The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (57 page)

48
“Address” can be more particular and deliberate than just general manners. It names both the tact that enables a woman to go about getting her way without ruffling other people’s feathers and a man’s style of paying attention to women. So in a rough and ready sort of way, you might say your “address” is your “manners” when you’re in pursuit of something you want.

49
Darcy, before Elizabeth inspires him to try harder, doesn’t think of it as his responsibility to entertain other people or to put them at their ease. When Elizabeth suggests he’d get along with new people better if he practiced his social skills, she is quite right. Edward and Edmund are both on the shy side, too. Edward’s “quietness of manner,” Jane Austen tells us, “militated against all [Marianne’s] established ideas of what a young man’s address ought to be.” But of course Elinor is on the quiet side herself, and not really looking for a man who takes up a lot of social space. Her Edward, like Edmund and Mr. Darcy (at least by the end of his story), is clearly within the range of “manners” that a Jane Austen heroine can live with.

50
Edward’s brother Robert Ferrars is affected, with all his attention given over to trivial matters that feed his vanity—particularly in the unforgettable scene when we first meet him, engrossed in “examining and debating” at elaborate length his order for a custom-made ivory, gold, and pearl toothpick-case. In contrast to Edward’s “simple taste” and “diffident feelings,” Robert’s mental outlook is the essence of impertinent “puppyism.” He has “no leisure to bestow any other attention on the two ladies, than what was comprised in two or three very broad stares.” With a final look at the Dashwoods that seems “rather to demand than
to express admiration,” he walks out of the shop “with an happy air of real conceit and affected indifference.” John Thorpe in
Northanger Abbey
is “a rattle,” whose non-stop mile-a-minute conversation is a farrago of “idle assertions and impudent falsehoods.”

51
Though, take note, there are cases where the social classification we use to group people in is a reliable marker for their principles. And I’m not thinking only of self-styled “pickup artists” who pride themselves on being members of “the Seduction Community” and see “female insecurity” as “the gift that keeps on giving.” (You can check out, for example, Neil Strauss,
The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists
(It Books, 2005) or
http://www.tuckermax.com/—
but it’s advisable only if you’ve got a really strong stomach.) I’m also thinking of, for example, the campus radicals who used to hang around the Marxist book store in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when I was an undergraduate at U.N.C. When I became friends with “Caroline the Communist” (she didn’t like people to know her last name, as she was nervous about the police, being a fan and possibly—friends suspected—an actual member of the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party then sponsoring the Shining Path’s guerilla war in Peru), I learned that the group shared an anti-monogamy principle that was causing serious unhappiness among its female members.

52
Turning over Jane Austen’s skeleton keys, I can see that for me, intelligence has always been the great aphrodisiac, to the point where in my twenties I was virtually indifferent to all sorts of other valuable qualities, right down to a man’s looks and even hygiene. Note that that’s not something a Jane Austen heroine would be specially proud of. But being a young Romantic at the time, with nearly the intensity of a Marianne Dashwood, I was quite pleased with myself on that score. The passage of time, which tends to teach us all the value of qualities we didn’t appreciate early or easily (think of Captain Wentworth’s late appreciation for the persuadable temper of Anne’s mind) has made me see ending up with a handsome husband—out of the various brilliant men I was smitten with at one time or another—as a gratuitous perk that I certainly didn’t deserve.

53
We’ve seen that when fathers, mothers, and uncles weigh in on a young woman’s marriage arrangements, it’s too often on the side of crass self-interest or at best world-weary cynicism.

1
General Tilney is the closest thing we meet with, in any of the novels, to the oppressive father who doesn’t hesitate to interfere in the love lives of his children. Still, he’s much less oppressive than Catherine suspects him of being! And
Northanger Abbey
is the novel that includes an apology for the fact that it was already old-fashioned when it was published. (“The public are entreated to bear in mind that thirteen years have passed since it was finished, many more since it was begun, and that during that period, places, manners, books, and opinions have undergone considerable changes.”) Even in that novel, General Tilney and his overbearing methods are balanced by the more modern paternal style of Catherine’s father, who was “not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters.” The most oppressive patriarch we get a glimpse of in Jane Austen’s novels is literally from an earlier generation. Colonel Brandon tells Elinor the story of his poor cousin Eliza, who loved him but was forced into a marriage against her will by his father: “She was married—married against her inclination to my brother. Her fortune was large, and our family estate much encumbered. And this, I fear, is all that can be said for the conduct of one, who was at once her uncle and guardian.” But the older Mr. Brandon’s methods—“I was banished to the house of a relation far distant, and she was allowed no liberty, no society, no amusement till my father’s point was gained”—are clearly from another era.

2
Catherine Morland is at a distance from her parents, visiting Bath with family friends. (And the same thing is true about the heroine in Jane Austen’s last, unfinished novel, though in that case she’s at “Sanditon” instead of Bath). Elinor and Marianne’s father has died—and their mother’s “romantic delicacy” forbids her from stepping up to ask the uncomfortable questions her husband might have insisted on.

3
Mme. d’Arblay, the novelist that John Thorpe knew wouldn’t be worth reading once he heard she was “married to an emigrant” from Revolutionary France.

4
Richardson goes to even more extreme lengths than Jane Austen to arrange for his heroines to be alone and exposed to all the dangers inherent in arranging their own affairs without parental advice and consent: He sends his Pamela into domestic service in the house of a man who threatens seduction and even rape—in a case of
extreme
hostile work environment, eighteenth-century style. And he arranges for his Clarissa to be actually kidnapped and lodged in a house of ill repute by the villain of her novel.

5
Mrs. Dashwood’s “romantic delicacy” doesn’t turn out so well for her daughter. Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove look a bit irresponsible, seeming “either from seeing little, or from an entire confidence in the discretion of both their daughters, and of all the young men who came near them ... to leave everything to take its chance.” And Mrs. Norris is guilty of serious dereliction of duty: “Mrs. Norris was too busy in contriving and directing the general little matters of the company, superintending their various dresses with economical expedient, for which no one thanked her, and saving, with delighted integrity, half-a-crown here and there to the absent Sir Thomas, to have leisure for watching the behaviour, or guarding the happiness of his daughters.” And “No one would have supposed, from [Mrs. Norris’s] confident triumph [in Maria’s marriage to Mr. Rushworth], that she had ever heard of conjugal infelicity in her life, or could have the smallest insight into the disposition of the niece who had been brought up under her eye.”

6
Jane Austen tells us of Henry that, though he did eventually become “sincerely attached to [Catherine] ... felt and delighted in all the excellencies of her character and truly loved her society, I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought.”

7
And doubly flattered to be singled out by him when “every girl in or near Meryton was out of her senses about him.”

8
“His lengthened absence from Mansfield, without anything but pleasure in view, and his own will to consult, made it perfectly clear that he did not care about her.”

9
“Wishin’ and Hopin,’”by Hal David and Burt Bacharach, sung by Dusty Springfield (1964).

10
“It is all very strange,” Elinor remarks to her mother about Willoughby’s abrupt departure—when Marianne is simply wrapped up in her role of brokenhearted Romantic. “So suddenly to be gone! It seems but the work of a moment. And last night he was with us so happy, so cheerful, so affectionate? And now after only ten minutes notice—Gone too without intending to return!—Something more than what he owned to us must have happened. He did not speak, he did not behave like himself.
You
must have seen the difference as well as I. What can it be?”

11
Marianne rebuffs “with energy” not just Elinor’s advice but her eventual attempt to force Marianne’s confidence: “We have neither of us any thing to tell; you, because you communicate, and I, because I conceal nothing.” Elinor also tries to persuade their mother to interfere, to no effect.

12
She tries, even, to keep her Romantic sister Marianne from jumping to the conclusion that Edward loves her, but that’s a hopeless cause.

13
“Disappointed, however, and vexed as she was, and sometimes displeased with his uncertain behaviour to herself, she was very well disposed on the whole to regard [Edward’s] actions with all the candid allowances and generous qualifications, which had been rather more painfully extorted from her, for Willoughby’s service, by her mother.” But still Elinor thinks “of Edward, and of Edward’s behaviour,” with “censure, and doubt” as well as with “tenderness.”

14
“He must be either indifferent or unwilling. Had he ever wished to see her again, he need not have waited till this time; he would have done what she could not but believe that in his place she should have done long ago, when events had been early giving him the independence which alone had been wanting.”

15
Or, if he’s an actual pickup artist, cooperating in his deliberate deception of you.

16
As Elinor does in evaluating Willoughby: “Suspicion of something unpleasant is the inevitable consequence of such an alteration as we have just witnessed in him.... Willoughby may undoubtedly have very sufficient reasons for his conduct, and I will hope that he has. But it would have been more like Willoughby to acknowledge them at once.”

17
Thus at Darcy’s first proposal, Elizabeth’s “intentions did not vary for an instant,” though “she was at first sorry for the pain he was to receive.” And Mary Crawford “
had
begun to think of [Edmund]; she felt that she had, with great
regard, with almost decided intentions; but she would now meet him with his own cool feelings.”

18
Most especially Edmund Bertram, who spends weeks on tenterhooks, in a variety of different situations, on the lookout for “confirmation of Miss Crawford’s attachment.”

19
In fact, rather more so, as Frank Churchill happens to be in a situation—as a man who expects to inherit a very large fortune, marrying a woman with virtually none—in which men are often deceived about a woman’s true feelings. So that it’s all the more valuable that Jane Fairfax’s sterling character testifies to her “disinterested” attachment.

1
Don’t forget that in Jane Austen, insofar as protecting women from relationship-induced pain is at issue at all, it’s
self
-protection we’re talking about. She’s relying on us to be strong enough to look out for ourselves, and she’s teaching us how to do it better. She’s not suggesting that any special female weakness authorizes those side-whiskered Victorian older brothers to manage our love lives for us. Also, as we’ll see in the next chapter, Jane Austen actually expects men to pay quite a lot of attention to their relationships (certainly more than we’re used to expecting of them). But still, Jane Austen noticed things about women that are bound to raise our eyebrows—her observations are so out of step with our assumptions.