The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (47 page)

Lovelace is the villain (or from Sir Edward’s peculiar point of view, the hero) of Samuel Richardson’s
Clarissa
. And Richardson was Jane Austen’s favorite novelist, no less than Sir Edward’s. Though of course she took Richardson in a very different way.

Both Richardson’s and Jane Austen’s books are called “novels of manners” for good reason. “Manners” meant so much more to Jane Austen’s original readers than they mean to us. They weren’t just about which fork to use, or even how not to hurt people’s feelings. Manners were how you regulated your conduct to meet all life’s challenges.
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They were the rules and resources that smoothed over all the rough places in the ordinary course of life—from how to fend off rude questions about the cost of your dress to how to get through a painful first meeting with the only man you ever loved (whom you sent away seven years ago and haven’t seen since). They covered the whole range of questions about how to behave, everything between mere formal etiquette and full-fledged moral issues. And women in Jane Austen’s day read her kind of novel expecting to pick up tips from them—not just to be entertained, but also to learn how to manage their lives better.

The original “novel of manners” actually started as a how-to book. It’s called
Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded. In a Series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel to Her Parents
. Like many another inventor, Samuel
Richardson stumbled on his great discovery almost by accident. Richardson was a mid-eighteenth-century printer who was hoping to make some money selling a volume of model letters. England in his day was in a great ferment of improvement, education, and refinement. Richardson saw the chance to appeal to a growing demographic: people whose social skills hadn’t caught up to their new literacy. The nouveau-literate
⁹
were sure to find themselves in situations where they were at a loss for how to act, and particularly how to express themselves in writing.
¹⁰
Richardson sat down to imagine the situations in which letter-writing skills would be needed, and to write a variety of model letters (which he eventually did publish as
Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, on the Most Important Occasions
)
.
But in the course of writing that frankly instructional book, he also began to imagine a more complex situation that he could tell a story about in a long series of connected letters. For his story, Richardson imagined the difficult and dangerous position of a young female servant whose employer was trying to seduce her.

At the beginning of the book, the sixteen-year-old Pamela goes to work as a servant in the house of the rich and lustful “Mr. B.” Mr. B finds her attractive but naturally doesn’t see her as marriage material; she’s got no money and she’s several rungs below him on the social ladder. So he does his best to seduce her and even comes close to rape. Pamela is in an ugly and probably all too realistic dilemma, suffering the indignities that innumerable victims of eighteenth-century-style sexual harassment were no doubt subjected to. But, improbably, Pamela manages not only to fend off Mr. B’s dishonorable attentions, but in the end inspires him to fall in love with and marry her.

Richardson had hit on a situation with huge potential to interest readers. The “manners” involved may be very different from ours. But the problem itself is universal: men and women often want different, sometimes wholly incompatible things from each other. But they can—sometimes, somehow, miraculously, they do—negotiate their way to that intoxicating state of affairs in which each does really want exactly what will make the other happy.

Pamela’s story is meant to be just as instructive in its own way as the book of model letters Richardson was working on when he thought of it.
Pamela
’s alternate title, after all, is “
Virtue Rewarded
.” But it’s not just Pamela’s “virtue” that gets its reward when Mr. B finally falls in love with her and proposes marriage. In addition to real integrity (sexual “virtue” is
not
the only virtue she’s got), Pamela needs all her intelligence, too, to manage the tight spot she’s in. Mr. B is continually astonished by her command of language and the quality of the reasons she gives to fend him off—she’s very clever about answering his indecent proposals effectively without offending against either the social requirements of her day or her job description. It’s
reading her letters
that makes Mr. B see Pamela as a real person. He’s been thinking of her as just another hot body.

Pamela is a new kind of heroine. Richardson “substituted social embarrassment for tragic conflict, thus developing the first novel of manners.”
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Before Richardson, heroes fought their way through wars and quests, or suffered a catastrophic fall on account of their tragic flaws. After Richardson, heroines fight their way through a new kind of adventure, using their wit and hard-won social skills (their “manners”) to manage the more ordinary dangers that women are threatened by in real life—predatory suitors, painful encounters with old flames, back-stabbing friends, clueless parents. Instead of a knight slaying the dragon to rescue the princess, the novel of manners gives us a young lady struggling through awkwardnesses and misunderstandings to happiness with the hero of her dreams.
¹²

Pamela’s adventures are crude, occasionally bordering on soft porn.
¹³
In comparison, Jane Austen’s novels are marvels of good taste, psychological realism, and subtle insights into relationships. Part of the difference is Jane Austen’s natural “delicacy of mind” and original genius. But also, the novel of manners—and the whole great societal refinement and improvement project it was part of—were half a century further along in Jane Austen’s day than in Richardson’s.

In fact, the novel of manners reached its high point with Jane Austen. Her novels are the best of the kind Richardson invented. And they’re also the last great English novels in the Richardson strain. That is, the last that
take an optimistic—not an angst-ridden—view of society’s rules and a realistic—rather than Romantic—view of human nature. During Jane Austen’s lifetime, the great literary and societal improvement project that her novels are the fruit and flower of reached its high tide and began to recede. By the time she was writing
Emma
and
Persuasion
, the enthusiasm that was still shaping her own work was no longer the cutting-edge attitude.

Instead of a culture war or a sexual revolution, English society in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had been engaged in a great cultural building project. Or, rather, a great retooling project. The century into which Jane Austen was born was the great age of improvement in modes and manners. Grammar and spelling, dress and hygiene, the behavior of ladies and gentlemen (and of those who aspired to be ladies and gentlemen)—all were in a ferment of refinement. The English novel of manners arose out of this ferment, and one of its functions was to teach proper behavior by example.

What was this great project for improvement and refinement? It was part of the Enlightenment, of course. But not the Enlightenment as we usually think of it. Nothing could be more alien to Jane Austen than the world of the French
philosophes
. But remember, there was an English, or an Anglo-American, Enlightenment too. It wasn’t all Voltaire and Rousseau. It was also Edmund Burke and James Madison. The Enlightenment was responsible for the constructive American Revolution, as well as the destructive French one. The great figures of the Enlightenment in England and her American colonies were moved by an impulse of lively and intelligent curiosity to test every pin and spar in the great edifice of their civilization—only to leave every individual part cleaned and polished and the whole machine running more smoothly than before—not “to pull it to bits and put something else in its place.”
¹⁴

And one of the things they were reforming and improving was love and marriage. There
were
radicals and revolutionaries on that subject—Shelleys and Godwins and Wollstonecrafts who argued that marriage was slavery, called for the abolition of monogamy, and wanted to reinvent love from scratch on the basis of reason alone—the same way the revolutionaries were starting everything from the year zero in France.
¹⁵
But Jane Austen was a
reformer, not a revolutionary. She didn’t take a slash-and-burn or Voltaire-and-Rousseau approach to human institutions. Instead, she was firmly in the moderate wing of the English Enlightenment. (Think Edward Coke, not Thomas Hobbes; Dr. Johnson, not John Locke.)

The Enlightenment reformers weren’t radicals, but they weren’t hidebound conservatives either, unquestioningly accepting everything their ancestors believed and did, à la Sir Roger de Coverley in the
Spectator
. They
were
busy improving and refining human institutions, but all the time they were taking care not to throw the baby out with the bath water. They approached human traditions in need of reform with care and respect. More care and respect than the French
philosophes
and revolutionaries, of course. But also more than our modern social scientists and public health experts.

You can argue that since the Enlightenment the human race has been acting like a highly evolved flock of geese. A few especially advanced ganders got smart enough to ask,
Why do we have this irrational tradition of flying south every winter?
but not quite bright enough to figure out the reason.

The modern scientific establishment has often been reductionist—too ready either to dismiss human conventions altogether (as “myths” and “old wives’ tales”), or else to tell us that scientists have discovered “the” reason for some universal human custom or traditional bit of wisdom and to triumphantly supply a substitute—which experience and additional research eventually reveal isn’t completely adequate: “Hygienic” baby bottles and formula for breastfeeding. Scientifically formulated vitamins for consuming actual vegetables. Lowfat foods as a substitute for eating and drinking in moderation. Antibiotics and condoms instead of being selective about your sex partners. In contrast, the moderate Enlightenment tradition that Jane Austen belonged to was not only critical but also respectful of the aggregate wisdom contained in longstanding human habits and conventions.

Jane Austen and her contemporaries took a less root-and-branch attitude toward human culture. In fact, they had a positive value for human civilization as over against mere nature.
¹⁶
Jane Austen’s heroes and heroines take such an anti-Rousseauian-back-to-nature attitude that they aren’t even enthusiastic picnickers!
¹⁷
They understand that culture is natural to human beings.
¹⁸

So the great reform of marriage, sex, and family life that Jane Austen contributed to took as its starting point the things that human beings have always wanted and tried to capture in those institutions, with varying degrees of success over the course of history: love and happiness.

Marriage had been in a state of flux and even of reinvention for many years leading up to Jane Austen’s lifetime. We forget how close she was to the days of mercenary alliances and old-fashioned arranged marriage. We don’t think a lot about how and when marriage for love became the norm. As a matter of fact, it’s a long and a complicated story, involving a lot of surprising history, including the power struggles between the Catholic bishops of late antiquity and the great Roman families whose influence survived the collapse of the Empire; the literary fad for courtly love in the High Middle Ages; and the settlement of America. But the long and the short of it is that, by Jane Austen’s day, while a good many European, English, and American women were marrying for love, the love marriage was still in some sense a live issue.

As it still is on the world scene today.
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And as in a theoretical sense it is everywhere, and always will be. Love is a perennial dilemma for the human race. It’s not ever easy to manage things so that the volatile energy of erotic love can be channeled into lasting matches and long-term happiness.

Love promises perfect bliss. It can deliver the greatest happiness we’re capable of in this life (“all which this world could do for her,” as Jane Austen says of Captain Wentworth’s love for Anne Elliot, when Anne is in suspense about it). The promise of happily ever after is an essential part of the experience of love. Love itself tells us that love is the guarantor of our happiness: it promises that being with that one person means being happy.

But love often fails of its promise. And it doesn’t just fall short of intense bliss. Love can, in fact, cause untold misery. All of us know, at least in our saner moments, that happiness really, and especially in the long run, depends on more than the intensity of our feelings. Ironically, whether we’ll be happy in love depends on factors that it’s easier for people who aren’t in love—our friends, and sometimes even our parents—to see while we’re under love’s enchantment. For example, whether he has a good temper; whether he treats us with respect; whether he mixes well with our friends and family; whether his goals in life are compatible with ours; whether our principles and beliefs are in conflict.

It’s a paradox. Love is necessarily unplanned, even irrational. It’s about the choice of the heart, not the head. If it’s real love, it’s precisely love
no matter what—
casting aside all prudent calculations about compatibility, worthiness, suitability, social status, whether there will be enough money to live on. And yet ignoring all those factors means ignoring red flags that absolutely can wreck the happily-ever-after that love looks forward to. Love promises happiness, but it makes it hard to plan for.