OCs Past and Present: Eleanor

Jan 10, 2011 11:26

Inspired by this post at fanlit_project , I got to thinking about OCs and Mary Sues and how Mary Sue self-consciousness affects our writing. I didn't post at the comm because I'm neurotic and a hater I doubted they'd be interested in two pages of reflections on a Pride and Prejudice OFC in stories they certainly haven't read. But I've been thinking a lot about the OC/Mary Sue thing, so I wanted to put it out there.

So, Eleanor Fitzwilliam.

(And TV Tropes.)

For a long time, one of the most popular trends in Austen fandom was the invention of enlightened, free-thinking, outspoken relatives for Darcy. At first, this characterisation was simply pinned on Colonel Fitzwilliam, who had the advantage of being (1) Darcy's rival and BFF in canon, and (2) such a minor character that you could do just about anything with him.

Within a short time, fandom's version had morphed into a macho-yet-saintly mass of muscles, golden hair, and anachronistic values known to his admirers as Colonel Studmuffin -- which for the rest of us, conveniently shortened to "Colonel Stu." He served two purposes: one, he could reform the drunken, despairing, post-Hunsford Darcy (of course Elizabeth's own scathing denunciation couldn't possibly be a sufficient catalyst), and two, he provided a sympathetic ear for her - something crucial to P&P as the ultimate wish-fulfilment fantasy, since the happily-ever-after would be rather less than perfect if, aside from Darcy, Elizabeth has no support whatsoever in facing a bunch of in-laws who want her to die in a fire.

At some point there was a quasi-backlash -- I suspect mostly engendered by people starting to wonder why Elizabeth wasn't ending up with Fitzwilliam, everyone's favourite picture of manly perfection, rather than that asshole Darcy. (Darcy/Elizabeth trumps everything in this fandom. And by everything, I do mean everything.) So the trend shifted to a new one: the creation of a sympathetic female cousin/cousin-in-law/aunt/whatever for Darcy to fulfill the fanon!colonel's roles of (1) espousing modern-day ideals, (2) reforming Darcy, and (3) taking Elizabeth's side, without threatening the OTP.

The thing I found odd about this character was that she was almost invariably raised in the family that produced Fitzwilliam, Darcy, and Anne. That is, one man who is determined to marry a woman rich enough to support his aristocratic lifestyle, another man who proposes by explaining that he loves her so much that, against his better judgment, he'll overlook her horrific family and lower-class relatives, and a woman whose only known action in the entire novel is her daily habit of forcing the clergyman's wife to stand out in the cold while she talks at to her.  The previous generation consists of the earl, less-benevolent-and-amiable-than-her-husband Lady Anne, and Lady Catherine.

I had no difficulty imagining another woman in this family. I did have difficulty imagining her as a profoundly egalitarian Elizabeth Bennet-fangirl. Moreover, I found it particularly unlikely that Elizabeth would ever be more significant to Darcy's relations than Darcy himself -- yet, more often than not, they seemed to consider him as little more than a satellite revolving around her wonderfulness. Or horribleness. But in any case, her. I'd rarely read anything where their primary interest in her was as their nephew's/cousin's/whatever's wife, and I'd never read anything where liking Elizabeth didn't turn out to be some kind of moral barometer.

I mean, plenty of characters hate Elizabeth (most often Lady Catherine ... even when it doesn't make any sense), but only as a marker of what horrible people they are. I'd never seen any even marginally sympathetic character who disliked her or simply didn't much care about her. Well, I had an OFC cousin lying around - a minor character I'd invented early in my world-building (there is no fandom in which I don't start by world-building), simply to fill out the Fitzwilliam family tree. So I took her and turned her into a raging subversion of The Enlightened Cousin.

Eleanor is not enlightened.

I suspect this is the only reason she manages to squeak past the Mary Sue Litmus Tests.  I basically imagined her as girl!Darcy -- not how he would have turned out if he'd been born a girl (that's Catherine!), but how someone with a similar personality and background would behave, if that person were female.

So Lady Eleanor Fitzwilliam is tall, strikingly beautiful, clever, dutiful, loyal, proud, strong-willed, articulate, blah blah blah. I had a brief roadblock in the form of Georgiana's canonical shock that anyone could ever question Darcy the way Elizabeth does -- Eleanor, as I'd built her up, is more than capable. I decided that she not only shares his values (which suited what I was trying to do with her anyway) but that she's both intensely loyal and intensely formal. She'd never question him before his sister.

Well, Enlightened Cousin usually shows up in post-Hunsford stories about her pulling Darcy out of his depths of despair with a stern talking-to. (Why this is the first time she's done it isn't explained. Nor is Darcy's canonical insistence that he'd never had any reason to question his assumptions before Elizabeth.) So I decided to write that story: post-Hunsford Darcy is ... okay, I don't have it in me to write drunken!despairing!Darcy, but naturally he's a bit out of sorts, and Eleanor, in her infinite wisdom, becomes the catalyst for his transformation reformation character growth.

The story -- one of the few early ones I'm still at least somewhat satisfied with -- begins with Eleanor in all her quasi-Sue glory, upset and alarmed about something that isn't yet another proposal of marriage she's just refused. All right, this one may be from a duke, but he's so new money. (Yes, she really is that much of a snob, and no, this is not a charmingly quirky Mary Sue flaw.) What she's really upset about is her cousin Darcy, who she knows is deeply perturbed because OMG, he almost snapped at the housekeeper.

Then there's a bit about exposition about how Darcy and Eleanor became the bestest friends ever (her father and his mother were brother and sister and very close, so the children were pretty much constantly together and Eleanor and Darcy happen to be the same age). Yes, they experimented a little as teenagers, but their quasi-siblingship made it deeply squicky and they have, like, negative chemistry.

[Subtext: don't worry about your OTP, dear readers. It's not like that.]

So, Eleanor shakes Georgiana (PLEASE HELP HIM, IT'S ALL MY FAULT!!) off and beards Darcy in his den study. After she guilt-trips him a bit, he admits that he thinks he might have made an error about something, and since he's Darcy, his mistakes only come in 'epic'. She prods him a bit more, and it comes out that the girl half of the latest couple he rearranged is heartbroken, and he knows this because the girl's sister heard about the whole affair from Colonel Fitzwilliam, who was trying to improve her opinion of Darcy, and the sister told him.

Eleanor puts two and two together -- for some reason the girl told him about his own interference in her sister's romance, and for some reason Eleanor's brother was trying to convince her of Darcy's merits -- and...

ELEANOR
           Please tell me you didn't try to make her your mistress.

... gets five.

Darcy is thoroughly offended and segues into a rant about his mother, his mother's lovers, Eleanor's brother, and Eleanor's brother's mistress, before dropping the bombshell.

DARCY
           I did not ask her to be my mistress. I asked her to be my wife.

ELEANOR
           o_O
           She refused you?

Per the tradition of this particular subgenre, the whole story then comes out -- well, the whole story as Darcy understands it, which means it has some holes: for instance, he still has no idea why Elizabeth made such a point of telling him where and when she walked. And Eleanor, also per tradition, throws a screaming fit.

But it's at Elizabeth, not Darcy. She goes on a rant about how Elizabeth must be a colossal idiot to have believed Wickham's pack of lies, and that the kind of person that would like Wickham better probably deserves him, and why didn't she wonder about him telling her these stories, and that a woman in her position can't afford to those kinds of mistakes. It'd be one thing if she were aristocratic -- things happen, they all understand that -- but this girl has no money, low connections, and no name worth speaking of. Men of much lesser status than Darcy wouldn't lower themselves to marry a girl like that, she's so ungrateful --

DARCY
          o_O

ELEANOR
          Er, all meant in the nicest possible way, of course.

DARCY
          OH MY GOD I MUST HAVE SOUNDED JUST LIKE THAT

ELEANOR
          Hm, I can see why she was pissed about the Bingley thing, but it's really Bingley's fault for being such a wimp. So she's a horrible person and doesn't deserve you and she hurt you so I hate her forever.

DARCY
          Please stop talking now.

ELEANOR
          You're going to be okay, right?

DARCY
          OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD

The End!

I ended up writing her (and her fellow Fitzwilliam/Darcy OCs) into a lot of different stories, because I got attached to her and she could get any scene going, but she exists for this: her job is to be the tough, independent OFC cousin who inexplicably sets Darcy on the path to reformation, but to do it in a way that at least somewhat subverts the trend.

Eleanor hits a good portion of the Common Mary Sue Traits, and I always had the feeling I was walking a pretty fine line with her. She needed to be that quasi-Sue -- that was the entire purpose of her character -- but at the same time, I liked her enough that I wanted her to stand on her own merits, too. I tried to tamp down on Shilling the Wesley, to make her only as important as her in-story role warranted, to treat her faults as genuine faults and not adoraklutz token faults.

Eleanor is abrasive and humourless and oblivious and snobbish. She's not covering up a tragic past. She's not covering up anything. By an accident of birth she's an earl's daughter, smart and beautiful and rich, and it's only a curse in that it's made her kind of a bitch. The rigid boundaries set around her as a woman don't help, of course, but still -- she's better off than a lot of women. She's better off than Elizabeth Bennet and she's fairly awful to her. But she's also intensely loyal and honourable, and for all her ruthlessness and ambition, I think she'd be a Gryffindor.

Some of my readers loved her. Some didn't. Some actively hated her, some just didn't care. Nobody ever suggested that she's a Mary Sue, even though she's much closer to one than many OCs that get the accusation hurled at them before they so much as squeak. Perhaps I'm lucky, or perhaps Austen fandom's Cult of Nice just saved me from the inevitable. I don't know. I do know that Mary Sue paranoia was never far from my mind, and a good part of her characterisation was my attempt to take her from subverted!Sue to an exceptional but deeply flawed human being. I don't know if it worked.

But I had fun. I liked her. I still like her. So she works for me.

fandom: fandom, character: elizabeth bennet, character: eleanor fitzwilliam, mary sue, fandom: austen, genre: meta, character: fitzwilliam darcy, series: ocs past and present

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