The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (21 page)

IF WE REALLY WANT TO IMPROVE THE LEVEL OF OUR relationship-expertise, we’re going to have to go in for some theory, as well as a lot of practice. And there’s no better model for theorizing about how to treat other people than Jane Austen’s heroes and heroines. Let’s take a close look at one particular conversation between two of them. If we watch Emma and Mr. Knightley in action, we can uncover where Jane Austen’s principles for good relationships come from. (Remember, that’s relationships
in general,
not just “relationships.”)

Here’s the issue. Emma and Mr. Knightley are discussing why Frank Churchill hasn’t yet paid his respects to his father and new stepmother on the occasion of their marriage. Frank has sent a handsome letter, he continually talks of paying the visit, but he never actually shows up.

This is not a trivial matter. Frank’s neglect is hurting his stepmother’s feelings. The slight is a reflection on the fact that she was a social nobody before her marriage.
¹
Emma and Mr. Knightley debate to what degree Frank’s financial dependence on his rich aunt and uncle excuses Frank
Churchill’s neglect of this duty, and what effect it would have on his relationship with them if he paid the visit against their wishes. Emma—who admits to herself that she’s “taking the other side of the question from her real opinion”—defends the “amiable young man,” maintaining that it’s absurd to expect him to defy the relatives he’s totally dependent on. After all, he would risk being disinherited.

But Mr. Knightley is disgusted.
²
And he argues that if Frank did the right thing by his stepmother, then his aunt and uncle would actually respect and trust him more than ever before. It would “fix his interests stronger with the people he depended on.” They’d be sure he’d always treat
them
with the gratitude and attention he owed them, too:

“Right conduct” on the basis of “principle”—that’s the bedrock on which Jane Austen’s heroes and heroines base their judgments of other people’s behavior, and their own. Of course there’s a superstructure of manners and conventions built up from that basic foundation; nobody in Jane Austen claims that things like “the forms of introduction” or the rules about who gets to be “the principal lady in company” are laws of morality. But Jane Austen’s characters follow even those conventional rules because it’s part of their “duty”—in the
sense of what’s “due” to other people. There’s a strong element of morality in the judgments that Jane Austen characters make about how to manage your relationships with other people.

But Mr. Knightley’s “right conduct” and “principle” are
very
different from the icky Victorian morality that can still make us shudder, more than a century after that pudgy queen’s reign ended. Jane Austen’s characters don’t wax lyrical about a saccharine angelic goodness that’s the special preserve of innocent virgins, dying children, and downtrodden poor relations. (Yes, Charles Dickens, I’m looking at you.) In Jane Austen’s vigorous eighteenth-century mind, morality hasn’t been made the exclusive preserve of women and children, much less reduced to a hypocritical concern about women’s sexual “virtue”—and an unhealthy interest in that subject. The men in Jane Austen novels are as eager as the women to work out standards of “right conduct”; to judge other people’s choices by those standards; and to run their own lives in accordance with them. And none of her characters are looking anxiously over their shoulders all the time to see whether Mrs. Grundy approves. They consider
themselves
to be independent and competent judges of the best way to behave. But on what basis do they judge? Where do Jane Austen’s characters find the rules that they go by to manage their lives so elegantly?

Well, they mostly do take their religion pretty seriously. But it’s nothing like as simple as that. You don’t see Jane Austen heroines sitting down to look up what the Ten Commandments have to say about whether or not to let your family and friends know that you’ve learned a charming officer in the militia is really a scoundrel who schemed to elope with an heiress for money and revenge. You don’t catch them asking themselves what insight the Sermon on the Mount can offer a woman on how to answer the impertinent questions of the busybody aunt of the man she loves.

Jane Austen heroes and heroines, like Jane Austen herself, have a very eighteenth-century way of thinking about the connection between 1) the right principles to live by, 2) religion, and 3) how to be happy in this life—all
three go together. Jane Austen and her contemporaries believed that rules of “right conduct” aren’t
just
written in the Bible. They’re also, as a famous eighteenth-century American put it, “self-evident” truths. They’re “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” in other words, principles written into the very nature of things—especially into
human
nature
³
—by the Author of the universe. And those self-evident laws of human nature show us the right way to behave if we want to succeed at “the pursuit of happiness.”

As Thomas Jefferson wrote in another context, “We are firmly convinced, and we act on that conviction, that with nations as with individuals, our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties ....”
⁴
Jefferson here sounds a lot like Jane Austen, who writes that the same virtue that “prepares us for the spiritual happiness of the life to come” will also “secure to us the best enjoyment of what this world can give.”

Mr. Knightley is thinking along these very same lines when he says that Frank Churchill would “fix his interests stronger” with his aunt and uncle by following his conscience and treating his father with respect. Acting on the self-evident principles of right and wrong is always ultimately in your best interests, because the right way to conduct yourself is written into the very nature of things. “Right conduct” is respected by us all—deep down, even if we don’t admit it—and we’re disgusted with people who act without principle. We can’t help it; it’s written into our nature. And if you conform your behavior to the laws inherent in human nature, you’ll be pursuing happiness in the most effective way possible.
⁵

So why should we take this two-hundred-year-old way of looking at human nature, morality, and relationships seriously? Could it possibly be applicable to us? Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If you can read Jane Austen and not be impressed—if you’re sure you’re running your life better than Elizabeth Bennet and Anne Elliot run theirs—then by all means forget about it. If the way they think about their relationships and
make their choices doesn’t appeal to you, put down this book. But if you think there’s something compelling in Elizabeth Bennet’s struggle to give up her prejudices and see Darcy for who he really is ... in Emma’s belated recognition that she wants to quit manipulating other people and embrace “every thing that is decided and open” ... in Anne Elliot’s gentle but unbending determination always to value the things that are really important even though she has to live in a world ruled by selfish vanity, then it’s worth asking how we can discover the principles they run their lives by. The respect that most of us will admit to feeling for
them
is one bit of evidence for Mr. Knightley’s claim that everyone respects “right conduct.”

Its principles are self-evident. But “self-evident” doesn’t mean “obvious to people who’ve never bothered to think about it and don’t give a hoot.” Two plus two equals four, and parallel lines can never cross—those axioms are also “self-evident” in the sense that once you understand what they mean, you can’t think the opposite. But you have to “get” the basic ideas of arithmetic or geometry in order to “get” that they’re self-evident. The same thing is true about the principles of right conduct. In some sense you “can’t not know”
⁶
what you owe other people, in terms of fairness and respect—if you actually think about. But a lot of people do their best not to think about it. And the longer they go on ignoring the whole issue, the less motivated they are to focus on it, as they’d have to realize their own conduct doesn’t merit respect. Plus, there’s the fact that the more sophisticated principles that Jane Austen heroines debate—about the right conduct in particular complicated social circumstances—are more like the complexities of Newtonian physics than like two plus two equals four. Her ladies and gentlemen start with obvious principles of right conduct and build up from there to a more complex structure of sophisticated ideas about how men and women should behave, the way Newton depended on mathematical and geometric axioms to create an elegant explanation of how physical objects act.

Look again at how Mr. Knightley talks about Frank Churchill’s choices. When Emma argues that Frank can’t be expected to resist pressure to slight his father and stepmother because he has all the “habits of early obedience” to his aunt and uncle “to break through,” Mr. Knightley answers, “I can allow for the fears of the child, but not of the man. As he became rational, he
ought to have roused himself and shaken off all that was unworthy in their authority.” Being “rational”—being a grownup—means you’re capable of understanding what you owe the people you have any kind of relationship with. But you can make your grasp of it clearer or fuzzier, depending on whether you’re in the habit of putting it into practice. When Emma maintains that Frank Churchill “may have as strong a sense of what would be right, as you can have, without being so equal under particular circumstances to act upon it,” Mr. Knightley counters, “Then, it would not be so strong a sense.”

There’s a great example from
Mansfield Park
of how a principle about the right way to treat other people can be completely self-evident, and at the same time really hard to see—if you’re not used to making yourself pay attention. It’s Fanny’s first dance, and she’s enjoyed the first four dances immensely. She’s very eager to dance again, but has to sit out the next two because, though there’s an even number of men and women, her cousin Tom has gone out to the stable to look in on his sick horse. She expects that he’ll ask her to dance when he gets back. But instead he sits down by her, tells her all about the sick horse, picks up a newspaper, and says “in a languid way, ‘If you want to dance, Fanny, I will stand up with you.’” Tom makes it very obvious that he doesn’t want her to say yes, and so she can’t. And yet a few minutes later, when his annoying Aunt Norris tries to draft him to play cards with the chaperones, he leaps up, tells Mrs. Norris he was just going to dance with Fanny, and “indignantly” exclaims, “A pretty modest request upon my word! ... To want to nail me to a card table for the next two hours .... And to ask me in such a way too! without ceremony, before them all, so as to leave me no possibility for refusing!
That
is what I dislike most particularly. It raises my spleen more than any thing, to have the pretence of being asked, of being given a choice, and at the same time addressed in such a way as to oblige one to do the very thing—whatever it be!”

Fanny is happy to be dancing again, but she can’t be grateful to Tom “or distinguish, as he certainly did, between the selfishness of another person and his own.”

You don’t think of “Never ask a girl to dance in a way that makes it impossible for her to say yes” as a moral principle. It’s not anywhere in the Bible. But Tom’s clearly done a shoddy thing here, and Jane Austen shows
that he ought to be able to see that he’s being selfish. The abstract principle of “right conduct” in this situation is self-evident to him; Tom himself does an impressive job of articulating exactly what he’s done wrong. But he doesn’t apply the lesson to judge his own behavior, only his aunt’s. The basic underlying moral principle is obvious to anybody who cares about “right conduct”: Treat other people the way you would want to be treated. (That one
is
in the Bible.) It’s just that seeing exactly how the basic principle applies in all the sophisticated complexities of social life is a lot easier when you’re the victim of other people’s selfishness than when you’re the one being selfish.

All the complicated questions that Jane Austen’s ladies and gentlemen debate with each other have to be decided, ultimately, by reasoning from basic principles that are self-evident to everyone. But it’s not just a question of seeing these principles. You also have to be in the practice of acting on them. If you never act on them, after a while you won’t even be able to see them clearly. The longer you let yourself go
on
being selfish, the harder it is to see the right conduct in your particular circumstances.

This is another reason that the keen interest Jane Austen characters take in “principle” and “right conduct” feels so different from Victorian morality. In Jane Austen, the right way to conduct yourself in the tangled realities of life with other people isn’t about conforming to authority. In fact, it’s often about
resisting
the authority of parents and guardians. In Jane Austen it’s the older generation who have let their long habits of selfishness make “self-evident” principles obscure to themselves. And it’s Jane Austen’s young people who come to these questions with energy and high ideals.