The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (49 page)

19
As one woman who vainly beat herself against life’s limitations like a bird breaking its body against a plate-glass window was able to recognize, “At fifteen [Jane
Austen] had few illusions about other people and none about herself.” Virginia Woolf, “Jane Austen,”
The Common Reader
(Mariner Books, 2002), p. 136.

20
So that Alexis de Tocqueville, writing a couple decades after Jane Austen, could argue that marriages worked better in America because American women got to choose their own husbands.
Democracy in America.
See especially vol. II, section III, chapter 11, “How Equality of Condition in America Contributes to Good Morals.”

1
“She saw with the creative eye of fancy, the streets of that gay bathing place covered with officers. She saw herself the object of attention, to tens and to scores of them at present unknown.”

2
A popular destination for elopements, on account of Scottish marriage law.

3
“‘And they are really to be married!’ cried Elizabeth, as soon as they were by themselves. ‘How strange this is! And for
this
we are to be thankful. That they should marry, small as is their chance of happiness, and wretched as is his character, we are forced to rejoice! Oh Lydia!’”

4
“A conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man.”

5
“The stupidity with which he was favored by nature, must guard his courtship from any charm that could make a woman wish for its continuance; and Miss Lucas, who accepted him solely from the pure and disinterested desire of an establishment, cared not how soon that establishment were gained.”

6
Elizabeth’s thoughts on Lydia’s prospects for happiness with Wickham: “neither rational happiness nor worldly prosperity, could be justly expected for her sister”; and “how little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue, she could easily conjecture.” And on Charlotte’s future with Mr. Collins: “the distressing conviction that it was impossible for that friend to be tolerably happy in the lot she had chosen.”

7
“Without thinking highly of men or matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honorable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want.”

8
She and her sister are “the finest young women” in their neighborhood.

9
And she doesn’t have Charlotte’s excuse, either; the Bertrams are so well-off that Maria will never have to worry about money, whether she marries or not.

10
“Independence was more needful than ever; the want of it at Mansfield more sensibly felt. She was less and less able to endure the restraint which her father
imposed. The liberty which his absence had given was now become absolutely necessary.”

11
Headlines on
Cosmo
covers from May 2007, March 2006, November 2010, and July 2007, respectively.

12
Though it’s good to remember that men’s attention comes in kinds and degrees. And it’s definitely worth asking yourself whether the kind of attention you’re attracting is really the kind you want—not to mention, the kind that’s likely to last as
long
as you want.

13
For every example Jane Austen’s unhappy characters give of approaching men and marriage the wrong way, you can find an example of a Jane Austen heroine who does what seems like almost exactly the same thing, except that she gets it right. Charlotte Lucas wants “nothing more than a comfortable home” and ends up married to an embarrassing fool. But Elinor Dashwood, prudently insisting on a certain degree of financial security before embarking on marriage, wins her way through to the only kind of
really
comfortable home—that is, one she shares with a man she loves and respects. Maria Bertram’s pride in Mr. Rushworth’s extensive property is a pitiful caricature of Elizabeth Bennet’s admiration for Mr. Darcy as a just master and liberal patron of the poor. And every happy Jane Austen heroine in the end finds exquisite delight in one man’s intense “admiration.”

14
According to the
New York Times
review of
The Washingtonienne: A Novel—
Cutler’s fictionalized account of her experiences in D.C.—she and her friends were “concerning themselves only fleetingly with finding long-term mates. Indeed, jaded Jackie compares marriage to suicide. ‘Love is not enough,’ she declares to April during one of their frequent girls’ nights out. ‘It just doesn’t cut it anymore.’” Alexandra Jacobs, “‘The Washingtonienne’: D.C. Horizontal,”
New York Times
, June 26, 2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/books/review/26JACOBSL.html
.

15
Life expectancy is longer. Adolescence is extended; women don’t have to grow up so fast. We don’t get married in our teens or early twenties. Just think of Anne Elliot: when
Persuasion
begins she’s past her bloom and in the autumn of her life, where love is concerned—at age twenty-seven! That’s just about the age that one of my high school friends was when she got married, and the women she had worked with in the movie business worried about her: Was she making a big mistake, tying herself down at such an early age?

16
C. S. Lewis discusses all three examples, op. cit., pp. 175–86.

17
“If you, my dear father,” she argues, “will not take the trouble of checking her exuberant spirits, and of teaching her that her present pursuits are not to be the business of her life, she will soon be beyond the reach of amendment.”

18
“A flirt, too, in the worst and meanest degree of flirtation; without any attraction beyond youth and a tolerable person; and from the ignorance and emptiness of her mind, wholly unable to ward off any portion of that universal contempt which her rage for admiration will excite.”

19
Those happy-escape stories were always the unusual ones. (They’re part of what makes Jane Austen’s heroines rare and delightful.)

20
Anderson, op. cit., pp. 12ff.

21
Stories about, for example, the guy who asked her to lick his face, the one who tried to get her to wear a burka, and the one who carefully explained the security system in his apartment building in advance “in case I should want to flee while he was sleeping.”

22
Anderson, op. cit., pp. 5–15.

23
Ibid., pp. 245–46.

24
She makes it clear, for example, that Julia Bertram might have nipped her hopeless crush on Henry Crawford in the bud if she’d had more “knowledge of her own heart”: “He went for a fortnight; a fortnight of such dullness to the Miss Bertrams, as ought to have put them both on their guard, and made even Julia admit in her jealousy of her sister, the absolute necessity of distrusting his attentions, and wishing him not to return....”

1
With setbacks and strategic retreats, but always roaring ahead again in the end.

2
If you had to pinpoint one event that marks the introduction of the Romantic mindset to the world, your best bet might be the publication of Rousseau’s popular epistolary novel
Julie
in 1761. That’s thirty-five years before we know Jane Austen was working on
Elinor and Marianne
, an early version of the novel that became
Sense and Sensibility
(originally also a novel in letters), in an era when, without the twenty-four-hour news cycle or the internet, and when magazines were quarterlies instead of weeklies, fashions reached saturation point at a much slower pace.

3
“Everything crammed in the box and the Victorians sitting on the lid smiling serenely....” F. Scott Fitzgerald,
This Side of Paradise
(Modern Library, Random House, 2005), p. 146.

4
The last of the three quotations is from “Me and Bobby McGee,” written by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster and most memorably sung by Janis Joplin. “Live fast, die young, and have [rather than leave] a good-looking corpse” seems to be originally from William Motley’s
Knock on Any Door
, made into a 1949 movie starring Humphrey Bogart (but the actor speaking this particular line was John Derek); see
http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2010/02/real-origin-of-live-fast-die-young-and.html
. And “If it feels good, do it” was apparently emitted by the 1960s zeitgeist.

5
“Victuals and Drink! Replied my Husband in a most nobly contemptuous manner [to his sister, who’s so unRomantic as to suggest that marrying Laura with no visible means of support may have been a mistake] and dost thou then imagine that there is no other support for an exalted Mind (such as is my Laura’s) than the mean and indelicate employment of Eating and Drinking?”

6
Not to mention the less grievous matter that his conversation is practically incomprehensible on account of the jargon he’s picked up from the literary criticism he reads.

7
“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning.”

8
Respectively, “Love the Way You Lie,” written by Eminiem and Skylar Grey and sung by Eminem and Rihanna (2010); “Someone like you,” written by Adele and Dan Wilson and performed by Adele (2011); “Lucille,” written by Roger Bowling and Hal Bynum and sung by Kenny Rogers (1977); and “Hallelujah,” written by Leonard Cohen and sung by k.d. lang (2004). And, yes, I know, Rihanna and Eminem are supposed to be engaging in some sort of public service announcement against domestic violence. Nevertheless, it’s the intensity of their suffering that makes the song compelling.

9
And
Arthur
and
Marty
(the 1955 Oscar winner), are versions of the same story but with the sexes reversed. The odd romance in
Napoleon Dynamite
between Napoleon’s brother Kip and his soul mate LaFawnduh is a sendup of the same plot.

10
As the author of the actual
When Stella Got Her Groove Back
sadly discovered when her much younger Jamaican husband came out of the closet. She divorced and subsequently sued him, claiming that he had married her for a green card and that he and his lawyer had engaged in a plot to humiliate her in the divorce proceedings. As Jane Austen might say, she discovered that the young lover whose attentions had at first seemed so “bewitching” turned out to be “an unprincipled Fortune-hunter.”

11
Anne Elliot is quite capable of feeling “a nervous thrill all over her.” But for her, that intensity is not the acid test of love.

12
Of course Elinor isn’t simply a mouthpiece for Jane Austen’s own views. She and Marianne are fully realized characters, each with her own limitations. Elinor’s flaws become crystal clear when her habitual equanimity leads her to underestimate the very real danger of Marianne’s near-fatal illness. But Jane Austen’s criticism of Romanticism is real, too. And it’s worth noting that she, like Elinor, had suffered because a man loved her and yet his family and financial situation made it impossible for him to marry her. Almost
three years
after Jane Austen saw Tom Lefroy for the last time, she was “too proud to make any enquiries” about him to his aunt, visiting the Austens at Steventon. In his old age Tom Lefroy admitted to having loved Jane Austen in his youth, though only with “a boy’s love.”

13
“You Belong with Me,” written by Taylor Swift and Liz Rose and performed by Taylor Swift (2008).

14
“My dear Fanny, you feel these things a great deal too much.”

15
Does pursuing happy love instead of Romantic love mean you have to prefer Taylor Swift to Leonard Cohen? No. But one reason happy love can seem trite is that it’s even harder to create truly great art from happiness than from misery. How many of the world’s greatest literary artists is a comedian? Shakespeare pulled it off. And Dante, Mozart, Jane Austen. There aren’t many in that class.

16
She’s having difficulty managing her toddler nephew while she tends to his big brother, who has a broken collar bone: “In another moment, however, she found herself in the state of being released from him; some one was taking him from her, though he had bent down her head so much, that his little sturdy hands were unfastened from around her neck, and he was resolutely borne away, before she knew that Captain Wentworth had done it.

17
“A great tendency to lowness.”

18
And also “Love don’t make things nice—it ruins everything.... We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die.”
Moonstruck
, script by John Patrick Shanley.

19
Jane Austen famously called Emma “a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like.” And even if you do like Emma, you can see what Jane Austen meant. Emma is one of the most aggravating women in all of fiction. (My husband, in an aggravating moment of his own, once claimed that Emma is the perfect picture of what any woman looks like to a man who loves her—unaccountably
interfering, with infinite inexplicable energy for detail, and always starting trouble of one kind or another, yet somehow enchanting despite or even because of it all. As Mr. Knightley says, “sweetest and best of all creatures, faultless in spite of all her faults.”) She’s bossy. She’s a snob who’s indignant about other people’s snobbery. She’s a thorough menace to her friends and neighbors.