Soaked and sodden

In Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, no one gets wet, except for poor Jane Bennet, soaked (offstage) while riding to Netherfield in a rainstorm.

This marked absence of moisture has not discouraged those adapting or updating P&P for the screen, whether it’s a dripping Darcy proposing to Elizabeth during a downpour (P&P 2005) or a succession of Bridget Jones paramours immersing themselves in lake (2001), fountain (2004), or swimming pool (2025). Of course, all this hydrating harks back to the ur-wet scene, Colin Firth’s famous clingy-shirt moment in the BBC’s iconic 1995 miniseries.

Apparently, however, the deluge of drenchings ends now. Or so the UK’s Sun tabloid informed us earlier this month, in a truly hilarious piece of staged outrage packaged as part of an ongoing series called “Wokeipedia: A Compendium of PC Poppycock.”

In the forthcoming Netflix adaptation of the novel, “Mr. Darcy’s wet top will be packed away . . . to avoid objectifying men,” the Sun reported, attributing the news to a “TV insider” whom the newspaper doesn’t actually quote saying any such thing. Nonetheless, a capsule summary insists, “the decision to axe the iconic scene is the latest woke nonsense The Sun's Wokeipedia campaign has identified.”

Needless to say, the newspaper does not attempt to grapple with the question of where, exactly, the ogling of the male body fits on a left-right political spectrum. Isn’t that “the female gaze,” and thus arguably feminist, usually coded as left-wing by the likes of the Sun? And isn’t sexual modesty a traditionally conservative value?

Meanwhile, in the eighth paragraph of its ten-paragraph story, the newspaper does note in passing another reason that might explain Netflix’s decision to omit the wet-shirt moment from an adaptation that the streamer has promised “will hew closely to the original text”: the inconvenient fact that the scene, iconic though it may be, does not actually figure in the source material.

But no matter! Never let facts interfere with the ginning-up of high dudgeon. Everyone into the pool, and let the objectification begin.