The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (28 page)

Anne’s detective work keeps her well clear of danger. When Mrs. Smith’s revelations about Mr. Elliot—that he married for money, was unkind to his wife until she died, treated old friends with callous cruelty, and got close to the Elliot family only to stop Sir Walter from remarrying so he could inherit a baronetcy one day—confirm him to be a “disingenuous, artificial, wordly man, who has never had any better principle to guide him than selfishness,” Anne isn’t really shocked.
¹¹

In my old job as a book club editor, I read quite a lot about how technology is changing our lives. Social critics worry that the internet shortens our attention spans and teaches us to read differently; that email and cell phones exhaust our energy by forcing us to be “on” all the time, maintaining too many too shallow connections; that young kids are under relentless pressure to perform socially—to answer every text immediately and to maintain a Facebook presence that attracts and impresses—and that adult lives will be blighted by youthful indiscretions.
¹²
But if you think about how social life has changed since Jane Austen’s day, you notice that in some ways computers, cell phones, and social media are actually changing our lives
back
toward the way they were
then
. (Not in every way, obviously. Sexting is
not
advisable if you want to live like a Jane Austen heroine.)

One thing that makes social media really retro is the pressure to put a lot of effort into the image of yourself that you show the world. Up until the last ten or fifteen years, virtually every change in social relations for decades had been in the direction of less formal, more casual.
¹³
The great relaxation of dress and manners
¹⁴
continued apace until email, then blogs, then Facebook and Twitter began to change things back in the direction of putting more effort into shaping the appearance you showed in public.

At first email seemed like the next extension of the same relaxing trend.
¹⁵
But then something interesting began to happen. Electronic communication—beginning with email, but accelerating with blogs and social media—began to actually reverse what the telephone had done to make long-distance communication ephemeral. When you communicate by computer rather than phone, you’re not just expressing yourself, you’re also creating a lasting record that represents you. You know you may be judged by it after the passing moment. The opportunity for turning electronic interactions into a lasting representation, a kind of performance, became clearer to many people with blogging—and to almost everyone with the advent of MySpace and Facebook. Because a little extra thought and effort make you look so much more interesting, and because it’s so easy for friends and family to play appreciative audience with their comments and “likes,” everybody gets to cut a figure of sorts, to have a public persona. It does put us under some pressure—pressure that has a lot in common with the responsibility Jane Austen’s ladies and gentlemen feel to create and maintain a “character.”
¹⁶

We’re all leaving a trail behind us, a really permanent record. So all this twenty-first-century technology makes it much harder to be an entirely anonymous stranger whenever you meet new people. The virtual “global village” that the internet is creating has something in common with the real English country villages that Jane Austen’s heroines all lived in.

In Jane Austen’s day, women didn’t socialize with men who hadn’t been formally introduced by somebody who at least knew somebody who knew somebody who...knew enough about their pasts to vouch for them. Men’s reputations—their “characters”—were expected to precede them, or at least not to lag too far behind. Elizabeth Bennet is frantic when she suddenly realizes that she doesn’t really know anything about Wickham’s past.
¹⁷

But then, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became easier to leave your past behind—
without
having to run away and join the army.
¹⁸
It became normal to accept a strange man at face value. The internet takes that trend further—so far, in fact, that it starts to collapse in on itself and work in reverse. Sure, computers make it even easier to get together with a total stranger. On the other hand, social media shrink the world so much that even total strangers are getting easier to find out about. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, and so forth have created a kind of virtual society in which our pasts all leave traces that can’t be so easily erased.
¹⁹
A man’s past has likely created a cyber-trail, a rough equivalent to the reputation a man had built for himself in Jane Austen’s day.

Those cyber-trails certainly make Jane Austen heroine-style detective work about the men we meet easier.
²⁰
It’s as natural for you to look around the Facebook page of a guy you’re getting to know as it was for Elizabeth Bennet to ask Darcy’s housekeeper about her master’s character—and it can be just as revealing.

Jane Austen’s women don’t take an interest in men’s principles
only
to avoid unprincipled men—and the unhappiness they inevitably create
²¹
—like the plague. Her heroines are also on a positive quest for principled men.

Elinor Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, Anne Elliot, Catherine Morland (in her own naïve way), and even Emma (when she isn’t tripping herself up in manipulative schemes) are all keen discoverers and honest judges of real quality in human beings. Catherine, plain and honest herself, is as naturally attracted to Henry Tilney’s integrity as she is repelled by John Thorpe’s braggadoccio; she feels the difference even though she’s not sophisticated enough to be able to explain it. Elinor loves Edward because he cares about the things that really matter. Coming from a family impressed by nothing but money and making a splash in the world, he’s somehow managed to acquire simple tastes, honest principles, and a natural bent for domestic happiness.
²²
Fanny Price, even as a little girl, admires the good principles that make Edmund consider her feelings when the rest of the family are too selfish to notice or care that she’s miserable. Anne is originally smitten with Wentworth’s honest, energetic masculinity. Seven and a half years later she’s bewitched again by the easy, generous, really genuine friendships he enjoys with his brother officers, who share a “hospitality so uncommon, so unlike the usual style of give-and-take invitations, and dinners of formality and display.”

Here’s where else practicing “right conduct,” self-knowledge, and “delicacy toward the feelings of other people” pays off. Those self-evident rules for living are the very best “principles” a man can have. The Jane Austen heroine who has made them a habit naturally recognizes other principled people as kindred spirits.
²³
This is a big part of what makes Jane Austen heroines seem so dignified to us. They, their real friends, and the principled men they love are walking on more solid ground; they’re breathing a freer air.

But “principle” is only the first skeleton key Jane Austen heroines make use of to unlock a man’s potential. “Temper” comes next. It’s the more
practical
as opposed to the
theoretical
part of what makes a man worthy of admiration, trust, and respect. Having high standards isn’t enough; a guy also has to have enough “self-command” to be able to live up to those standards.

Jane Austen’s men with bad tempers aren’t monsters who murder, lock up, or beat their wives. Lack of self-control on that scale, it should go without saying, absolutely disqualifies a man from consideration as a possible Jane Austen hero. John Knightley, Dr. Grant, and General Tilney aren’t violent.
²⁴
They just offload the unavoidable frustrations of ordinary life onto other people. They speak sharply; they complain freely. Essentially, they make a lot of fuss about whatever inconveniences and frustrations come
their
way, while overlooking the fact that other people have their own difficulties. In fact, they
create
unpleasantness for other people, by outsourcing their own share of the discomforts that plague everbody in this life onto the people closest to them.
²⁵
Think of Dr. Grant in
Mansfield Park
, who can’t “get the better of” his “disappoint ment about a green goose.” Whenever Mrs. Grant serves a dinner that falls below his high expectations for epicurean enjoyment, Dr. Grant makes life miserable for everybody else. So miserable that the rest of the family is “driven out” of the house—leaving poor Mrs. Grant behind to apply her patience to soothing him down again. If you don’t want to end up in her position, avoid bad-tempered men.

Jane Austen had
very
high standards where temper is concerned. You don’t have to be even rude (not to mention violent) for her to make it clear that you are, as it were, living at other people’s emotional expense. There are all kinds of different ways to take your frustrations out on other people—imposing discomfort on them to make yourself more comfortable—ranging
from loud and incessant complaining to habitual sulking.
²⁶
Jane Austen expected her heroes and heroines to undertake a positive effort to make life pleasant for other people. That can consist of simply taking the trouble to keep the conversation going. (That’s where Colonel Fitzwilliam’s civility is superior to Darcy’s pre-Elizabeth’s-refusal manners.) Or it can mean stepping in to smooth things over when someone else has said an angry or insulting thing, as Mary Crawford does when Mrs. Norris publicly reminds Fanny of her dependent position. “There,” thinks Edmund of Mary, “goes a temper which would never give pain!”

Of course Mary Crawford’s temper isn’t quite as perfect as Edmund thinks it is. Fanny’s impressions of Miss Crawford’s temper are quite different from Edmund’s.
²⁷
When the two girls are alone together, Mary isn’t shy about letting Fanny know her displeasure at Fanny’s choices—particularly, Fanny’s refusal of her brother—in terms that seem quite strong to a person as shy as Fanny is. Like many of us, both men and women, Mary is on her best behavior in the presence of the person of the opposite sex that she’s romantically interested in—which is why it can be very instructive to see a man in the company of his friends, his family, his co-workers, waiters, and store clerks. And even more interesting to learn how he treats those people when you’re not around. Because if you get close to him, there will inevitably come a time when he’s no longer on his best behavior with you. You want to know in advance what his ordinary or habitual standard of self-control is.