The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (2 page)

At least that’s what I thought. So I set out to analyze what’s missing from modern women’s lives, but all over Jane Austen. And I discovered something astonishing. Of course it’s no secret that modern mating rituals have gone badly wrong. But reading Jane Austen makes it crystal clear
where
we’ve gone off track. The crucial question: What is it that Jane Austen heroines do (that we’re
not
doing) that makes really satisfying happy endings possible for them, and not so likely for us? The great hope: Could reexamining love from the perspective of Jane Austen’s heroines mean getting results that are more like theirs? Maybe Jane Austen can help us rethink from scratch what we really want out of love and sex—and figure out what we would be doing differently if we were pursuing those things the way Elinor Dashwood and Anne Elliot do.

What is it that’s hard to find in the world we live in, but available in spades in Jane Austen?

First off, right at front and center, is what Jane Austen calls
elegance.
Women in Jane Austen aren’t “hot” or “sexy.” I mean, maybe they are, actually, hot. But Jane Austen makes sure that’s not what we notice about them. The judges of female attractiveness in Jane Austen novels are interested in “elegance,” not “hotness.”

Jane Austen is famous for saying almost nothing about what her characters look like. She’s the original Regency author.
²
But she
never
introduces a character the way the writer of a modern “Regency” romance might:

Jane Austen’s one-sentence description of Marianne Dashwood is about as much physical detail as we get about any of her heroines:

Even in this physical description, Jane Austen is painting a picture of Marianne as a person, not just a man-magnet. She glosses over the physical details—“her features were all good”—to cut to the things that show what Marianne is really like. And in the process she gives us something very different from the raw sexuality we see every day on our television and computer screens or the magazine covers at the checkout counter. Marianne is a flesh-and-blood young woman, but we see more than just her flesh. It’s
almost as if Jane Austen sees women the way a woman naturally sees other women, not in the
how-sexy-would-a-man-find-that-body?
way we have come to judge ourselves and each other in the age of
Maxim
and
Cosmo.

But it’s all without a hint of prudery. After all, Jane Austen is no repressed Victorian. There’s no “anxious parade” about the modesty of female dress in her novels. Jane Austen heroines aren’t aiming for the shock of raw sexuality, but they’re not swathing the piano legs in drapery lest the gentlemen be reminded of female curves, either. They expect men to notice their bodies—their figures, their eyes, the coloring and quality of their skin. And they take notice of the men’s physicality, too. But somehow in Jane Austen there’s a dignity about the whole subject of physical attraction that we’re missing.

And the dignity of Jane Austen’s heroines is about more than elegance versus hotness. It’s hard not to think that if we could live like Jane Austen heroines, we’d be spared some of the ugliness and humiliation modern life can deal out to us. Around the time I read Jennifer Frey’s
Washington Post
article, I also read
Bridget Jones’s Diary
.
³
And it occurred to me, there’s no better way to explain what Jane Austen heroines have, that we’re missing, than to compare Elizabeth Bennet to Bridget Jones, her hapless modern alter ego. Just like Elizabeth Bennet, Bridget Jones meets a Mr. Darcy who’s out of her league, class-, looks-, and money-wise. And like Elizabeth, Bridget is first repelled by her Mr. Darcy and then falls for him, hard. But the perfect parallels between their situations only show up how sadly substandard Bridget’s life is, compared to Elizabeth Bennet’s.

Thank heavens, we’re not quite as pitiful as Bridget Jones. But her
Diary
is a bit close for comfort. The comedy wouldn’t work if we didn’t recognize ourselves in Bridget’s life. There’s her obsession with her weight, her chocolate intake, and how much she drinks—a world of things that seem to be completely beneath Elizabeth Bennet’s notice. But worse, Bridget Jones regularly gets into humiliating situations that Elizabeth Bennet would never, ever find herself in.

Jane Austen heroines do embarrass themselves, of course. Elizabeth is ashamed when she reads Darcy’s letter and sees how completely unfair she
has been to him, and how she was taken in by Wickham: “And yet I meant to be uncommonly clever.... ”
⁴
But there’s a dignity even to her embarrassment. Bridget Jones’s humiliations are in an entirely different class. Think of her interview with Colin Firth, which ends in a fiasco when she dives for his torso. Or the disastrous tryst with the twenty-something hunk in her building who’s weirded out by her squooshy thirty-something belly.

Helen Fielding pushes it to the point of absurdity. But there’s a ring of truth to it all. The modern dating scene imposes similar indignities on real women every day. Thus Hephzibah Anderson, the real-life author of
Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year without Sex
, explains how the
Sex and the City
lifestyle she adopted after breaking up with her college boyfriend left her with not much more than an endless supply of absurd stories to tell her girlfriends. And then she started to notice the “pity in their eyes as they listened to me.”
⁵
Finally, desperate to make
some
change that would break the pattern, she resorted to the no-sex-for-a-year experiment that’s the premise of her book.

It’s not just that Elizabeth never looks as foolish as Bridget Jones, or as we sometimes do. If we had the kind of lives we really wanted, we wouldn’t care so much how other people see us. The difference between us and Jane Austen’s heroines isn’t just about elegance and dignity. There’s also a competence gap. This is where Bridget Jones’s life is a really perfect picture of what we’re missing. Bridget is simply incompetent when it comes to men, and love, and even understanding what she really wants. Jane Austen’s heroines seem to
know what they’re doing.
At the beginning of
The Edge of Reason
,
⁶
the sequel to
Bridget Jones’s Diary
, Bridget breaks things off with Mark Darcy in an ill-timed fit of solidarity with the sisterhood. She’s used to getting together with her girlfriends to grouse about the awful men in their lives—to swap those “good stories” the real-life Hephzibah Anderson talks about.
⁷
Emboldened by her girlfriends’
don’t-let-yourself-be-pushed-around-by-those-jerks
solidarity, Bridget loses sight of everything else—that she adores Mark Darcy, that he makes her blissfully happy, that her behavior will only hurt and mystify him—and breaks up with him for no real
reason. Then, of course, she immediately regrets it. Elizabeth Bennet may make some mistakes, but Bridget is totally clueless.
⁸

Jane Austen heroines have a “seniority of mind” that’s very attractive. They actually have a clue about male psychology. Anne Elliot can advise a guy about recovering from his broken heart, or explain how men and women differ when it comes to love, in a way that’s completely convincing—without anger, defensiveness, or special pleading. Elizabeth Bennet can make allowances for a lack of emotional flexibility in the man she loves—not out of low expectations, but with genuine respect for him and confidence in her own emotional competence.
⁹
Their competence means Jane Austen heroines can work their way through the minefields of love and courtship without making themselves totally ridiculous. They’re equipped to figure out how to live happily ever.

It’s funny. Bridget has a job and Elizabeth doesn’t, of course. You’d guess a grown woman living with her parents with nothing much to do but think about her love life would be a basket case. But she’s not. It’s the modern free-and-independent Bridget Jones who’s driven to “the edge of reason.” And not just the fictional Bridget Jones—real-life romance seems to be in something of a crisis at the moment. There are the women giving up on sex altogether.
¹⁰
There are the perennial complaints about “the hookup culture.”
¹¹
Books of advice for the lovelorn sound increasingly less romantic and more like advice for getting through boot camp:
The Rules
;
He’s Just Not That Into You
;
Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man.
Or else they advise giving up on romantic love altogether:
Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.
And then there’s a truly bizarre phenomenon: centuries after we gave it up for the love match, decades after feminism,
arranged marriage
is getting a second look.
¹²

These signs of desperation suggest something has gone badly wrong with modern romance. Women find looking for love increasingly difficult, painful, or even pointless. The solid prospect of a happily-ever-after ending recedes to the vanishing point; counsels of despair multiply. In contrast, Jane Austen heroines don’t find men a hopeless puzzle. They seem to know how to make marriage and love go together. And they understand what they themselves want—maybe not instantly, but they figure it out, applying all the intelligence and honesty they can muster to that vital question.

Maybe Jane Austen’s heroines can make it all work out precisely because they take love more seriously than we do. Here’s yet another thing we find in Jane Austen that’s missing in our world: she takes completely seriously what has always mattered most to women—relationships.

In Jane Austen, even a foolish seventeen-year-old girl’s heartbreak is taken seriously, even by the grownups. A Marianne Dashwood isn’t left to struggle through her affairs of the heart alone, while the adults in her life pretend they aren’t really happening, or they aren’t really important. The Jane Austen heroine hasn’t been taught that love is just a messy distraction from the serious business of her life (to do well in school so she can succeed in a career). She doesn’t get the message that if she cares more about a boy than about anything else in the world at the moment, she’s weak. She doesn’t assume that planning your future around a relationship is a sign of failure. The Jane Austen heroine doesn’t try to run her love life like an occasional extracurricular activity, somewhere down the list between chorus and lacrosse practice.

Okay, but it was a different world back then. In Jane Austen’s day, seventeen-year-old girls got married. And back then marriage
was
a career—practically the
only
career—for women.
¹³
To take love seriously enough to get it right, would we have to give up education and having a profession and aim straight for barefoot and pregnant? To become Jane Austen heroines, do we have to fall off the career track and get in line for our MRS degrees?

Here’s what I imagine you may be thinking at the moment:

This is really the question at the heart of Jane Austen’s fascination for modern women: Can we have Jane Austen-style elegance, dignity, and happy love only at the cost of modern freedom and equality? To take the relationships that have always mattered most to women seriously (seriously
enough to get them right), do we have to give up everything else we’ve gained since Jane Austen’s day?

No! There’s no reason living like a Jane Austen heroine has to mean going back to a life of pre-feminist misery and oppression. Let me remind you that our favorite novelist was no repressed Victorian. As a matter of fact, Jane Austen’s last, unfinished novel is a brilliant parody of the incipient Victorian era.
¹⁴
She understood very well the dangers of an unhealthy kind of femininity. In Jane Austen’s world there are better and worse ways of making relationships central to your life. If you survey the novels looking at the matches Jane Austen makes, you’ll notice that she doesn’t, as a matter of fact, consider marriage at seventeen to be ideal. Her heroines are grownups.

Plenty of Jane Austen characters’ lives revolve around relationships ... marriage and family ... men and love ... but in the
wrong
way. Jane Austen could give some very good reasons why it can be a very bad idea to plan your life around a particular man, to pursue relationships in a certain way, or to let your interest in men and marriage become a stupid obsession.
¹⁵

But her reasons are not the same reasons women today hear from our mothers, and our culture. Just because love can end badly—or can be pursued with pathetic desperation—doesn’t mean that the best course is to refocus all our energy and careful attention on other areas of our lives where we think we have control. Trying to make love an afterthought, or confining it to a recreation, is not Jane Austen’s solution. The things most crucial to our happiness are never a hundred percent under our control. They depend on other people. And so it’s reasonable for us to spend significant intellectual and emotional capital on our relationships—but in the right way, not the wrong way.