The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (25 page)

What Jane Austen Heroines
Aren’t Looking for in a Man
(and What They
Are
)

 

“FULLY TWO-THIRDS OF AMERICANS BELIEVE IN THE concept of soul mates, where ‘two people are destined to be together,’” reported the
Washington Times
in September 2010. Even more women than men, researchers found, accept that theory of love. An impressive 69 percent of us, versus 63 percent of men, are on board with the soul mate concept. The down side? People who believe in soul mates are 150 percent more likely to end up divorced than people who don’t.
¹

What does Jane Austen have to say on this subject? Are her heroines looking for their soul mates? Do they marry the men they’re destined for? She sure doesn’t sound like it. Here’s Elinor Dashwood, doing her best to talk her Romantic sister out of the soul mate theory of love: “And, after all, Marianne, after all that is bewitching in the idea of a single and constant attachment, and all that can be said of one’s happiness depending entirely on any particular person, it is not meant—it is not fit—it is not possible that it should be so.”

By the time you’ve read this far, it’s not going to shock you to find Jane Austen on the realistic rather than the Romantic side of any question. But if Jane Austen heroines aren’t looking for their soul mates, what are they looking for? And if they don’t end up with “The One” perfect match that it’s their destiny to be with, how come the matches they’ve found at the end of their novels seems so ... perfect?

A Jane Austen heroine thinks a lot less than we do about finding a guy who’s “great for her,” and a lot more about finding a guy who’s just plain old, flat out great. It’s not that compatibility doesn’t come into the equation at all—Jane Austen is no proponent of the “don’t be so picky, you can be happy with any decent man if you put your mind to it” school of thought.
²
But her heroines think and talk about guys in terms of objective qualities that make them impressive men, not just in terms of how well they suit the heroines’ own subjective preferences and needs. Jane Austen has a whole sophisticated vocabulary for talking about every aspect of a man’s personality. Because we’ve forgotten that language, our thinking about any guy—at least when it goes any deeper than looks and status, into questions about what kind of a person he is—tends to collapse almost immediately into a subjective evaluation of what appeals to us personally. A Jane Austen heroine has better criteria for evaluating men. Not with exact scientific accuracy, of course, but by measuring them against standards that have some kind of universal application. She thinks about how “perfect” a guy is in the abstract before she asks if he’s “perfect for me.”

It’s funny. We’ve forgotten how to think about people’s personalities in the objective categories that Jane Austen heroines use. But we can still do that very thing when it comes to people’s looks. We talk about whether guys are good-looking not just “for us,” but in reality. Of course there’s no scientific standard of hotness. The objectivity of our judgments on guys’ physical appeal is only a rough and ready sort of objectivity. But it is a more universal measure than the sheer subjectivity of our own personal “type.” Think of Tiger Woods and his international harem of cut-rate Elin look-alikes. Elin
Woods is good-looking, but there are plenty of beautiful women who look nothing like her; Tiger was obviously going for a particular physical type.
³
Despite our individual preferences, we can still see that a man is handsome even if he’s not our type—just as we know a woman can be beautiful, whether or not she happens to float a particular guy’s particular boat.

That ability to see attractive qualities apart from who’s your type is something that Jane Austen heroines
also
apply to characteristics that are even more important than looks—to everything, in fact, that makes up a man’s personality, mental outlook, and approach to life. A Jane Austen heroine judges a man’s “manner,” his “address,” his “understanding” and “information,” his “temper,” his “principles,” and so forth—before she starts thinking about whether he’s the perfect fit for her. Or at least that’s the order she does her thinking in, if she’s going about picking her hero the right way.

Jane Austen doesn’t pretend that looks don’t matter. She tells us about Mr. Darcy’s “fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien.” Her heroines notice men’s looks right away and can discuss the finer points of their social skills and attitudes at least as readily. But then—if they’re serious about finding happy endings—they look deeper, at the qualities that make up a man’s essential “character.”

Mr. Bingley, for instance, is not only “good looking,” with “a pleasant countenance.” He also has “easy, unaffected manners.” Colonel Fitzwilliam is “not handsome,” but he’s “in person and address most truly the gentleman.” Jane Austen’s heroines measure guys’ manners—whether the men they meet are comfortable with other people, whether they take the trouble to be “generally pleasing”—against an objective standard.
⁴

And they’re on the lookout for tip-offs about even more important qualities as well. Or they ought to be. Thus Elinor undertakes the due diligence that her sister has so dangerously neglected, taking the trouble to make inquiries of anyone who “might be able to give some more particular account of Willoughby’s character” in pursuit of “a confirmation of his merits.”

If they skip that step, Jane Austen’s heroines are sorry. Elizabeth Bennet, like Marianne Dashwood, foolishly lets herself start to fall for a man before she has thought much about the most important qualities that Jane Austen expects her heroines to notice in men. Elizabeth and Wickham get along beautifully from their first conversation with each other. He’s naturally
social and comfortable with people, with a “happy readiness for conversation,” just like her own. They’re both a lot of fun to listen to.
⁵
Even after Elizabeth realizes that she and Wickham can’t afford to be serious about each other, and he defects to become “the admirer of someone else,” she’s still sure “that whether married or single, he must always be her model of the amiable and pleasing.” In their very last conversation before Darcy’s letter opens her eyes to Wickham’s real character, Elizabeth is still on board with what Wickham says about their natural affinity for each other, believing that “their opinion of every body—would always coincide.”

It’s not until the letter from Darcy clues her in to what Wickham is really like that Elizabeth tries frantically to figure out if she has ever heard anything about his being a decent human being—“some instance of real goodness, some distinguished trait of integrity or benevolence, that might rescue him from the attack of Mr. Darcy.” She suddenly realizes that she has completely neglected her job (and
our
job, if we want to find happy endings) of looking into the actual character of the man she’s interested in: “Of his former way of life, nothing had been known in Hertfordshire but what he told himself. As to his real character, had information been in her power, she had never felt a wish of enquiring. His countenance, voice, and manner, had established him at once in the possession of every virtue .... She could see him instantly before her in every charm of air and address; but she could remember no more substantial good than the general approbation of the neighborhood, and the regard which his social powers had gained him in the mess.”

Elizabeth’s “prejudice” toward Wickham is a classic case of going for your “type”—of thinking
way too much
about whether a man suits you to
a T, and
not nearly enough
about whether he’s a person of any quality. There’s a problem with going for your type. Your individual preferences—whether in looks or in personality traits—are very likely going to arise from quirks on your own part that at worst are dysfunctional, and that even at best unnecessarily limit your choices. If you notice, à la Lori Gottlieb, that you keep picking the same “spontaneous and grounded” type of man with a “sense of wonderment about the world” over and over again, and yet those guys never make you happy, it’s definitely time to widen your horizons.

I was well into adulthood before I figured out that I’d always felt comfortable with dark-haired men and been nervous about blond guys, all on the basis of an unexamined assumption that blond men were untrustworthy. Which, I belatedly realized, was probably because my father was brilliant and charming but tragically addicted to alcohol, gambling, and women—and the only blond male in my large extended family. (It didn’t help, either, that I watched way too many episodes of
Starsky and Hutch
as a kid
.
)

Lots of Jane Austen characters pick their partners because of something defective about that person’s character that matches up very nicely with some similar defect of their own. John and Fanny Dash- wood are
perfect
for each other! John is Marianne and Elinor’s cold fish of a brother. He has married a woman even more cold-hearted and selfish than himself. And Fanny eggs John on, making all his bad tendencies worse.
⁶
After John promises his father on his deathbed to provide for his sisters, his wife cleverly talks him out of his promise by appealing to the selfish impulses the two of them share. She knows he won’t be able to bear the thought of letting go of even a tiny percentage of the huge fortune they’re accumulating to pass down to their spoiled son.
⁷

The Eltons are made for each other, too: “‘Happy couple!’ said Frank Churchill, as soon as they were out of hearing:—‘How well they suit one another!—Very lucky—marrying as they did, upon an acquaintance formed only in a public place!’” But what they have in common is “a sort of sneering consciousness” with which they meet any challenge to their vanity and self-importance.
⁸

Lucy Steele and Robert Ferrars are exactly suited, as well. They’re perfect matches in vulgar, unscrupulous self-promotion. The two of them are equally adept at getting their hands on whatever they want, mostly because no amount of trampling other people’s rights is beneath them.
⁹
Here’s how Jane Austen describes the end of Robert and Lucy’s story: “They settled in town, received very liberal assistance from Mrs. Ferrars, were on the best terms imaginable with the Dashwoods [John and Fanny, that is]; and setting aside the jealousies and ill-will continually subsisting between Fanny and Lucy, in which their husbands of course took a part, as well as the frequent domestic disagreements between Robert and Lucy themselves, nothing could exceed the harmony in which they all lived together.” It is a happy ending, of a certain sort. But not of a sort Jane Austen would recommend.

So finding “your type” is obviously not a fail-safe recipe for the kind of happiness Jane Austen holds up for our admiration. But neither is acting on the “opposites attract” principle, and going for someone who seems perfect for you because he balances all your deficiences and you fill in all his gaps. There are lots of Jane Austen characters in relationships of
that
kind, too. And those partnerships aren’t necessarily any more attractive than the “just my type” relationships that John and Fanny, the Eltons, or Lucy and Robert have.