The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (37 page)

There are all sorts of things in my friend’s story that offend our Romantic sensibilities. We don’t want there to be a list, or a plan that predates his choosing us. We want him just to see us (“a stranger / Across a crowded room”
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) and be so struck with us that true love emerges like Venus from the ocean foam. We don’t want to wait for a man already ready for commitment to come along; we want a man’s love for us to be so transformative that it alone empowers him to overcome his “fear of commitment.” But as we can see from what happens between Marianne and Willoughby, counting on love for you to inspire an immature man to grow up—or a selfish man to blossom into a “generous attachment”—is a very risky proposition.

Inspired by Marianne, Willoughby comes very near to pulling it off. But he doesn’t quite get to real love. He himself admits, “I did not then know what it was to love. But have I ever known it? Well may it be doubted; for, had I really loved, could I have sacrificed my feelings to vanity, to avarice?—or, what is more, could I have sacrificed hers?—But I have done it.” Elinor upsets Marianne by calling Willoughby “selfish.” But it’s true. He
just
fails to reach the point at which he could really love Marianne. Willoughby misses happiness because he never gets beyond putting himself first. Until
he has to make a choice, he lives in the moment, as men usually do. And when he does have to choose, he commits not to Marianne but to leaving his own options open—so that when the crisis comes, he’s still got an easy option to betray her. And he takes it.

 

Wickham is a sort of cut-rate Willoughby. Wickham, too, has a vague plan to repair his fortunes by finding a rich girl to marry. Just as in Willoughby’s case, Wickham’s fortunes need repairing because he has lived a life of self-indulgence. He’s been as careless with money as with women. The very unserious attentions he pays first to Elizabeth, then later to Lydia, are pure selfishness. When he finds himself in a nasty financial spot and flees his creditors, he takes Lydia along, because why not take advantage of her stupid trust? In Wickham, Jane Austen gives us a picture of the ugly dead end that a thoughtless pleasure-lover like Willoughby is headed toward. (Meeting Marianne was a last-ditch opportunity for Willoughby to raise himself out of self-indulgence and truly love a woman. He fails the test.)

 

But the men who seem to be suffering from “fear of commitment” in Jane Austen aren’t all callous players and self-indulgent jerks who refuse to grow up. Frank Churchill completely confuses Emma—and her friends and neighbors too—by paying her the kind of attention that leads everybody to think he’s probably falling in love with her. But Frank is really using Emma to create a smokescreen for his secret engagement to Jane Fairfax. Luckily, Emma doesn’t fall for Frank Churchill. He’s sure Emma is not really interested in him, and he does turn out to be right. But his opinion on this point is just a lucky guess, wishful thinking rather than a real understanding of her feelings.
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Next after Frank Churchill in the spectrum of men who seem to be afraid of commitment (ranging from villains to heroes) comes Edward Ferrars. Edward actually causes more confusion and pain than Frank Churchill, though he’s harder to blame. Both things are true for the same reason. Edward is bound to Lucy Steele only by his sense of integrity. His feelings are actually disengaged—that is, free to be engaged by Elinor Dashwood. All the enthusiasm that got him into his youthful commitment to Lucy has long since worn out in the four years during which he’s gotten an education and grown up, while Lucy has only grown more sharp and selfish. Edward stays engaged to Lucy only because he’s convinced she sincerely loves him still.

That’s why it’s so hard for even Elinor, the most prudent of Jane Austen’s heroines, to guess the reason for his aggravating hot-and-cold style of courtship. Edward hesitates to tell Elinor what she guesses he feels. He takes two steps into intimacy with her and one step back. Edward obviously likes Elinor; they’re clearly getting close—and then, suddenly, they aren’t; they’re moving apart. Edward’s ambivalence is maddening. He’s a classic case of apparent fear of commitment, and she can’t figure him out any more than we can figure out the men who drive us crazy. And until Lucy tells her about the engagement, Elinor never guesses that there’s another woman in the picture.

Secret engagements have fallen out of fashion. The revelation that the man you love is already honor-bound to a girl he no longer cares for is not going to be the major plot twist in your personal drama. So what application do these cases have for us? Well, plenty of men today will pay attention to a woman when they’re already attached to some other woman, either by
their feelings or else by some sense of obligation. There are plenty of men who will show up in your life “with affection and faith engaged” on the one hand, and on the other “with manners so very disengaged”—just as Emma complains about Frank Churchill. They don’t necessarily worry about what right they have to behave this way. They leave us to wonder about it, as Frank left it to Emma.

So wonder about it! If the guy who seems to be interested in you hesitates or blows hot and cold, ask yourself why you’re assuming that you’re his only or his first object. Don’t be blindsided by the late discovery that he has already has a commitment elsewhere.

And if he does? What do you do about it? Jane Austen heroines are not much into scheming to detach men from other women, in order to attach them to themselves. They tend to step back and put their energy into preparing themselves to deal with the reality that they may lose the man, rather than get out there and fight for him. That’s what Elinor Dashwood does, and Fanny, and Anne Elliot. Why? Are they doing the Victorian shrinking violet thing, sitting on the sidelines while the men get to do all the fighting, working, and choosing? No. But they’re aware that disentangling a man from another woman he’s entangled himself with—like making the decision he’s going to grow up, quit being selfish, and really love a woman—is something a guy has to do for himself, if he’s going to do it right. You may be able to inspire a guy to get his act together, overcome his past mistakes, and love you. But you can never
make
it happen, however much you pour yourself into the effort. Jane Austen heroines respect men’s autonomy and their own dignity, and they’re willing to face up to the reality that sometimes a prior commitment is going to mean you have to let the guy go.

 

“We must not be so ready to fancy ourselves intentionally injured,” says Jane Bennet. “We must not expect a lively young man to be always so
guarded and circumspect. It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than it does.”“And men take care that they should,” answers Elizabeth. They’re discussing Mr. Bingley’s character—whether he’s to blame for courting Jane until she fell in love with him, and then leaving. Jane knows that Bingley isn’t a villain of the Henry Crawford sort: “If it is designedly done, [men] cannot be justified; but I have no idea of there being so much design in the world as some persons imagine.” Elizabeth agrees that Bingley hasn’t injured Jane on purpose, but points out that he may have committed some sins of omission: “Without scheming to do wrong, or to make others unhappy, there may be error, and there may be misery. Thoughtlessness, want of attention to other people’s feelings, and want of resolution, will do the business.”
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Here, once again, we’ve got a case of a man’s attention meaning more to the woman than it means to the man. And more than the man realizes it means to her. Bingley was falling in love with Jane. Darcy and Bingley’s sisters noticed it. Darcy had “often seen him in love before,” but now observed that Bingley’s “partiality for Miss Bennet was beyond what I had ever witnessed in him.” And Jane was falling in love with him, too. Only she was falling a little faster than he was. Or a little deeper. That’s why Bingley was capable of being persuaded that marrying Jane wouldn’t be prudent, and so he’d better go away—but she couldn’t forget him when he was gone.

This happens today, too. You meet a guy, you really like each other, everything seems to be proceeding toward the happy ending. And then something changes. You may never know what changed his mind, or pulled him off course, or simply distracted him.
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Maybe he gets really absorbed in a big project at work and his pursuit of you loses momentum. Maybe he has to leave town on business or goes on a trip with friends, and your relationship looks different to him when he gets back. Maybe he meets another girl. If any of these things, or a thousand other possible intervening events, happens before he’s gotten to that crucial point—before real love for you has taken him out of a man’s typical present-bound views—then your affair will fizzle. Until he’s “all in for life,”
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until you’re the object of the kind of committed love that Captain Harville and Anne agree men are capable of, a guy
is going to be susceptible to any number of distractions that may at any point derail his interest and keep him from ever getting there.

Elizabeth Bennet, we’ve seen, indicts Bingley for being thoughtless, for “want of attention to other people’s feelings.” Jane Austen’s heroines have very high expectations of men in one crucial area where we’ve quit expecting virtually anything from them at all. They expect that a man should take into account the effects his attention is bound to have on a woman. Jane Austen heroines are well aware that insight on this particular subject does not come naturally to men. They don’t expect it in the sense of foolishly relying on all men to notice or care about leading women on. They expect it, instead, in the sense that Jane Austen heroines have little respect for men who carelessly destroy women’s peace of mind, and they admire and seek out men of that rare kind who take responsibility for the effect their attention is having on women. These men are the real heroes they’re looking for.

 

 

Jane Austen’s Case Study No. 8 in male “fear of commitment” illustrates the value of a man who meets these high expectations. Captain Wentworth returns to England ready to meet a woman he can love and marry, goes to stay with his sister, and meets Louisa and Henrietta Musgrove. We’ve already seen Anne using her fine-tuned sense for relationship dynamics to discern that Wentworth ought to “know his own mind early enough not to be endangering the happiness of either sister, or impeaching his own honour.” Anne sees that her own former lover is not acting in bad faith. He’s “not in the least aware of the pain he [is] occasioning.” Anne guesses that of the two girls, Louisa is “rather the favorite,” but “as far as she might dare to judge from memory and experience,” she divines “that Captain Wentworth [is] not in love with either.” Henrietta eventually abandons the field to her
sister—a previous attachment to her cousin having triumphed over a “little fever of admiration” for Wentworth. And Wentworth continues to pay Louisa a lot of attention.

The most intense intimacy that we see in this courtship is probably the conversation behind the hedgerow. Actually, we don’t see it; we only overhear it with Anne, who listens as Wentworth tells Louisa, “Yours is the character of firmness, I see,” and—comparing her “with playful solemnity” to a glossy hazelnut—“My first wish for all, whom I am interested in, is that they should be firm. If Louisa Musgrove would be beautiful and happy in her November of life, she will cherish all her present powers of mind.” Soon afterwards, on the visit to Lyme, this relationship—such as it is—is at its height. Louisa is “jumped down” from all the stiles along their walk by Captain Wentworth. They’re walking together; he’s responding to her energy and determination with admiration and even allowing her to assume something of a proprietary air about him.

That pretty much sums up the extent of the relationship between Louisa and Wentworth when its course is suddenly suspended by her fall. Louisa is “too precipitate” in jumping down one last time, Captain Wentworth reaches out for her half a second too late, she falls and is taken up unconscious. The accident makes a break not unlike Bingley’s going to London. Louisa’s relationship with Wentworth is essentially frozen in place, and he can step back and take stock of the situation. What Wentworth discovers is that he doesn’t love Louisa. He concludes, in fact, that his attempts to see whether he could fall in love with her were motivated by injured pride and resentment of Anne, whom he still loves.

Captain Wentworth may or may not be right to believe that he could never have loved Louisa. We can only guess what would have happened if her fall at Lyme hadn’t given him the opportunity to recalibrate. But up to that moment he looked just like Bingley at Netherfield. From the point of view of the woman he was courting, he seemed to be falling in love. The fact that it took him only a few hours’ break from her company (in combination with some striking reminders of Anne Elliot’s value) to completely change his course may possibly indicate that their relationship would have fizzled eventually, one way or another. Or it may just be another bit of
evidence that until you are a man’s real object—in other words, at any time before he’s made that ultimate commitment to you—there’s always the possibility that something will interrupt a progress that seems inevitable to you, but isn’t really. The case of Wentworth and Louisa reminds us not to assume that, even barring accidents and distractions, a guy will keep going in the direction it looks like he’s headed in.