The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (34 page)

The question they famously asked on
Sex and the City—
“Can a woman have sex like a man?”—did not interest Jane Austen.
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What she wanted to know was the exact opposite:
Can a man be in love like a woman?

Jane Austen takes up that question in the famous passage at the end of
Persuasion
,
²¹
where Anne Elliot tells Captain Harville that it “would not be in the nature of any woman who truly loved” to forget her lover as soon as Captain Benwick
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has forgotten the deceased Fanny Harville for Louisa Musgrove—as soon, in fact, as men somehow manage to forget women all the time. “We certainly do not forget you, so soon as you forget us,” Anne claims.

When Anne asserts that it wouldn’t be in a woman’s “nature” to forget a man this way, Captain Harville isn’t buying it. So Anne backpedals just a bit—not on her basic claim, but on what we might call the nature-nurture question: “It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.”

But when Harville points out that this argument doesn’t apply to Benwick, who has been living quietly at home with Fanny Harville’s family ever since he found out she died, Anne goes back to her original claim, that the difference is in the “nature” of men and women.
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What’s fascinating about this issue is that we twenty-first-century women have so much more evidence on Anne’s point than she had—evidence that all tells in the same direction: to prove that nature, not nurture, explains this gaping chasm between the sexes. The attachment gap between
men and women has survived enormous changes in men and women’s lives in modern times—beginning with women’s liberation from living “at home, quiet, confined” back in the days when only men had “a profession, pursuits, business.”
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And the “nature” explanation for male-female differences when it comes to love is also backed up by a lot of recent scientific research. Our modern biologists confirm the reality of this difference between the sexes. Women experience what both Jane Austen and modern science call “attachment” more readily than men do. And in oxytocin,
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modern scientists have discovered something about the biochemical mechanism behind that fact. Twenty-first-century physiological knowledge seems to confirm Anne Elliot’s insight that the analogy “between our bodily frames and our mental” ones makes it natural that while men’s feelings may be stronger, women’s are more “tender” and “long-lived.”

So would Jane Austen advise us to give up hankering for men to ever really love us the way we love them? Would she tell Marguerite Fields that her deep desire for “permanence” with a guy is simply hopeless? If she did, she’d be in numerous (if not unreservedly good) company. The chorus of seems to echo from all the hills. A woman’s larger “reproductive investment” in her mate
²⁷
naturally leads her to maximize selectivity and put all her eggs in one basket, as it were, while a man can spread his genes most effectively by trying for the largest possible number of sexual partners. Or so say the evolutionary psychologists (charming fellows to a man, I’m sure). “Social and cultural analysis” out of a major research university asks whether “polygamy might not offer some potential benefits to women.”
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A large and fast-growing world religion accommodates male polygamy and female
monogamy by allowing men to have up to four wives, but women only one husband. And modern literary figures, ranging from the breeziest to the most earnest and high-minded, concur.
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Would Jane Austen agree with this cloud of witnesses? Does she offer the same counsel of despair: Men are incapable of fidelity, and women might as well learn to live with it? There’s simply a hopeless mismatch between male and female sexuality? It’s no good expecting a man to love you the way you love him; it’s not in his nature?

No, she doesn’t. Jane Austen absolutely would not advise us to resign ourselves to male “polygamy.” Her realism is ambitious; she never sank to cynicism about the male character. She never despaired that men and women can find permanent happiness with each other. She saw that the two sexes are very different in their “natures”—while equally deserving of respect—and that it’s quite a tricky thing, finding the precise conditions under which both men and women can love in a way that satisfies the deepest desires of both. But she didn’t despair of our picking our way through that minefield. Just the opposite! It was Jane Austen’s unique genius to map the secrets of happy love.

Getting there depends on truly understanding and working with the differences between men and women. Because, as we’ll see, Jane Austen believed that women’s special capacities are unique strengths, not weaknesses. That includes both the especially tender and long-lived nature of the kind of love that Anne Elliot claims for us, and also the delicate insight into human psychology that Anne herself demonstrates. Jane Austen didn’t see women’s tendency to be relationship-centric as pitiful. She saw it as a valuable resource for constructing human happiness. The impulse that drives us to pore over bridal magazines, ransack the self-help aisle at the book store, and “work on our relationships” is the same impulse that inspires Anne Elliot to theorize about the limits and conditions of male fidelity. Some modern expressions of women’s special flair for sticking to relationships and understanding them
may be misguided and counterproductive, but that underlying bent of our nature is a valuable strength.

The final speech Jane Austen gives Anne Elliot in this debate on love with Captain Harville expresses 1) unshaken certainty that the differences between men and women are real, and have a huge impact on our happiness, and 2) absolute confidence that men can offer us real devotion worthy of the name of love:

Two things are clear here. First, men are capable of real love—given the right circumstances. And second, while women are, in other circumstances, more faithful than men because our love is more “tender” and “long-lived,” that’s not just a vulnerability. It’s also a “privilege.” Anne’s not making a shamefaced admission of women’s weakness; she’s staking a claim to female superiority.
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So what exactly are the circumstances in which men are capable of offering us the kind of love we crave? Anne concedes to Captain Harville that “you, and those who resemble you” are capable of love, fidelity, and “domestic forbearance” “in your married lives,” “so long as you have an object.” But we all know that marriage is no guarantee of male fidelity. Anne Elliot understands that fact as well as we do. And clearly it’s not enough for a woman to “live for” the man she loves either. Marianne does that for Willoughby. So does Eliza, for
that matter. A woman can’t just “live for him” and expect
her
love will guarantee
his
constancy. A woman’s love may be a necessary condition, but it’s certainly not a sufficient one. First, before a woman starts “living for him,” she needs to be sure that, in Anne’s words to Harville, she’s “the woman you love.” It’s what Anne says about “so long as you have an object” that really gets to the heart of the mystery about when a man can truly love a woman, and when he can’t.

So what’s the difference between a man like Harville, who does “have an object” in a woman he really loves, and a man like Willoughby? We may guess men like Willoughby simply aren’t capable of real love—the kind of love we have for men and want from them, the kind of love that makes a man capable of fidelity—under any circumstances. There are undoubtedly some men whose principles and long-ingrained habits have made it a vanishingly small possibility that they’ll ever be able to pull themselves together and truly love a woman. After all, when Anne tells Captain Harville that men are capable of real love, she says it not about men
in general
but about “you, and those who resemble you.” (Which takes us back to using Jane Austen’s skeleton keys to help us identify and steer clear of guys whose principles and habits make them bad bets.)

But there’s much more to unpack here in Jane Austen’s insights into male psychology. After all, Willoughby comes awfully close to happy love with Marianne. And even the still
less
principled Henry Crawford, with still
worse
ingrained habits where women are concerned, misses being the hero in Fanny’s happy ending by just a thread. If you look really closely at the course of the affairs in which both men so nearly succeed at loving a woman—and especially at Willoughby’s, because we actually get to hear him recount the whole story of how close he came—you can see exactly what would have had to be different for them to get to real love.

Look at Willoughby at the beginning of his relationship with Marianne. He confesses to Elinor that when he first got close to Marianne, he had “no other intention” “than to pass my time pleasantly while I was obliged to remain in Devonshire.” This is standard operating procedure for men. And
not
just for unprincipled ones. Guys’ time horizons are just different from ours. Where women are concerned—and
compared to
women—men’s default setting is to live in the moment. Listen to Reginald de Courcy, a really decent young man,
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reassuring his father that he’s not considering marriage with a well-known coquette a decade older than himself: “I can have no view in remaining with Lady Susan than to enjoy for a short time (as you have yourself expressed it) the conversation of a woman of high mental powers.” There is a strong tendency for any man’s views to be bounded by the present—limited to what’s in front of him right
now.
That’s why it’s so much easier for him to forget a woman, in Anne Elliot’s words, “when existence or when hope is gone.”
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While it comes naturally to a woman to hold a man in her heart even after he’s gone, he can be faithful only so long as he has “an object.” Object
not
in the “objectification of women” sense, but in the “object of pursuit” or “object of attachment” sense: a goal, an aim, a treasure.

Anne Elliot is explaining how men and women are so different about the
end
of their love affairs. But the same principle applies at the
beginning
, too. Men aren’t just quicker to forget us; they’re also slower to become attached in the first place. The really interesting question is, under what circumstances can a man transcend his tendency to live in the moment—his natural ability to “just enjoy the time we spend together” with no expectations for the future (which Marguerite Fields, being female, finds it impossible to achieve) and start really loving a woman in the first place?

Because you’ll notice, that’s Jane Austen’s plan for men and women. She doesn’t expect her heroines to adapt themselves to guys’ modus operandi by cultivating “Zenlike nonattachment” and vainly hoping to piece together “a rich and fulfilling life” out of random “collected experiences” of the most fleeting and unsatisfactory sort. Instead, she expects her heroes to transcend their usual present-bound style of dealing with women, actually fall in love, and commit themselves to the kind of permanent happiness that women crave.

And exactly why is that expectation fair? It does seem outrageous that women have been somehow maneuvered into the position where
we’re
supposed to accommodate men’s psychology by cultivating the carpe diem-style “nonattachment” that comes so naturally to
them.
In the seventeenth century, Andrew Marvell had to write world-class lyrical poetry to persuade a woman to live and love only in the passing moment.
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In the twenty-first, women are dutifully working to inculcate the same attitude in themselves, as a kind of last-ditch effort to avoid being emotionally crushed by the male-measured speed their love lives are set at. That can’t be right. But is it any more reasonable for us to expect
men
to suddenly start doing relationships
our
way?

The modern cliché is that women are always wanting men to behave like the heroes of romance novels, so why shouldn’t guys expect girls to act out porn? Well, Jane Austen is not romance novels. And nobody is going to be happy catering to the other sex’s lowest denominator.
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What Jane Austen heroines expect of men is not that they’ll be feminized or gelded or made to fulfill our selfish desires, but that they’ll transcend their limitations and stretch themselves to accommodate our actually superior understanding of what’s going to make both men and women happy in love.

Because if there’s one sex that has the better chance of really understanding relationships, it’s us. Face it: relationships are our hobby, our fascination, our obsession. Make Facebook friends with a couple of fourteen-year-old girls, and you’ll soon see that they’re as preoccupied by relationships as fourteen-year-old boys are by—well, let’s just say, by women’s physical endowments. Park next to a construction site outside a commuter train station and watch the men and women on their way to work.
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Every man will be watching the backhoes move dirt, and every woman will have her eyes on some human being’s face. It’s true about us even as infants. Baby girls respond to facial expressions; baby boys’ eyes follow moving objects.
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And women grow up to possess “emotional intelligence,” verbal facility, an awareness of other people’s feelings, and a head for relationship dynamics that men can’t compete with.
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