The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (6 page)
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Authors: Elizabeth Kantor
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I
F WE
REALLY
WANT TO BRING BACK JANE AUSTEN ...
F WE
REALLY
WANT TO BRING BACK JANE AUSTEN ...
We won’t fool ourselves into thinking love is something we can afford to play with or regard as a distracting hobby. We won’t try keeping men safely in one compartment of our lives for entertainment, security, or comfort. We won’t fritter away our chances for happiness by treating men and love casually. We’ll take happiness seriously—seriously enough to make it the standard by which we judge all our choices about men. We won’t aim for anything less than the kind of love Elizabeth found with Darcy.CHAPTER TWO
D
ON’T FALL FOR A FALSE IDEA OF LOVE
ON’T FALL FOR A FALSE IDEA OF LOVE
OKAY, SO YOU’ RE DETERMINED TO PURSUE YOUR Jane Austen happy ending. You’re set to resist every other attractive temptation that could pull you off course—everything from
short-term pleasure, to ...
a quick fix for loneliness, to ...
feeling mature and sophisticated, to ...
financial security, to ...
impressing your friends ...
and set your sights on happiness.
But wait a minute. Where’s
love
in all this? We’re used to thinking of “love,” not “happiness,” as the opposite of all the foolish and mercenary things women can do in regard to men. You marry for money, or else you marry for love—right? Yes, but ... what exactly
is
love, according to Jane Austen? Do our ideas of a happy ending match hers? Or are they different—maybe in some subtle way that keeps us from ever reaching what Elizabeth finds with Mr. Darcy?
love
in all this? We’re used to thinking of “love,” not “happiness,” as the opposite of all the foolish and mercenary things women can do in regard to men. You marry for money, or else you marry for love—right? Yes, but ... what exactly
is
love, according to Jane Austen? Do our ideas of a happy ending match hers? Or are they different—maybe in some subtle way that keeps us from ever reaching what Elizabeth finds with Mr. Darcy?
When we see what Jane Austen means by “permanent happiness,” we can’t help agreeing with her. We see Elizabeth with Darcy, Emma with Mr. Knightley, Anne Elliott with Captain Wentworth, and we want what they have. That’s love, obviously. That’s the happiness we’re looking for.
But would Jane Austen recognize everything that
we
typically think of as “love” as the real thing?
we
typically think of as “love” as the real thing?
As a matter of fact, Jane Austen is a fierce critic of a certain set of ideas about what love is. She set out quite deliberately to warn her readers against it. Jane saw one particular concept of love as a dangerous threat to women’s happiness—a distraction even more seductive than money, or status, or sex.
Jane Austen versus the Romantic SensibilityWhether we know it or not, we’ve inherited a whole set of notions about love that you can call Romantic with a capital R, as in “the Romantic Era”oror “the Romantic Movement.” And Jane Austen would disapprove. Now, nobody can deny that Jane Austen is a fan of romantic love
without
that capital R. Or, rather, she’s more than a fan: she’s drawn the most perfect pictures of exactly what it’s like for a woman to be deeply in love with a man; to hope with every fiber of her being that he loves her, but fear he doesn’t; and to come through the ordeal to love’s ineffable delights. Jane Austen somehow manages to describe the indescribable. If you’ve ever been deeply and happily in love, just read
Pride and Prejudice.
You will instantly recognize the experience that Jane Austen somehow manages to create between Elizabeth and Darcy. It’s as if she could compound endorphins out of ink and paper.
without
that capital R. Or, rather, she’s more than a fan: she’s drawn the most perfect pictures of exactly what it’s like for a woman to be deeply in love with a man; to hope with every fiber of her being that he loves her, but fear he doesn’t; and to come through the ordeal to love’s ineffable delights. Jane Austen somehow manages to describe the indescribable. If you’ve ever been deeply and happily in love, just read
Pride and Prejudice.
You will instantly recognize the experience that Jane Austen somehow manages to create between Elizabeth and Darcy. It’s as if she could compound endorphins out of ink and paper.
But Jane Austen was
no
fan of specifically
R
omantic notions about love, as we’ll see. What are these Romantic notions? Well, they’re hard for us today even to recognize. Not because they’re difficult to find, but because they’re everywhere. Romantic ideas have woven themselves into all our music, movies, and books. They’ve dominated our culture
1
for about two hundred years. By this point, it’s hard for any of us to step outside of Romantic assumptions to see Romantic ideas objectively. Romanticism is that voice
in the back of all our heads, pushing us to go for emotional intensity at all costs (intense misery, if we can’t get intense bliss), encouraging us to mistake rebellion against convention for true love, and telling us that happiness is boring.
no
fan of specifically
R
omantic notions about love, as we’ll see. What are these Romantic notions? Well, they’re hard for us today even to recognize. Not because they’re difficult to find, but because they’re everywhere. Romantic ideas have woven themselves into all our music, movies, and books. They’ve dominated our culture
1
for about two hundred years. By this point, it’s hard for any of us to step outside of Romantic assumptions to see Romantic ideas objectively. Romanticism is that voice
in the back of all our heads, pushing us to go for emotional intensity at all costs (intense misery, if we can’t get intense bliss), encouraging us to mistake rebellion against convention for true love, and telling us that happiness is boring.
T
IP JUST FOR JANEITES
IP JUST FOR JANEITES
Be a romantic,
not a Romantic,
about love.
not a Romantic,
about love.
But in Jane Austen’s day, Romanticism and the “Cult of Sensibility” were fresh and new ideas.
2
In fact, they were so new that society hadn’t yet fallen for them hook, line, and sinker. But those ideas went on to conquer the popular imagination. After they led to painful excesses in the aptly named Romantic Era, the Victorians tried to put a lid on the whole thing,
3
but Romantic ideas still weren’t really seen through, or ever effectively answered. They were repressed, and they boiled away like lava under a thin crust, waiting to erupt just as soon as Victorian repression and hypocrisy should be relaxed. And in the twentieth century they broke out with a vengeance: “If it feels good, do it”... “Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse” ... “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”
4
....
The Cult of Sensibility2
In fact, they were so new that society hadn’t yet fallen for them hook, line, and sinker. But those ideas went on to conquer the popular imagination. After they led to painful excesses in the aptly named Romantic Era, the Victorians tried to put a lid on the whole thing,
3
but Romantic ideas still weren’t really seen through, or ever effectively answered. They were repressed, and they boiled away like lava under a thin crust, waiting to erupt just as soon as Victorian repression and hypocrisy should be relaxed. And in the twentieth century they broke out with a vengeance: “If it feels good, do it”... “Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse” ... “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”
4
....
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Let’s go back to Jane Austen’s teenage years, when Romantic ideas were a raging fad—not, as they are today, a set of unquestioned axioms in the back of all our minds. She can help us disentangle the real delights of romantic love from the pseudo-thrills of Romantic sensibility—by teaching us to recognize (and laugh at) the capital-R Romanticism that’s now woven into all our assumptions about love. Even before Jane Austen began writing what would become
Sense and Sensibility
, she was quite a sharp critic of the “cult of sensibility” that swept Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. In her teens she wrote
Love and Friendship
, a spoof that makes hilarious fun of the “novel of sensibility,” in which emotional intensity is set up as the be-all and end-all—to the extent that there’s no room for honesty, responsibility, or the most basic common sense. Laura, the heroine of
Love and Friendship
, admits that her Romantic “sensibility too tremblingly alive to every affliction of my Friends and particularly to every affliction of my own,” is her “only fault, if a fault it could be called.” Really, Laura is proud of herself for allowing her life to be governed by intense emotions at the expense of common sense and even common decency. She falls in love in the approved Romantic manner, at first sight: “No sooner did I first behold him, than I felt that on him the happiness or Misery of my future Life must depend.”
Sense and Sensibility
, she was quite a sharp critic of the “cult of sensibility” that swept Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. In her teens she wrote
Love and Friendship
, a spoof that makes hilarious fun of the “novel of sensibility,” in which emotional intensity is set up as the be-all and end-all—to the extent that there’s no room for honesty, responsibility, or the most basic common sense. Laura, the heroine of
Love and Friendship
, admits that her Romantic “sensibility too tremblingly alive to every affliction of my Friends and particularly to every affliction of my own,” is her “only fault, if a fault it could be called.” Really, Laura is proud of herself for allowing her life to be governed by intense emotions at the expense of common sense and even common decency. She falls in love in the approved Romantic manner, at first sight: “No sooner did I first behold him, than I felt that on him the happiness or Misery of my future Life must depend.”
T
IP JUST FOR JANEITES
IP JUST FOR JANEITES
Don’t fall in love
at first sight—or even
on the first date.
at first sight—or even
on the first date.
The object of this instant passion is Edward, whose “noble Manliness” is demonstrated by his spurning the girl his father wants him to marry: “No never exclaimed I. Lady Dorothea is lovely and Engaging; I prefer no woman to her; but know, Sir, that I scorn to marry her in compliance with your wishes. No! Never shall it be said that I obliged my Father.” Edward’s father is unimpressed with this reasoning: “Where Edward in the name of wonder (said he) did you pick up this unmeaning Gibberish? You have been studying Novels I expect.”
Laura and Edward’s “sensibility” makes them superior in their own eyes to unRomantic people—“that inferior order of Beings with regard to Delicate feelings, tender Sentiments, and refined Sensibility,” who stupidly concern themselves with such pedestrian questions as how to have enough money to live on.
5
Their Romantic sensibilities make them keenly alive to their own refined feelings. To other people’s feelings? Not so much. If other people’s sensibilities don’t entirely coincide with their own, why should they pretend to care? That would be hypocrisy, good manners, an inauthentic expression of something they don’t really feel—everything they despise.
5
Their Romantic sensibilities make them keenly alive to their own refined feelings. To other people’s feelings? Not so much. If other people’s sensibilities don’t entirely coincide with their own, why should they pretend to care? That would be hypocrisy, good manners, an inauthentic expression of something they don’t really feel—everything they despise.
Laura and Edward are forced by financial difficulties to move in with Sophia and Augustus, an equally Romantic couple. The four of them are perfectly happy together, spending their time “in mutual Protestations of Friendship, and in vows of unalterable Love”—until Augustus is hauled off to debtors’ prison. Naturally his wife’s exquisite feelings make it too painful for her to visit him there.
Choose Your Entertainment Carefully—and Notice What It’s Doing to You
J
ane Austen characters get themselves into terrible messes because of the books they read. Poor Catherine Morland in
Northanger Abbey
is afraid she’s lost Henry Tilney when he finds out she’s been speculating that his father murdered his mother, or locked her up, just like the villains in the Gothic novels that she’s addicted to. In
Sanditon,
Sir Edward Denham has somehow managed to take the rapist in Richardson’s
Clarissa
as a role model and is planning his own future career of abduction accordingly.
6
ane Austen characters get themselves into terrible messes because of the books they read. Poor Catherine Morland in
Northanger Abbey
is afraid she’s lost Henry Tilney when he finds out she’s been speculating that his father murdered his mother, or locked her up, just like the villains in the Gothic novels that she’s addicted to. In
Sanditon,
Sir Edward Denham has somehow managed to take the rapist in Richardson’s
Clarissa
as a role model and is planning his own future career of abduction accordingly.
6
And Anne Elliot, the most nearly Romantic of Jane Austen’s happy heroines,
7
warns against overindulgence in certain kinds of Romantic reading. She’s been listening to the heartbroken Captain Benwick as he quotes Byron and Scott’s “various lines which imaged a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness.” Worried about the young man, Anne ventures “to hope that he did not always read only poetry; and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it sparingly.”
7
warns against overindulgence in certain kinds of Romantic reading. She’s been listening to the heartbroken Captain Benwick as he quotes Byron and Scott’s “various lines which imaged a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness.” Worried about the young man, Anne ventures “to hope that he did not always read only poetry; and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it sparingly.”
The idea that some kinds of entertainment can’t be “safely enjoyed” doesn’t jibe very well with our modern attitudes. But notice that Jane Austen is not arguing for book-banning or doing the Victorian matron act here, trying to protect a young girl’s innocent ears from naughty stories. She’s talking about the effect of Romantic poetry on a grown man, whom an even more mature woman—“feeling in herself the right of seniority of mind”—is advising to exercise responsible judgment about his own mental health. If Captain Benwick, already heartbroken and deeply discouraged, spends his days reading poems about love and agony, he’s not taking care of himself, and he’s likely to end up dangerously depressed.
The poetry that’s exacerbating Captain Benwick’s heartbreak isn’t much read now; but we absolutely do hear what Anne Elliot calls “impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony” every day, no matter what radio station we’ve got the car stereo tuned to. Rihanna tells Eminem, “Just gonna stand there and watch me burn, But that’s alright because I like the way it hurts....” Adele lets the pain flow: “Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead.” Kenny Rogers sings, “This time the hurtin’ won’t heal.” Or k.d. lang lets us know, “But all I’ve ever learned from love, Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya.”
8
8
The songs and stories that we immerse ourselves in
do
create expectations that we carry with us back into our actual lives. Both fiction and poetry or music, in their different ways, draw us in by a certain attractiveness that they cast over their subject matter, even when that subject matter is in itself horribly painful. A fantastic movie or a great novel can make any kind of suffering—unrequited love, grinding poverty, even child abuse, psychosis, and suicidal depression—interesting and even somehow more appealing than they are in real life. Okay, so moviegoers didn’t rush off to become schizophrenic because they loved
A Beautiful Mind
, or walk out of
Good Will Hunting
seriously regretting their own comparatively boring, abuse-free childhoods. But how many of us were nudged just a notch or two over from ordinary adolescent angst toward actual depression by
The Bell Jar
or
Girl
,
Interrupted
?
do
create expectations that we carry with us back into our actual lives. Both fiction and poetry or music, in their different ways, draw us in by a certain attractiveness that they cast over their subject matter, even when that subject matter is in itself horribly painful. A fantastic movie or a great novel can make any kind of suffering—unrequited love, grinding poverty, even child abuse, psychosis, and suicidal depression—interesting and even somehow more appealing than they are in real life. Okay, so moviegoers didn’t rush off to become schizophrenic because they loved
A Beautiful Mind
, or walk out of
Good Will Hunting
seriously regretting their own comparatively boring, abuse-free childhoods. But how many of us were nudged just a notch or two over from ordinary adolescent angst toward actual depression by
The Bell Jar
or
Girl
,
Interrupted
?
Laura and Sophia are taken in by a cousin whose generosity they repay by persuading his daughter to reject the man her father approves of: “They said he was Sensible, well-informed, and Agreeable; we did not pretend to Judge of such trifles, but as we were convinced he had no soul, that he had never read the Sorrows of Werther, & that his hair bore not the slightest resemblance to Auburn, we were certain Janetta could feel no affection for him, or at least that she ought to feel none.”
Under Laura and Sophia’s influence, Janetta soon learns “a proper confidence in her own opinion, & a suitable contempt of her father’s.” Her new Romantic role models persuade her that she’s really in love with an Army captain who’s never given her a thought, but who’s naturally delighted at the chance to elope with an heiress. Janetta’s boringly unRomantic father points out that he’s “an unprincipled Fortune-hunter.”
Love and Friendship
is a scream, with Laura and Sophia fainting “Alternately on a Sofa” and rapturously recognizing long-lost grandfathers and cousins at the drop of a hat. It’s all very funny. But it’s a bit of a shock, too. Here’s Jane Austen, the creator of Elizabeth and Darcy—siding against Romantic love, making it look ridiculous and cheap.
Liberation, Authenticity, Intensityis a scream, with Laura and Sophia fainting “Alternately on a Sofa” and rapturously recognizing long-lost grandfathers and cousins at the drop of a hat. It’s all very funny. But it’s a bit of a shock, too. Here’s Jane Austen, the creator of Elizabeth and Darcy—siding against Romantic love, making it look ridiculous and cheap.
We’ve seen the same plot in a hundred movies. Again and again—think
Grease
,
Moonstruck
,
Dirty Dancing
,
Say Anything
,
Titanic
,
How Stella Got Her Groove Back
, or the Molly Ringwald character in
The Breakfast Club
9
—
we’ve rooted for the girl who falls in love, if not exactly at first sight, then close to it, with someone totally unsuitable from the point of view of her parents, or the advice of too-conventional friends, or (here’s a modern twist) in comparison to her current safe, boring husband or boyfriend. Our Romantic heroine gains the self-confidence to break away from the well-meaning but not-really-right-for-her plans that other people have for her and follow her own heart. At the end she’s not just happy in love—she’s freer, more authentically herself. She’s found a life that’s more intensely real
than the one she broke away from. Even Disney animation uses the same plot. Sleeping Beauty disobeys her fairy godmothers’ careful advice, goes out into the woods, and falls in love with a stranger. The Little Mermaid defies her father, breaks the rules, and finds true love and the kind of life she wants for herself in an alien world.
Grease
,
Moonstruck
,
Dirty Dancing
,
Say Anything
,
Titanic
,
How Stella Got Her Groove Back
, or the Molly Ringwald character in
The Breakfast Club
9
—
we’ve rooted for the girl who falls in love, if not exactly at first sight, then close to it, with someone totally unsuitable from the point of view of her parents, or the advice of too-conventional friends, or (here’s a modern twist) in comparison to her current safe, boring husband or boyfriend. Our Romantic heroine gains the self-confidence to break away from the well-meaning but not-really-right-for-her plans that other people have for her and follow her own heart. At the end she’s not just happy in love—she’s freer, more authentically herself. She’s found a life that’s more intensely real
than the one she broke away from. Even Disney animation uses the same plot. Sleeping Beauty disobeys her fairy godmothers’ careful advice, goes out into the woods, and falls in love with a stranger. The Little Mermaid defies her father, breaks the rules, and finds true love and the kind of life she wants for herself in an alien world.
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