The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (22 page)

The fourteen-year-old Susan Price, “acting only on her own unassisted reason,”
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is a real force for good in her parents’ mismanaged household, dominated by chaos and favoritism. And when Sir Thomas Bertram puts the force of his formidable character behind his advice that Fanny accept Henry Crawford’s offer of marriage, his young niece stands firm on the principle that it would be wrong to marry a man she can’t love and respect.
General Tilney cynically eggs his son Henry on to court Catherine Morland because the General thinks she’s an heiress; when he hears she’s actually poor, he expects Henry to drop her like a hot potato. But the son, knowing himself now “bound as much in honour as in affection to Miss Morland,” proposes to Catherine in defiance of his father because he’s “sustained in his purpose by a conviction of its justice.”

Again and again, Jane Austen’s twenty-something heroes and heroines insist on doing the right thing against the unreflecting selfishness of the older generation. Where Jane Austen’s fictional parents and guardians have too often learned from their experience only to be short-sightedly selfish, or simply not to care any more, her heroes and heroines strive for clear and impartial judgment about how people ought to behave.
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Jane Austen heroines are utterly uninterested in all things political. In the novels, “politics” is practically a synonym for “the most boring thing you can possibly talk about.”
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But Jane Austen does mention “justice” very frequently, in all the novels. Only the kind of justice she’s interested in isn’t about the poor, or conflict between classes, or improving social conditions.
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What Jane Austen was really interested in was whether men and women “do justice” to the people in their personal lives: whether they judge the people they actually know fairly, and whether they’re loyal or untrustworthy friends, grateful or ungrateful children, impartial parents or the kind who play favorites. The kind of “justice” Jane Austen finds inspiring is Catherine Morland’s “innate principle of general integrity.”
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Jane Austen heroines bring all their youthful idealism—the very same moral fervor that college students over the past half century have poured into political action on Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, divestment from South Africa, and Occupy Wall Street—to conducting their personal lives with scrupulous justice to everyone they’re close to and compassion for other people’s flaws and struggles.

There’s a paradox about Jane Austen’s stress on “principles.” On the one hand, she’s got very high standards about the right way to behave. But on the other hand, she’s totally against bossing, bullying, arguing with, and generally interfering in the lives of other people on the excuse they’re not
living up to those standards.
Not
because she doesn’t think the same “principles” apply to everybody. The self-evident principles that her heroines live by have universal application; they’re the same standards that they apply to other people’s conduct when they exercise their judgments about how those other people should behave. They freely judge other people by those principles, in the sense of debating and deciding on what’s right and wrong about their conduct. But they
don’t
judge other people in the sense of ‘standing in judgment over them’ from a position of moral superiority. They’re not judgmental.

“Self-knowledge” inoculates them against self-righteousness and ugly Victorian hypocrisy. They’re always on the look-out to be sure that they’re not making the too-common error Tom Bertram falls into at Fanny’s first dance: seeing other people’s flaws as clear as day, all the while being utterly blind to your own. On one of the very rare occasions when a Jane Austen heroine gives unsolicited advice—when Anne Elliot advises Captain Benwick on more cheerful and edifying reading—she immediately fears “that like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct could ill bear examination.” Jane Austen heroines are sparing even of
solicited
advice.
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That’s because Jane Austen heroines know something we tend to forget. It is almost impossible for people to hear any advice about their own behavior. If you tell them that they’re going about something the wrong way, or that the thing they’re pursuing isn’t worth having, they’ll almost never listen to you. What they
will
do, quite frequently, is get angry about it. That’s why it’s “a wonderful instance” of advice-giving “without being resented” when Elizabeth actually listens to Mrs. Gardiner’s advice that she should discourage Wickham. It’s “injudicious” to attempt to control things you don’t have any power over—as when Susan Price tries to make her brothers keep their noise down at home though she doesn’t really have the authority to make them behave. Failing attempts to influence other people’s choices are inevitably conducive to quarrelsomeness, discord, and the kind of too-frank exchange of views in which you end up flinging accusations and ugly characterizations at the people closest to you, without any kindness or even respect—all things that Jane Austen’s heroes and heroines recoil from with horror. They make efforts to “keep the peace” because they don’t want to
live in chaos and hostility. And they particularly don’t want their closest relationships to spiral downward into undignified spats.
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Jane Austen’s heroines know that if you want to get other people to take your insight into how they ought to live seriously, you can’t use the direct attack method—though that’s always most tempting to try. Instead, you have to 1) set them a really good example by actually living up to the principles you want them to see, and 2) treat other people with respect, approaching anything remotely like telling them what to do
very
carefully and gently. That’s why Fanny Price would be more likely than anyone to influence Henry Crawford for the better. She’s “firm as a rock in her own principles” but with “a gentleness of character so well adapted to recommend them.” A lot of our modern therapeutic culture, from “the serenity to accept the things I cannot change” to any good therapist’s insistence that
you focus on your own issues instead of trying to fix other people, does the work that good manners did in Jane Austen’s world. Well, make that good manners
and
self-knowledge.

As Jane Austen points out, real self-knowledge supplies a “higher species of self-command” than mere “politeness.” The honest realization that in your own mind you’ll almost always overstate other people’s flaws and underestimate your own is what saves Jane Austen’s good manners from turning into Victorian hypocrisy. Real Jane Austen-style “forbearance” with other people’s faults doesn’t mean pretending that you think everyone’s better than you, meanwhile storing up all your secret criticisms and resentments of them for an eventual explosion.
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When Jane Austen heroines are running their lives the right way, they’re tougher on themselves than on other people—honestly, because they actually see how much harder it is to judge yourself by your principles than anybody else. Things that you could easily see are mistakes, if only someone
else
were doing them—like how
stupid and dangerous it is for you to keep pinning your hopes on a man who’s obviously pursuing your already-engaged sister and only pretending to pay attention to you when the chaperones are watching—are the very things that never take a clear shape in your mind if you’re lacking in “knowledge of [your] own heart” (as Jane Austen says about Julia Bertram). Really holding yourself up to your own principles is a stretch, but it’s necessary if you’re going to be fair to other people, get along with them, and have any chance of influencing them for the better.

That’s how Elizabeth begins to do justice to Darcy. When she remembers the arrogant way he proposed to her, she’s “full of indignation.” But when she thinks about “how unjustly she had condemned and upraided him, her anger was turned against herself; and his disappointed feelings became the object of compassion.” She gets to Mr. Knightley’s “delicacy towards the feelings of other people” by seeing that the way she hurt him wasn’t fair. Jane Austen’s ideal was “to be severe only in the examination of our own conduct, to consider our fellow-creatures with kindness, and to judge of all they say and do with that charity which we would desire from them ourselves.”