The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (3 page)

One of the most appealing things about Jane Austen is her eighteenth-century mindset.
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The Age of Reason was all about balance and perspective.
¹⁷
We’re used to thinking about everything, and especially about
women’s lives, in stark either-or terms.
Either
women can be equal and independent,
or
we’ll be the downtrodden dependents of men.
Either
we make education and careers our top priorities,
or
we’ll end up barefoot and pregnant.
Either
we let other people make us unhappy,
or
we take complete responsibility for our own happiness.
Either
we celebrate sexual experimentation,
or
we end up repressed and frustrated. Jane Austen didn’t think that way. Her ideals are all about rational balance, not about running screaming from one extreme only to fall off the edge on the other side. If you’ve escaped from a fire, it’s still not a good idea to jump off a bridge and drown yourself.

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, we’ve been whipsawing back and forth between two unsatisfactory attitudes toward love. On the one hand, we’ve been swept away on successive waves of Romantic promises—of certain, total bliss if we’ll just throw off all constraints and follow our hearts. On the other, we’ve undergone repeated waves of reaction against the inevitable fallout from that Romantic philosophy of love. The Victorians clean up after the Romantics, and then a revolt against Victorian repression breaks out at the turn of the twentieth century. Skirts get so short in the Roaring Twenties that women rouge their knees.
¹⁸
Everybody wakes up with a hangover, and hemlines come down again. The relaxed gender roles, chaos, and risk-taking of the World War II years give way to the conformity and plastic domesticity of the 1950s, which in turn yield to the Sexual Revolution, which sets us up for modern cynicism about love. At this point, the whole thing is pretty much played out.

After two centuries trapped in the same vicious circle, aren’t we ready to hear something completely different? That’s just what Jane Austen has to offer. Her eighteenth century was the era of reason and balance—but also of hope and ambition for every kind of human endeavor. Despite the impression you might get from the dreamy dresses, Jane Austen was a complete realist about human nature, never shocked (though often amused) by folly and vice. Because of her realism, she was a clear-eyed critic of Romanticism at its very beginning. Jane Austen saw through the Romantic obsession with liberation, authenticity, and intensity to the neglect of every other value. She was never taken in by Romantic wishful thinking. She was a complete realist about men and women. But she was
never
cynical about
love. She’s 180 degrees from our jaundiced modern view of relationships. The “delicacy of mind” her heroines cultivate makes a refreshing contrast with modern bitterness about men. The “rational happiness” Elizabeth Bennet aims for is a beautiful prospect to women exhausted from alternating between Romantic intensity and modern despair on the whole subject of men, love, and marriage.

Jane Austen makes you think maybe it’s time for us to quit ricocheting back and forth between extremes and see what a balanced approach to love and sex might look like. The case for Jane Austen’s approach to love is
not
an argument that we can “have it all”—be neurosurgeons who work eighty-hour weeks and at the same time have the kind of family where we never miss a baby’s first step. (Jane Austen is all about the clear-eyed recognition of limits we can’t get around; she doesn’t do illusion.)
¹⁹
It’s an argument that we’ve got the balance wrong—partly because we insist on treating love, which is really central to our happiness, as an afterthought, or a recreation, or something we can afford as a luxury once we’ve got the essentials of our life in order. It’s not working. You may have noticed.

Maybe because Jane Austen takes love seriously, she also shows us something else that’s deeply attractive. Her men have a particular kind of respect for women that’s nearly forgotten today. They take into account the things that women typically want, instead of always expecting women to accommodate female desires to male interests and limitations. In Jane Austen novels, men are compelled by their consciences—or, if they should happen not to have any, by society—to consider what effect their romantic attentions are having on women. Not to manipulate the woman more effectively, but out of respect for her vulnerabilities and her ultimate happiness. It’s the same kind of respect you’d be demonstrating for male psychology by deciding not to walk slowly past the windows of a boys’ school in your bikini while the boys were taking their exams.

You know the famous
Sex and the City
question:
Can a woman have sex like a man?
Jane Austen was interested in a totally different question:
Can a man be in love like a woman?
She was fascinated by many of the same
issues that preoccupy us. She gave us at least eight case studies (that’s 1.3 per novel!) of men who are, as we say, “afraid of commitment.” But she was more ambitious than we are. She didn’t just wonder how a commitment-shy man can be cajoled or pressured into accommodating a woman’s desire for commitment. Jane Austen identified circumstances in which a man can come to passionately desire the very kind of commitment that the woman is longing to be asked for. Wouldn’t it be lovely to live in her world?

Jane Austen was undoubtedly a genius about happy love. That doesn’t just mean she was born with an innate talent for understanding relationships. Like Michelangelo at the height of the Renaissance ... like Beethoven at just the right point in the development of classical music ... like Einstein at the dawn of modern physics ... Jane Austen flourished at the precise time in history perfectly suited to her special talents. Her inborn genius met a key cultural moment and produced a masterpiece. In Jane Austen’s case, that masterpiece is a body of work on a subject of even greater importance to human happiness than physics or art: love. Jane Austen lived at the precise point when Western culture was giving up on traditional arranged marriage and people were feeling their way toward a completely new way of managing sex, passion, and family life.
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Jane Austen was in the ideal position, historically, to see all the issues involved, and to show us a way of making matches that respects women’s freedom and the imperatives of romantic love, without totally abandoning the prudent concern for future happiness that had gone into arranged marriage.

In Jane Austen novels, it’s the heroines themselves who make their own matches, not their parents or guardians. She shows us the most pleasant way of arranging marriages ever invented—by falling in love with the right man, at the right time, in the right way. Now that, for too many unhappy women, love and marriage seem to have come unglued again, it’s time to reconsider Jane Austen’s wisdom.

When we do look at Jane Austen’s novels with an eye to what they can teach us about managing our love lives, her insights are surprisingly fresh. Because her view of love is unclouded by Romantic illusions, she’s as
realistic as the “he’s just not that into you,” “sex and the city” crowd—but not as brutal. She’s got “rules” for women to live by, but they’re not manipulative and hypocritical; she respects men as well as women. And her understanding of the psychology of love is receiving remarkable confirmation from recent discoveries in biology and sociology. (“Attachment,” for example, is crucial to Jane Austen’s understanding of love. But it wasn’t until the discovery of oxytocin that we began to understand its physiological basis. Twenty-first-century sociologists puzzle over the fact that cohabitation before marriage raises the divorce rate. Jane Austen could have told you why.) And finally, she’s the perfect model for how women can achieve the kinds of things that only men have had the opportunities for in most of history—get a first-class education, become an artist or have a profession, be anyone’s intellectual equal—
without
having to pretend that the things that have always mattered most to women are not important.

Women today are settling for less than we really want. We have sex—but too often on men’s terms, not our own. We have love, and we have marriage—but we have trouble fitting them together. We have careers, and we have relationships—but we can’t get them into the right balance. We feel like we have to crimp and pinch ourselves into shapes that aren’t comfortable or dignified for us, to accommodate ourselves to the men we don’t want to live without. Jane Austen’s novels remind us that there are other possibilities.

They’re fiction, of course. They’re only models, not true history. But then so are the other models, the ones we’re living by now—whether it’s the women’s magazines telling us how to get a man’s attention or how to hold it; the movies spinning us a line about what happily ever after looks like (or, in the alternative, how deeply cool it is to be unhappy in love); or the advice columnists reminding us once again to cut our expectations back to the bare minimum that we’ve negotiated for in our relationships.

If we take Jane Austen for our model instead, can she teach us how to find what we really want better than those other voices, the ones already echoing in our heads? I think she can.

ALL SUCCESSFUL JANE AUSTEN HEROINES SHARE one goal. In love, they look for happiness. It’s what they aim for where men are concerned, and it’s what they worry about for their friends.

It seems way too simple, doesn’t it? Doesn’t that go without saying? Everybody wants to be happy. Right?

The short answer is
No.

Or rather,
of course
we all
want
to be happy. If life asked us the question that way—pick up or down, choose happiness or misery—we’d have no trouble getting the answer right. But Jane Austen is at pains to let us know that important questions in real life don’t come to us that way. You don’t get offered happiness on a plate with parsley on the side.

It’s no good thinking,
Of course
I want to be happy. The difference between the
of course
sort of wanting to be happy and the serious pursuit
of happiness is a tricky distinction. But understanding it is absolutely crucial. The vague
of course
kind of wanting to be happy is something we all share.
The pursuit of rational and permanent happiness
is what sets Jane Austen heroines apart.

For help seeing the difference, look at this conversation in
Pride and Prejudice.
“They can only wish his happiness, and if he is attached to me, no other woman can secure it,” says Jane Bennet, about Bingley’s sisters. But Elizabeth points out the flaw in Jane’s argument: “Your first premise is false. They may wish many things besides his happiness; they may wish his increase in wealth and consequence; they may wish him to marry a girl who has all the importance of money, great connections, and pride.” If you asked Bingley’s sisters whether they want their brother to be happy, they’d say yes.
Of course
they do. They wouldn’t set out to make him unhappy just for the sake of ruining his life. But life doesn’t pose this kind of question in the abstract. You don’t get to choose up or down, for or against everything you
of course
want.

To get to happy love, you have to make your way through a wilderness of competing desires. In the process, it’s easy for an
of course I want that
kind of goal to get shunted aside by entirely different aims that you’re actually pouring your time and energy into. It’s only in retrospect that you see you’ve given up something you really wanted.

How many of us want to lose weight?
Of course
we do. But we don’t get to choose thin versus fat in the abstract. We have to aim for skinny and stick to that aim, in a world full of twenty-ounce sodas and half gallons of ice cream.

In just the same way, if you ask any woman, “Do you want to be happy?” she’ll say yes. But that answer is to the question in isolation, which is
never
how it comes up in the complexities of real life (or the closest thing to it, a Jane Austen novel). The real question isn’t “Do you want to be happy?” It’s “What do you want?” In other words, which goal—of the many competing aims you’d say yes to if any one of them was offered to you on a platter with water cress around it—are you actually pursuing? (With your limited time and energy and all the smarts you’ve got.) When you envision what you want from love, what’s the picture in front of you? Are you really looking forward to happily ever after?

To inspire us, Jane Austen shows us heroines who win through to happiness. But to warn us, she also gives us women who don’t. They fail not so much because they’re looking for love in all the wrong places as because they’re looking for other things where they ought to be looking for happiness in love.

Take Lydia Bennet, for example, Elizabeth’s flighty sister. Like a lot of us at age sixteen, Lydia is intoxicated with male attention. She has a Scarlett O’Hara fantasy of herself “tenderly flirting with at least six officers at once” on a proposed visit to the military camp at Brighton.
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Elizabeth worries about Lydia’s “rage for admiration” and tries hard to get her father to forbid the visit to Brighton. In vain.

The Brighton visit ends in disaster. It would have been complete disaster for Lydia if she hadn’t been rescued by more level-headed people. Lydia runs away with George Wickham, leaving a note to say she’s off to Gretna Green
²
with the “one man in the world I love, and he is an angel.” But what Lydia thinks is a romantic elopement is really something much uglier. Actually, Wickham has left Brighton to escape his gambling debts. He’s taken her along—taken her virginity, changed her life forever, ruined her chances of marrying anyone else—only as an afterthought, just because “he was not the young man to resist an opportunity of having a companion,” no matter the cost to her. Lydia is nothing more than a temporary pleasure to him, a distraction from his money problems. He tells Darcy straight out that he never had any intention of marrying her. Even while living with Lydia, Wickham is still planning to make his fortune by marrying a rich girl as soon as he can.