The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (12 page)

WHAT’S THE NATURAL REACTION TO ROMANTIC illusion? Modern cynicism, of course. If you were the sixteen-year-old Angela in Dr. Meeker’s story, waking up from your starry-eyed belief that your boyfriend was “The One” only to discover that he’d given you herpes and let all your friends know—wouldn’t you be tempted to become a cynic? Cynicism about love, and bitterness about men, are totally understandable reactions when you find out that Romantic promises are illusions. Love gone wrong can hurt like hell. And if you’ve been hurt, it’s natural to grow a hard shell to protect your heart.

As a matter of fact, you don’t even have to wait for your heart to be broken to grow that protective shell. We’re living in the wake of two hundred years of Romantic illusion—and the disillusionment that always comes with it. Cynicism is in the air. Barely teenaged girls who haven’t yet
had
a boyfriend or even a hookup already have Facebook Walls full of “likes” for statuses along the lines of “My ex? Yeah, I’d still hit that. Only this time, it’d be with a baseball bat!” and “One relationship status they should have
is ‘getting played by _____.’” Just as we grow up expecting to be swept off our feet and have our hearts broken, we also look forward to being tough and flip and worldly wise about it all afterwards.

Now Jane Austen was not blind to men’s shortcomings. She completely understood all the things that make women bitter about the opposite sex. And she often turned on her famous irony to expose men’s faults—the typically masculine kind of selfishness, the way guys can be oblivious to other people’s feelings. She could be quite severe. Just think about the happy love scene at the end of
Persuasion
. Captain Wentworth is telling Anne about the horrible suspense he suffered once he realized he still loved her—but he couldn’t ask her if she still loved him because he was honor-bound to wait and see if his attentions to Louisa Musgrove had made Louisa expect to marry him. It was “dreadful,” Wentworth tells Anne, “to be waiting so long in inaction.” He never stops to think that he’s complaining about
six weeks
of terrible suspense to a woman who waited for him for
seven years
.

Jane Austen totally got the psycho-dynamics of women’s disappointment with men. Elizabeth Bennet does the same thing that Hephzibah Anderson did throughout her sex-and-the-city years; she entertains other women with witty commentary on the men who have subjected her to indignity and heartbreak. Turning her bitterness into a riff on men in general, Elizabeth tells her aunt,

And a little bit later, when her aunt invites her on a tour of the Lake District: “Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains?”

Elizabeth is speaking partly out of her disappointment with George Wickham.
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But even more, she’s wretched and angry about how Bingley has hurt her sister Jane. On that subject, Elizabeth can sound just like any of us in all-men-are-bastards mode. But Elizabeth’s wise aunt, Mrs. Gardiner, who has already saved her from real heartbreak in the Wickham affair,
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also warns her against talking about men in a way that “savours strongly of disappointment.”

Jane Austen sees something deeply unhealthy about the
they’re-all-cads
way of talking about men. It may be justified. But as a mindset, a general attitude toward men and love, it’s terribly counter-productive.

Why? How on earth can it hurt to make fun of men’s flaws? They’re real enough—and so is the pain they cause women. If we’re on the receiving end of that misery, why should we deny ourselves the relief of turning it all into an acerbic commentary on the male sex? Why not slam men, be funny and cynical about love, amuse our friends, and make ourselves feel better?

Because, as Jane Austen shows, cynicism is a kind of blindness. When we let ourselves slip into cynicism, we think we’re being clever. Maybe we used to have unrealistic hopes for love, or we stupidly trusted men. But now we know better—or so we think. But really, while we believe we’re seeing through illusions that fool more naïve people, Jane Austen demonstrates that we’re also seeing through some things that really
are
there. This is how she has Fanny Price describe Mary Crawford, the quintessentially cynical woman in Jane Austen’s novels: “a mind led astray and bewildered, and without any suspicion of being so; darkened, yet fancying itself light.” Mary loses the man she loves, and it’s no accident. It’s because of choices that she makes blindly, unaware that the things she sees through, and thus fails to take into account, are things of real importance to the man she’s in love with.
Some of the things that we’re seeing through if we’re cynical about men and love are things that we have to be
able to see
in order to find happiness.

The most obvious way that cynicism blinds us is that if we’re cynical about men in general, then we’re painting with too broad a brush. We’re over-generalizing from one jerk—or maybe a few we’ve known—to condemn all men. That’s exactly what Marianne is doing when Jane Austen tells us that “Edward seemed a second Willoughby” to her. When Marianne finds out about Edward’s secret engagement to Lucy, she immediately lumps him together with the perfidious Willoughby. Edward has hurt Elinor, so Marianne leaps to the conclusion that he’s to blame in exactly the same way and to exactly the same degree as Willoughby is guilty for breaking her own heart. In reality, the two men could hardly be more different.

If you’re going to be running your love life à la Jane Austen, it’s absolutely crucial that you be able to tell the real cads from the decent guys who make understandable mistakes.
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It’s of enormous importance to our happiness for us to notice what the man we’re dealing with at the moment is really like, compared to other men, and compared to what we’re looking for. If you let a wholesale anti-man attitude take root in your way of thinking, then anything typically masculine that you notice about the next guy—that he’s more interested in sex than talking about your relationship, or that the percentage of his weekend he wants to devote to achieving a clutter-free living room turns out to be zero—is liable to seem like evidence that here’s yet another bad apple. Cynicism about men in general will only keep you from seeing the individual guys clearly enough to distinguish the good prospects from the heartbreakers.

Man-bashing diminishes
us.
That’s what Hephzibah Anderson found out. Reducing the men she was sleeping with to figures of ridicule in the absurd stories she told her girlfriends ended by making her look small, too.

Jane Austen heroines inspire respect from men partly because they treat their “fellow-creatures”—Anne Elliot’s gentle way of referring to the male sex—with respect, too. That’s in the famous passage at the end of
Persuasion
, where Anne Elliot is arguing that women are more faithful than men. Notice that Anne is engaged in the
exact same kind
of observation of the shortcomings of men in general that also inspires our funny, bitter riffs on the jerks who have broken our hearts. Anne sees male deficiencies as clearly as we do. But she doesn’t turn her observations into a sarcastic indictment of all men. “God forbid,” she exclaims, “that I should undervalue the warm and faithful feelings of any of my fellow-creatures.” She accords men respect, and the benefit of the doubt, as she herself expects to be respected.
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Respect for men as individuals and generous pity for their faults as a sex seems to come naturally to Jane Austen. Maybe that’s because she grew up in a large family of mostly boys and, like Mary Eberstadt, another “sister outnumbered by brothers ... knew unshakably that men were more to be pitied than feared.”
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Or maybe it’s because Jane Austen was consciously exercising a virtue that people in her day thought about a lot, but that has dropped off our radar screens—so much so that we no longer even have a word for it. Jane Austen and her contemporaries called it “candour.” By which they meant something totally different from what the word means now. To us today, being “candid” means being frank and honest, telling the whole truth. But back then, “candid” described not the teller but the listener. That’s why the Declaration of Independence says, “Let facts be submitted to a candid world.” “Candour” in Jane Austen’s day was the opposite of small-minded suspicion. It meant judging other people and their stories with sympathy,
openness, and generosity. “The most Liberal & enlightened minds,” the heroine of
The Watsons
tells us, “are always the most confiding.”

Jane Austen’s generous “candour” is of a piece with her eighteenth-century optimism and ambition.
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She doesn’t do illusion—about men, about women, or about love. But she’s never
dis
illusioned or cynical either. Her heroines’ generous “candour” keeps them from tarring all men with the same brush. That’s a mistake crucial to avoid; you need to be able to see what individual guys are actually like if you want to end up with one who makes you happy.

But cynicism is still important to avoid
after
you’ve picked a guy. Hostility to all things masculine can really poison a relationship once you’re in it.
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In Jane Austen’s world, it’s a sad marriage where there’s not “superior affection” and superior “confidence” between husband and wife—where the woman loves her husband no more intensely than she does her friends, and confides in him no more freely than in them, where she continually complains about him behind his back and finds being with other people more really satisfying than being with him. Anne Elliot’s sister Mary has that kind of marriage: “If there is any thing disagreeable going on, men are always sure to get out of it,” she tells Anne, “and Charles is as bad as any of them. Very unfeeling!” Elizabeth Bennet’s parents’ marriage is another example.
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Modern women have raised man-bashing to an art form. If you hang out with a group of single friends, especially if they’ve reached the “Thought by now she’d have a man, Two car seats and a minivan”
¹⁰
stage—you’ve likely heard them complaining about what bastards the men they go out with are because they won’t commit to a relationship. And if you hang out with a group of married friends, you’ve probably heard them spend their regular girls’ nights out complaining about the men who
have
married them and
are
the fathers of their children.
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But man-bashing as an entrenched attitude is alien to the mindset of the Jane Austen heroine. You can’t build up one of these grand indictments—
even just in your own head, let alone in regular gripe sessions with your girlfriends—without having it come out, sooner or later, in angry or sarcastic words aimed at the guy you’ve been complaining about. Harboring resentment in this way will set you up for an ugly scene that doesn’t belong in a Jane Austen love story.
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Given that Jane Austen and her heroines aren’t blind to men’s faults, given that they’re extraordinarily intelligent and witty women, how do they steer clear of spoiling the confidence and affection they share with the men they love by making them objects of ridicule?

Their respect for men is grounded in the realization that they themselves have flaws, too. It’s the generous attitude summed up by a quotation that’s showing up on Facebook,
¹³
alongside those cynical “likes” about “my ex”: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” Jane Austen’s heroines nurture compassion and respect for the men in their lives as fellow-strugglers and fellow-sufferers, as people who, like themselves, are flawed human beings. The cure is what Jane Austen calls “self-knowledge.”

This really works, I know from personal experience. I can make my mother, or somebody at work, or the woman who has different ideas from mine about how to run a fundraising project at my son’s school—or my husband—sound like
the
most selfish,
the
most unreasonable,
the
most difficult person in the world. There’s almost always some foundation of truth to my original complaint, but by the time I’ve got the whole case built up to perfection, there’s a lot of my own creative resentment holding the structure together. And the fastest way for one of my grand mental cases for the prosecution against whomever I’m at odds with to come crumbling to the ground is for me to get a sudden glimpse of the fact that I, too, am being, selfish, unreasonable or difficult.

The quicker we are to resort to that cure—
never
blinding ourselves to men’s real flaws, but meeting them with the same kind of generosity and compassion we hope other people will have for our own imperfections—the more likely we are to inspire a similar respect in the men we love. Anne Elliot, the gentlest of Jane Austen’s heroines, a woman habituated to “serious reflection” on her own conduct, can hear Captain Wentworth’s account of his dreadful six weeks of suspense without reminding him sarcastically of her seven years of patience. She’s not doing the “women who love too much”
thing, or desperately “keeping sweet” like one of Warren Jeffs’ polygamous brides, taking all the blame on herself to avoid facing the fact that she’s been mistreated. No, Anne judges “the right and the wrong” of her own and Wentworth’s past choices “impartially” and honestly tells her lover that she believes she was in the right. But she doesn’t feel the need to be nasty about it, or to build up an ugly picture of him. And, basking in her gentle love, it doesn’t take Wentworth long to question—for the very first time in all those years—the self-righteous resentment that kept him from coming back to her as soon as he had begun to make the fortune that would allow them to marry.
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