The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (51 page)

10
“Something’s Gotta Give,” by Craig Wiseman and Tony Mullins, recorded by LeAnn Rimes (2005).

11
Lori Gottlieb, single mother by choice, explains how she responds to her married friends’ complaints: “‘OK, if you’re so unhappy, and if I’m so lucky, leave your husband! In fact, send him over here!’ Not one person has taken me up on this offer.” Lori Gottlieb, “Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough,”
Atlantic
, March 2008,
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/marry-him/6651/
. But note that Jane Austen is absolutely not about “settling.” That’s just a different kind of cynicism (about which, see more later in this chapter).

12
As Elizabeth Bennet says, “The misfortune of speaking with bitterness is a most natural consequence of the prejudices I had been encouraging.” And, believe me, the things Elizabeth is ashamed of having said to Darcy are really quite civilized compared to what will come out of our mouths if we indulge ourselves in cynicism and resentment.

13
Somewhat improbably attributed to Plato. The real author of this sentiment seems to have been a John Watson, writing under the name Ian MacLaren around the turn of the twentieth century. See “Be Kind; Everyone You Meet Is Fighting a Hard Battle: Plato? Philo of Alexandria? Ian MacLaren? John Watson?” Quote Investigator: Dedicated to the Investigation and Tracing of Quotes,
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/29/be-kind/
.

14
“I was proud, too proud, to ask again,”Wentworth finally realizes. “I did not understand you. I shut my eyes, and would not understand you, or do you justice. This is a recollection which ought to make me forgive every one sooner than myself.”

15
As Colonel Brandon observes, “When the romantic refinements of a young mind are obliged to give way, how frequently are they succeeded by such opinions as are but too common and too dangerous!” Romanticism over-promises and under-delivers. When the inevitable happens, and Romantic illusions are exposed as illusory, it’s easy to overreact in the opposite direction and become too practical—ready to settle. That’s why it’s the ever-Romantic Mrs. Dashwood, not the sensible Elinor, who is most eager to rush Marianne into marrying Colonel Brandon. Mrs. Dashwood goes straight from one extreme—being almost as bewitched by Willoughby as Marianne is and having too much “romantic delicacy” to ask her seventeen-year-old daughter if she’s actually engaged or not—to the other. Once it becomes clear that Willoughby was deceiving them all, Mrs. Dashwood is ready to pressure Marianne into marriage with a rich man twice her age, all the while deceiving herself about her own motivations and her daughter’s heart.

16
Apu: “But one in twenty-five arranged marriages end in divorce!”“The Two Mrs. Nahasapeemapetilons” by Richard Appel,
The Simpsons
Season 9 (1997). Noorah al-Meer, a friend of mine from Oman in Arabia—where they still have arranged marriage—saw another American friend put up that Simpsons quote on Facebook and pointed out that from her experience, “Nine of those arranged marriages stay intact because they’re forced to stay in it” by their families.

17
Married by America
, the 2003 reality show on FOX.

18
Reva Seth,
First Comes Marriage: Modern Relationship Advice from the Wisdom of Arranged Marriages
(Fireside, 2008).

19
Gottlieb, op. cit.

20
Gottlieb, op. cit.: “Back when I was still convinced I’d find my soul mate, I did, although I never articulated this, have certain requirements. I thought that the person I married would have to have a sense of wonderment about the world, would be both spontaneous and grounded, and would acknowledge that life is hard but also be able to navigate its ups and downs with humor. Many of the guys I dated possessed these qualities, but if one of them lacked a certain degree of kindness, another didn’t seem emotionally stable enough, and another’s values clashed with mine. Others were sweet but so boring that I preferred reading during dinner to sitting through another tedious conversation. I also dated someone who appeared to be highly compatible with me—we had much in common, and strong physical chemistry—but while our sensibilities were similar, they proved to be a half-note off, so we never quite felt in harmony, or never viewed the world through quite the same lens.” It all sounds an awful lot like Marianne’s “I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter into all my feelings.... The more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!”

21
“Disinterested affection,” not “the pure and disinterested desire of an establishment.”

22
November 18, 1814, Letter from Jane Austen to Fanny Knight.

23
During a period when she was especially unhappy at home and around the time when she must have “felt her approach to the years of danger” (it was the month of her twenty-seventh birthday, roughly equivalent to a woman’s thirty-seventh, today, in terms of romantic prospects), Jane Austen received—and at first accepted—an offer of marriage from Harris Big-Wither, a young man as awkward and unattractive as his name, but a very rich one. But by the next morning Jane Austen had decided she couldn’t bring herself to marry him, and called off the engagement.

24
Anne means “a man to whom I am indifferent.”

25
And Emma Watson, the heroine of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel
The Watsons
, finds the idea of marrying without love shocking and incomprehensible: “To be so bent on Marriage—to pursue a Man merely for the sake of situation—is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it.”

26
Megan McArdle, “The Case against Settling,”
Atlantic
, June 8, 2010,
http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/06/the-case-against-settling/57836/
.

27
As Jane Austen says of a poor girl’s feelings about being sent out to India to find a husband because she has no other way of securing “a Maintenance”: it is “so opposite to all her ideas of Propriety, so contrary to her Wishes, so repugnant to her feelings, that she would almost have preferred Servitude to it, had Choice been allowed her.” And “to a Girl of any Delicacy, the voyage in itself, since the object of it is so universally known, is a punishment that needs no other to make it very severe.”

28
From Jane Austen’s next letter to Fanny Knight, on November 30, 1814, warning her niece about the misery of finding yourself in love with a different man from the one you’ve “settled” for—a very possible outcome if you’ve made a commitment your heart isn’t really in.

1
Mrs. Smith tells Anne Elliot, “When one lives in the world, a man or woman’s marrying for money is too common to strike one as it ought.”

2
And us! You don’t expect sodomy jokes in a Jane Austen novel: “‘Post captains may be a very good sort of man, but they do not belong to
us.
Of various admirals, I could tell you a great deal.... Of
Rears
and
Vices
, I saw enough. Now, do not suspect me of a pun, I entreat.’

3
“She had felt an early presentiment that she
should
like the eldest best. She knew it was her way.”

4
Later, when Mary’s equally worldly brother Henry falls for Fanny, he’s similarly incapable of naming—and thus of seeing really clearly—what it is that’s so attractive about her: “Henry Crawford had too much sense not to feel the worth of good principles in a wife, though he was too little accustomed to serious reflection to know them by their proper name....”

5
And to poor Fanny, who’s forced to listen to the man she loves talk himself into falling in love with another woman against his better judgment. Edmund blames Mary’s mercenary opinions and sometimes crude language on her unfortunate upbringing. He’s charmed by her “lively mind” even when it pains him that she “can hardly be serious even on serious subjects.”

6
“The misunderstanding is incurable. She will never know Edmund.” Lewis, op. cit., p. 184.

7
Mary does see that there’s no love between Janet Fraser and her husband: “In their house I shall call to mind the conjugal manners of Mansfield Parsonage
with respect. Even Dr. Grant does shew a thorough confidence in my sister, and a certain consideration for her judgment, which makes one feel there is attachment; but of that, I shall see nothing with the Frasers.”

8
It is sad to see Mary, who in Mansfield seemed to appreciate Edmund’s real worth as a human being, now thinking about him in these terms: “My friends here are very much struck with his gentleman-like appearance. Mrs. Fraser (no bad judge), declares she knows but three men in town who have so good a person, height, and air; there were none to compare with him, and we were a party of sixteen. Luckily there is no distinction of dress [to mark Edmund out as a clergyman] now-a-days to tell tales, but—but—but.”

9
Or even just when they issue “a short decisive sentence of praise or condemnation on the face of every woman” they see, like the appalling John Thorpe.

10
Fanny, Jane Austen’s most religious heroine, would approve!

11
“I became accustomed to seeing myself as a commodity—a varied collection of looks, wit, intellect, and
je ne sais quoi
. I looked for men whose commodities were worth as much as my own.” Eden met “nice guys ... but either they seemed boring—as nice guys so often are when you’re used to players—or I KO’d the budding relationship by trying to rush things.” She writes about being forced by her sex-and-the-city lifestyle to follow “a set of Darwinian rules—dressing and acting a certain way to outperform other women competing for mates.” Eden, op. cit., pp. 87, 3, and xi, respectively.

12
Hephzibah Anderson’s experience is hardly unique: “Unfortunately, the moment I fell into bed with a man, I’d fall at least a little in love. Was it biological? Or was I responding to the notionally dead double standard—a double standard lively enough for women to continue scaling down their sexual conquests while men fibbed upward? And was it really so unreasonable of me to stubbornly link sex and love?” Anderson, op. cit., p. 18. Dawn Eden doesn’t call it falling in love, but she writes about how sex inevitably made her feel attached: “I knew I’d be no more likely to fall in love after sex than I was at the moment. I would, however,
feel more attached to him, even if it wasn’t love. Sex does that to me whether I want it to or not; it’s part of how I’m wired as a woman.” Eden, op. cit., p. 9.

13
She’s got a better sense of self-preservation than even de Merteuil. And in any case, she seems to prefer teasing guys.

14
Caitlin Flanagan, “Love, Actually: How Girls Reluctantly Endure the Hookup Culture,”
Atlantic
, June 2010,
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/love-actually/8094/
.

15
Or just because some accident of circumstances entirely beyond their control gave them that reputation.

16
And he’s pilloried by the other students. “It was the first day of an undergraduate seminar... on the subject of men and women in literary perspective. The students were asked what they thought was the most important decision that they would ever have to make in their lives. Nearly all the students answered in terms related to personal fulfillment: ‘Deciding which career to pursue,’ ‘Figuring out which graduate or professional school to attend,’ ‘Choosing where I should live.’ Only one fellow answered otherwise: ‘Deciding who should be the mother of my children.’ For his eccentric opinion, and especially for his quaint way of putting it, he was promptly attacked by nearly every member of the class, men and women alike. The men and nearly all the women berated him for wanting to sacrifice his freedom or for foolishly putting such matters ahead of his career; the women and some of the men were offended that he would look upon and judge women for their prospective capacities as prospective mothers, worse yet, as mothers for
his
children ....” Amy A. Kass and Leon R. Kass,
Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar
(University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), p. 1.

17
Mrs. Jennings on Marianne and Willoughby: “Poor thing! she looks very bad. No wonder. Aye, it is but too true. He is to be married very soon—a good-for-nothing fellow! I have no patience with him. Mrs. Taylor told me of it half an hour ago, and she was told it by a particular friend of Miss Grey herself, else I am sure I should not have believed it; and I was almost ready to sink as it was. Well, said I, all I can say is, that if it is true, he has used a young lady of my acquaintance abominably ill.”

18
The married professors who team-taught the class in which that male student got major grief for making his choice of mate his top priority argue from their experience that he was right. “Our reaction was quite different. As a happily married couple, and as parents of children (now grown and married) whose existence and rearing have been central to our happiness, we could—albeit with hindsight—endorse the young man’s view. Indeed, we wondered only how he could have acquired such a mature outlook at such a tender age. Far from condemning
him as a freak, this opinion revealed an admirable seriousness about life .... Why, we wondered, were not more of our young people aware of the importance—to their own flourishing future—of private life, marriage, and family? Why did they not foresee the supreme importance of finding the right person with whom they might make a life?” Kass and Kass, op. cit., p. 1.