The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (10 page)

Even when Marianne finally has to admit that Elinor has really suffered, she’s still not ready to abandon Romantic attitudes. Elinor’s struggle to bear up under the same kind of pain just makes Marianne feel worse about herself. She begins to “fondly [flatter] herself” that she may fall “a sacrifice to an irresistible passion.” And eventually Marianne does make herself dangerously ill. Her typical depression-induced lack of self-care (as the modern mental health professionals say) has a Romantic flavor to it.
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Taking “delightful twilight walks” in the kind of landscape whose “wildness” is as close as Marianne—staying at a well-tended country estate—can get to the windswept heath that’s the perfect setting for Romantic agony in
Wuthering Heights,
she comes home wet, fails to change, and catches a fever. At the low point of her surrender to “the stormy sisterhood,” she lies in bed hallucinating and apparently “dying of a putrid fever”—a Brontë heroine in a Jane Austen novel.

Marianne follows the Romantic script for love until it almost kills her. The news that she’s in serious danger gets out; John Willoughby hears about it, and he rushes to the house where she’s staying, surprising Elinor in the middle of the night. Thus Elinor gets to hear the other inside story of the relationship between Marianne and Willoughby—from his point of view. It turns out to be pretty ugly. But not a case of such calculated wickedness as Marianne and her friends were guessing, once they knew how he had seduced and abandoned Eliza.

Willoughby admits that he originally pursued Marianne with “no other intention, no other view in your acquaintance than to pass my time pleasantly.”
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He was in the habit of leading women on, all the while planning to marry for money.
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At first it wasn’t any different with Marianne. But despite his bad intentions, Willoughby did fall in love with Marianne. And he eventually talked himself into telling her so. But only after he had spent too long allowing himself “most improperly to put off, from day to day, the
moment of doing it, from an unwillingness to enter into any engagement while my [financial] circumstances were so greatly embarrassed.”

Tragedy intervened in “the very few hours” between Willoughby’s resolution to finally declare his love to Marianne and his next opportunity to speak with her alone. His rich cousin Mrs. Smith, a rigidly moral old lady, found out about Eliza. Mrs. Smith threatened to disinherit him. Panicked, Willoughby decided to go back to his original plan to marry for money.

By the time he tells Elinor the whole story, Willoughby is sorry. Wealth with a bad-tempered wife he doesn’t love
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is not making him happy. He now regrets what he gave up by deserting Marianne.
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And Elinor is glad to know that he wasn’t simply using Marianne the whole time; he did come to care for her—he still does. But it’s hard to imagine how Willoughby could have done more damage even if he’d been heartlessly calculating throughout.
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Jane Austen gives Marianne’s story an ending that’s deliberately unRomantic. Marianne marries Colonel Brandon.

I’ve heard it said that “Jane Austen doesn’t sell me” on the ending of
Sense and Sensibility
. That’s a very common criticism of the novel. But as a matter of fact Jane Austen isn’t
trying
to sell us on Marianne’s marriage to Colonel Brandon in quite the way we may assume she is. She doesn’t expect
us to believe that Marianne will be as happy with Brandon as she would have been with Willoughby ... that Brandon is really a better match for her ... or that we ought to lower
our
expectations of love and marriage to the level of happiness that Marianne finds with Colonel Brandon.

How do we know Jane Austen isn’t selling us that line? Because she makes sure that
that very interpretation
of Marianne’s situation gets articulated in the book—by the Romantic Mrs. Dashwood, of all people. And then she has the wiser Elinor throw cold water on it. After Mrs. Dashwood knows that Willoughby has betrayed Marianne and that Colonel Brandon loves her, she talks herself into thinking that Colonel Brandon “is the very one to make your sister happy.” Marianne’s mother goes as far as to maintain, “I am very sure myself, that had Willoughby turned out as really amiable, as he has proved himself the contrary, Marianne would yet never have been so happy with
him,
as she will be with Colonel Brandon.” If Mrs. Dashwood really believes the nonsense she’s spouting here, she’s delusional.

You don’t have to be subject to Romantic illusions—“Is he The One?”—“finding your soul mate”—to see that some matches promise exquisite (small-r) romantic delights that others don’t. Elinor’s clear-eyed view of reality keeps her, unlike her Romantic mother,
²⁵
from blinding herself to the obvious fact that Willoughby is, in Jane Austen’s phrase, “exactly formed to engage Marianne’s heart” in so many ways that Colonel Brandon really isn’t. Whatever real happiness Marianne finds in her marriage to Colonel Brandon—and she does in the end love her husband
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—it’s not what she could have had with Willoughby.

And then, in the second-to-last paragraph of
Sense and Sensibility
, Jane Austen practically breaks
our
hearts by snatching away our only scrap of comfort about Marianne’s heartbreak. Elinor has argued, pretty persuasively, that things would have gone wrong even if Willoughby had married Marianne. They would have been “always necessitous”; Willoughby’s extravagance would have come into conflict with Marianne’s honest impulse to economize; and he would have come to regret marrying her.
²⁷

There’s a lot of sense in this. Willoughby is awfully spoiled. He’s deeply in debt, and his only ideas for solving his money problems are of the I’ve-absolutely-got-to-win-the-lottery school of thought: it’ll all be fixed when
he inherits from Mrs. Smith; he’ll marry a rich girl. He could easily become a total jerk under pressure. And marrying Marianne would bring on the pressure. He’d have large new expenses, no scheme left for acquiring any more income, and the increasing demands of his creditors to deal with. On top of all that he’d be living with a woman whose notions of how to handle money
²⁸
are themselves a major new irritant. The picture Elinor paints is believable enough.
²⁹

But then Jane Austen totally explodes Elinor’s reasonable argument. She lets us know that marriage to Marianne would
not
have made Willoughby “always poor” after all. Mrs. Smith eventually forgives him because of “his marriage with a woman of character.” So we know that “had he behaved with honour towards Marianne, he might at once have been happy and rich.”

Sometimes our hearts are broken. The man we love may not love us enough, or in the right way, or at the right time. Jane Austen didn’t expect us to pretend that the love and happiness we’ve missed out on aren’t really all that attractive, after all,
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or that something less exciting is really more satisfying than what we wanted in the first place. If we have to give up what we want, to lose out on love—and sometimes, tragically, we do—she wanted us to do it with both eyes open, under no illusions about the real cause of our pain. In this case, she’s made it crystal clear that Marianne’s heartbreak has to be blamed on Willoughby’s decision to desert her—and on whatever Marianne did that made Willoughby’s bad choice more likely.

Hold on just a minute. Are we buying it? Isn’t Marianne really a victim of her society? It’s tempting for modern readers of
Sense and Sensibility
to shift the blame. We’re likely to chalk the tragedy up not to Willoughby’s and Marianne’s choices, but to the social constraints they were living under. We can’t help asking
why
exactly Marianne and Willoughby have to be permanently separated just because of a choice that’s so easily reversible now. Today, we’re sure, the protagonists would get it sorted out. There’d be some drama, pain, and humiliation for everyone involved,
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but the lovers would be together in the end. At the end of the book, everybody knows that Willoughby loves Marianne and not his wife. What besides outmoded sexual taboos and an antiquated attitude toward divorce are keeping them apart? It’s hard for us to relate. Probably the closest thing to this kind of unresolved
triangle in modern times is the Diana–Prince Charles–Camilla Parker-Bowles debacle—which presumably resulted from the fact that the twentieth-century British royal family was still trying to live by nineteenth-century rules. These things don’t happen to ordinary people any more.

But stop right there. If we’re going to translate Marianne’s life into modern circumstances, we have to be consistent. We can’t change the rules in some places, but not in others. We have to think about what actually happens now, with
none
of those old taboos and antiquated rules in place, to young women who fall for men who set out to toy with them and then—sometimes it does happen—fall deeply in love with them after all. Do they typically end up living happily ever after together? Well, sometimes it must end that way, I guess. But I can’t think of an example. I’ve known quite a few spoiled, Willoughby-style young men.
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But I don’t know even one who managed to settle down in his twenties, or, frankly, even to stay with one woman for more than a very few years.
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And that’s despite the fact that these guys can sometimes get really wild about a girl. It’s just that the same circumstances that make it easier now for us to get
out
of a commitment that was a mistake also make it harder for us to
make
a commitment at all, in the first place. Marriage to the wrong person doesn’t any more, today, necessarily separate you forever from the one you love. But then today there’s a lot less reason to get married in the first place—to anybody, even a woman you’re passionate about.

Too often, all the initial excitement and energy that comes with falling in love, and that in Jane Austen’s day went into cementing a permanent relationship, is dissipated in the first excitement of becoming a couple, moving in together, and then the work of learning to live with another person. A man like Willoughby doesn’t often stick to a woman through all that to the point of permanent commitment.

If we still lived under the social constraints Marianne and Willoughby did, there’d actually be less chance that guys like this would fritter away the energy and excitement that comes with falling in love. Men would be faced with the choice that Willoughby has to make: either man up and start taking
the relationship really seriously, put it on the road to a permanent commitment, or else give the girl up. Willoughby makes the wrong decision, and Marianne’s heart is broken. But at least—it has to be argued in favor of the Jane Austen-era arrangements—it’s broken early rather than late, before she has wasted years on a man who’s never going to commit to her.

And there’s another tantalizing possibility. As Colonel Brandon says to Elinor, “Sometimes I thought your sister’s influence might yet reclaim him.” If Willoughby had made the
right
choice and honorably told Marianne he loved her, he would have been breaking his long habit of leading girls on without committing himself. He would have been doing something to climb out of the rut he was in, instead of digging himself in deeper. The choice for love and Marianne might have “fixed” his character in a different shape from the one it got “fixed” in by what actually happened.

We can’t help thinking that Marianne’s story wouldn’t have to be a tragedy if she didn’t have to live by the old rules and conventions. But you know what? That’s just the same Romantic impulse talking, the one that messed up Marianne’s life in the first place. The Romantic imperative to kick over every constraint has made big differences in courtship and marriage since Jane Austen’s day. But it hasn’t left women with the best possible choices.

There’s not much we can do about the world-historical transformation that Romanticism has made in negotiations between the sexes over the past two centuries. But we absolutely can learn from Marianne’s story not to let Romantic thinking wreck our own individual lives. Romanticism leads Marianne astray in two different ways. She’s got dangerous ideas about falling in love. And she’s absorbed even more destructive ones about having your heart broken.

Before Marianne even meets Willoughby, she is looking to be swept away on a tide of intense emotion by, as we’d say, “The One”—the man who’s a perfect emotional match for her. The only danger she can see is that she might miss that intensity. So when she meets him, all her care and prudence, such as they are, go into confirming that he’s capable of rocking her world.
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It never occurs to Marianne to wonder whether the man she’s convincing herself is “The One” is acting on the same principles as she is, or if he’s bringing entirely different motives and desires to the experience. Marianne and Willoughby agree perfectly on the poetry of Scott, Cowper, and Pope. Where they don’t agree, it turns out, is on what they want from each other.