The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (18 page)

This love is life-changing, all right. But it’s nothing like Romanticism’s false promise of instant liberation and authenticity. For one thing, love hasn’t changed Elizabeth and Darcy’s lives instantly and painlessly. There’s been quite a lot of embarrassment and pain involved in the changes they’ve
both been through. They’ve been humiliated by having to face their own flaws. And they’ve both had to stretch to understand the value of a person so different from themselves.

In fact, there’s so much language about pain and humiliation in Darcy and Elizabeth’s love story that it’s easy for us to get the wrong impression about why the story’s so exciting. Especially if Regency “erotica” is anywhere on your radar screen, it’s hard to read Darcy’s “your reproofs had been attended to” or “by you, I was properly humbled” without snickering. (And I can’t write that Elizabeth “has to learn” humiliating lessons from Darcy without expecting guffaws from the peanut gallery.) To our cynical modern minds, language like that has a cheap sexual charge. We’re likely to suspect that all the talk about being reproved and humbled is just a smokescreen for a certain kind of sexual tension.

But if we come to that conclusion, we’ve got the whole thing exactly backwards. The delight that Elizabeth and Darcy feel in being humbled by and in awe of each other can’t be reduced to the kind of excitement you can get from dabbling in sadomasochism. It’s the other way around. Sexual playacting
¹⁸
of that sort is a pitiful substitute for the real life-changing transformation Jane Austen’s characters experience. Her kind of domination and submission involves her characters’ whole personalities, not just their sexual hobbies.

Everything that happens between Darcy and Elizabeth is sexual, but it can’t be reduced to the
merely
sexual. If Darcy hadn’t felt a sexual passion for Elizabeth, her disdain for him would never have spurred him to re-think his self-image and his attitude toward people outside his circle. It’s only because she’s a
woman
“worthy of being pleased” that he’s inspired to think what kind of
man
he’d have to be to please her. And from Elizabeth’s point of view, it’s because Darcy is an attractive man that the self-conquest he achieves moves her in the way it does. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense that S&M is the most common sexual interest, beyond the basics.
¹⁹
It’s a poor shadow of the actually creative and life-changing humiliations
that Darcy and Elizabeth suffer on their way to deserving a noble love, and the pride they feel in each other once they’ve found their happy ending. After all,
Pride and Prejudice
is the real thing.
A Rake’s Pleasure
,
Between Linen Sheets
, and
Passion at Pemberley
are the cheap knock-offs.

Jane Austen would tell you that
every
other kind of submission that love can involve is a cheap substitute for the real thing, the life-changing rebalancing of her whole world that Elizabeth finds with Darcy. Remember, Darcy’s original proposal also involved a kind of submission, but of an inferior sort. He was all set to submit to the force of his irrational passion for Elizabeth and give up what he thought were rational and principled objections to a connection with her family.
²⁰
At that time he saw his declaration to her as lowering himself, stooping to a love that was beneath him. That kind of love submits, too. But it’s a submission that makes the lover less than he was before, not more.

Who wants to be loved
that
way? Well, unfortunately,
we
sometimes do. It’s possible to take pride in having that sort of power over a man. That’s the very kind of submission that Mary Crawford wants from Edmund. It’s why she tells Fanny that if she could relive one week of her life, it would be the week of their rehearsals, when Edmund gave up his principled objections to the play out of love for her: “His sturdy spirit to bend as it did! Oh! it was sweet beyond expression.” It’s a boost to your ego for a man to be willing to give up even things he thinks it’s wrong to give up, for you. Not to mention that it’s a great convenience, especially if you really like having things your own way. If your guy is so bewitched by you that he’s willing to abandon his principles to please you, there’s not much he won’t give way on. You can run right over him to your heart’s content. Only, will it really content your heart to lead a man around by the nose like a prize bull? Will a guy who’s made himself less than he was to be with you make you happy? Not the way Elizabeth is happy with Darcy.

OKAY, HAVE YOU GOT THAT DOWN?

Elizabeth Bennet, Anne Elliot, and Emma Woodhouse get love exactly right by finding the perfect balance, defining the happy medium, realizing in just the nick of time which man they really value, and being willing to humble themselves for the right kind of noble love—but never for the wrong kind of selfish passion. It’s that simple.

But it doesn’t sound so easy, does it? It’s quite a tightrope act. No wonder getting love right is obviously touch and go even for Jane Austen heroines—who seem to have a head start on us, somehow. They arrive at the critical moments in their love stories already equipped with a whole toolbox of useful concepts and mental habits that we don’t have. How do they manage to show up at the starting gate so ready for the race?

Well, for one thing, they’re used to approaching their relationships—
all
their relationships, including their friendships and their family life—with the kind of deliberation that we usually apply only to our important
career goals, our artistic ambitions, or, just possibly, that one significant relationship with a member of the opposite sex. The problem is, by the time we’re putting that much effort into a romantic relationship, it’s usually because something has gone badly wrong. We’re wondering what happened to the initial excitement, or why we’re ready to commit so much sooner than he is—or even why this relationship is making us miserable in the very same way as every disappointing relationship we’ve had in the past. We don’t try to master the subject until our love affair (or our love life in general) requires emergency attention. Ransacking the self-help aisle of the local book store in a desperate attempt to fix something that’s already broken is no substitute for the expertise Jane Austen heroines bring to all their relationships from the beginning.