Maybe the problem, I finally realized, was the myths. Marianne thought that Willoughby reminded her of the heroes of her favorite stories, and I had clung to that relationship because the way it started seemed like something from a movie. We had both been deluded by our expectations about what love was supposed to look like. It was Northanger Abbey all over again: conventional beliefs, derived from fiction, that turned out to bear no relationship to reality.
But didn’t Austen’s other books promote those same beliefs? Now that I really thought about what made them feel romantic, I saw to my chagrin that the answer was no. She made us adore her heroines and admire her heroes, made us long to see them get together, devised ingenious ways to keep them apart and finally unite them, teased us with a whole array of traps and feints and surprises, but search as I might, I could never find a single one of those clichés in which I’d put such faith.
I had simply imposed my ideas of romance on Austen’s novels without really thinking about it—just as the people who make those adaptations always seem to do. The Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice may not alter the basic story, but it does embellish it with all the trappings of movie love: swelling music, windswept vistas, glowing sunsets. Elizabeth strikes moody poses, her lover strides towards her through waving fields of grass, the two lock lips with hungry urgency. But why shouldn’t they? The young woman whom Mr. Darcy called “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me” is drop-dead gorgeous now. Patricia Rozema’s travesty of Mansfield Park (the one with Harold Pinter as Sir Thomas) turns prudish little Fanny Price into a naughty and bold young rebel with teasing eyes and a sensuous mouth. The 1995 Persuasion ends, unthinkably, with a public, premarital kiss. Even the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice, more faithful to Austen than most, plunges the overheated hero into the water (a sigh goes up around the world) in scarcely more than his skivvies.
But Austen, of course, was way ahead of us. She knew what we’d be thinking, and in Sense and Sensibility, I now saw, she headed us off at the pass. Which was where Mansfield Park came in. That novel told us something essential—that goodness was more important than wit—that her other books allowed us to miss. And it did so by separating the two qualities into different characters (Fanny on the one hand, Mary Crawford on the other) and challenging us to go against our instincts as to which one we ought to prefer. So it was, I now saw, here. Austen’s other novels were all so romantic in obvious ways that we didn’t need to pay attention to what really made them so. Now, by putting the two on different sides, she forced us to tell them apart. Elinor was to Marianne what Fanny was to Mary Crawford: the less appealing choice, but the right one. Marianne got the storybook romance; Elinor got what Austen called true love.
Once I opened my mind to this possibility, it started to make perfect sense. For Elinor-love—and Elizabeth-love and Emmalove and love in all the other novels, now that I really thought about it—was perfectly consistent with everything else I’d learned from Austen: about goodness, about growing up, about learning, about friendship.
For her, I saw, love is not something that happens to you, suddenly or otherwise; it’s something you have to prepare yourself for. As long as Elizabeth thought that she was right about everything, as long as Emma disdained the people around her, as long as Marianne ignored her sister’s advice about the things she owed her neighbors and family, their hearts remained closed. For Austen, before you can fall in love with someone else, you have to come to know yourself. In other words, you have to grow up. Love isn’t going to magically transform you, make you into a better or even a different person—another myth that I’d bought into—it can only work with what you already are.
Like it said in Northanger Abbey, we have to learn to love. I knew those words applied to loving things like hyacinths or novels, but I never really thought that they applied to, you know, love love, romantically loving another person. What could be more natural than falling in love? Strange as it seemed, however, Austen was saying that we aren’t actually born knowing how. Youth is not a necessity in her idea of romance; it’s an impediment. Yes, most of her heroines were quite young by our standards, but by the time they fell in love, they had shed their innocence and ignorance. One, of course, was even as old as Marianne’s dreaded twenty-seven, and two of Austen’s heroes were at least thirty-five. As for Marianne herself, she began the novel at sixteen but ended it some three years older—as old as her sister, and finally as wise, as when the story started.
But knowing yourself, Austen taught me, is not enough. You also need to know the person you fall in love with, and despite what Marianne and I believed, this doesn’t happen overnight. To Austen, love at first sight is a contradiction in terms. Lust at first sight, a whole train of fantasies and projections at first sight—those she recognized. But love at first sight, never. As dull as it sounded, I now saw, Elinor’s way of going about things is the right one: to see a great deal of a person, to study their sentiments, to hear their opinions. Needless to say, neither a moment nor a week can suffice for such an operation; only a long, patient acquaintance is enough. A person’s character, as Marianne—and Elizabeth Bennet, and I myself—all discovered to our sorrow, could not be read at a glance. And it is a person’s character, not their body, with which we fall in love.
None of this happens rationally, though, as if you drew up a checklist of pros and cons—another cinematic cliché—and toted up the sum. Elinor’s way, I recognized, is every bit as intuitive as Marianne’s, and, if anything, takes place at a deeper level. Not only does love not strike you in an instant, it turned out, it doesn’t even “strike” you at all. You never know the moment that you fall in love, in Austen’s vision; you only discover you already have. “Will you tell me how long you have loved him?” Elizabeth was asked near the end of Pride and Prejudice. “It has been coming on so gradually,” she replied, “that I hardly know when it began.” As for Elinor and Edward, I realized, we never even heard about it. At one point it was “like,” at another it was “love,” and Austen simply trusted us to understand that the first had slowly turned into the second.
So, I asked myself, what if Elinor and Edward had never met? What if she had “seen a great deal” of someone else? What if she had discovered that his mind was well informed, his observation just and correct, his taste delicate and pure? Would she have fallen in love with him, instead? Austen’s reply was brutally clear: of course she would have. There is no “one person” out there, Elinor’s creator was trying to tell us. Austen had no use, I saw, for things like fate or soul mates, second selves or other halves, guiding stars or Greek myths, or any other of the mystical ideas with which we try to turn love into something cosmic, something sacred, something more than what it is: a relationship dependent, at least in its inception, not on destiny but on its very opposite—chance.
And then, I realized, she went a terrible step further. Even once we fall in love, she said, it isn’t necessarily forever. Divorce was not a realistic possibility in Austen’s world, but death and disenchantment both were, and when they occurred, she thought, it was perfectly possible—even inevitable—to fall in love a second time. “He will rally again,” Anne Elliot believed of Captain Benwick in Persuasion, just lately bereaved of his fiancée, “and be happy with another.” Benwick himself did not believe it, but so it proved to be, and faster than even Anne had imagined. As for Marianne, instead of dying for love, as she first expected, or withdrawing from the world, as she later planned, she lived to form the thing that had not been dreamt of in her philosophy, a second attachment.
“The cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments,” wrote the grandmother of romance fiction, the author who launched a score of sappy movies and a hundred sentimental sequels, “must vary much as to time in different people.” No passions, in other words, are unconquerable, no attachments exist that can’t be transferred. Our hearts can change, just like our minds. Austen believed in love, I saw; she just did not believe in it the wa
y we want her to.
None of this was merely theoretical for her. Austen was called upon to give some real-life romantic advice at a certain point, and she put her money where her mouth was. When Fanny Knight, her favorite niece, was twenty-one, she was trying to decide whether to marry a local young gentleman, John Plumptre. The young lady had her doubts. He seemed a little stiff, a little too religious and moralistic, and in any case, she wasn’t sure that she loved him enough. So in the course of two long exchanges, she hashed it all out with her wise Aunt Jane.
The correspondence was top secret: Fanny concealed the first letter in a package of sheet music, and even Austen’s sister, Cassandra, was not allowed to be in on it. “I do not know how I could have accounted for the parcel otherwise,” Austen said approvingly, “for tho’ your dear Papa most conscientiously hunted about till he found me alone in the Dining-parlor, Your Aunt C. had seen that he had a parcel to deliver.—As it was however, I do not think anything was suspected.” The second letter, though, began to make her sweat. “I shall be most glad to hear from you again my dearest Fanny,” she said, “but . . . write something that may do to be read”—that is, read aloud—“or told.”
Austen examined the letters, as may be imagined, with keen attention. “I read yours through the very evening I received it,” she replied, “getting away by myself—I could not bear to leave off, when once I had begun.” This was no mean trick in such a tight-knit household, with three other women—Cassandra, their mother, and Austen’s best friend, Martha Lloyd—breathing down her neck. “Luckily,” she explained, “Your Aunt C. dined at the other house, therefore I had not to manoeuvre away from her;—& as to anybody else, I do not care.”
Austen’s response to her niece’s dilemma, however, was more ambivalent. “My dearest Fanny,” she interrupted herself at one point, “I am writing what will not be of the smallest use to you. I am feeling differently every moment, & shall not be able to suggest a single thing that can assist your Mind.” Fanny quite plainly felt otherwise, though, and in talking out the arguments on both sides of the question, Austen not only helped her niece reach a decision, she affirmed the romantic beliefs that her own novels expressed. What she urged on her readers was good enough for her own flesh and blood.
The problem was this. On the one hand, Mr. Plumptre was clearly a very worthy young man. On the other, Fanny’s affection for him, as Austen saw, was already on the decline. But as she consoled her niece, by reflecting on the young man’s qualities, for having made the mistake of thinking herself in love in the first place, Austen’s mind began to change once more: Oh! my dear Fanny, the more I write about him, the warmer my feelings become, the more strongly I feel the sterling worth of such a young Man & the desirableness of your growing in love with him again. I recommend this most thoroughly.—There are such beings in the World perhaps, one in a Thousand, as the Creature You & I should think perfection, where Grace & Spirit are united to Worth, where the Manners are equal to the Heart & Understanding, but such a person may not come in your way.
In choosing a mate, she was telling her niece, the most important thing is character. Grace and spirit and manners—the kinds of qualities that attracted Marianne to Willoughby—are wonderful to have, but they are no substitute for the Edwardlike attributes of worth and heart and understanding. All of Austen’s heroes had the second; only a couple were also blessed with the first.
Yet talking Fanny into the match was the last thing that Austen wanted to do. “You frighten me out of my Wits,” she said at one point. “Your affection gives me the highest pleasure, but indeed you must not let anything depend on my opinion. Your feelings & none but your own, should determine such an important point.” Feelings, not arguments. You shouldn’t marry someone because of his character; you should marry him because of the emotions that his character inspires. “Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection,” Austen reminded her niece, “and nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without Love.”
Still, feelings can change, and we can do something about it. “The desirableness of your growing in love with him again”: it sounded like Austen were asking her niece to perform the impossible. Surely you can no more choose to grow in love than you can decide to grow taller. Yet Austen believed that if a person’s character is good, love increases with simple familiarity. She said “grow,” not “fall”—a gradual, organic process, not a bolt from the blue. “I should not be afraid of your marrying him,” she explained; “with all his Worth, you would soon love him enough for the happiness of both.”
“Marrying” as opposed to becoming engaged to. The problem was that Mr. Plumptre’s financial circumstances were not going to allow the two of them to formalize their union anytime soon. “You like him well enough to marry,” Austen told her niece, “but not well enough to wait.” Love, again, depends on chance—and in more ways than one. No, the perfect man may never arrive, but Fanny was only twenty-one, and, Austen insisted,When I consider how few young Men you have yet seen much of—how capable you are (yes, I do still think you very capable) of being really in love—how full of temptation the next 6 or 7 years of your Life will probably be—(it is the very period of Life for the strongest attachments to be formed)—I cannot wish you with your present very cool feelings to devote yourself in honour to him.
What was more, “It is very true that you never may attach another Man, his equal altogether, but if that other Man has the power of attaching you more, he will be in your eyes the most perfect.”
Better to love than be loved—something we never had to learn from the novels, where feelings, by authorial grace, were always perfectly reciprocal. As for “Poor dear Mr. J. P.,” Austen said, “I have no doubt of his suffering a good deal for a time, a great deal, when he feels that he must give you up;—but it is no creed of mine, as you must be well aware, that such sort of Disappointments kill anybody.” As it turned out, Fanny took her aunt’s advice, and nobody died. John Plumptre married three years later, had three daughters, and approved of Mansfield Park, on account of its stern morality. Fanny waited six years, just as her aunt suggested, married a man a dozen years her senior with six children from a first marriage, and had nine more kids of her own.
Austen was not against romance, she was against romantic mythology. No one who wrote as many novels about love and marriage as she did can fairly be accused of being unromantic. If anything, simply believing that people should marry for love, that “nothing can be compared to the misery of being bound without Love,” made her all too romantic by the standards of the day. People wrote stories of crazy love, then as now, and some people, especially young people, believed them, but when it came time to lay it on the line and commit themselves for life, most were far more apt to forget about love altogether.
Those were the days of the marriage market, when young people were auctioned off according to a strict system of equivalences. Men offered money and status, women offered money, if they had any, and beauty, and the exchange rates were calculated to a hair. Here was Elinor and Marianne’s odious half brother, John Dashwood, who would never have dreamed of marrying for love, handicapping the heroines’ chances. Elinor had just informed him that her sister (in the wake of Willoughby’s rejection) had taken ill:I am sorry for that. At her time of life, any thing of an illness destroys the bloom for ever! Her’s has been a very short one! She was as handsome a girl last September, as any I ever saw; and as likely to attract the men. . . . I remember Fanny [his wife] used to say that she would marry sooner and better than you did. . . . She will be mistaken, however. I question whether Marianne now, will marry a man worth more than five or six hundred a year, at the utmost, and I am very much deceived if you do not do better.
The worst thing about this system was that no one forced you into it. Parents could pressure their children not to “marry down,” could disown them for doing it or even thinking of doing it, but the days of arranged marriages were long over. Young people h
ad a choice, and made a choice, but so thoroughly had they internalized the values of the marriage market—marry prudently, marry “well,” don’t worry about love—that they acted just as if their parents still decided for them.
“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance,” said one of Austen’s young ladies, “and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.” “There is not one in a hundred of either sex who is not taken in when they marry,” said another. “It is a manoeuvring business,” “of all transactions, the one in which people expect most from others, and are least honest themselves.” If happiness was simply a matter of chance, if marriage was just a maneuvering business, then you might as well go for the gold.
This kind of attitude, as much as the romantic dreams of a Marianne Dashwood, was what Austen wrote her novels to rebuke. The first of those young ladies was Elizabeth Bennet’s friend Charlotte, who went on to marry the most ridiculous—and surely, for a wife, the most distasteful—man in the world. “I am not romantic,” she explained; “I never was. I ask only a comfortable home; and considering Mr. Collins’s character, connection, and situation in life”—yes, that Mr. Collins, one of the greatest fools in English literature—“I am convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast on entering the marriage state.” No doubt. The second young lady was Mary Crawford in Mans field Park, who couldn’t bring herself to marry the man she loved. Two versions, for their creator, of self-damnation.
A Jane Austen Education Page 19