The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (43 page)

(by Falling in Love the Jane Austen Way)

 

IS FINDING HAPPY LOVE JANE AUSTEN’S WAY OUT OF reach for us? How on earth are you supposed to signal to a guy that you have any interest in him—let alone keep him interested in you—while you keep your distance? After all, Jane Austen herself never got married. Why? Were her standards just
too
high?

Susan Walsh’s advice for “Hooking Up Smart” includes this critique of the
Sex and the City
writer’s
He’s Just Not That Into You
approach, which we’ve seen overlaps with Jane Austen’s in some surprising ways: “On the other hand, this approach can lead straight to the dating desert. You don’t waste time with jerks, but where are the great guys who want to date [you]? Guys know you won’t hook up randomly, so you find yourself ignored at a party. You may not be getting dumped, but life sure gets boring when there is no guy intrigue or boy drama.”
¹

Okay, first of all, if what you’re looking for from guys is intrigue and drama instead of love and happiness, please go back and read chapters 1 to 3. Still, “Where are the great guys?” is an entirely valid question.

Jane Austen, like us, was living in an era and in a slice of society when a lot of women didn’t have great marriage prospects. And for some of the same reasons as today. Women tend to want to marry “up.” We find guys attractive if they’re smarter, more successful than we are, and competent at things we don’t understand.
²
And no, not because we’re all heartless gold-diggers on the prowl for an easy meal ticket. A woman who’s going to entrust herself to a man for the long term needs to be able to rely on and respect him. As a matter of fact, the more intelligent and assertive we are ourselves, the more important respect for our man is going to be for our happiness—and yet the harder it’s going to be to find a guy who can inspire it. Mr. Bennet tells Elizabeth, Jane Austen’s wittiest heroine, “I know your disposition, Lizzy. I know that you could be neither happy nor respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband; unless you looked up to him as a superior. Your lively talents would place you in the greatest danger in an unequal marriage.” So if you’re at the absolute top of the heap—as English gentlewomen were in the eighteen-teens and we educated, liberated, successful American women are today
³
—good matches are going to seem thin on the ground.
⁴

But besides being in competition for the cream of the crop, we’re also suffering from some flaws in modern social arrangements. This is where Jane Austen heroines have a terrific advantage over us. Whatever their difficulties, at least they have the benefit of a social scene deliberately organized to bring women into contact with interested men without putting them under a lot of pressure to get too close too early.

Compare the ways we get to know men to their opportunities. The quintessential social setting at which Jane Austen heroines mingle with potential heroes is the assembly ball, like the one in
Pride and Prejudice
where Elizabeth first sees Mr. Darcy.
⁵
Jane Austen lived at the height of the period when “assemblies”—monthly public balls typically at a town’s inn, drawing families and single men from all over the local area for dancing through each winter—were held in “most places.”
⁶

Entertainments of this kind were something new, at least if we take the long historical perspective. Jane Austen’s own favorite novelist, Samuel Richardson, played the aging curmudgeon on this subject in a 1751 letter to the
Rambler
,
⁷
complaining about assemblies and other innovations since his own youth, when, he claimed, “the young ladies contented themselves to be found employed in domestick duties; for then routs, drums, balls, assemblies, and such like markets for women, were not known.” Richardson explains the good old-fashioned method of courtship that prevailed before assembly balls and other new-fangled social events designed to facilitate actual (gasp!) meetings and conversation between young men and women.

Before the days of assemblies, Richardson claims, men would go to churches, “almost the only places where single women were to be seen by strangers.” A young woman in church wouldn’t talk to or even look at the men there: “Her eyes were her own, her ears the preacher’s. Women are always most observed, when they seem themselves least to observe, or to lay out for observation. The eye of a respectful lover loves rather to receive confidence from the withdrawn eye of the fair-one, than to find itself obliged to retreat.”
⁸

Taking an interest in a woman he saw at church, a young man would inquire into her “domestick excellence.” If he found out she was likely to be a good housekeeper, he’d be “confirmed ... in his choice,” and he’d get his friends to propose him to her parents, who, if they approved, would tell her he was interested. The news probably wouldn’t be a real surprise to her, Richardson explains; she would have noticed him staring at church. If she liked him, she’d dutifully tell her parents that she was ready to meet their approved choice.

As you can see, assembly balls and the other novel social events Richardson was complaining about were part of the move away from marriage arranged by parents and toward women’s freedom to make our own choices. Things were moving towards romantic relationships based on a more intimate knowledge of the other person. But there were still special rules for these occasions—a subset of those arcane rules that happy Jane Austen heroines follow and Marianne Dashwood disregards to her peril. You allowed each partner only two dances and the break in between, then separated from him and (hopefully, if someone else asked you) spent the
next two dances with a different man. Dancing more than twice in a row—or for more than two pairs of dances in a whole evening—with the same partner was a breach of decorum because it meant you were showing a “dangerous particularity”—favoring one man.

These dances, and the rules that went with them, were the perfect setting for a kind of male-female interaction that’s much harder to find today. On the one hand, assembly balls
were,
in a sense, the “markets for women” that Richardson accuses them of being. Everybody involved knew that pretty much everybody else involved was “looking.” So you avoided all the awkwardness—and the missed opportunities—that come with meeting guys at work or in your neighborhood, where it’s hard to know who’s available and what their interest means. (And where it’s difficult to make your own interest clear without risking major embarrassment.) On the other hand, no man expected you to go straight home with him from an assembly ball. If a guy liked you, he’d have to follow up by paying you more attention later and getting to know you slowly over time. The rules slowed the progress of the relationship down to a pace at which his feelings would have a chance to catch up to yours, before you committed yourself.

There’s even a sense in which the actual entertainment men and women enjoyed at these balls was a kind of trial marriage. But it was almost the exact opposite of our love on the installment plan. The dancing was arranged precisely to bring men and women together to try each other out
without
undermining a woman’s independence and freedom of choice. Here’s Henry Tilney explaining how dancing is like marriage:

Henry is being facetious. But accepting a man’s offer to stand up with you for a couple of dances
was
a sort of marriage in miniature. That’s why it was “improper” for brothers and sisters to dance with each other.