The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (39 page)

Not for Manipulating Men—for Preserving
Women’s Peace of Mind, and
Our Freedom to Choose

 

 

IN 1995, ELLEN FEIN AND SHERRIE SCHNEIDER PUBLISHED
The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right
. Fein and Schneider revealed what they said were the unique secrets of “rules girls,” passed down from generation to generation among those special women who know the tricks of getting men to fall in love with and marry them. “The Rules” required you to keep your distance in the early stages of the relationship. You shouldn’t be too eager, or too accommodating to the guy too early on. Don’t agree to go out with him on Saturday unless he calls by Wednesday. Make sure you’re the one who ends every phone call. Wait to have sex, and when you do, “stay emotionally cool no matter how hot the sex gets.”
¹
Essentially, play hard to get until you’ve got him hooked.

There are rules for women in Jane Austen novels, too. And some of them may seem to us even more bizarre and arbitrary than “The Rules.” For example, Jane Austen heroines know that they must never write a letter to a man before they’re already engaged to be married.
²
In
Sense and Sensibility
a breach of that very old-fashioned rule, which our author and her
heroines
³
take very seriously, turns out to be a serious mistake. But Jane Austen also has some fun with the whole subject of rules for courtship, suggesting at one point that “if it be true, as a celebrated writer has maintained, that no young lady can be justified in falling in love before the gentleman’s love is declared, it must be very improper that a young lady should dream of a gentleman before the gentleman is first known to have dreamt of her.”

That’s obviously absurd. What we dream about is entirely beyond our control. And when we fall in love is equally out of our power—right? Well, yes and no. We’ve seen that Jane Austen is a critic of the Romantic love-at-first-sight, Is-he-The-One? method of proceeding in these matters. She doesn’t paint love as something you should fall into in a “haphazard” manner (“randomly,” as we’d say).
⁴
Jane Austen didn’t think men
or
women should allow themselves to get attached without considering the character of the person they’re attaching themselves to.

She also frowned on falling in love without at least some “encouragement” from the other person. (When men act like that, she calls it “selfish passion.”) Ideally, a man and a woman will fall in love more or less simultaneously, and effortlessly get to a place where their “hearts ... understand each other.” But of course the plot of every Jane Austen novel, like the drama in our real-life love lives, arises from the fact that the course of true love hardly ever runs as smoothly as all that.

As we’ve seen from the impressive array of cases in which men give every evidence of “fearing commitment,” we often outpace guys in falling in love. And it can also sometimes happen (as in the case of Elizabeth and Darcy) that men turn out to be in love with us before we even guess they’re falling. Out-of-sync timing in love, with all the attendant misunderstandings and missed opportunities for happiness, is an inevitable feature of the romantic landscape.
⁵
When you think about all the possible variations on this theme—all the myriad ways men and women can miss each other if their progress in love isn’t perfectly in sync—it’s a wonder all our relationships aren’t permanently stuck in Bob Dylan “you’ll love me, or I’ll love you” hell.
⁶
It seems miraculous that we ever do manage to find each other.

What’s the solution? Can we slow ourselves down? Or should we speed the guy up? How can a man and a woman come to love each other—and
let each other know—at just the right time? How can we prevent misfires and short circuits in love? What’s Jane Austen’s solution?

Not
manipulating men. That much is absolutely clear. Jane Austen is almost as scornful as Mr. Darcy of the “meanness in
all
the arts which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation.” Plenty of characters in Jane Austen make use of such “arts” for getting a man to fall in love faster. But they aren’t the characters we admire. The repellant, simpering Margaret Watson, in unrequited love with the absurd Tom Musgrave in
The Watsons
, leaves town for a month at a time “on purpose to egg him on, by her absence”—with no effect whatsoever. Tom doesn’t even realize she’s away. Elizabeth Bennet, on the other hand, who emphatically does not believe in “increasing” a man’s love “by suspense,”
⁷
does attract Mr. Darcy’s interest because she’s so much less eager to please him than the other women he knows. Jane Austen tells us Elizabeth “roused” and “interested” Darcy by an attitude that was so unlike the “deference” and “officious attention” he was used to. Elizabeth attracted him by being different from the women “who so assiduously courted” him.
⁸
But she wasn’t playing hard to get, like a “Rules Girl.” She was
being
hard to get. The “liveliness” of Elizabeth’s mind was quite natural to her, and her “impertinence” to Mr. Darcy came very naturally, too—it was her perfectly normal reaction to his rudeness. It was “simple” and natural, not “a trick”
⁹
on her part.

Ironically, “always speaking and looking and thinking” for a man’s approval—as we see Caroline Bingley doing with Darcy—can also be “a trick.” Flattery and eagerness to please can be applied just as deliberately to strengthen a man’s feelings for you as can the opposite devices, the ones intended to increase his love by “suspense.” That’s because, depending on the circumstances, both “suspense”—if for whatever reason he’s unsure of your feelings—and “gratitude”—if he
does
realize that you like him first—can be natural fuel for love.
¹⁰
And either gratitude or suspense can also be generated artificially by the kind of woman who doesn’t mind manipulating men. In Jane Austen’s
novels, Lucy Steele
¹¹
and Mrs. Clay
¹²
are the most notable practitioners of the art of flattering a man into love. And Charlotte Lucas explains the theory behind it.

The too-prudent Charlotte Lucas sees the precarious nature of Bingley’s regard for Jane before Elizabeth Bennet can see it. But Charlotte’s solution to the problem is not Jane Austen’s solution. Charlotte wants to bridge the gap between how fast Jane and Bingley are falling in love by artificially speeding things up on his end. Lest Jane “lose the opportunity of fixing him,” Charlotte thinks Jane should manipulate Bingley’s feelings to “help him on”: “There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost every attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all
begin
freely—a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. Nine times out of ten, a woman had better shew
more
affection than she feels.... When she is secure of him, there will be leisure for falling in love as much as she chuses.”