The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (15 page)

Still, the hard shells we grow to protect our hearts can keep out the good guys as well as the heartbreakers. The cynical way Mary judges Edmund when she’s with her friends in London has a very familiar flavor. If we haven’t done it ourselves, we’ve heard women talk about men in that calculating way—as if the dating game were some kind of competition in looks, money, and status. We don’t like it when men judge women in that brutal manner, and particularly when they get together in groups and rate us like meat.
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It doesn’t improve matters if we fall into a similar habit, setting up with our girlfriends to judge men in hotness, or other competitive categories.

Dawn Eden, a veteran of the sex-and-the-city-style New York dating scene who gave it up because of a religious conversion,
¹⁰
describes how the longer she did that kind of dating, the more she saw sex and romance as a competition, ranked men in terms of how they measured up in alpha male qualities, and consequently lost the ability to notice the kind of man with whom she might find real love.
¹¹
She had to recover from the female version of the disease my husband calls “shopping
for a sports car”—when a male friend’s love life is a series of predictable disasters because he insists on picking girls for their looks and the status their hotness confers on him, instead of a woman he can imagine actually spending his life with.

A lot of our cynicism amounts to a kind of mimicry of the worst men’s bad habits—on the unstated theory that if we can’t beat ’em, we might as well join ’em. That’s the thinking behind the famous
Sex and the City
question, “Can a woman have sex like a man?” There’s a lot of evidence that most of us can’t, at least not if to “have sex like a man” means to use and discard partners casually and painlessly, the way the most callous players do.
¹²
But why would we
want
to be like those guys?

Jane Austen did create one female character who exhibits all the callous selfishness of the deliberate male heartbreaker.
Lady Susan
is an early novelette Jane Austen wrote in a series of letters. The title character is Jane Austen’s version of the Marquise de Merteuil, the scheming villainess Glenn Close played in
Dangerous Liaisons
. Lady Susan may not “have sex like a man,”
¹³
but she’s as cold as any player.

You don’t finish reading the book wanting to be like Lady Susan, the way you wish you could step into Elizabeth Bennet’s shoes, or Emma’s. Lady Susan’s mental world is a kind of desert, void of everything that makes life worth living. She
sees through
all the things that matter, more thoroughly than even Mary Crawford. To Lady Susan, personal integrity and honorable love are nothing but weaknesses. “There is a sort of ridiculous delicacy,” she complains about Reginald de Courcy, the idealistic young man she’s wrapping around her little finger, “which requires the fullest explanation of whatever he may have heard to my disadvantage.” Reginald loves Lady Susan only because she has cleverly managed to explain away her well-deserved reputation.

“This is
one
sort of Love,” says Lady Susan, “but I confess it does not particularly recommend itself to me. I infinitely prefer the tender & liberal spirit of Manwaring, which impressed with the deepest conviction of my
merit, is satisfied that whatever I do must be right.” Lady’s Susan’s hard-bitten lover Manwaring doesn’t care that Lady Susan has deliberately broken up his marriage; has simultaneously “detached” a suitor from his sister; and is cruelly insisting that her own fifteen-year-old daughter marry a man she despises. Reginald loves Lady Susan only as long as she can trick him into believing that none of these things is true. But it’s nothing to Lady Susan to be loved by a man of integrity: “If I were not already as much attached to another person as I can be to any one, I should make a point of not bestowing my affection on a Man who had dared to think so meanly of me.” She isn’t capable of real love. Like all the cynics in Jane Austen, Lady Susan is maimed and blind.

She overestimates her control of the situation—which is the only thing that matters to
her—
gets caught in her outrageous lies in spite of her considerable powers of persuasion and charm, and fails in her schemes. All she can see in the honest people she’s attempting to manipulate is a repulsive “milkiness.” But by the end of the novelette, boring domesticity and naïve sentiment look suddenly fresh and attractive in comparison with Lady Susan’s devious mind and heart of stone. One-upping the nastier members of the male sex in callous disregard for other people is no solution for the fear we have that men can never really give us what we want from them.

And neither is the even more common way we modern women have of answering that fear. The standard technique for protecting our hearts—one that’s woven into our whole culture—is to tell ourselves that love can’t hurt us too badly just as long as we’re careful never to take it seriously.

You can understand where this impulse comes from. In a controversial article in the
Atlantic
,
¹⁴
Caitlin Flanagan describes how her mother, the kind
of pioneering feminist who volunteered at Planned Parenthood in the ’70s and helped get sex education past the eyes of the watchful dragons on the P.T.A., used to startle the teenaged Flanagan by “sneaking up on me and then delivering some report on the nature of human sexuality” at the most inopportune moments—in the middle of the dog’s bath, say, in a tone of voice more appropriate to “Do you want me to get the flea dip?” Mothers like Flanagan’s were trying to spare their daughters the mistakes too many women made in the repressed’50s—marrying the wrong man just because you wanted to go to bed with him, pairing up too early because marriage in your early twenties was the only way to become a grownup, or ending up stuck with somebody truly awful for life because you got pregnant. It’s not hard to see why mothers wanted to spare their daughters these miserable outcomes, or why they thought that lowering the temperature around the whole subject of sex was the way to keep it from being such a high-stakes game for women.

The idea was to mitigate the pain by making love lower-risk. If less in women’s lives depended on love and sex, then women could afford to experiment, make mistakes, recover, and try again. So much of what women like Caitlin Flanagan’s mother were doing was in aid of
making sex and romantic love less important
.

And large societal trends were cooperating to bring about the same result. Sex education in school helped chip away at the taboos that had made the whole subject seem momentous because forbidden—and at the ’50s culture’s hard, bright line between “good girls” and “bad girls,” so that women wouldn’t end up as humiliated outcasts because they were more sexually adventurous.
¹⁵
Meanwhile, the Pill and
Roe v. Wade
made it possible to fend off the most obvious life-changing consequence of sex. And the explosion of divorce and the simultaneous entry of women into the workforce in large numbers meant that choices about love and sex were becoming less decisive for women’s long-term financial security.

So girls began to think of love and sex less in terms of momentous, life-changing decisions. The new approach to love, Flanagan explains, was one, “in which sex did not cleave the girl instantly and permanently from her home and her family”: “I was going to get to be a daughter living at home, studying for algebra quizzes and putting Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific
shampoo on my mother’s grocery list, and also a young woman beginning a private and womanly sex life.”

But another way of looking at it is that eventually women learned to treat “womanly” love and romance as merely a side issue, something apart from the main trajectory of our lives. We learned to call it “having a sex life.” Now men go in a separate compartment from our serious plans, lest they upset them. Ultimately, acknowledging how much love and sex mean to us comes to seem shameful, or at best sub-standard. That’s what comes out when a professor asks a class at the University of Chicago what they think will be the most important decision in their lives ... and only one student—a guy—is willing to say that it’s going to be picking a mate.
¹⁶

This is one reason Jane Austen is so compelling to us. In her novels, everyone takes sex, love, and the pain they can cause seriously. Even a seventeen-year-old girl’s heartbreak is a subject of serious adult concern, not eye-rolling.
¹⁷
That’s a breath of fresh air to us. Taking love as seriously as the people in Jane Austen novels do certainly fits better with how we feel about love when we’re actually in it. We all know that when we fall in love, it
can’t
seem like a side issue to us. It’s earth-shattering. Pretending not to take it seriously creates a kind of double vision. You’re experiencing love as supremely important, but you feel you have to keep it under control, as if it doesn’t really matter to your life. And then when you come to a fork in the road and you have to choose—say, you have to decide whether to move to the same city where your college boyfriend gets his first job—then either you give up a love that might make you happy in the long run, or else you choose to change the trajectory of your real life, and you end up feeling compromised, like you’re not a serious person. Taking love seriously seems to make you weak.

Setting aside the intensity of romantic love as we experience it, we also can’t help but notice that there’s a level-headed, objective case to be made for the importance of love to our ultimate happiness. Granted, modern trends have stripped away many of the consequences that used to depend on women’s choices about men—our reputations, our financial security, even whether or not we’ll have children. But a large proportion of female happiness in the world still depends on how we manage our love lives. Everything that sex education, no-fault divorce, modern contraceptives,
and anti-depressants can do has been tried. We’re left with the stubborn truth that love can still break your heart and mess up your future. We know women who are happy because they’ve managed to get love right, and women whose lives seem to be a mess because they haven’t. Even in the modern world, which guy we end up with—not to mention whether we end up with one at all—is going to make a huge difference for our ultimate happiness, no matter what other success we achieve.
¹⁸
Jane Austen would not be surprised.

Jane Austen was keenly aware of the fact that love can wreck our lives if we go about it wrong. Her novels are full of sad examples of lives blighted this way. Putting aside the Maria Bertrams and the Charlotte Lucases, Jane Austen gives us a whole other cast of characters whose lives have been ruined by botched romance. She makes it impossible for us to miss the lessons of their lives because we meet them only long after they made the mistakes that wrecked their futures. Jane Austen introduces us to these women (or tells us about them in retrospect) only in the squalor, or the hopeless reflections, or the bitter poverty and loneliness that the original false step led them into. We get just glimpses of Mrs. Tilney, who frequently had “much to bear” from the awful temper of her hypocrite of a husband, and of Lady Elliot, whose “youthful infatuation” for Sir Walter bought her a lifetime managing his stupid vanity.
¹⁹

We see more of the original Eliza—not the girl Willoughby seduces, but her mother, who let herself be bullied by an uncle into marrying his elder son though she was in love with the younger brother, the future Colonel Brandon.
²⁰
Eventually “provoke[d]” into “inconstancy” by her husband’s nastiness, she found herself divorced, and then abandoned by the man for whom she’d broken up her awful marriage. By the time Colonel Brandon was able to return from India and look for her, Eliza was dying in debtors’ prison; she’d been reduced to living off a series of lovers, or even by prostitution.
²¹

And of course there’s poor Mrs. Price, Fanny’s mother, who married “in the common phrase, to disoblige her family, and by fixing on a Lieutenant of Marines, without education, fortune, or connections, did it very thoro-roughly.” A decade later she’s overburdened by “a large and still increasing family, an husband disabled for active service, but not the less equal to
company and good liquor, and a very small income to supply their wants.” Eloping with a marine seems dashing and Romantic; even a large family on a small income may sound charming to us. But Fanny’s visit to Portsmouth leaves no doubt about just how squalid Mrs. Price’s life really is: her once-gentle voice “worn into fretfulness” by the demands of a household she can’t manage; the proud, judgmental relatives she defied and scorned at the time of her marriage now the only resource she can turn to for any kind of future for her children; her husband a coarse, hard-drinking lout who doesn’t seem to contribute anything to his family, either by working or by getting a house full of rowdy boys under control; and the passion that got her into this situation now a distant memory.

You can’t say Jane Austen underestimated the stakes involved in love, sex, and marriage. She saw the problem very clearly. She just wanted to solve it differently. Jane Austen didn’t think we could make it all better by becoming cynics about love—by trying to isolate sex with all its complications from our serious hopes for our lives because we’ve given up on the bliss love promises. She wouldn’t see the point of trying to limit romance to a recreation, instead of a chance for “permanent happiness.” She was more ambitious than we are. Jane Austen was firmly convinced that human relationships are the solid basis for happiness.