What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (37 page)

Colonel Brandon’s explanation of his feelings to Mrs Dashwood is not entirely evasive. Applying to a lady’s parents is conventional. Mr Collins ‘made his declaration in form’ in
Pride and Prejudice
by applying to Elizabeth’s mother for ‘a private audience with her’ (I. xix). As soon as Mr Bingley has proposed to Jane Bennet he whispers something to her and leaves the room (III. xiii). Later we find that it has been for a ‘conference with her father’. The day after successfully proposing to Elizabeth, Mr Darcy comes back to Longbourn to see her father. The difficulty that Emma and Mr Knightley have in dealing with Mr Woodhouse is all the more marked because the husband-to-be is supposed to apply to the father. In
Persuasion
, Captain Benwick evidently proposes to Louisa Musgrove and is accepted, but then writes to Mr Musgrove before travelling to Uppercross for his answer. Characters are preoccupied by the notion that there are matters of form in the business of making and accepting (or rejecting) a marriage proposal. ‘In such cases as these, it is, I believe, the established mode to express a sense of obligation for the sentiments avowed, however unequally they may be returned,’ says Elizabeth Bennet to Mr Darcy, with haughty irony (II. xi). Her pretence of attachment to convention is utterly disdainful. We know that Charles Musgrove cannot have loved Anne Elliot by the parody of formality that Austen adopts when she tells us that he proposed to her: ‘She had been solicited . . . to change her name, by the young man’ (I. iv). He might have said something quite unaffected, but his actual words are turned into a formula. This is nothing like the imagined flow of ‘declarations and proposals’ that Anne once heard from Captain Wentworth. So it is no surprise when the second half of the sentence tells us that his proposal of marriage to her sister Mary followed ‘not long afterwards’. Later in the novel we overhear Louisa telling Captain Wentworth that he married Mary ‘about a year’ after being refused by Anne (I. x). The proposal itself must have come a good deal sooner after that rejection.

What is a proposal? It is easy to assume that it is just a matter of popping the question. But some men in Austen’s novels feel that the very framing of a question is a difficult business. John Thorpe in
Northanger Abbey
is a buffoon with few conversational resources, but the problems he has proposing to Catherine Morland are comic because they are real (I. xv). He comes very close, in his words and phrases, to the purposes in his head, yet never quite manages an actual proposal, and leaves Catherine with no idea of his intent. ‘A famous good thing this marrying scheme, upon my soul!’ Only a few chapters later Isabella is telling her that John Thorpe is ‘over head and ears in love with you’ and that Catherine has given him ‘the most positive encouragement’ (II. iii). ‘He says . . . that he as good as made you an offer, and that you received his advances in the kindest way.’ Catherine is naturally flabbergasted.

Reluctance must be overcome, proper hesitation allowed its expression. The assumption is that the woman who might say yes in the end will not necessarily say yes straight away. ‘You are silent . . . at present I ask no more,’ cries Mr Knightley, sensing that he does have hope of Emma accepting him. But then presumptuousness is the worst possible element of a proposal. The most enjoyable example of this is Mr Collins’s proposal to Elizabeth, where his speechifying is the consequence of his assurance. Then there is Mr Elton, who is given little pause by Emma’s initial resistance. He stops for a moment or two to wonder why she keeps talking of Miss Smith, but soon his flow of amatory exclamations is on him again. In
Mansfield Park
, Henry Crawford’s presumptuousness is more subtle. He softens Fanny up for his proposal by telling her of the commission that has been procured for her brother William. As she is about to leave the room in excitement to tell her uncle, he pounces. ‘The opportunity was too fair, and his feelings too impatient. He was after her immediately’ (II. xiii). We do not hear his words, for we are inhabiting Fanny’s mind, and she at first hardly realises what it is that he is saying. He is ‘in the middle of his farther explanation, before she had suspected for what she was detained’. We get snatches of his likely phrasing: ‘sensations which his heart had never known before’ filter through her disbelieving consciousness. ‘It was all beyond belief!’ Yet the presumptuousness of these men is no greater than that of Mr Darcy in his first proposal to Elizabeth. He opens with a declaration that it is made despite himself: ‘In vain have I struggled’ (II. xi). His ardour overwhelms his reservations. He proposes because, despite all pride and all social considerations, he must have Elizabeth. It is the closest thing in all Austen’s fiction to a declaration of sexual desire, and therefore not sufficient grounds for marriage. No more than Mr Collins does Mr Darcy conceive of being refused, which is why he must think again.

Mr Collins is wonderfully absurd for taking Elizabeth’s first, politely phrased refusal as but the first step on a path to acceptance. There is no saying no to him. He foolishly supposes that he knows what is ‘usual with young ladies’. Yet his expectation that a well-brought-up young woman would not necessarily say yes immediately is probably based on real social convention. Anything other than a rejection is encouragement. So tricky is the whole business that while some, like John Thorpe, who do want to propose do not manage to do so, others who never propose find that they have in fact offered marriage. The key example is in
Persuasion
. Captain Wentworth never proposes or comes near to proposing to Louisa Musgrove, but finds that he is being thought of as if he had. ‘I found . . . that I was considered by Harville an engaged man!’ (II. xi) He is not outraged; he is mortified, for on reflection, he cannot quarrel with their assumption. ‘I was hers in honour if she wished it.’ He has acted in such a way that she might expect a proposal – walking on his own with her, paying his attentions to her, jumping her down – and he has done this before witnesses. As he is an honourable man, all this is as good as proposing. If a man of honour does make an offer he is hooked. Thus John Dashwood’s grotesque (and ill-advised) advice to Elinor about Colonel Brandon: ‘his friends may all advise him against it. But some of those little attentions and encouragements which ladies can so easily give, will fix him, in spite of himself. And there can be no reason why you should not try for him’ (II. xi).

It is a matter of morality as much as law. Thinking Willoughby engaged to Marianne, Elinor had expected his letter to her sister to express ‘his desire of a release’ from their engagement, along with ‘professions of regret’, this being the ‘decorum of a gentleman’. So a man might ask to be released, even if the example of Lucy Steele would tell us that his fiancée’s agreement might not be forthcoming. A man who broke off an engagement without permission could be sued for breach of promise by a woman, though if the case did not involve seduction, awards for damages in this periods were not usually financially crippling, and cases were often settled out of court for modest sums.
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A good man, however, will regard himself as bound to his first proposal. So Edward Ferrars explains to Elinor that he had to stick to the arrangement with Lucy Steele, however hateful it had become to him (III. xiii). A woman, however, can change her mind. Jane Austen herself changed her mind overnight, from yes to no, when she received a proposal from Harris Bigg-Wither in 1802.
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Lucy Steele changes her mind and ‘releases’ Edward Ferrars. Sir Thomas Bertram gives his daughter Maria the chance to change her mind about marrying Mr Rushworth. Anne Elliot was once persuaded to change her mind from accepting Captain Wentworth’s proposal to declining it.

It is not surprising that women might like to entertain their ‘power of refusal’, if it is the only power available. Emma, the arch-‘imaginist’, entertains herself with imagining all the ways in which Frank Churchill might come to a ‘declaration’ and be rejected by her (II. xiii). Mrs Smith in
Persuasion
suggests something rather dismaying about marriage proposals: that women contemplate them with disdain but respond to them with gratitude. She talks as if a woman can usually foresee a proposal and likes to imagine turning it down. ‘Till it does come, you know, we women never mean to have any body. It is a thing of course among us, that every man is refused – till he offers’ (II. ix). She does not know that her friend has already turned down two men. Yet Mr Collins’s theory about the mere conventionality of refusals finds some backing in the refusals even of some of Austen’s heroines. Fanny rejects Mr Crawford’s proposal, but the next day Sir Thomas says that he has ‘received as much encouragement to proceed as a well-judging woman could permit herself to give’ (III. i). He is being insensitive, but not stupid. Near the end of the novel the novelist intervenes unnecessarily to tell us that, had Edmund married Mary Crawford, and Henry Crawford remained dedicated to marrying Fanny, she would eventually have complied. Only her secret love for Edmund keeps her safe; if this had become hopeless, she would have given in to the inevitable. Equally, Anne Elliot in
Persuasion
is guarded from her cousin’s advances only by her secret love for Captain Wentworth. In her revelatory conversation with Mrs Smith, she contemplates agreeing to marry Mr Elliot. ‘Anne could just acknowledge within herself such a possibility of having been induced to marry him, as made her shudder at the idea of the misery which must have followed’ (II. ix). The dread possibility is that she might have been ‘persuaded’ by Lady Russell, who, as she herself is forced to see in the final chapter, has been ‘pretty completely wrong’ about everything.

Men should not necessarily take no for an answer. Anne Elliot tells Captain Wentworth that if he had returned two years later and tried her again he would have succeeded. He curses himself for not having done so. Mr Darcy returns to Elizabeth to ask her once more, having properly learned the lessons of what was wrong with his first proposal. Robert Martin in
Emma
also asks again. ‘You cannot mean that he has even proposed to her again—yet. You only mean that he intends it’ (III. xviii). Emma cannot believe that it has all already happened. It took just one visit with John Knightley’s family to Astley’s Amphitheatre, followed the next day by family dinner. Robert Martin ‘found an opportunity of speaking to Harriet’ – and made his proposal. Other men react to being turned down by making another speedy offer to a different woman: Mr Collins, most ludicrously, within three days, but also Mr Elton, within four weeks, and Charles Musgrove, ‘not long’ after being turned down by Anne Elliot. The last of these three is not so absurd, Charles Musgrove being more desperate than calculating (and being discerning enough to want to marry the neglected Anne in the first place).

The proposal is a crucial element of Austen’s fiction because it imagines, in a world of concealed feelings, a moment of release. As love cannot be expressed directly without a proposal, this must always come as a kind of surprise. When Mr Darcy first declares himself to her, Elizabeth Bennet is probably the most surprised recipient of a proposal in all the novels. It is a satisfying irony, as she is the only one of Austen’s heroines not to believe that the man she loves is destined for another woman. Proposing marriage is difficult because it is the first moment of explicitness in a relationship. Or rather, it should be difficult to propose. (Sometimes so much so that the novelist herself cannot put it into words.) For the right proposal is the one that can imagine the answer ‘no’. Mr Knightley brings himself to the point of a declaration, but gives Emma the opportunity to halt him before he makes anything explicit (III. xiii). The ‘tone of deep mortification’ in which he responds to her request that he not tell her why he envies Frank Churchill comes from his (mistaken) assumption that she will not allow their nearly familial relationship to become something else. Once the proposal has been made, nothing can be the same again – or so he seems to acknowledge. He thinks that he is detecting in Emma the very unease that some readers have expressed about the possibility that his protective affection for the much younger woman should become an amorous attachment. When Darcy proposes to Elizabeth for the second time, it is with the possibility of rejection uppermost: ‘one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever’ (III. xvi). His declaration echoes Captain Wentworth’s conclusion to his renewed proposal in
Persuasion
, ‘A word, a look will be enough . . .’ (II. xi). He offers himself with all the chance of being refused, and therefore we know he will be accepted. And he shows that a letter, sealing two people apart from the endless company they have to keep, can, after all, be the best kind of proposal.

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