The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (7 page)

But Jane Austen portrays flouting convention “for love” as ugly and really stupid. She’s not on the side of the courageous young people who defy everybody’s advice and expectations to find their own destiny. In Jane Austen’s parody of the Romantic plot, the defiant young lovers are selfish and disastrously foolish. They trample other people’s feelings and indulge their own in the most self-defeating way. Their kind of Romantic love is not really very loving. And it most definitely doesn’t produce anything that we’d call happiness. Laura, Sophia, Augustus, and Edward seem quite satisfied to turn their lives into train wrecks—just so long as they can congratulate themselves that their Romantic feelings make them superior to the rest of us. The young Jane Austen was not impressed.

And doesn’t she have a point? Forget the movies for a minute and think about real life. Say one of your friends gets involved with a man who’s obviously wrong for her from a conventional point of view—maybe he’s much younger or much older, an obvious rich playboy or else without a real job or any prospect of one, completely outclassed by her education and accomplishments. Are you instantly sure she’s going to be happy? For long? As she raves about how he’s loosening up her inhibitions, are you cheering her on 100 percent—or is there a sense of impending doom in the back of your mind? She keeps telling you, “He’s so good for me.” But are you sure she’s right?

A woman can throw caution to the winds and “get her groove back” in a relationship with a man who, wiser heads would advise, is completely unsuitable for her. But all too often it turns out that there’s some downside
to the relationship that she’s not able to see in the first glow of excitement.
¹⁰
Sometimes these things work out, but a lot of the time they crash and burn. As you listen to your friend in the first raptures of this kind of love, it’s not unreasonable to think you may eventually be called on to help sort through the wreckage. Life isn’t a movie, much less a Disney fairy tale. If you ignore all the sensible but boring advice, wander out into the forest, and meet an attractive stranger, you can’t be sure he’ll turn out to be a prince.

But wait a minute here. Is the creator of Elizabeth and Darcy less romantic than we are? Is Jane Austen on the side of the stodgy parents and boring husbands? Is she, disappointingly, of the it’s-just-as-easy-to fall-in-love-with-a-rich-man-as-a-poor-one school of thought? Was Jane Austen a cynic about love?

Far from it! But she didn’t confuse true love with rebellion against your parents, rejection of convention, or selfishness. She could tell the difference between finding the right man and “finding yourself.” She knew that falling in love isn’t about being struck on first sight with the irrational conviction that some random stranger is the man on whom “the happiness or Misery of my future Life must depend.” She could tell the difference between the pursuit of emotional intensity at all costs and the pursuit of happiness. Jane Austen saw clearly that Romantic love in the unhealthy sense is just another blind alley—like money or the desire to be desired—leading away from happiness in love. Only it’s even more seductive.

Capital-R Romantic love is way too easy to confuse with the real thing. Real love
is
truly liberating. It is full of emotional intensity. And it’s natural that love will be part of a process of growing up into greater independence and your own mature identity. If those things resonate with you, don’t think that Jane Austen didn’t understand what you feel ... or that her ideas about love are too tame for you ... or that what she’s offering is an anemic version of the red-blooded
reality you’re looking for. Her rejection of the Romantic template for love is
not
a rejection of the intensity of romantic love,
¹¹
the way it makes you feel free, or the new start it gives you. It’s not a rejection of personal authenticity, either. It’s simply a rejection of the way the Romantic Cult of Sensibility fetishized those things, made them ends in themselves, and seduced countless numbers of real live human beings into totally unnecessary misery.

Speaking of totally unnecessary misery, let’s take a minute with the Brontë sisters, authors of
Jane Eyre
and
Wuthering Heights
. Why drag them into this? Because Charlotte and Emily Brontë are a couple of nineteenth-century novelists who provide a perfect contrast with Jane Austen’s attitude toward love. They’re ardent practitioners and enthusiastic connoisseurs of the Romantic idea of love that Jane Austen was trying to get her readers to laugh at. If you put Emily’s
Wuthering Heights
and Charlotte’s snarky comments about the Jane Austen novels together, they pretty much sum up the anti-Jane Austen, capital-R Romantic position on love. The Brontë indictment of Jane Austen is the very same objection that we, unconscious heirs of Romanticism that we are, can’t help feeling at least a little bit once we see how Jane Austen expected us to get a grip on our distracting Romantic impulses and reprogram our romantic GPS to aim for happiness.

Here’s Charlotte Brontë on Jane Austen:

In other words, Jane Austen is not intense enough for us true flesh-and-blood women. She floats on the surface above real, deep, throbbing, all-compelling passion, which she’s too superficial even to understand.

And here’s Jane Austen’s answer to Charlotte Brontë:

Okay, so that’s not literally Jane Austen’s answer to Charlotte Brontë, who hadn’t yet turned two years old when Jane Austen died! I’m cheating. It’s actually Elinor Dashwood in
Sense and Sensibility
, talking to her sister Marianne.
¹²
It is, however, Jane Austen’s answer to the very accusation that Charlotte Brontë would one day hurl at her.

But how could Jane Austen anticipate Charlotte Brontë’s criticism, and have Elinor answer it? How could she know that anyone would think the kind of love her heroines find is completely superficial—just a negative thing, a lack of passion? How anticipate that years after her death a Charlotte Brontë would come along and claim that she, Jane Austen, exhibited a total and embarrassing ignorance of the intense heights and depths of real love? Jane Austen knew precisely the case she had to answer because Charlotte Brontë was speaking out of the spirit of Romanticism, which was already alive and well in Jane Austen’s day.

And which, unfortunately, keeps on giving two hundred years later—unfortunately, because the whole thing is a kind of bait and switch. Here’s the bait: At the beginning, Romanticism is all frothy promises of certain, total bliss if you will just throw off all restraints. Love will hit you like a thunderbolt. It requires no effort on your part—certainly not the effort of asking whether you and the man you’re suddenly enamored of are at all “likely to be necessary to each other’s ultimate comfort.” Romantic love promises instant liberation, authenticity, and emotional intensity. And then,
once you have liberated yourself from convention, from the standards your parents taught you and the opinions of your friends, from every practical concern, you get the emotional intensity all right. But—surprise!—it’s intense emotional pain.

“Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unutterable!” That’s the
cri de coeur
of the Romantic lover, straight from Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
. Sooner or later true Romantics find out that their kind of love fails to deliver on the effortless bliss it promises. Do they, then, reconsider their premises? Does it occur to them that those unRomantic people whose advice they scorned might know something about love after all? Of course not! Here’s the switch. Their agony is proof that they—and only they—are experiencing authentic love. To true Romantics, anyone who hasn’t suffered as they have doesn’t know what it is to love. Which, to Jane Austen, made it perfectly clear that the Romantic illusion is less about love than it is about “distinction” and “importance”—about being more “interesting” than other people.

Love as Jane Austen understood it isn’t measured by the intensity of our agony. Jane Austen heroines feel all the emotions from giddy delight to terrible pain. She doesn’t think the emotional roller coaster is the main point of love, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t understand love’s ability to put us through the ringer. Jane Austen, in fact, excels in painting realistic pictures of love’s painful moments. Her true-to-life accounts aren’t much like the Brontës’ stormy dramas. But for all their
sturm und drang
, the Brontës never come so close as Jane Austen to what it’s really like for most of us (who aren’t gypsies reared on windblown heaths, or governesses wooed by men with insane wives locked in their attics) to be unhappy in love.

Jane Austen gives us women whose unhappiness in love is too close to real life for comfort. There’s Fanny Price in
Mansfield Park
, hopelessly in love with a man to whom she’s romantically invisible. She’s Edmund’s timid little cousin, sharing all his tastes, interests, and beliefs. For Fanny, growing
up means realizing she’s always loved Edmund. But for Edmund, Fanny is just part of the background: his cherished friend and confidante, to be sure, but not really a woman to him.

It’s not until Edmund meets Mary Crawford that he begins to think of love and marriage. Mary is sparkling, fashionable, “fearless,” and exciting to talk to; she’s everything that Fanny isn’t—and everything that Edmund isn’t, either. Fanny shares Edmund’s steady temperament, his quiet but deep enjoyment of natural beauty, his ramrod-straight principles. Things between Edmund and Mary Crawford never go smoothly, even from the beginning. He’s continually shocked to learn how lightly she takes the things he’s serious about; she’s forever frustrated by his stick-in-the-mud attitudes. But until Edmund is forced to see how very little Mary cares about the things that matter most to him, it never, ever occurs to him to think of Fanny as a woman he could love.

If Fanny were a twenty-first-century teenager, she’d go through the first forty-six chapters of
Mansfield Park
humming along to Taylor Swift: “Why can’t you see / You belong with me?”
¹³

Fanny is ecstatic when Edmund gives her a gold chain to wear to her first ball. It’s just a cousinly gesture on his part, and she does her best to hide her rapture, but still he finds her emotions a bit much.
¹⁴
This is the excruciating nature of unrequited love. Feelings that would be welcome, delightful, fascinating to a man who felt the same as we do are at best embarrassing to one who doesn’t. Fanny’s pain is of a distinctly unglamorous sort, and it may be trite
¹⁵
compared with the drama the Brontës cook up. But it’s a very real kind of heartbreak that women are actually suffering all the time—thousands at this very moment, I have no doubt, in hundreds of high school classrooms, college dorms, and offices—even if that pain isn’t dignified by perfectly timed thunderclaps and picturesque decaying architecture.

Anne Elliot’s situation is no less realistic, and no less painful, than Fanny Price’s. While Fanny is a teenage girl in love for the first time, Anne is a mature woman. In fact, Anne is almost past the age when a woman can (well, could then) reasonably hope to find happiness in love. She’s long since come to realize that one fatal decision she made at the age of nineteen lost
her the man she loved and ruined her happiness, very likely forever. When Anne first met him, Frederick Wentworth brought into her life all the things that she was missing at home. Anne’s mother had died, and her father and older sister were cold fish with no affection or respect for Anne; their vanity and selfishness made it impossible for them to see any value in a person so different from themselves.

Wentworth was full of energy and warmth, with an open and generous temper, the determination to make his way in the world, and the sterling qualities to make all his ambitions realities. But her father was appalled that a penurious young naval officer should aspire to the hand of a baronet’s daughter. And Anne’s only real friend, Lady Russell, was against the match, too. She was sure that a long engagement to a man with no solid prospects wasn’t a good idea for her young friend. Since Lady Russell was the one person Anne had to trust and look up to, she allowed herself to be persuaded that breaking her engagement to Captain Wentworth was the right thing to do. And that decision blighted Anne’s life. She broke the engagement only out of a sense of duty, against the dearest wish of her heart—and only because she was persuaded that it would be a drag on Wentworth’s prospects, that ending it would be “for his advantage.” But Wentworth couldn’t see it that way, and he parted from Anne in bitterness.