Mr. Darcy - Cultural Influence and Legacy

Cultural Influence and Legacy

The character of Fitzwilliam Darcy has appeared in and inspired numerous works. Both Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet feature as part of science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer's 'Wold Newton family' concept, which links numerous fictional characters (such as Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes) together via an interconnected family tree of people and events. According to Farmer's works, both were recipients of radiation resulting from a meteorite that struck Wold Newton in Yorkshire in the 1790s (this event actually occurred). This allowed them to be the ancestors of many other famous literary characters, some of whom possessed unusual or even superhuman gifts and abilities. Numerous re-imaginings of the original work written from the perspective of Mr. Darcy have also been published, among them American writer Pamela Aidan's Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman trilogy.

Helen Fielding has admitted she "pillaged her plot" for Bridget Jones's Diary from Pride and Prejudice. In Bridget Jones's Diary and its sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Bridget Jones is constantly mentioning the 1995 BBC adaptation and watches the scene in the fourth episode where Darcy (Colin Firth) comes out of a pond wearing a wet white shirt numerous times, and refers to the Darcy and Elizabeth of the TV series as "my chosen representatives in the field of shagging, or, rather, courtship". When in The Edge of Reason Bridget becomes a journalist, she is flown to Italy where she is to interview Firth about his (then upcoming) film Fever Pitch, but finds herself only asking him questions about Mr. Darcy and the filming of the "pond scene". This scene was shot but not included in the film adaptation of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. This scene can be seen in the DVD's extra features. Colin Firth's "pond scene" made it into Channel 4's Top 100 TV Moments. Colin Firth has found it hard to shake off the Darcy image, and he thought that playing Bridget Jones’s Mark Darcy, a character inspired by the other Darcy, would ridicule and liberate himself once and for all from the character.

Darcy's status as a romantic hero transcends literature. In 2010 a protein sex pheromone in male mouse urine, that is sexually attractive to female mice, was named Darcin in honour of the character.