The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (4 page)

Meanwhile, Lydia is completely oblivious to the reality of the situation. She’s “sure” that they’ll get married “some time or other, and it did not much signify when.” In other words, while Lydia has been actively pursuing male attention (and excitement, and sexual pleasure), she’s left long-term happiness to take care of itself.
Of course
she plans to be happy with Wickham in the long run. But she’s taking happiness for granted, not pursuing it.

Lucky for Lydia, her family and friends are able to bribe Wickham to marry her after all. But it’s sad, too.
³
Even after the wedding, Jane Austen shows us that Lydia is still tone deaf to the essentials of her relationship with her husband. She doesn’t give a thought to what it might take to turn this “patched-up business” into a happy marriage. Instead, she’s busy showing off her new status as a wife. She makes sure everyone sees her wedding ring. She offers to play the married chaperone to her sisters—to take them to balls and “get husbands for them”—and tells her oldest sister, “Ah! Jane, I take your place now, and you must go lower, because I am a married woman.”

Of course
Lydia assumes that whatever she’s pursuing at the moment will make her happy—going to Brighton to enjoy all that male attention; running off with Wickham; showing off how important it makes her to be a married woman. But she never looks beyond the short-term pleasure she’s actually pursuing to ask herself what makes for lasting happiness.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from careless Lydia is Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth Bennet’s
too
-practical friend. Charlotte shocks Elizabeth by marrying a man who is unattractive in every possible way—except as a source of financial security.Mr.Collins
⁴
takes pompous nit-wittery to the point that it’s painfully embarrassing to be in the same room with him. Charlotte is repelled by him, as any normal woman would be.
⁵

Once they’re married, Charlotte arranges her life so that she can avoid her husband as much as possible: she picks a small room at the back of the house to spend her days in because if she chose a more “lively” one, Mr. Collins would be with her more often throughout the day. The female reader shudders to imagine Charlotte’s nights.

Charlotte’s prudent planning is as different as possible from Lydia’s thoughtless foolishness. But they’ve both missed happiness,
⁶
and both through aiming at something else instead. In Charlotte’s case, it’s “a comfortable home.”
⁷

Maria Bertram in
Mansfield Park
seems to have everything a girl could ask for. She’s an attractive blonde.
⁸
She’s well-educated and accomplished, too, full of self-confidence, and popular. But under the surface, something is not right. Maria agrees to marry a young man who’s very rich—even richer than her father—tall and handsome, but unimpressive in every other way. Her brother can’t help thinking, “If this man had not twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow.”

Maria is not exactly mercenary. She’s not making Charlotte Lucas’s mistake.
⁹
For Maria, the money is more about pride—“vanity” and “self-consequence”—than security: “No one loved better to lead than Maria.” It’s flattering to be courted by a man of such enormous wealth, to imagine herself the mistress of so splendid an estate. Whenever we see Maria with her fiancé, she’s engaged in “shewing her power over him.” Not in a sadistic way, and not to make a scene (Maria doesn’t enjoy drama). It’s just that her sense of her own importance is flattered by her power over a man with so much power himself.

Maria also urgently wants to escape her father’s house, and Mr. Rushworth is a way out. Maria has been spoiled; she’s too used to having her way. Her mother is so lazy she never interferes in her children’s lives at all, and her aunt spoils and flatters all the Bertram children, but especially Maria. Her rather forbidding father’s authority has been the only real check on her freedom. And then, just when Maria reaches that “most interesting age” at which she’s ready to think about men and marriage, her father is called away to the West Indies on business—
for two years.
By the time Sir Thomas gets back to Mansfield, Maria is too used to her freedom to be able to stand living under his roof.
¹⁰

And after getting herself engaged to Mr. Rushworth on the strength of nothing better than vanity, Maria has fallen deeply in love with Henry Crawford. When it becomes clear that Henry has only been playing with her emotions for his own entertainment, she decides she’d better go ahead and marry Rushworth: “Henry Crawford had destroyed her happiness, but he should not know that he had done it; he should not destroy her credit,
her appearance, her prosperity too. He should not have to think of her as pining in the retirement of Mansfield for
him,
rejecting Southerton and London, independence and splendour for
his
sake.”

Maria Bertram is an intelligent woman, but she ends up doing an incredibly stupid thing out of vanity, injured pride, and frustration with her life at home. She marries a man she doesn’t love to spite the one who doesn’t love her. She sells herself for an “escape from Mansfield” and a “house in town.” But in that grand house she finds that “fortune and consequence, bustle and the world” are poor substitutes for happiness.

So what’s the relevance of these nineteenth-century mistakes to our twenty-first-century lives? We don’t have autocratic baronets with grave, forbidding personalities for fathers. We don’t, like Maria, have to marry to shake off parental control and escape to life in the big city—much less to be assured of three square meals a day, like Charlotte. And even if we should choose to run off with a scoundrel who’s skipping town to escape his gambling debts, like Lydia, it’s not quite the life-changing experience it was in the eighteen-teens. Surely women today don’t miss happiness for the quaint reasons in Jane Austen novels?

Oh yes we do.

Let’s start with Lydia Bennet’s “rage for admiration.” You don’t have to look far to see exactly the same impulse today. It’s being catered to at the checkout in every grocery store, where
Cosmo
advises us on “10 Things Guys Crave in Bed: The Surprising Trait 80% of Men Find Sexy,” “78 Ways to Turn Him On,” “First, Pull Down His Pants,” or “Secrets of Male Arousal: A Surprising Trigger to His Deepest Sex Cravings.”
¹¹
Are these articles selling us on the pursuit of what Jane Austen calls “permanent” and “rational” happiness? I don’t think so. They’re pointing straight toward the same blind alley that made poor Lydia Bennet miss her happy ending.
Cosmo
expects its readers to try some things that even Lydia Bennet might not have been up for. But the basic goal the
Cosmo
reader is being advised to pursue is exactly the same kind of male attention Lydia was craving.

And what’s wrong with male attention? Nothing.
¹²
But here’s the crucial thing. If you pursue male attention single-mindedly, you’re not keeping your mind on what’s going to make you happy. You’ve taken your eye off the ball, you may miss your chance.

Jane Austen’s “rational happiness” doesn’t in the end exclude any of the things women want—both from men and from life.
¹³
We all want to be passionately admired, courted, and cherished, which is what Lydia Bennet is obsessed with. We want to have a comfortable, well-ordered life, like Charlotte Lucas. And we all want to feel good about ourselves, and to feel free—the same things Maria Bertram wants. But just the same way these Jane Austen characters miss their happy endings, plenty of modern women miss happiness by putting it on the back burner and snatching at those other things first. Every day women go for the shiny thing right here and now, putting their ultimate dreams of real happy love on hold. They end up with sex, or money, or status—but not happiness.

In twenty-first-century America, scatter-brained boy-crazy sixteen-year-olds don’t run off with cads and enter foolish marriages because they want the higher status of a wife, like Lydia. But a lot of them do have disappointing sex with the first guy who shows any interest in them, for pretty much the same reason: they’re intoxicated by male attention, and they want to seem more mature to themselves or their friends ... to shed virgin status for experience ... not to feel left out of things.

And even in these enlightened times, a man’s status or his money can still distract us, like Charlotte Lucas and Maria Bertram, from the pursuit of real happiness. The glamour of dating someone who’s got money, or is older, more established, or more sophisticated than we are turns quite a lot of our heads. How many women sleep with their professors, or their bosses? (And how many of those relationships turn out well?)

Does Jane Austen suggest that our desires—to feel good about ourselves, to be wanted, to have great sex, to live comfortably—are incompatible with happiness in love? Of course not—at least not in the abstract and in the long run. But remember, life doesn’t offer you happiness in the abstract. And to get everything you want in the long run, you have to get your priorities straight in the short run. Like a Jane Austen heroine, you have to
fight your way to happiness through a maze of competing calls on your energy and attention.

If anything, the weeds we have to struggle through to our happy endings have only grown taller and more tangled since Jane Austen’s day. Take a look around you. Everywhere you look—in films, in music, on reality shows, in your friends’ lives, maybe in your own—you see women losing out on happiness in love. And a lot of the time, you can see (at least if you know your Jane Austen) that they lose the race because they’ve lost their focus on happy love ... or they’ve scaled back their ambitions from it ... or they never believed happiness was a realistic goal for them in the first place.

Here’s what failing to aim for happiness in love looks like in modern times: Bridget Jones, madly happy with Mark Darcy, nevertheless sticking it to him on the phone because it makes her look good in front of her friends.

Here’s what else it looks like: the barista played by Marisa Tomei in
What Women Want
, thinking to herself as Mel Gibson makes love to her that she’d better go through with a pretty obviously pointless one-night stand because she hasn’t had sex in so long. If you’re having sex to prove to yourself (or your friends) that you’re still in the game—then the game you’re playing is for a different prize from the one Jane Austen heroines win.

Or, to turn to real-life examples, not aiming for happiness in love looks like the adventures of Jessica Cutler, the notorious “Washingtonienne” who worked in a Republican senator’s office, all the while supplementing her $25,000-a-year government salary with generous presents of cash from the older men she was having sex with, and blogging about it. Or, lower down on the same food chain, there’s the story of Ashley Alexandra Dupré, the wanna-be singer, real-life prostitute at the center of the Eliot Spitzer scandal.

These women achieved a certain measure of success. Cutler got a book deal. Dupré at least had her fifteen minutes of fame, sold some downloads of her song, and saw her music all over the internet. But from the point of view of finding happiness in love, they were failures. Because, apparently, they weren’t even looking for it. “Love is not enough,” the Washingtonienne’s fictional alter ego tells a girlfriend in Jessica Cutler’s novel. “It just doesn’t cut it anymore.”
¹⁴

Your wrong turn doesn’t have to be quite as—how shall we put it?—sordid? public? flamboyant? as these examples to be, nevertheless, just as dead an end, compared to what Jane Austen’s heroines end up with. All your mistake has to be is a distraction from the “permanent happiness” Jane Austen heroines aim for.

In chapter 6 we’re going to be taking a closer look at exactly what Jane Austen means by happiness that’s “rational” and “permanent.” But even before we get there, it’s obvious enough that some things you can pursue can’t possibly be rational or permanent happiness by
anybody’s
definition. Jackie (Jessica Cutler’s alter ego in her novel) is pretty far down her blind alley before she hits the bumps in the road that tell her she’s in a place she may not want to be. It’s not until the guy who’s been handing her envelopes full of cash wants sex after they’ve had a fight, and pays for it, that she feels demeaned: “Fred had given me approximately $20,000 in cash since our arrangement started, but this was the first time I ever really felt like a whore.” And it’s not until she’s sleeping with six different men that the temperature of her sex life reaches the point on her moral thermometer marked “Eeew.” Imagine if she’d been measuring her choices, instead, against Jane Austen’s standard. It might have become obvious—long before the six guys or the money for sex—that she wasn’t on the road marked “This Way to Permanent Happiness.”

Even if our lives are less lurid, there are plenty of mile markers that we’re more likely to notice if we’ve got it in mind that we’re headed either in the direction of a happy ending or else on the way to somewhere altogether different. Being on the road to permanent happiness means making happiness in love a conscious aim of our actual choices here and now, not just an
of course
sort of assumption about what’s bound to happen to us in the vague, unplanned future.

Lydia Bennet’s mistake, pushing what she wants off onto “some time or other” is a trap that’s so much
easier
for us to fall into today. Consider how
all the changes in women’s lives between
Pride and Prejudice
and today make it more tempting to postpone happily ever after. We’ve got so much more time than they did.
¹⁵
If it was easy for Lydia Bennet, back when marriage at sixteen still seemed reasonably normal, to postpone her plans for happy love, how much easier is it going to be for us to lose focus on our ultimate goal through all the extra years we have? We’re bound to think we’ve got plenty of time to worry about happiness later on.