The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (48 page)

Let’s set aside for a minute the splendid arrangement Jane Austen and her contemporaries came up with, and look at two completely different—and opposite—ways of managing the love-and-happiness paradox: first, traditional arranged marriage and second, love as conducted according to modern feminist theory. We’re familiar with both schemes for love, but what we may not notice is that they’re two different plans for solving the love-happiness paradox. Each one solves the same problem, but they solve it in diametrically opposed ways, by eliminating either love or else lasting happiness from the equation. Neither approach guarantees either love or happily ever after—that’s for sure—but each opposite scheme abandons one of those things in pursuit of the other.

Let’s start with traditional arranged marriage. Absurd as this sounds, arranged marriage leaves out love to aim for—happiness. Okay, so in reality arranged marriages cause an enormous amount of
unhappiness
. But still
the theory behind them is to try to guarantee life-long happiness in marriage—by ignoring the free choice of the human heart, bypassing the essence of erotic love. Where marriage is arranged, it’s thought to be too serious a business to be left to flighty young lovers, who don’t know what will make them happy in the long run.

We picture young lovers—Juliet, Maria in
West Side Story
, or some poor girl in Pakistan today who falls in love with a man from the wrong tribe—who desperately want to escape arranged marriages. They want to pursue real love, which promises them an intoxicating happiness beyond the dreams of their stodgy or cynical elders.

But look at it from their parents’ point of view.
They’re
trying to take into account all those factors that do to some degree determine long-term happiness—from the real character of the other person to whether the young couple will be able to support themselves or not. Now, from
Romeo and Juliet
, as well as from the real-live honor killing stories in the news, we know that parents aren’t in fact always promoting their children’s happiness by the marriages they arrange.
²⁰
But the
theory
that justifies arranged marriage is that love is too volatile a foundation to build a happy family on. “If marriage was left up to the woman without her guardian’s consent,” argues Sheikh Muhammad S. al-Munajjid, “you would see most girls marrying those who enchant them of the wolves of men, who are eager to rob them of their chastity and then throw them aside.”
²¹

Setting aside the question of chastity—on which we’re unlikely ever to see eye-to-eye with the sheikh—let’s look for the grain of truth that gives power to his perverse understanding of marriage. Is it true, after all, when women are free to choose for themselves, that most Juliets find their Romeos? Do women often find love stronger than death, and lovers who are faithful to the grave? How many young women have lovers of Romeo’s caliber? And it’s not that they always find “wolves among men” instead—though there certainly are some wolves out there.
²²
But even when the men our hearts choose aren’t wolves, is following the choice of our hearts any guarantee of lasting happiness? It has to be admitted that succumbing to youthful passion is no guarantee even of a love affair of Romeo-and-Juliet intensity, much less of lifelong happiness together.

So let’s turn to the other extreme from Sheikh Muhammad S. al-Munajjid. Our radical feminists, at the opposite end of the spectrum on the love-happiness continuum, urge us to give up on hopes for lasting happiness, in order to be able to enjoy love—or at least really intense sex—in the here and now. They’re as unhappy with the Romeo-and-Juliet scenario as the sheikh is, but for the opposite reason. The sheikh is afraid that the intoxicating power of love will make a life-long union impossible. Nona Willis-Aronowitz, writing for the
Nation
, is afraid that a woman’s wish for life-long happiness with the man she loves will interfere with the intoxication of the moment.
²³
“Why,” she asks, “should sex have an everlasting warranty of love attached to it? Sex is the ultimate risk, a risk that makes human relationships complicated, intoxicating and wonderful.” In the name of erotic love—the intoxicating and the wonderful—Ms. Willis-Aronowitz wants us to quit aiming for “eternal companionship” altogether. She recommends the pursuit of love with no happily-ever-after promise attached.

So why should we care about these extreme examples? Surely most of us are going to have enough sense to ignore Muslim sheikhs
and
radical feminists when we’re arranging our love lives. The problem is, these extremes point up something that’s gone horribly wrong even with the middle, where the great majority of relationships are today. Love and living happily ever after aren’t so easy for any of us to fit together any more. It isn’t just the divorce rate, which, it has to be admitted, climbed most steeply in the very same decades when love became
the
pervasive theme of our pop culture. It’s not even the fact that fewer people are risking marriage at all, now that there’s no other reason but love to get married—the shotgun wedding being a relic of the past,
²⁴
societal pressure to marry being at an all-time low, and increasing numbers of us having come ’round to the point of view that there’s no requirement to wait until marriage for either sex or children. (In 2005, apparently for the first time in world history, more women were living without than with husbands.)
²⁵
It’s that we’ve lost faith
in the promise that love itself makes to us—that the excitement of falling in love is an invitation to a lifetime of being happy together.

Jane Austen is the cure for that disillusionment. She figured out how love and happiness could go together. She took the perennial problem that Richardson built that first “novel of manners” around—how men and women can negotiate the minefield created by the different and often conflicting things we want from each other. The love match comes to its absolute perfection in her novels.

Jane Austen gives us heroines who are quite as clever as Sheikh Muhammad S. al-Munajjid at spotting the “wolves among men.” The sheikh would be amazed—and likely not all that pleased—at their capacity to protect themselves from heartbreakers, and arrange their own happily-ever-after endings. And yet the relationships of Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot are every bit as “complicated, intoxicating and wonderful” as anything we can believe we’d ever find in the kind of love (or sex) that Ms. Willis-Aronowitz is recommending. Even though—we might say
especially because—
in the lives of Jane Austen heroines, sex
does
“have an everlasting warranty of love attached to it.”

If we do love the Jane Austen way, we don’t have to give up on either love
or
happiness. She shows us exactly how we can have both.

THIS BOOK WAS CROWD SOURCED AMONG MANY friends, who helped me to new insights about love in the twenty-first century and into Jane Austen; answered frantic Facebook blegs for the sources of quotations I couldn’t find; read the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions; and generously contributed other kinds of help too numerous to mention. I’m also grateful to my colleagues at Regnery who worked on the book, a number of whom are also friends described above. Many thanks to the Acevedos, David Alexander, Noorah Al-Meer, Natalie Barg, Adam Bellow, Joseph Breslin, Matt Bronzi, Tommy Campbell, Amber Colleran, Harry Crocker, Jeanne Crotty, Dawn Eden, Louise and Brock Fowler, Anne Fisher, Percy Galbreath, Mary Hills Baker Gill, Jay Glasgow, James Guinivan, Zélie Guinivan, Charlotte Hays, Karen Hickey, Kathy Hofer, Liz Holmes, Vera Hough, Mary Jabaley, Nicole and Michael Jabaley, Patricia Jackson, John Janaro, Liza Jabaley Johnson, Caitlin Jones, both Jeff and Billy Kantor, Pat Lally, John Lalor, Jack Langer, Amanda Larsen, Anne and Matt Lloyd, Margaret Harper McCarthy, Rebekah McCarthy, Joseph McPherson,
Frank Moncher, Sean Munns, Alex Novak, Kate Oates, Michelle Oddis, Pat Lally, Melissa Pop-Lazarova, Sam Phillips, Anastasia Pimentel, Gregory Pimentel, Stephen Pimentel, Mark Reed, Marji Ross, Jeff Rubin, Maria Ruhl, Andy Schwarz, Karl Selzer, Cassandra Snyder, Siobhan and Richard Solomon, Leslie Spencer, Matt Stroot, Jason Sunde, Kathleen Sweetapple, Mary-Powel Thomas, Tom Tobin, Gretchen Tombes, Adam Tragone, Kara Verducci, Charmie Vince, Dave Washburn, Deborah Whelan, Lydia Whitney, Susan White, Rachel Wolford, Maggie Wynne, and Lionel Yaceczko. Of course none of these folks is responsible for the advice in this book, and they should not be presumed to agree with it. Special thanks to Mary Beth Baker for her grueling work, and gratitude for the rare combination—really high standards plus a sense of proportion—that makes her such a good editor. This also seems like a good place to thank to Ruel Tyson, in whose graduate seminar I first read
Sense and Sensibility
, and whom I unaccountably forgot to mention in the acknowledgments to my book on English literature. If you helped me with this book and I’ve unaccountably left you out, please forgive!

1
Jennifer Frey, “Jane Austen: A Love Story,”
Washington Post
, August 22, 2004, p. D1.

2
Jane Austen didn’t just write about the Regency period, she actually lived then.

3
Helen Fielding,
Bridget Jones’s Diary
(Viking, 1996).

4
“... in taking so decided a dislike to him, without any reason ... one cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.” Her sister Jane knows that Elizabeth is really embarrassed, however much she tries to turn it into a joke: “Lizzy, when you first read that letter, I am sure you could not treat the matter as you do now.” And Elizabeth admits it. “I was uncomfortable enough. I was very uncomfortable, I may say unhappy. And with no one to speak to, of what I felt, no Jane to comfort me and say that I had not been so very weak and vain and nonsensical as I knew I had!”

5
Hephzibah Anderson,
Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year without Sex
(Viking, 2010), p. 15.

6
Helen Fielding,
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
(Viking, 1999).

7
Anderson, op. cit.

8
On a whole different scale from even Emma, whose story was reworked into a movie of that title.

9
“Elizabeth longed to observe that Mr. Bingley had been a most delightful friend; so easily guided that his worth was invaluable; but she checked herself. She remembered that [Mr. Darcy] had yet to learn to be laught at, and it was rather too early to begin.”

10
Hephzibah Anderson is just the tip of the iceberg. In the spring of 2010, abstinence was a fad among New York City sophisticates. See Mandy Stadtmiller, “No More Sex in the City: New York Women Are Going Celibate—and They Feel Happier Than Ever,” the
New York Post,
May 11, 2010. Dawn Eden was an early adopter; see
The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment by Keeping Your Clothes
On
(Thomas Nelson, 2006). There’s also Joan Sewell,
I’d Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido
(Crown Archetype, 2007).

11
Caitlin Flanagan, “Love, Actually: How Girls Reluctantly Endure the Hookup Culture,”
Atlantic,
June 2010; Kathleen A. Bogle,
Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus
(NYU Press, 2008); Laura Sessions,
Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both
(Riverhead Trade, 2008).

12
See chapter 4 below.

13
Okay, so Jane Austen heroines don’t have jobs. But then again, neither do most of the men they marry. Elizabeth Bennet settles down to manage a family and a household. And her husband ... manages his estate.

14
Sanditon
is complete with bathing machines, a gourmandizing hypochondriac hypocrite, an officious do-gooding spinster, a seaside resort town in which sound economic fundamentals are giving way to speculative get-rich-quick schemes, a heroine who’s a poor relation and companion to a rich old lady, and a black-hearted Snidely Whiplash-style villain.

15
There’s Elizabeth’s boy-crazy sister Lydia, who thinks she’s being eloped with for love when really she’s just being used for sex. There’s Mrs. Bennet, whose frenetic desire for her daughters to marry well actually drives men away. (“The business of her life was to get her daughters married ....” There’s something wrong there. Love is a serious part of our lives, but it shouldn’t be anybody’s “business” in quite that frantic way.) There’s empty-headed Anne Steele, desperate to be teased about her non-existent relationship with “the Doctor.” There’s Isabella Thorpe, talking archly about “the men” and making calculating use of her feminine wiles to pursue an ambitious marriage.

16
She was “the daughter of Dr. Johnson,” as C. S. Lewis argued in “A Note on Jane Austen,”
Selected Literacy Essays
(Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 186. Remember that Jane Austen turned twenty-five in 1800, in an era when people, particularly women, grew up faster than we do today. But the real tip-off is her prose style. Read George Washington’s correspondence, or the letters between John and Abigail Adams, and you’d almost think you were in a Jane Austen novel. There’s a watershed in style after Jane Austen just like—okay, maybe not
just
like, but it’s the same sort of difference as—the one between Frank Sinatra and Elvis. Wordsworth’s famous preface to
Lyrical Ballads
offers insights into, and also provided impetus for, this change.

17
Versus Bridget Jones’s
Edge of Reason
, where we too often find ourselves instead.

18
Benjamin Roth,
The Great Depression: A Diary
(Public Affairs, 2009), p. 4.