A writer friend recently posted on Facebook that he was having trouble not giving his detective hero “too many autistic traits.”  This struck me, as I have recently found myself wondering whether Mr. Darcy,  hero of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice and literary crush of countless women, might have been autistic himself.

Autistic people supposedly demonstrate limited empathy, a tendency towards obsessive behavior, and are physically clumsy, at least as children. This manifests to different degrees, but as we learn more, we have moved away from using the terms Asperger’s or talking about “mild” and “severe” forms of autism. Personally I think that the line between “normal” (or “neurotypical”) and autism is pretty fuzzy. There’s a lot of folks out there who are kind of clueless about people and have their little obsessions. We used to call them nerds. I don’t meet the criteria for autism myself, but being introverted I often demonstrate some of the same behaviors (like having low tolerance for being in noisy large groups of people).

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that quite a few heroes of books & screen popular today seem to land near the autism end of the spectrum. Sheldon Cooper of the hit shows “The Big Bang Theory“ and its spinoff “Young Sheldon” is clearly autistic. He’s bewildered by other people and a savant about physics and science fiction. His personal hero is Mr. Spock of “Star Trek,” another favorite character of television and movies, who ignores emotion as “illogical” while he pursues the rational course of action.

And then there’s Sherlock Holmes, a perennial favorite. As I write this we have three avatars onscreen: Robert Downey Jr. in the movies, Benedict Cumberbatch on British television, and Jonny Lee Miller on American television. Like most autistic people, Sherlock is fascinated to the point of obsession with certain topics and has become an expert on them; for instance, he can identify different soils and types of cigarette ash at a glance. He has very few friends and says of his time at university, “I was never a very sociable fellow, Watson, always rather fond of moping in my rooms and working out my own little methods of thought, so that I never mixed much with the men of my year.”

Likewise, Mr. Darcy says “I certainly have not the talent others possess . . . of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns.” I’ve been watching the brilliant online “Lizzie Bennet Diaries,” a modern version of Pride and Prejudice set in America and told through various characters’ video logs. Lizzie takes against William Darcy at first because he’s withdrawn and socially awkward, which she interprets as being stuck-up. We later find out that he’s a genius in certain areas. But he can’t read people, and as a result meddles disastrously between Jane Bennet and Bing Lee, which of course also upsets Lizzie. Later, Darcy confesses to Lizzie that “I’m not very good at communicating what I mean.” 

Why do we make such people into heroes? When I was much younger, a friend and I made a list of the traits we found most attractive in a movie or TV male character. It was pretty short: dark, tall, with an accent, and aloof or distant. We didn’t like “players,” we liked the guys who pretty much ignored women except for the one exceptional woman to whom they would give their heart forever, as Mr. Darcy gives his to Lizzie. Of course we wanted to be that exceptional woman who inspired such love, but we also needed a role model for the hero who could love like that, and Mr. Darcy fit the bill.

These characters’ aloofness suggests mystery, unplumbed depths that few are privileged to enter–yet that may contain hidden treasures. The slightest gesture of respect from someone like Mr. Darcy means far more to us than any gushing compliments from people who may just be “being polite” and not mean it. (A personal bugaboo: the person who says “we must get together!” or “I’ll call you!” and never follows up.)

Watson is wounded in one story. The wound is slight; he is shaken far more by Holmes’s response, the first evidence that Holmes cares at all for his friend. “For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain.” And that great heart cared for him. it was a moment he never forgot.

Perhaps that’s the hook. We want to believe that these great minds are accompanied by a great heart. We accept that only a privileged few will ever be allowed to see that heart–and we hope to be one of those few.