The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (19 page)

For reasons that will become clear later, Jane Austen was no fan of “working on your relationship” in our modern sense. But her heroines do put an enormous amount of energy and care into working on their relationships in general. They approach ordinary friendship and family life with deliberate attention. And the principles and skills they apply to those relationships are different from anything you can learn from our whole advice industry—though there are some interesting parallels to insights from modern psychology.

Think about it. You can’t just wake up one morning and say that from now on you’ll always judge men by their real worth. The clear head and keen sight that Jane Austen heroines bring to their romantic adventures can’t be ginned up on the spot, just as soon as you decide you want to improve your love life. Internal balance and good judgment about other people aren’t available on demand. You have to be already practicing having them. Elizabeth and Darcy help each other to find a more nearly perfect balance, but they don’t start from zero. Long before they ever notice each other, or even meet, they’re both already used to thinking—and talking—quite a lot about how to be the kind of people they want to be, and how to judge other people accurately. You can’t wait to become a Jane Austen heroine until after you’ve met your Mr. Darcy. If you’re not already on that trajectory when he comes along, you won’t be ready.

One reason Jane Austen heroines are so much better at managing love and romance than we are is the simple fact that they have more practice. Not practice specifically at love and romance—we’re definitely ahead of them in false romantic starts—but practice at managing close relationships with other people, in general. Practice really does make perfect, even in knowing how to get along with people. And living in the eighteen-teens, you pretty much
had
to learn how to live with other people in a way that twenty-first-century people can mostly avoid.

Houses were mostly smaller, and families were quite a lot bigger. They didn’t have dishwashers and washing machines; instead, they had servants, often living in the house.
¹
Single women shared bedrooms, and quite frequently beds, with their sisters (and, on long visits, their female friends and cousins) all their adult lives. They didn’t go off to college, get jobs, and rent apartments; they never left home, or else they came back after a few years at a boarding school and lived with their families.
²
All the trends that are giving us ever more independence and elbow room (think McMansions for one- and two-child families; colleges building new dorms with only “singles” to accommodate freshman classes full of kids who’ve never shared a room in their lives; and cell phones so ubiquitous that it’s becoming awkward even to ask a stranger the time) were either non-existent or in their infancy in Jane Austen’s day. Almost any kind of entertainment required a cooperative effort. To hear music, you had to actually collect live musicians in one place. Games were with fellow guests around a card table, not at your solitary screen.
³
And getting to a ball often meant having to be grateful to more well-to-do neighbors for a place in their carriage.
⁴

Jane Austen would not begrudge us our independence. Far from it. “Independence” is something her characters value very highly. Then, as now, it required money. Being able to pay your own way means not always having to please, compromise with, and be grateful to the people you depend on for the bare necessities of life. It means freedom from the temptation to do really shabby things to avoid offending them.
⁵
Jane Austen was proud to be earning cash from her novels. And she invested her earnings exactly as a person who valued independence would—so that her small nest egg would provide her with a steady stream of income to make her a little less dependent on her family for every comfort and convenience. We don’t think of ourselves as rich. But most of us take it for granted that we can afford to live apart from our parents as single women. That kind of independence was beyond the wildest dreams of Jane Austen and her heroines. “Independence” was something they aspired to; for us, it’s a non-negotiable minimum of adult life. Jane Austen would be delighted at the prosperity of our modern lives, which—even in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s—are still replete with comforts and freedom unimaginable in her day.

But she would also notice that our prosperity has actually made it harder for us to handle romantic relationships well—precisely
because
it makes our lives so much easier and more independent of other people. In Jane Austen’s novels, people who can afford “independence,” and particularly people who don’t have to consult anyone else in the arrangement of their own lives, are in danger of missing happy love.

“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich,” Jane Austen tells us, suffers from two “disadvantages” that Emma, strange as it may seem, doesn’t class as “misfortunes” at all—“the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself.” Though Emma herself can’t see it, her independence, and the fact that she’s rather spoiled as a result, actually are disadvantages when it comes to finding happy love. Women who aren’t used to having to accommodate other people (Emma, Maria Bertram, Mary Crawford) don’t have the chance to
exercise some capacities that are crucial for success in love. Jane Austen makes the down side of “independence” even more explicit in the case of some of her male characters—men, after all, were much more likely than women to be financially independent in her day. Willoughby is a victim of “the irreparable injury which too early an independence, and its consequent habits of idleness, dissipation, and luxury, had made in the mind, the character, the happiness, of a man who, to every advantage of person and talents, united a disposition naturally open and honest, and a feeling, affectionate temper.” And Henry Crawford, who “indulged in the freaks of a cold-blooded vanity a little too long,” lost the woman he loved because he was “ruined by early independence and bad domestic example.”

Financial independence doesn’t automatically give us big egos, make us lazy and selfish, or turn us into cold fish who are callous about other people’s feelings. But it does make it dangerously easy for us to fall out of the habit of getting along with other people at close quarters—something we’d have more practice at if we were forced to live as close to other people as Jane Austen heroines do. A teacher at my son’s school once pointed out to me that virtually all our really close, important, and lasting relationships are formed during the few periods of our lives when we are forced to live with other people—our siblings, the friends we make in our freshman dorm at college, the other guys in boot camp or in the unit in Afghanistan.
⁶
We find those relationships uniquely satisfying. And yet, ironically, we also find independence so compelling that we avoid putting ourselves in situations where we’re likely to form those kinds of friendships.

Of course we’re “independent” in a different way from rich people in Jane Austen novels. We’ve achieved financial independence from our families by working for a living. Granted, we do have to please our bosses and our customers, but the fact that we’re modern employees—instead of governesses, companions, or teachers in residence at boarding schools—means that it’s only in the limited hours when we’re at work that we have to be “professional” in our dealings with other people. And once we leave work, we feel that we should be able to relax.
⁷
Which too often means we don’t think of putting any actual work into the interactions we have with people in our private lives. When we’re with our friends, or with a guy, we’re expecting what we want from those relationships to happen naturally,
without much deliberate effort on our part. Until, that is, we get into a bad patch with a boyfriend and find ourselves inspired to “work on our relationship.” Whereas Jane Austen believed every kind of relationship—friendship, marriage, family life—requires “forbearance” on the part of both parties. It’s just hard for two people to fit into the same space; it takes work.

Paradoxically, Jane Austen thought it was
easiest
to manage the very kind of relationship that seems
hardest
to us. She counts it as achieving “independence” when a woman leaves her parents’ house—or her job as a governess-companion, as Mrs. Weston does at the beginning of
Emma
—to marry. To Jane Austen, a man and woman in love with each other are the two people on earth who come closest to being able to comfortably fill the exact same space at the same time. Men and women are so different from each other that they naturally complement as well as compete with each other. And of course the division of labor between the sexes was more rigid then.
⁸
Those differences—the complementarity and the possibility of some kind of natural harmony between men and women—make sense of the idea that while it’s “dependence” to share a house and an income with your parents or your employers, it’s “independence” to share them with your husband. Plus, in that case, there’s the excitement of new love (not to mention the sex) to help smooth over the rough spots.

So why do “relationships” seem so much harder for us today than relationships in general—friendships and so forth—do? I don’t think it’s only because instead of relying on traditional gender-based assignments we have to negotiate who does the dishes and who balances the checkbook. It’s that, these days, a romantic relationship is almost the
only
really close relationship a lot of us even try to have as adults—“close” in the practical sense that
we’re sharing living space, money, and decision-making about anything more important than where to have lunch.

We turn to our friends for sympathy about the parts of our lives we’re actually having to “work on”—our jobs and our relationships with men. Friends are there when we step out of the hurly-burly of life onto the sidelines, when we do the post-game analysis. We share our thoughts and feelings with them, or maybe with our mother or our sister; but after we leave college and those tiny shared apartments where we moved when we got our first jobs, we don’t often share our
lives
with anybody but a guy. Which means that we’re trying to manage our “relationships” without the kind of practice at relationships in general that Jane Austen heroines have.

But Jane Austen heroines don’t just have more practice at relationships than we do. They also have a lot more
theory
. Jane Austen’s characters continually think and talk about the right way to act in relationships with other people.

They theorize about romantic relationships, of course. Elizabeth Bennet and Charlotte talk over Bingley’s courtship of Jane; they disagree about whether she should let him see that she’s beginning to fall in love with him. Mrs. Gardiner advises Elizabeth on what to do when you realize you’re interested in a man who can’t afford to marry you.

But Jane Austen gives us similar conversations about every kind of situation between people, not only about their love lives. And these discussions don’t take place just between the people whose choices are being canvassed. Jane Austen’s characters consider it their right—even their duty—to take a position on other people’s choices, and to hold up their own and their neighbors’ behavior to certain principles by which relationships ought to be managed.

Elizabeth and Colonel Fitzwilliam discuss whether Darcy had a right to use his influence with Bingley to persuade him to give Jane up. Fitzwilliam doesn’t think it at all odd for Elizabeth to have a strong opinion on the
subject—even though he has no clue that they’re actually talking about her sister! He’s heard the story from Darcy and retailed it to Elizabeth, not realizing it has anything to do with her family, just because it sheds an interesting light on his friend’s character. Colonel Fitzwilliam finds it quite natural that Elizabeth should take a keen interest in the abstract question of how much influence Darcy should presume to exercise over a friend’s choices.

Applying their reason and principles to interesting questions about people’s “conduct” and their “character” is simply something ladies and gentlemen do. They talk about whether writing letters quickly is something to be proud of. They disagree on whether walking three miles to visit your sick sister at a neighbor’s house—and arriving there with your petticoat “six inches deep in mud”—is justified by your affection for your sister, or shows a “conceited ... indifference to decorum.” They discuss what qualifications entitle you to call yourself a “really accomplished” woman. They debate whether it’s admirable, or weak, for a man to be willing to change his plans at a moment’s notice to accommodate his friends. They consider it their right—and even their responsibility—to take a position on the correct way to conduct yourself in any conceivable set of circumstances.

By the time a Jane Austen heroine finds herself in what we’d call a “relationship” with a man, she’s better practiced at relationships in general than we are. And she’s also armed with more theory about how to deal with other people. We, in contrast, are starting out with a huge relationship-expertise deficit.

So how can we close the gap? Well, we can start by taking questions of “conduct” and “character” more seriously—instead of expecting that the natural course of things is for us to be able to get along effortlessly with the people we’re close to. We can remind ourselves that our relationships would benefit from some of the same deliberate attention we put into work or school, and that no Jane Austen heroine would be ashamed to take relationships more seriously than she takes anything else in her life.