towards the most major character of color.
Okay let’s talk about Mark’s ex-wife who cheated on him (in the movie she is a Japanese British woman who cheats on him with Daniel Cleaver, so we might go with that continuity a little). This is a woman we never meet or see or hear from; we do not know her reasoning for cheating on a universally beloved Sex God, we do not know what she does for a living, her hopes and dreams, her dislikes, her fears, her insecurities, we don’t know how she feels about her in-laws, her family life, her childhood, what cartoons she watched, her favorite food, which clothes make her feel good, her favorite sports, if she has a name...we know nothing about her except a few things:
She is Japanese
She committed infidelity
She wasn’t truly in love with Mark
Her former in-laws and their friends dislike her
She is not Bridget: who is Anglo British, from a upper-middle class background, whose parents knew Mark’s before either of their children were born, who is insecure and bumbling (non-threatening), therefore she wasn’t a “proper” pick for Mark
Keep in mind that in the movie series, at some point Bridget broke her engagement with Mark because he was absent due to his workaholic habits and his emotional constipation (a symptom of Fragile Masculinity if there is one), where Bridget felt neglected to the point of comparing herself to a lonely spinster despite being in an official relationship. Doesn’t anyone think that perhaps those habits played a role in the breakdown of his first marriage? Also what made a supposedly “clever” and “cold” woman like her want to boink a sleaze like Daniel Cleaver (who has an inclination towards negging and could be an emotional abuser) when she is married to a “nice man” like Mark?
Here’s a thought: perhaps maybe she and Bridget aren’t too different? Perhaps Bridget benefited from White Privilege in that she could do things in her relationship with Mark that would brand her as the Bad Guy if she were the first Mrs. Darcy? How what work referenced a already established book and focused on the point of view of the undesirable first wife of the wealthy Byronic Sex God? Where Bridget can be easily forgiven and given the benefit of a doubt of being “relatable”, the ex Mrs. Darcy has been stereotyped?
What could be a narrative we could start with as inspiration to base around a anti-heroine story about her? One that takes issues of racism, fallible personalities, being a woman blessed with intellect and sensuality, some mental health issues and of feeling like the outsider in society that doesn’t bother to understand you?
Wide Sargasso Sea, of course (or Colonialism and British Patriarchy fuck everything and everyone up and gets a woman from Barbados locked up in a attic while her husband starts falling in love with the new properly White and British governess). The book is a prequel of sorts (and a reaction) to Jane Eyre for how Bertha was trapped in the attic due to her mental health (then again mental institutions sucked ass in the Victorian era) and for how dismissive the text (mostly set in the English Moors) was of Barbados (then a colony of the British Empire) and for how Bertha’s origins were coded to make her “The Other”. The ex Mrs. Darcy is soon to be replaced with a properly White and British, non-exotic daughter of family friends, one who through script and costume design, is coded as soft and feminine (therefore non-intimidating). Doesn’t this sound familiar? Like a musical that Mark enjoyed in the second book?
The musical in question was Miss Saigon, which was based on Giaomo Puccini’s three part opera Madame Butterfly. The latter was based on the French novel, Madame Chrysanthème, by Pierre Loti who wrote of his time as a naval officer in Japan where he was temporarily married to a local woman in Nagasaki. In the early 1900s, partly to criticize Western Imperialism and the treatment of Japan, Puccini wrote the opera where a navy man named Pinkerton enters a romance with a trusting teenager named Cio-Cio San, who falls in love with him and takes him TOO seriously (hell he was warned of it by his superior). He has sex with her, dumps her and the baby, and comes back with his white American wife and they come to take the son (did I mention Cio-Cio’s family disowned her when she got pregnant?) and she allows them to take the kid and then she kills herself.
Yes, and Miss Saigon was based on this opera and novel, I kind of wonder if Mark has some unchecked rage flavored with Orientalist Misogyny targeted towards his ex. In this scenario, Bridget who’s with her mother and her friends (including Mark’s mother) and Bridget’s mom’s African ornament (a Masai tribesman who is treated like a ornament and doesn’t make it to the film adaptations but is another example of how Bridget’s mom fetishizes non-British men) and sees Mark with her frenemy Rebecca (the OG Becky with the good hair); Bridget feels like Cio-Cio San but in reality: she has been the “proper” Kate Pinkerton caught up in this drama, who depending on how the actress plays her, is complicit or a innocent bystander. I am so triggered by Bridget’s relationship with Mark because it gets me reminded of my relationship with my late boyfriend and he was so many leagues above Mark and I tell you that if I was with Mark, I would be crying every night, he reminds me of a ex-friend who gave me that reaction.
Now time for my personal shit with Mark. As we know, he is the classic stoic and silent British Gentleman in his relationship with Bridget and he often makes things impossible with her because he cannot be true with her but she is the light in his dreary life. We also know that Bridget’s mother and her parents friends are casually racist (”a very cruel race”) and that Geoffrey Alconbury has a habit of groping Bridget’s ass! Now imagine what that is like for an “outsider” like the first Mrs. Darcy: to be fetishized, groped at, have a very distant husband, and be unwelcomed and made uncomfortable by your in-laws and their friends. Also that Mark is friends with Bridget’s married friends? I feel that there is a lot of strong “Ohhhh Mark she is wrong for you, let’s get you an insider that we all know!” This is a woman who has been made to feel unwelcomed and excluded because of her race, I can’t buy she decided to sleep with Daniel Cleaver for the lolz, I wouldn’t put it past her that she may feel insecure and she decided to swap bodily fluids with someone who basically treated her halfway decent? Why is she the bad guy?
Thankfully we have come a long way since Helen Fielding set her pen down: Crazy Rich Asians and Fresh Off the Boat and Awkwafina is Nora from Queens have proved that media focusing on Asian people can be profitable, GLOW and The Babysitters Club have focused on the storylines of their Asian members, Mad Men touched on casual racism even from it’s sympathetic characters. Media is focusing on less-than likable women as protagonists and has come a long way in acknowledging inter-sectional issues.
So maybe it’s time that the ex-Mrs. Darcy gets her own name, her own personality, her own power, her own frailty, her own triumphs, her own low moments, the freedom to be awful and sympathetic, and her own story.
