The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (35 page)

That’s why Fanny sees exactly what Henry Crawford is up to with Maria and Julia, while Edmund is totally oblivious to the fact that his good friend is playing with his sisters’ hearts.
³⁸
(Mary Crawford sees it all very clearly,
too, though without Fanny’s compassion.)
³⁹
And Fanny understands the progress of Edmund’s love for Mary much better than he understands it himself. Anne Elliot, we’ve already seen, advises Captain Benwick on his heartbreak from a position of “seniority of mind”—and also, of course, very ably makes the case for her deeper understanding of men, women, and love to Captain Harville. And when Anne sees that Captain Wentworth’s attention has thrown both Louisa and Henrietta Musgrove into “a little fever of admiration” for him and that their cousin Charles Hayter has become jealous on Henrietta’s account, Anne sees where it’s all likely to lead: “Anne longed for the power of representing to them all what they were about, and of pointing out some of the evils they were exposing themselves to. She did not attribute guile to any.... There was no triumph, no pitiful triumph in his manner. He had, probably, never heard, and never thought of any claims of Charles Hayter. He was only wrong in accepting the attentions—(for accepting must be the word) of two young women at once.”

And notice that Anne is an expert on the how-to aspect of the situation as well as on the realities of the sexual psychology: “As to Captain Wentworth’s views, she deemed it of more consequence that he should know his own mind, early enough not to be endangering the happiness of either sister, or impeaching his own honour, than that he should prefer Henrietta to Louisa, or Louisa, to Henrietta.” Anne longs to deploy her expertise for the benefit of all concerned.
⁴⁰

But besides having a bigger skill set when it comes to understanding and maneuvering through the dynamics of relationships, women also do a better job of seeing the end game. We have a picture of where things ought to be going when it comes to sex, love, and romance. We’ve already heard Darcy, in pre-softened-by-love-for-Elizabeth mode, snarking, “A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.”

True, our readiness to attach and our eagerness for the happy ending can cause us pain and embarrassment. (I’m thinking of a friend’s sister who
went out to dinner with a man she really liked, had a bit too much to drink, and blurted out that he was...
the man she planned to marry.
That one actually worked out all right for her in the end; the guy didn’t bring what she’d said up again until much later—until, in fact, they really were well on their way to getting married.) It can seem like a weakness, and make us feel stupid, that we want more, earlier, from a man than he has yet learned to want from us.

But this feature of female psychology is a weakness only under the wrong circumstances. Think about it. Which is wiser, really, and more conducive to happiness? 1) considering how our present actions, pleasures, and choices are likely to affect our future, or 2) blithely living in the moment with no thought for long-term consequences or plans? On any other subject that’s important to how our lives turn out—education, career, how we handle money—do we admire the person who lives in the present, or the one who thinks about the future? Do we trust that good results in these other areas of our lives will magically appear out of a random collection of experiences, while we put tomorrow out of our minds?

And anyway, does love make
only women
happy? Finding somebody you’re wild about, making a long-term commitment, living with the person you love, having children, and growing old together—quite a few men have admitted to finding excitement and lasting satisfaction in these things.
⁴¹
But it’s women who are more likely to be thinking about how we want them, and whether what’s happening
now
is likely to lead there, or not. In the era of “failure to launch,”
⁴²
the indefinite extension of male adolescence,
⁴³
the erosion of family formation,
⁴⁴
and the national crisis in specifically male unemploment,
⁴⁵
the value of women’s preoccupation with lasting love as the basis for permanent happiness should be easier to see than ever before.

For Jane Austen heroines, women’s relationship expertise is not about having everything our way. And it’s not about wielding power over men for our selfish benefit. The woman who acts like that in Jane Austen is a villainess, not a heroine. Lady Susan Vernon uses her typically female
verbal virtuosity to manipulate men. She understands that “consideration and esteem as surely follow command of language, as admiration waits on beauty,” and she takes unfair advantage of that fact. (Language, that key skill for relationships, being another area where modern psychologists have demonstrated women’s comparative advantage.)
⁴⁶
But who wants to be Lady Susan? You might as well aspire to be the Wicked Witch of the West. Jane Austen heroines use their powers for good, not for evil.

They wield those powers with real respect for men. Their superior feel for the dynamics of relationships doesn’t lead them to despise the other sex for being a little slower to grasp what’s really going on between people.
⁴⁷
Notice that Anne’s insight into Wentworth’s limitations—she sees that he doesn’t understand the rapidity of women’s imaginations when it comes to love, so that he doesn’t realize the effect he’s having on Henrietta and Louisa—does not make him despicable in her eyes.
⁴⁸
Like Jane Austen heroines in general,
⁴⁹
Anne is confident in her superior grasp of the emotional situation, and her confidence is justified. But that doesn’t keep her from respecting and admiring Captain Wentworth. In the end Wentworth comes to discover, very belatedly, a number of truths that have been crystal clear to Anne for the better part of a decade: that her susceptibility to reasonable persuasion under the right circumstances is a character strength, not a weakness; that he’s the one chiefly to blame for the eight years he and Anne have spent apart; that he should have written and asked her to renew their engagement as soon as he could afford to marry.
⁵⁰
But however slow he has been to make these discoveries, Captain Wentworth is never reduced to bumbling sitcom male idiot status—in Anne’s mind, in ours, or in Jane Austen’s.

And at the end, both Anne and Wentworth get what they really want. More to the point, they’ve both come to want what will make them both happy. But it was Anne who held onto that desire for all the years that Wentworth forgot it. Like every Jane Austen hero, Wentworth has learned to really love a woman with a passion like her own. And Anne, like the heroine at the end of every Jane Austen novel, really is “as dear to him as [her] own soul could wish.”
⁵¹
Captain Wentworth isn’t feeling crowded or pestered into commitment, saddled and bridled, or cornered, trapped by incomprehensible female demands. Wentworth is happy in love in a completely masculine
way. In Anne, he has taken a rich prize. He’s bringing home a precious cargo. He’s a conqueror, a triumphant hero.
⁵²

This is the side of the equation that Jane Austen was fascinated by: how a man can come to
want
to give us what we want most.

Jane Austen didn’t think women are the weaker sex. As a matter of fact, some of the unique characteristics of female psychology that we fear demonstrate weakness seemed to her to be superior merits. Jane Austen didn’t want us to play to our vulnerabilities, or men to play to theirs. Or, especially, for either men or women to play
on
the weaknesses of the other sex. In the worst-case scenario, both sexes prey on each other’s vulnerabilities and learn to use, resent, and despise each other. But Jane Austen is the best-case scenario. She teaches women to apply our talent for relationships to figure out how both sexes can avoid the pitfalls our weaknesses expose us to. She shows how men and women can transcend our limitations to meet each other in a place where we’ll both be happy.

Jane Austen’s novels were written partly to help women develop our natural talent for relationship expertise. Being expert at relationships Jane Austen-style means measuring the dynamics at work between men and women by the yardstick of “permanent happiness.” It means keeping your eye on that ultimate goal, which is almost always easier for women to envision—but which is equally satisfying to men. It means seeing, more clearly than men usually do, the implications of present events, choices, and patterns for the future outcome of the relationship. A happy ending is always going to involve a balance between the psychological dynamics of the heroine and her hero. It’s going to require
both
the man
and
the woman to transcend their limitations. It’s just that the woman can usually see more moves ahead in this game.

In aid of bulking up that capacity in us, Jane Austen supplies us with several case studies of men who are, as we say today, “afraid of commitment.” In other words, of men who confuse and frustrate women by failing to want to give the women the love they want. We can learn a lot about the circumstances under which a man
can
be in love like a woman by looking at all the different ways there are for a man to fail at it. They’re the subject of the next chapter.