The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (33 page)

Fanny is shocked
despite
the fact that she knows all about the ugly side of Henry’s character. She watched him entertain himself by breaking her cousins’ hearts and quite rightly concluded that he wasn’t to be trusted. But still, Jane Austen lets us know, Fanny’s “disesteem” of Henry almost certainly wouldn’t have saved her from having her heart broken by him in just the same way if she hadn’t already been in love with Edmund. When Henry originally (before he fools around and falls in love with her) decides to “amuse” himself by “making a small hole in Fanny Price’s heart,”
⁵
Jane Austen tells us that without her “love for another” Henry would very likely have succeeded
⁶
in his plot against her peace—he’d have been able to reduce her to a state in which, when Henry left her flat, she’d have felt “that she shall never be happy again.”

And what amazing seduction technique does Jane Austen suggest would be able to accomplish this, despite Fanny’s eminently justified dislike and distrust of Henry,
in just two weeks?
Paying attention to her. That’s it: “his continued attentions—continued, but not obtrusive, and adapting themselves more and more to the gentleness and delicacy of her character.”

Jane Austen points out that Fanny is really not that unusual in being so highly susceptible to male attention, so ready to form an emotional attachment even when she knows perfectly well it’s a stupid thing to do: “although there doubtless are such unconquerable ladies of eighteen (or one should not read about them) as are never to be persuaded into love against their judgment by all that talent, manner, attention, and flattery can do,
⁷
I have no inclination to believe Fanny one of them.”

Jane Austen’s novels are full of women who let male attention
⁸
persuade them into an “attachment” that’s at least premature—if it’s not flat out a
bad idea. There are Maria and Julia Bertram, of course, tricked by Henry Crawford, who nearly catches Fanny, too. And Marianne and Elinor fall for Willoughby and Edward when neither man has committed himself. Catherine Morland obviously learns to like Henry Tilney faster than he does her; lucky for her, an attachment on his side eventually arises out of “gratitude” for hers. Lydia falls for Wickham, and Elizabeth almost does, too, despite the fact that he has no serious intentions. Jane is in love with Bingley before he has a chance to get attached enough to stick around. And Louisa has clearly got Captain Wentworth picked out before he definitively chooses her.

Why are we in such a hurry to attach ourselves to some guy? Why does male attention turn our heads in this appalling way? If this is what women are really like—if two weeks of concerted attention from a man she
knows
is an untrustworthy jerk could theoretically make even the hyper-cautious Fanny Price forget all her distrust and start seriously crushing on him, to the extent of adopting his opinions
⁹
and feeling heartbroken when he goes away—then
aren’t
we the weaker sex? And
isn’t
the only cure for our nearly hopeless weakness the modern solution? That is, for women to change, to become different from what women have been like in the past—to be less, not more, like Jane Austen’s heroines? To build up a hard carapace of bitter cynicism about the male sex ... grow out of our vulnerability ... toughen ourselves up until we can compete with men in callous disregard for tender feelings—both their feelings (presuming they ever really have any) and our own?

In just a minute, let’s look at how that modern solution is actually working out for women. But first I want to make one preliminary suggestion here, working from Jane Austen’s attitude of mutual respect and compassion between the sexes. Seeing how vulnerable we are to falling for a guy who takes the trouble to pay us a little attention, it’s easy to get angry. The strange power that a man’s focus on us can have over us can make us feel like we’re really pathetic. They chat us up, they flirt with us, they spend a little time, and we lose our heads. When they don’t lose theirs, we look pitiful. And we find ourselves asking indignantly how they can
do
that to us—make love to us in a way that’s bound to “attach”
¹⁰
us, without reciprocating the desires that they’re creating.

But hold on a second. Put that way, does the complaint sound familiar at all? Where have you heard this kind of bitter frustration at the power of the opposite sex? Think about it. Don’t men make a very similar complaint out of
their
frustration with the power that
we
have over
them
? At its ugliest extreme, this accusation is the infamous Australian Sheikh Taj Din al-Hilali saying that for a woman to leave home without being covered from head to toe—let alone wearing makeup and a short skirt—is like leaving meat uncovered in your yard and complaining when the neighbor’s cat eats it.
¹¹
But a man doesn’t have to be a rape-justifying mufti to feel impotent rage at women’s power over men. You can hear the same frustration elsewhere, and not just from unenlightened men who’ve somehow managed to go on living in Archie Bunker’s world. Read Michael Kimmel’s
Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men
to hear from a new generation of young men whose hostility to women is clearly a function of their feeling that they’re at our mercy.
¹²
Because if women make ourselves pathetic by thinking with our hearts instead of our heads, then men make themselves laughingstocks by—well, you’ve heard the jokes about what organ they really think with.
¹³
And half the time the guy just has to
see
us. We don’t even need to pay him any attention to reduce him to the pitiful state of lust that Sophocles said was like being at the mercy of an insane and cruel slave master.

In the survival-of-the-fittest-style free-for-all that the current hookup scene can devolve to, members of the opposite sex—whom Jane Austen heroines somehow manage to see as “fellow creatures” deserving of our compassion and respect—can seem like the enemy. Men prey on our weaknesses, and we on theirs. And even when they’re not deliberately playing with our hearts à la Henry Crawford (and we’re not deliberately blue-balling them à la Lady Susan), women are still going to be walking through the world making guys miserable with our charms,
¹⁴
and men are still going to be chatting us up, showing their plumage, and then going away without even understanding the havoc they’ve caused. Jane Austen had zero interest in the solution that would preoccupy the Victorians and that still recommends itself to the Australian mufti: that women should hide our attractions beneath head-to-toe fabric to protect men from the powerful effect our bodies have on them. No one in Jane Austen’s novels seems particularly
agitated about modesty in female dress, or preoccupied with the special difficulties of managing the male libido. She had pity (as well as blame) for men whose “pleasures” are “not what they ought to” be. But her real interest was in the other side of the question: how to manage the mismatch between what men mean when they pay us attention, and what that attention means to us. The modern solution for
that
problem—that women should encase our hearts in a thick protective shell, now that we’ve given up swathing our bodies in yards of cloth—fails to solve the problem that Jane Austen saw so clearly.

The “constancy” and “attachment” gaps are points on which Jane Austen’s insights are borne out by the much greater experience of romantic and sexual relationships that we have as modern women. In the spring of 2008, the
New York Times
“Sunday Styles” solicited essays from college students exploring “the plain truth about what love is like for them.” The winning essay
¹⁵
is an indictment of what Jane Austen would call the “instability” of the writer’s own lovers, and of the other men she knows. It’s also evidence that male attention is still as powerful an intoxicant as ever. The essay is Exhibit A for the case that the differences Jane Austen saw between men and women have survived the two centuries between her day and our own. It’s also evidence that the grow-a-thick-skin-to-protect-your-emotions cure is not working.

Marguerite Fields, who submitted the winning essay to the
Times
, describes having tea with a male friend who actually is somebody’s boyfriend (the author hasn’t had a boyfriend for four years, since back when she was still living at home with her mother) only to learn that the “main thing” about the relationship in her friend’s mind is that he doesn’t object if his girlfriend sleeps with other people—because he doesn’t want
her
expecting
him
not to. The writer also goes on a few dates with a guy she sleeps with and starts to like. She asks when she’ll see him again, only to have him launch into a “long, boring, aggravatingly rehearsed, and condescending” story full of flimsy excuses for why he’s not going to get serious
about her. They go their separate ways, and she tries to remind herself “that when we first met I thought he was an arrogant, presumptuous little man.”
¹⁶

Despite her disappointments, Marguerite Fields doesn’t indulge in sarcasm, vitriol, or man-bashing. She’s committed to “actively seeking some Zenlike form of nonattachment.” She’s got it in her head that her heartbreaks will be easier to manage if she just remembers

And yet she can’t help wishing for something quite different: “despite the fleeting nature of most of my encounters...I think what I have been seeking in some form from all of these men is permanence.”
¹⁷
Her experience “never seems to diminish my underlying desire for a guy to stay, or at least to say he is going to stay, for a very long time.”

The Zenlike detachment that Ms. Fields is so painfully striving for seems to come quite naturally to the men in her life. The illustration
¹⁸
that accompanied her essay when it ran in the
Times
showed a woman standing against a heart-shaped target, pierced by many arrows. Next to her is a man who’s walking away from his own target heart unscathed; he’s leaving behind a man-shaped, arrow-free space right in the middle of it. Cupid aims the same slings and arrows at both the guy and the girl, but only the girl, apparently, is vulnerable to love. Or maybe love means different things to men and to women.

This is the mystery that Jane Austen delves into in some of the most painfully realistic bits of her novels. Elizabeth Bennet had it firmly fixed in her head that Bingley was falling in love with Jane at Netherfield until his
sisters and Darcy managed to separate them. When she reads Darcy’s take on the Bingley-Jane affair, revealed in his letter, it feels like being hit in the face with a bucket of ice water. Darcy doesn’t deny that Bingley was in love with Jane; but he sees love very differently from the way Elizabeth does: “It was not until the evening of the dance at Netherfield that I had any apprehension of his feeling a serious attachment. I had often seen him in love before.”

That’s a nasty shock: to suddenly see being “in love” from a man’s point of view. What Darcy is talking about is not what Elizabeth means by love. It’s certainly not love as Jane has been experiencing it—something that, months after she last saw the man she’s in love with, still matters to her so much that her depression is seriously affecting her health. Mrs. Gardiner (Elizabeth and Jane’s aunt, a married woman with, presumably, more intimate familiarity with the male character), had tried to tell Elizabeth that “the sort of love” Bingley was in might not be the life-changing passion Elizabeth was imagining: “A young man, such as you describe Mr. Bingley, so easily falls in love with a pretty girl for a few weeks, and when accident separates them, so easily forgets her, that these sorts of inconstancies are very frequent.” But it’s still an ugly shock for Elizabeth
¹⁹
to read Darcy’s cavalier reference to his friend’s having been in love “often” before.

Marianne Dashwood suffers the same shock, only much worse—up close and personal, you might say. We’ve seen that after Willoughby has betrayed her, Marianne finally tells Elinor what happened between the two of them, explaining, “I felt myself...to be as solemnly engaged to him, as if the strictest legal covenant had bound us to each other.” Elinor points out that it’s unfortunate that Willoughby “did not feel the same way,” and Marianne protests, “He
did
feel the same way, Elinor—for weeks and weeks he felt it. I know he did. Whatever may have changed him now (and nothing but the blackest arts employed against me can have done it,) I was once as dear to him as my own soul could wish.”

This is that familiar kick in the gut. The shared weeks of falling in love, or moments of physical intimacy, or years of living together—in which it seems that the two of you are feeling just the same—give way to a time when he feels different. What’s the truth of the matter? Were both of you really feeling the same thing, only a man can feel like that for a while, and then
change more easily than you can? Or were your feelings really different the whole time—you wouldn’t have been as excited about falling in love, or making love, or moving in together, if you hadn’t been looking forward to a future that the man didn’t need to expect in order to feel the same excitement. Can men feel just the same way as we do, and then forget? Or do men never really feel what we feel when we love them?