The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (17 page)

These absurd characters go about love in every possible wrong way. Mary in
The Three Sisters
is so status-obsessed that she “would willingly ensure herself everlasting Misery by a marriage to Mr. Watts” to prevent her younger sisters from marrying before she does. Charlotte Drummond, “whose character was a willingness to oblige every one,” acco-modatingly accepts proposals of marriage from two different men and, when she suddenly realizes her mistake, “the reflection of her past folly, operated so strongly on her mind, that she resolved to be guilty of a greater, & to that end threw herself into a deep stream which ran thro’ her Aunt’s Pleasure Grounds in Portland Place.”
³

In
Sense and Sensibility
, Jane Austen is still giving us ridiculous minor characters so distorted by one or another reigning preoccupation that we have to laugh at them.
⁴
But these absurd people have moved off center stage—Jane Austen is writing real novels now. The extreme “sense” of some minor characters
⁵
and the extreme “sensibility” of others
⁶
show off how comparatively (and delightfully) normal Elinor and Marianne are. Though Elinor has just a little more “sense” than would be ideal, and Marianne has a good deal more “sensibility” than will make her happy, both are real rounded characters we can’t help loving. They point to an ideal we can aspire to, not just absurdities for us to avoid.

And in
Persuasion
, look at how Captain Wentworth comes to realize that he has made a terrible mistake in pursuing Louisa Musgrove instead
of Anne. He has been operating on the idea that what he wants in a woman is “a strong mind.” It’s obvious why. This requirement is in reaction—in fact, in overreaction—to what happened between him and Anne Elliot all those years ago, when Anne was persuaded by Lady Russell to end their engagement. Anne’s persuadability broke Captain Wentworth’s heart.
⁷
After that miserable experience, he has concluded that all he needs in order to be sure of happiness in love is a woman who’s hard-headed.
⁸
When Louisa, encouraged by Wentworth’s enthusiastic praise of her “firmness” to think stubbornness is a virtue,
⁹
insists on being jumped down from the steps at Lyme and ends up giving herself a dangerous concussion, Anne wonders

Anne is thinking like a Jane Austen heroine, remembering to value all things in their right proportions. She wonders if Captain Wentworth is ever going to stop thinking the other way, in extremes.

As a matter of fact, at the very moment when Anne is wondering about him, Captain Wentworth is just beginning to recover his balance. He begins to love Anne again—or to realize that he has always loved Anne—at almost precisely this point in the story. When Louisa’s unconscious, her sister Henrietta’s fainting, Mary Musgrove is hysterical, and Wentworth and Benwick can’t think what to do, Anne is competent. She’s as gentle as ever, but quite as tough as she needs to be in an emergency—the steadiest person on the spot. Seeing her then, Captain Wentworth explains later, he began to learn “to distinguish between the steadiness of principle and the obstinacy of self-will, between the darings of heedlessness and the recollections of a collected mind.” On closer examination, Anne’s “character was now fixed in his mind as perfection itself.”
¹⁰

And what does the “perfect excellence” that Wentworth sees in Anne consist in? She maintains “the loveliest medium of fortitude and gentleness.” Louisa, in contrast, is only a “good-humoured, unaffected” enough girl.
She’s ready to be persuaded by Captain Wentworth that it’s admirable to be stubborn, and she acts stubborn to please him. Then later, when she’s falling for Captain Benwick, she is just as ready to be a quiet, gentle lover of poetry. But Anne is a grown-up woman in perfect balance, and Captain Wentworth can see how extraordinary she is, now that he has corrected the imbalance in his own way of thinking.

For Captain Wentworth, loving Anne is all about appreciating what’s really lovable about her. Here you find “rational” and “permanent” happiness—where men and women come together because each of them has a genuine “regard” for the other person’s real value. Thus Jane Austen says that Henry Crawford—despite the flaws that doomed his courtship of Fanny—loved her “rationally as well as passionately.” He didn’t just passionately want her; his reason recognized her excellence. It’s the exact opposite of what makes people like Lydia and Wickham so unlikely to find happiness in the long run. They’re “a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue.”
¹¹

But Jane Austen’s heroes and heroines don’t belong to some special class of super-excellent human beings who aren’t subject to folly and vice. Their ability to see clearly and judge wisely is not inbred or automatic. To arrive at the point where they can recognize the real value in the other person—the excellence that promises true “felicity”—they have to resist temptations to fall into the same extremes and absurdities that govern less balanced characters who aren’t fully realized heroes and heroines. Captain Wentworth let himself be pulled off center by his angry resentment of Anne. He could easily have ended up as just another example of how to get love wrong, another character who lost his balance and fell out of the main line of the story.

We learn about Captain Wentworth’s struggle only in retrospect and from the outside, as he tells the tale to Anne. But that very same struggle—to see things in their right proportions and limits, so that you can recognize true excellence and value it when you meet it—is exactly what we get to see
from the inside, from the woman’s perspective, in Jane Austen’s most exciting love stories.

For months Emma has romantic fantasies about Frank Churchill,
¹²
all because she’s in scheming, matchmaking mode, and he’s fodder for her overactive imagination. The whole time she’s toying with the idea that Frank may be in love with her, it never occurs to her to think about Mr. Knightley as a romantic prospect. When her matchmaking schemes explode in her face and she finally does get around to taking stock of Frank Churchill and Mr. Knightley as men—thinking about which one she really admires and values more—there’s no contest.
¹³

And of course there’s Elizabeth, who so very nearly misses her happy ending with Mr. Darcy because of her “prejudice” (not to mention his “pride”). Their love affair is the one we picture when we think of happy love in Jane Austen. It’s not Jane Austen’s most mature work of art; there’s more delicate psychological realism in her later novels. But Elizabeth with Darcy is our ideal of what we see in a Jane Austen love story, what we want for ourselves. In
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen really gets inside the love story, and shows us most intimately how these two difficult people come to love each other both rationally and passionately.

Elizabeth and Darcy both start out with faults that keep them from seeing each other clearly. She’s prejudiced against him because of his incivility. He makes little effort to please other people in general—his behavior verges on rudeness—partly because he is proud and selfish to a certain
degree, and partly because he’s shy, not naturally social like her. And she finds that making fun of him is “such an opening for wit.” She’s also naturally prejudiced in favor of Wickham, who has all the social skills Darcy lacks, and who feeds her full of lies about Darcy’s past misdeeds.

Darcy’s pride hits a course-correction when Elizabeth refuses his proposal. For Darcy, the process of falling in love with Elizabeth “rationally” as well as “passionately” only begins then. It means learning two separate lessons—one about himself, and one about her.

Up to the point of his first proposal, Darcy loves Elizabeth more “passionately” than “rationally.” He himself says, at the time of his original declaration, that his feelings for her aren’t supported by “reason” and “recollection.” He’s bewitched by her saucy manner and her “fine eyes.” And eventually he talks himself into believing that he has to have her, even though he can’t really approve of her—or of himself for choosing her. (That’s why he says he’s been “kinder” to Bingley “than towards myself.” Darcy has extricated his friend from an embarrassing family connection that he is ashamed to be pursuing himself.) When Darcy proposes to Elizabeth the first time, he thinks he’s yielding to a weakness.

But the shock of her refusal makes him reconsider all his assumptions. Only when it becomes clear that Elizabeth has good cause for not returning Darcy’s feelings (she accuses him, with some reason, of “arrogance,” “conceit,” and “selfish disdain for the feelings of others”) does he begin to think of her as “a woman worthy of being pleased”—and to realize “how insufficient were all my pretensions” of pleasing her. He begins to have a real rational regard for her (not just a passion he’s half ashamed of) at the same time that he begins to realize he is not worthy of her. Elizabeth’s rebuke starts a complete revolution in Darcy’s ideas. He begins to question himself. And he has to conclude that he’s “been a selfish being all my life.” He traces his faults to his childhood, when he was taught good principles, but not expected to put them into practice. Being an only son, he was spoiled by his parents, and he grew up “to be selfish and overbearing, to care for none beyond my own family circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world.”

The realization that Elizabeth is someone he doesn’t automatically deserve jogs Darcy out of this complacent pride. He sees that he’d actually have to stretch to live up to her. And the rebalancing that follows on that
realization makes him able to see her and all things connected with her more clearly, in terms of their real worth.
¹⁴
The next time Darcy sees Elizabeth,
¹⁵
he’s determined to show her that he has been improved by the lesson she gave him: “I hoped,” he explains to her later, “to obtain your forgiveness, to lessen your ill opinion, by letting you see that your reproofs had been attended to.”

Meanwhile, Elizabeth too has been forced into self-examination and reexamination of Darcy’s real value. Disliking Darcy has been as irrational for Elizabeth as liking Elizabeth was for Darcy. Beginning with his proposal and accelerating with his letter, her visit to Pemberley, and the generous part he plays in arranging for Wickham to marry Lydia, Elizabeth also has to learn that she has completely undervalued Darcy. Her own character flaws have blinded her to his real worth. She started out by indulging her dislike of Darcy and let Wickham flatter her into believing lies about him. She never bothered to think clearly about which man was actually more likely to be trustworthy. Darcy’s letter forces her to reevaluate both men—and also herself. Her humiliating discovery: the evidence of Wickham’s dishonesty was obvious all along. But her vanity kept her from noticing the contradictions between what he said and how he acted.

After Darcy’s letter, Elizabeth recalibrates her balance and begins to see more clearly. She’s in a much better position to judge Darcy rationally by the time she gets to Pemberley. Mr. Darcy may have disdained people outside his own family circle. But in that circle, he’s an exemplary guardian to his orphaned and vulnerable teenage sister; a responsible and benevolent landlord; and a kind and gracious master to the large number of people whose very livelihoods depend on him. Darcy has got the enormous power and wealth that tend to make people tyrannical to their dependents. (Think about how Hollywood stars treat their domestic staffs.) The testimony of his servants is extraordinary: “I never heard a cross word from him in my life, and I have known him ever since he was four years old.”

But it’s his role in the Lydia-Wickham affair that really proves his worth to Elizabeth. Before, Darcy was too proud even to speak to Wickham. Under Elizabeth’s influence he becomes willing to negotiate with him, to save her family from disgrace.
¹⁶
“Oh! how heartily did she grieve over every ungracious
sensation she had ever encouraged, every saucy speech she had ever directed towards him. For herself she was humbled; but she was proud of him. Proud that in a cause of compassion and honour, he had been able to get the better of himself.” And Darcy is thinking almost exactly same way about Elizabeth: “Such I was, from eight to eight and twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled.”

This is what it’s like to be plunged deeply into real rational love—not the inferior emotion that Jane Austen calls “infatuation” or being “bewitched.” On both sides it’s grounded in a humble, generous estimation of the value of the other person, but an estimation based in reality. Elizabeth and Darcy are now in perfect balance, each seeing the other person for who that person really is. But that perfect balance is not some static state, or a lukewarm average of opposites. It’s a kind of dynamic balance, which they’ve achieved by their struggles—each inspired by the other—to cast off their partial views and the absurdities that made them less than fully rounded, really admirable characters. It’s that struggle that gives real weight and importance to their love. Darcy and Elizabeth are feeling the delightful frothiness that belongs to the beginning of any love affair. But while you can fall in love over poetry, like Benwick and Louisa—or over a shared passion for collecting matchboxes, for that matter—the theme of Darcy and Elizabeth’s love affair is their mutual inspiration to each other to become better human beings.
¹⁷