The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (46 page)

DID JANE AUSTEN REALLY MEAN TO GIVE US ADVICE? Aren’t novels just entertainment? And, anyway, isn’t the whole relationship advice scene a bit beneath Jane Austen’s dignity?

On the one hand, we’ve got Jane Austen’s elegance, the high aspirations of her characters, their impressive self-understanding, and their competence about men. On the other, pep talks about finding the right man, tips for the lovelorn, and dating advice. Isn’t she in a whole different league? After all, one of the most cringe-inducing moments in Bridget Jones’s career—when the hopeless gap between her life and Elizabeth Bennet’s is clear as day—is the conversation with Mark Darcy when she lets slip that her religion is: self-help. Isn’t the advice book industry part and parcel of what’s substandard about our twenty-first-century lives?

Well, yes and no. Of course Jane Austen’s novels are in a completely different class from
Women Who Love Too Much
and
He’s Just Not That Into You
. But the issues books like those deal with aren’t beneath Jane Austen’s dignity. In fact, she was keenly interested in the very same problems. Her
solutions are just so much more elevated. Jane Austen absolutely did
not
consider it beneath her to offer women models and advice for their daily lives, for their choices, and especially for their courtships. On occasion, she can even give what-to-wear advice that’s vaguely reminiscent of the kind of thing we read in our women’s magazines.
¹

Jane Austen is not above any of our concerns, however apparently superficial. Now, the older woman of her acquaintance who called young Jane “the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly”
²
obviously missed something; Jane Austen was always quite a bit more complicated than that. But as a girl she
could
be silly about young men,
³
she
did
want to get married,
⁴
and she went on to write fiction that’s about those very things. Jane Austen was interested in everything that interests us, from clothes to men to advice for recovering from depression to strategies for coping with your older sister the narcissist. And she was far readier than modern “literary” authors to wade right in and give advice about them. She’s never the heavy-handed Victorian moralist. But there’s no doubt that Jane Austen considered it her job as a novelist to enlighten as well as to entertain. Here’s her famous definition of the kind of book she wrote:

We put Jane Austen and relationship advice in different categories partly because we moderns think of literature as “art.” And we assume that “art” has nothing to do with advice. We take it for granted that only the worst
kind of literature tells people how to live: moralistic Victorian novels, the dreary productions of Soviet socialist realism, TV dramas that “send a message” about domestic violence or drunk driving.

But in Jane Austen’s day, “art for art’s sake” wasn’t even a gleam in Edgar Allan Poe’s eye. Back then it wasn’t only the dregs of literature that were “didactic.” Even great literary art was meant to teach a lesson. It was intended to improve readers’ lives. And not just by opening their minds (whether to “the best which has been thought and said” or to the latest “transgressive” challenge to bourgeois values). But rather by showing them something about how to live.

If you think about it, writers in Jane Austen’s day were more realistic about how fiction actually influences readers. The fact is that we can’t help learning from our entertainment. We do imitate what we read—or, today, what we see on the screen. Otherwise advertisers wouldn’t pay for “product placement.” Writers have real power to make us want to be part of the world they show us. Shouldn’t they admit they have that power? And since they’re inevitably
going
to change us, for better or worse, why not aim for
better
? Jane Austen most certainly did.

Her novels combine different things that we’re used to putting in three separate categories: 1) fiction as art or entertainment; 2) practical advice; and 3) the exploration—almost the scientific investigation—of the basis of that advice in what motivates human beings and what will really make them happy. That third category is what she’s talking about when she says that novels offer “the most thorough knowledge of human nature.”
⁵

Art is supposed to be an imitation of nature. But life also imitates art. And Jane Austen was fascinated by that fact. She was very much aware of the power a writer can have in the lives of her readers.
⁶
One of the things that her “most thorough knowledge of human nature” told her was that we have a powerful urge to imitate the stories we enjoy. Human beings learn by imitation.
⁷
Jane Austen was fascinated by this phenomenon, and especially by how books make their readers want to be like the people in them.
Her own writing is full of characters who make their way through life copying the characters in the books
they’ve
read.

As a teenager she wrote hilarious parody fiction about hopeless Romantics who act out their favorite fiction by importing overwrought ideals and totally unnecessary drama into their increasingly chaotic lives. Remember how, in
Love and Friendship
, the hero’s father guesses the origin of the problem: “Where Edward in the name of wonder did you pick up this unmeaning Gibberish? You have been studying Novels I suspect”?

Then the main plot of
Northanger Abbey
turns on Catherine’s addiction to Gothic fiction. She’s such an enthusiastic fan of those early horror stories that she talks herself into believing that the father of the man she’s smitten with has murdered his wife. And in
Sense and Sensibility
, Marianne’s tragedy is that she acts so much like the heroine of a Romantic tragedy that she can’t see what’s in front of her in the real world. Now, those are two of Jane Austen’s earliest novels, and of course imitation is a natural preoccupation for any young writer. Because she has to learn her craft from earlier masters, she is immersed in imitation herself; if she’s self-aware, she’s going to take an interest in the subject.

But Jane Austen stayed interested in how people imitate what they read. In her last two novels, she’s back on the same subject. In
Persuasion
, the last book she finished, we’ve seen her heroine warn a younger man against reading too much Romantic poetry; Anne Elliot thinks the heartbroken and depressed Captain Benwick shouldn’t immerse himself in “impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony”—because they’re only going to make him even more heartbroken and depressed. And in
Sanditon
, the novel Jane Austen had only started writing when she died, she gives us a young man who acts like a complete jackass because he’s imitating the books he’s read. In this case, her character has quite literally decided to be a villain—just like one in a Samuel Richardson novel. He has learned all the wrong lessons from the books he’s been reading: