The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (62 page)

46
“Be True to Your School,” by The Beach Boys (1963).

47
Not to mention the Sexual Revolution that came next.

1
Susan Walsh, “5 Ways to Get More Control of Your Relationships,” June 29, 2009,
Hooking Up Smart
,
http://www.hookingupsmart.com/2009/06/29/hookinguprealities/how-to-get-hand-in-your-relationships/
.

2
And if they’re taller, as the 6’2” Megan McArdle explains in “The Long and Short of Dating” at her blog on the
Atlantic
’s website, April 20, 2011,
http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2011/04/the-long-and-short-of-dating/237600/
. It’s interesting to note that while McArdle casts aspersions on men’s hankering for “someone they can look down on. (Physically, not necessarily spiritually)” and on women’s “fantasy about being tiny and delicate,” and she’s clearly happy to have married a man “who labored mightily when he carried me over the threshold”—still, she
did
let him carry her over the threshold.

3
Yes, we really are, in world-historical terms, however inferior we may feel to the glamorous but mostly imaginary people we see in the media and the movies.

4
Which is one more reason to remember that your hero doesn’t need to be superior in
every
way. Especially not in ways that aren’t ultimately important—the flashy stuff that impresses the world, but that Jane Austen heroines see right through. If you care about integrity and can admire a man for keeping his priorities straight, you can be deliriously happy with an Edmund Bertram or an Edward Ferrars, despite their moderate incomes and the fact that they don’t cut much of a figure in the world. Your perfect match needs to be superior only in the things that matter to you.

5
And conceives her “prejudice” against him, when she happens to overhear him describe her as “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt
me
; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies slighted by other men.”

6
So Charles Dickens tells us, near the middle of the nineteenth century, looking back on the Regency Era: “There used to be Assembly Balls at most places then.” Chapter 38 of
Great Expectations
, published in the 1860s, but set in the eighteen-teens.

7
No. 97, February 19, 1751. As it happens, we know that Jane Austen certainly had read this number of the
Rambler
because she refers to Richardson’s letter in
Northanger Abbey
(in the passage where she considers whether it’s improper of a woman to fall in love with a man—or to dream about him—before he tells her his love or dreams about her), which she wrote at roughly the halfway point between Richardson’s letter looking back to the days before assembly balls and Dickens’s remark looking back on the balls themselves.

8
As, interestingly, Darcy’s eye is forced to do at the Meryton assembly ball where “turning round, he looked for a moment at Elizabeth, till catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said” those cutting things about her merely “tolerable” looks.

9
Apart from “fidelity” and “complaisance” in the actual dancing, he was also supposed to make sure you got refreshments, sit with you, and converse with you and your friends in the break between dances.

10
Being driven in a horse-drawn carriage by a man was another way of seeing whether you liked his physical style—whether you enjoyed being in his hands, as it were: “Henry [Tilney] drove so well—so quietly—without making any disturbance, without parading to her, or swearing at them: so different from the only gentleman-coachman whom it was in [Catherine’s] power to compare him with! ... To be driven by him, next to being dancing with him, was certainly the greatest happiness in the world.”

11
Besides Lydia Bennet’s offer to find her sisters husbands, scorned by Elizabeth, there’s the completely absurd Mary in “The Three Sisters,” who is egged into marrying the “extremely disagreeable” Mr. Watts by her more human younger sister Georgiana when their mother insists on his being accepted by one of her daughters. Georgiana excuses herself for manipulating Mary into accepting him thus: “Mary will have real pleasure in being a married Woman, & able to chaperone us, which she certainly shall do, for I think myself bound to contribute as much as possible to her happiness in a State I have made her choose. They will probably have a new Carriage, which will be paradise to her, & if we can prevail on Mr. W. to set up his Phaeton she will be too happy. These things however would be no consolation to Sophy or me for domestic misery.”

12
And how did they separate the sheep from the goats? We’re not talking about picking a hero here, only about identifying the kind of jerks who ought to be altogether excluded from the pool of possibles before you start picking. The ones to kick out were the men who were known to prey on women’s vulnerabilities. You could refuse an introduction to a man, and you would if he had that kind of reputation. That’s why Mrs. Edwards “testif[ies] by the coldness of her manner” that she introduces Tom Musgrave to Emma Watson only “very reluctantly.” Tom has managed to circumvent Emma’s right to refuse the introduction, and Mrs. Edwards’s right to refuse to make it, by impertinently asking to be introduced in front of Emma. Thus Mrs. Edwards can’t say no without creating some social awkwardness. Which she would likely be willing to do if Tom were just a little bit more dangerous; he’s a borderline case. Besides refusing introductions, if you found out that a man you already knew had started behaving like that you could “drop his acquaintance immediately.” Willoughby doesn’t care how bad he looks to Marianne’s friends because he knows that in any case that he’ll be “shut out forever from their society” once the essentials of how he treated her are known.

13
But isn’t it psychologically unhealthy for one person to consider himself responsible for the emotions of another? I don’t think so, in this sense. Was it any less reasonable for a man to take into account the overpowering effect that the
honest expression of his interest is likely to have on the woman than it was for her to take into account the overpowering effect the display of her body is likely to have on him? Male attention is as distracting, befuddling, and intoxicating to the average human female as a woman’s body is to the average human male. A woman used to dress to avoid exposing her body, and a man used to talk so as not to honestly expose his interest and his current (passing, present-bound) feelings for a woman, unless and until he was sure that interest was serious. If women are more level-headed about physical desire, it makes some sense for us to notice the effect our bodies are having on men. If men are less susceptible to emotional seduction, it makes sense for us to require
them
to notice the effect their words can have on women.

14
As Lady Caroline Lamb said of Byron.

15
The quality of analysis that Jane Austen heroines put into considering their prospects is really impressive. Any woman falling in love is going to be thinking how fabulous the man is. But how often do we appreciate the kinds of things Elizabeth appreciates about Darcy: what his responsible management means for the large number of people who work for and depend on him, and the fact that with very good reasons to be proud, he’s actually learning to master himself. Any woman regretting a man she has lost is going to be sighing about what her future with him could have been. But very few heartbroken women are going to have as truly mature and realistic a grasp of what they’ve lost as Anne Elliot: “There was so much attachment to Captain Wentworth in all this, and such a bewitching charm in a degree of hospitality so uncommon, so unlike the usual style of give-and-take invitations, and dinners of formality and display, that Anne felt her spirits not likely to be benefited by an increasing acquaintance among his brother-officers. ‘These would have been all my friends,’ was her thought; and she had to struggle against a great tendency to lowness.”

16
See Judith A. Reisman,
Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences
(Institute for Media Education, 1998).

17
Cheryl Wetzstein, “Government Survey: Virgins at 40 Do Exist: New Report Also Takes Note of Same-Sex Activity,”
Washington Times
, March 3, 2011,
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/mar/3/government-survey-virgins-at-40-do-exist/
, reporting on a survey by the National Center for Health Statistics.

18
And this study is subject to some, though certainly not all, of the same criticisms you can make of Kinsey. Setting aside the possibility of a really significant amount of homosexual activity (and much more of it among men than among women), the only explanation for the gap between men’s and women’s lifetime sexual experience is inaccuracy in self-reporting—which seems far more likely than
that the study is accurate. Almost certainly men are exaggerating and women are underestimating their numbers of partners.

19
The testimony of the human race, from the Psalmist to Bill Clinton’s apologists, is unanimous. Every man is a liar. And that’s “man” in the generic sense, including “woman.”

20
Perhaps the most solid bit of data—remembering that men’s and women’s average numbers have to be roughly equal in reality (minus only the difference between the amount of male-with-male and female-with-female sexual activity) was that on average men didn’t feel it either necessary or plausible to exaggerate their number of lifetime partners beyond five.

21
Note that to be ideal, a venue should be a place where it’s easy to signal interest, but also where you can preserve some plausible deniability, as women were able to do in Jane Austen’s day. Otherwise women’s “rapid” imaginations—our ability to envision the endgame long before the guy does—will scare some men off. A married friend of mine has a story about a group of women she knew in her single days. They were housemates, and all serious Christians. They were all also very serious about getting married; they had become persuaded that it was wrong to go out with a guy at all if you didn’t consider him a possible future husband. They let their friends know what they thought—with the result that none of them ever had any dates. Guys who are just getting interested in you do not want to sign up for immediate vetting as possible future husbands. There’s an ambiguity, a playfulness, that’s desirable at the early stages of any romantic affair.

22
I’m working from an imperfect memory here, as unfortunately I can’t find this account again online. But for other “pickup artists’” ideas on “gaming church girls,” see
http://www.pick-up-artist-forum.com/gaming-church-girls-vt8161.html
. .

23
We can only hope, “without presuming to look forward to a juster appointment hereafter” that this jerk will eventually come to feel the “vexation and regret” that he ought to for “having so requited” the “hospitality” of the people who welcomed him into their church.

24
Though Dawn Eden (op. cit., p. 138) warns, you also may not: “The wrong kind is one of those that my pastor aptly describes as ‘young adult groups that are neither young nor adult.’ It focuses its activities around drinking .... The free-flowing booze invites them to treat one another just as they would in a singles bar—as objects.” So you may want to steer clear of church activities along the lines of the “Extreme Charity Pub Crawl” Eden mentions.

25
C. S. Lewis,
The Screwtape Letters with Screwtape Proposes a Toast
(HarperSan-Francisco, 2000), p. 127.

26
“Middle-ranking civil servant, single, Catholic, 43, immaculate past, from the country, is looking for a good Catholic, pure girl who can cook well, tackle all household chores, with a talent for sewing and homemaking with a view to marriage as soon as possible. Fortune desirable but not a precondition.” He ended up married to a girl without a fortune,
http://www.catholicvote.org/discuss/index.php?p=5158
.

27
Amy Dacyczyn, “Cut-Rate Soulmate,”
Tightwad Gazette
40, September 1993, p. 4.

28
In a “contract of mutual agreeableness” in which “all [your] agreeableness belongs solely to each other for that time,” but that time is no longer than “for the space of an evening,” as Henry Tilney explains.

29
Apparently the name was garbled by the French before arriving in America.

30
That certainly sheds light on the difference between Jane Austen and the Victorians, doesn’t it?

31
Take the commenter on another one of those “pickup artist” posts who has “nothing against casual sex—I’d be happy to have more of it in my life” but who also sees the limitations of the “Game” that is played for only that prize. He points out, “if your objective is a woman who won’t go from bar to bed in an hour no matter what you say, then trying to get her there is an exercise in futility.” “Alsa-dius” commenting on “A Natural Contemplates Game,” March 3, 2011, on
Armed and Dangerous: Sex, software, politics, and firearms. Life’s simple pleasures...
,
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3000
.

1
“It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire; how little it is biased by the texture of their muslin, and how unsusceptible of peculiar tenderness towards the spotted, the sprigged, the mull, or the jackonet.”

2
The Mrs. Mitford quoted in James Edward Austen-Leigh’s
Memoir
(and to great effect in Virginia Woolf ’s essay on Jane Austen in
The Common Reader
).

3
From her January 9, 1796 letter to her sister Cassandra about Tom Lefroy: “You scold me so much in the nice long letter which I have this moment received from you, that I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. I
can
expose myself however, only
once more
, because he leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we
are
to have a dance at Ashe after all.”