The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (9 page)

LAURA, SOPHIA, AND THE OTHER NARCISSISTS IN
Love and Friendship
are cartoons. But in
Sense and Sensibility
, Jane Austen gives us a character we can actually believe in and care about who has her head turned by the very same fad for Romantic sensibility.
¹
With disastrous results.
Sense and Sensibility
is a detailed case study of exactly what happens when a warm-blooded young woman lets capital-R Romantic notions distract her from the pursuit of happiness.

Poor Marianne Dashwood is in a tragic class of her own: the only Jane Austen heroine who doesn’t find her happy ending. Or, at least, not the happy ending she originally wanted.

Marianne is naturally enthusiastic and emotional. She can’t love or hate by halves. The things Marianne loves—music, poetry about nature, Romantic landscapes—all inspire her to raptures. The things she doesn’t care
for—card games, gossipy middle-aged women, boring conversations about married friends’ children, men so obviously past the vigor of youth that they wear flannel waistcoats—Marianne can hardly stand to be polite about.

Marianne’s sister Elinor is all good sense to Marianne’s enthusiastic sensibility.
²
Elinor doesn’t expect Marianne to pick up “beliefs” or “sentiments in serious matters” from their neighbors. But she does think her sister should engage in a little more “general civility”—in other words, back down from the Romantic cult of authenticity at least enough to treat other people with attention and respect, even people whose ideas and feelings don’t come up to Marianne’s high standards.
³

The sisters differ in more than temperament. Their beliefs about life also differ.
⁴
And so do their imaginings about what it has in store for them. As a result, they’re really, actively pursuing very different goals in the choices they make (though if you asked them, no doubt they’d both say, like all of us, that
of course
they want to be happy).

Marianne is capable of rapturously appreciating the sublime and the beautiful in nature, music, literature, and art. She knows that Elinor appreciates those things too,
⁵
and so she can’t understand why Elinor isn’t embarrassed to be in love with Edward Ferrars, a man who doesn’t seem to share those intense enjoyments:

Of course, Marianne thinks this way partly just because she’s so young.
⁶
But her ideas aren’t simply the kind of thing every teenage girl since the beginning of time has believed. Some of Marianne’s ideas are the latest capital-R Romantic notions about nature and love and personal authenticity. On top of adolescent hormones, Marianne also has Rousseau and Romantic Sensibility running around in her bloodstream addling her judgment. Hers is one of the first generations to grow up with the same
Romantic ideas that two centuries later we’re still picking up from Hollywood and the radio.

Marianne expects so much from love that at sixteen and a half she despairs of finding a man she can have real feelings for: “Mama, 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!” But very soon—in a turn of the novel’s plot that will astonish no one familiar with the lives of teenage girls—Marianne meets a man she’s sure is “The One.”

Marianne falls in love in the approved Romantic manner—if not exactly at first sight, then the very next day. Her first meeting with John Willoughby is a dramatic one. Seeing her fall and sprain her ankle, he catches her up in his arms and carries her into her house. She’s impressed that he ignores propriety in his eagerness to get her home. And when she finds out that he’s been known to dance from eight at night till four in the morning, and then get up the next day at eight to hunt, she thoroughly approves: “That is what a young man ought to be. Whatever be his pursuits, his eagerness in them should know no moderation, and leave him no sense of fatigue.” (Ironically, we’ll see later that Willoughby’s eager, immoderate pursuit of another kind of pleasure has already set Marianne up for a broken heart.)

Willoughby comes to call the next morning, and he and Marianne get on like a house on fire. His “natural ardour of mind ... roused and increased by the example of her own,”
⁷
is what recommends “him to her affection beyond everything else.” Elinor teases Marianne that the two of them will run out of subjects to discuss by the third time they meet.
⁸
Her real worry, though, is that Marianne is rushing into emotional intimacy with a man she’s just met. But all of Elinor’s hints throughout the period of “increasing intimacy” with Willoughby fall on deaf ears. Marianne inevitably justifies her behavior by the Romantic touchstones: intensity, liberty, and authenticity.
⁹
Again and again she appeals from prudent convention to the higher court of her feelings.
¹⁰

With Willoughby, Marianne is intensely, deliriously happy.
¹¹
Love is everything that she has been looking forward to in her Romantic imagination and almost despaired of finding in real life. But it can’t last. Just as in any Romantic love story, there comes a time when the lovers must part. Willoughby tells Marianne that Mrs. Smith is sending him away on business; he makes it clear that he can’t expect to return any time soon. Marianne is devastated.
¹²
(Or she thinks she is. She won’t find out what real grief and misery are until later.) She has a wretched night:

Marianne is following the Romantic script.

To the mystification of Marianne’s family, no letters come for her from Willoughby. He stays away, and it’s not clear when Marianne expects him back. Marianne has never actually told her family that they’re engaged, and Elinor can’t help worrying that maybe Willoughby isn’t really serious about her sister. She presses their mother to ask Marianne about the status of the relationship. But Mrs. Dashwood’s “romantic delicacy”
¹³
keeps her from asking Marianne any awkward questions.

Marianne eventually finds that she has only been playing at having a broken heart. She and Elinor travel to London, and Marianne assumes she’ll see Willoughby there, but he avoids her. Marianne makes excuses for him at first. But soon she becomes agitated, then increasingly frantic, and finally “wholly dispirited, careless of her appearance ... indifferent” to where she is and what she does. The crisis comes at a party where Marianne finally runs into Willoughby by accident. He’s there with another woman. He
meets Marianne with cold formality, making it clear that he has moved on. Apparently he no longer loves her, if he ever did.

The morning after the party, Marianne writes Willoughby a desperate letter asking what he can possibly have heard about her to justify such a change, or whether his behavior toward her all along was “intended only to deceive.” His answer is “impudently cruel,” claiming that he never meant to make Marianne think he loved her, that his “affections have long been engaged elsewhere,” and that he expects to be married to the other woman in a few weeks.
¹⁴

Elinor is shocked to learn that Marianne never was engaged to Willoughby. When she hears the inside story of the relationship—or at least Marianne’s side of it—she’s appalled by Willoughby’s “hardened villainy,” but also by the fact that Marianne offered him such “unsolicited proofs of tenderness, not warranted by anything preceding.” And even now, when it has all turned out so badly, Marianne can’t see why it was a bad idea:

Willoughby’s betrayal devastates Marianne, and she keeps trying desperately to blame it on some third person—preferably on the other woman and whatever “blackest arts” she may have employed to make Willoughby think ill of Marianne—rather than have to conclude that the man she loves has betrayed her. But none of it’s any use. In the end Marianne can’t help seeing that there’s really no decent excuse for him to abandon her in this way.

Meanwhile we get some not-so-decent explanations for his behavior. First of all, it turns out that he’s engaged to a very wealthy young woman. Willoughby has been living well above his means, and his debts are now very pressing. His fiancée’s money won’t come to his rescue a minute too soon.

Another bit of information throws an even worse light on Willoughby’s behavior toward Marianne. Colonel Brandon, the flannel waistcoat-wearing middle-aged fellow that Marianne is so sure is past real love that she can imagine his marrying only to provide a nurse for himself, tells Elinor the story of his young ward Eliza, who, it turns out, was seduced, impregnated, and abandoned by Willoughby just a few months before he met Marianne. At the very time that Willoughby was enjoying himself so intensely with Marianne,
¹⁶
he had left Eliza pregnant, “in a situation of the utmost distress, with no creditable home, no friends, ignorant of his address.”

This news about Willoughby’s character makes it look like his intentions toward Marianne were predatory from the beginning. And seeing her love affair that way tips Marianne over into depression. Her mental health takes yet another blow when she finds out that Elinor has had her heart broken, too—because Elinor has handled the whole thing so much better than Marianne has.
¹⁷

Both sisters have been treated very badly by the men they’re in love with. Despite being engaged to Lucy Steele, Edward Ferrars has gotten close enough to Elinor to persuade her to fall in love with him. Elinor has as much right as Marianne to heartbreak, self-pity, and depression. But Elinor fights them, while Marianne surrenders unconditionally to “the stormy sisterhood.”
¹⁸
Marianne treats it as a moral duty to feel things as intensely as she can. Meanwhile, Elinor is still stuck on those boring, old-fashioned moral duties—treating people with attention and
kindness even if they’re not her soul mates; keeping her own promises even if other people don’t act honestly toward her; holding up even with a broken heart, so she can be strong enough to take care of her sister.