Mr. Darcy was my first Threshold Lover
The image that grabs you is not decoration. It’s direction.
Photo of my collage
This past week, while walking around my neighborhood listening to the cicadas sing, or as my mother would say, calling for rain, I got reflective about the recent Solar Eclipse in Leo and where it fell 18 years ago: what I was doing then, and how it links up to what I’m creating now. (In case you’re wondering why 18 years, it’s because eclipses are grouped into families called the Saros series, and one family produces an eclipse every 18 years. It’s like a cosmic timer that helps us predict when eclipses will repeat. On a personal level, it lets us reflect on how eclipses affect our lives thematically and symbolically, giving us a sense of life chapters, or resets.)
Summer of 2008, I was recovering from all of that grad school work, and starting to look at my own thesis as a framework for going on my own quest towards finding my romantic partner. In a kind of reversal, I first created the framework by working with romantic comedies as dreams, and then I “inserted” myself into my own container, becoming my own “lab rat” (I know, not the best of analogies), applying to my life all that I had written in the thesis.
In hindsight, that was the first time I consciously endeavored to work with what was grabbing my attention: my dreams and my fantasy life, as experienced through movies and books. Instead of dismissing them, I put on my scuba gear and dove in. I was already accustomed to paying attention to my dreams and taking them seriously.
My best example is how I followed a dream of angels carrying me to Portland’s fire department, where I was welcomed by all the firemen and a TV crew awaiting my arrival, and how that dream led me to take the leap and move to the Pacific Northwest. But treating what I was watching and reading as seriously as the imagery within dreams was a new level for me, one that back in 2008 I decided to explore.
Unfortunately, now I have a harder time remembering my dreams. They’re either too busy (a whole action movie happening behind my eyelids) or too wispy, so the minute I wake up the dream vanishes like a puff of smoke. But following the stories that grab me, especially through reading, has become my dreamwork, and it started with the thesis and that summer of 2008.
Collage in the making
Why this, why now?
Recently, I had my husband rewatch the 2005 film version of Pride & Prejudice, because we’re planning a trip to England in the fall, and I want to take him to see Chatsworth in Derbyshire, which in the movie stood in for Mr. Darcy’s Pemberley. So with this trip on the horizon, and my recent work creating the Threshold Lover quiz, I’ve been thinking about my O.G. threshold lover, Mr. Darcy.
It sounds almost cliche that I’m a Jane Austen gal and a Mr. Darcy fan. Sue me, I’m being cliche. But one of the movies I used in my thesis was Bridget Jones with, you guessed it, Colin Firth as the modern Mr. Darcy vying for Bridget’s heart. I blame my attraction to the saturnine hero on my own Venus conjunct Saturn, there’s something about that cravat and stern straight back that spells romance to me, plus my Mars in Pisces, which lends me a propensity to take characters as alive and real in my imaginal landscape.
After finishing my thesis, utterly exhausted both mentally and physically from splitting myself into three by being a grad student, working full time and seeing clients in my internship, the summer after graduating my brain couldn’t process anything serious, so I embarked on my first foray into romance novels. While I read mainly the more respectable ones like Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North & South and others, I also read what I consider the first prototype monster romances.
Seedlings, but no sprouts, until now. Though I’ve since learned that underground isn’t the same as dormant.
Hindsight being 20/20, as I look back at those years, 2008 and 2009, I see how I was starting to work with the prototype of the Threshold Lover, although I was far from calling it that then. Of all the stories that grabbed me by the scruff and wouldn’t let go, it was Pride & Prejudice, specifically the movie with Matthew Macfadyen and Keira Knightley, and the BBC adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North & South with Richard Armitage and Daniela Denby-Ashe (which I highly recommend). As you can see, I have a type: emotionally constipated heroes, with all of their saturnine stiff upper lip, who take action in ways that shift everyone’s lives for the better and don’t need to go on an ego parade down main street. A hero who can face his prejudices, take action that shows he’s willing to step up, and doesn’t need his ego stroked is hard to resist.
At the time, most of my exploration was in how these characters, which we now call book boyfriends, served me as torchbearers in learning to see my own relationship with the masculine, both inner and outer. Taking them beyond the plot, I reflected and journaled about them, eventually learning to see many of their characteristics as mirrors pointing me towards similar characteristics within. I kept going back to the same scenes, the same films, without being able to say why, and the returning was itself the tell. While I hardly identified with the female heroines in these stories, it was from the male characters that I was able to identify hidden qualities within, both challenging and affirmative. In their own ways, they functioned as torchbearers to corners of my self-understanding that I found easier to reach through them. I was less of a Lizzy Bennet, and much closer to Mr. Darcy’s stern “my good opinion, once lost, is lost forever,” a realization that stunned me when watching that scene for the hundredth time.
If back then I was looking to the heroes to learn about myself, the good, the bad, and the ugly, I now wonder whether that’s why so much of the frisson around the main male characters in romance and romantasy stems not from “just” a crush on these larger than life characters, but because they serve as a different kind of mirror for seeing one’s unclaimed aspects. The heroines are another matter, and the harsher, quicker judgments they tend to receive from readers are worth their own essay.
All this to say that Mr. Darcy, and to a lesser extent Mr. Thornton from North & South, became the first Threshold Lovers I embraced, although I didn’t call them that then. And working with them, immersing myself in stories and dreams, did bring me where I had hoped to arrive: I met my romantic other a year later, who eventually became my husband (and who I think looks a bit like Matthew Macfadyen). Meeting him was the start of another adventure, learning how to make a relationship work, where I found other stories to guide me through the art and craft of becoming a couple. But I’m grateful to Mr. Darcy and Mr. Thornton for helping me through that leg of the journey.
What I didn’t expect was where else that experiment would lead. Following the images took me back to making art, which I had set down years before, and the art took me back to astrology, which had grabbed me as a teenager and which I had put away during a stretch of depression and then the years of grad school. I went looking for a romantic other and came back with a vocation I had abandoned twice.
Like then, I’m returning to stories, except this time I’m doing it with the intention of a scout, exploring and taking notes, not just for myself but for others too. I look upon this landscape feeling more resourced because I’ve traversed it before, while making sure to keep the curiosity of a beginner’s mind. If then my goal was personal, to find my romantic other, now my intention is both individual, to navigate my own molting and how it will affect the work I do in the world, and shared, to pass on what I learn even as I’m learning it. I have a lot more experience now, personally and from working with others as they traverse their own threshold times, and my explorations of the Threshold Lover can’t be just for myself.
I wasn’t expecting that falling into romance novels last year would lead me back to my thesis, and to seeing these stories as both medicine and archetypal map for navigating personal and collective change. But the idea of crossing a threshold, of navigating liminal times, is no longer a subject for fringe corners. It’s more prominent and top of mind, even for those who wouldn’t use these words to describe what they feel about their own lives and the state of the world.
Wolves singing the cicadas songs
Cicadas singing
Hearing the cicadas sing this week reminded me of how I grew up listening to them, and how whenever they sang my mother would say they were calling for rain. What I didn’t know then is that there are periodical cicadas that only emerge after 2 to 17 years underground, depending on the species. While underground, as nymphs, they tunnel and feed off tree roots, then in their emergence phase they molt into winged adults, who will eventually mate and lay eggs. Interestingly enough, only the male adult cicadas sing mating songs, and when the females pick their mate they respond by flicking their wings. So all those years ago, I was listening to the males singing their mating songs, calling their mates, and perhaps some rain.
Thinking about the Saros cycle of 18 years, and 2008 for me, I see my thesis, The Healing Power of Fluff: The Heroine’s Transformation in Romantic Comedies, where I explored romantic comedies as modern fairy tales and the heroine’s transformation through her quest for love as her journey of soul making, as the cicada eggs that went underground and have been tunneling and feeding off the tree roots of my own life and work.
I never expected to return to my thesis, but seeing it emerge again, like the cicadas emerge from years of rooting down and nourishing themselves, I can see how certain things in our lives aren’t done, they’ve just been feeding at the roots of our experience. And this is the part I keep turning over: the nymph doesn’t sleep down there. It feeds, on the deepest and least visible part of the tree. The underground years aren’t the pause before the emergence, they’re what makes the emergence possible, and they’re why what comes out can hold more than what went in. The image of the cicada feels apropos to me now because its life cycle is resonant with the potent seeds planted during solar eclipses (aka new moons on steroids). And as is the nature of seeds, they may look small, but if the soil is rich and well tended they can sprout full of vitality and willingness to bring forth what they’re carrying.
Now, as I sit with the first results report for my Threshold Lover quiz, and my upcoming in-person talk on this theme at Romancing Portland in September, I feel I’m listening to the mating call of the male cicadas. It’s like my Threshold Lover is calling me again after all these years underground, and while Mr. Darcy still reigns as my O.G. book boyfriend, I now have eight threshold lovers from the quiz to work with.
Eighteen years ago, I not only wrote the thesis, I lived it. I did the work I wrote about, I experimented, I trusted the images that beckoned, I took what could so easily have been dismissed as fluff and recognized the potential hidden in it. Now, like a second chance romance, I’m standing in this territory again, and I get to explore it well beyond my then personal desire for a romantic relationship. Second chance romance works because both people have lived in the interval. What was true the first time is still true, but neither of them could hold it then. That’s what this feels like. Eighteen years ago there were two of them, Darcy and Thornton, and they were more or less the same man in different coats. Now there are eight, and they aren’t variations on a type. Which isn’t me having outgrown Darcy. It’s the capacity that got built underground, during the years I would not have called productive.
In honor of bringing forth the Threshold Lover work, this week I felt compelled to return to another love of mine: collages. Making collages is akin to an enchanting spell, a visual ritual prayer, where I translate into physical form what my imagination captures as a feeling tone. So I started a series of collages to honor my Threshold Lover(s) and its place in my liminal crossing now.
The method is simple and not very reverent. I pick images that grab me before I can explain why, I write on the back of them like prayers, and then I let my hands work out the puzzle. That’s what I love about collage, the physicality of it: the cutting, the trimming, the gluing, a little glitter for the whimsy. My Darcy is Macfadyen, so Macfadyen is who shows up. The I DO! I DO! card came from my own wedding, to the man that whole experiment led me to. And in the corner there’s a woman in red with a wolf under her hand, which has nothing to do with Austen and everything to do with where this is going next. My hands knew that before I did.
As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t know where this will lead yet, as I don’t have the full picture, but I’m trusting the image. I trust the image because I believe it’s alive, in ways that we, with the limited materialist worldview that permeates our culture and is hard to see beyond, can’t fully conceptualize. I feel the image, the Threshold Lover in this case, akin to the cicadas, calling to us, beckoning us through synchronicities, nudges, and by grabbing our attention in unexpected ways.
I’m also reflecting on the first results from those who have taken the quiz, and which archetype has come out on top: the Anchor in the Storm, followed closely by the Shape-Shifter. It’s early days and a small sample, so I’m holding it loosely, but I’m not surprised. Neither of those two rescues anybody. The Anchor holds steady while the weather does what it does, and the Shape-Shifter goes through the change with you rather than sparing you from it. It’s like these collective times are delivering two core threshold lovers to us: one who can help us navigate these choppy waters, and another who can help us live through our own moltings. The Shape-Shifter and the molting are the same event, which is not lost on me.
For now, I invite you not to dismiss the fluff that is filling you up. Don’t discard your own ways of making your own magical spells. And if you’re inclined, look at what was happening to you 18 years ago. Any resonance to now?
Eight of them, and one is already keeping you company. The quiz reads the season you’re standing in and names the one who’s calling.
