The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (38 page)

It also sheds light on an interesting difference between Jane Austen’s world and ours. Once Wentworth understands his own desires, he decides he is not free to pursue them. Some of his friends, he discovers, assume that there is a “mutual attachment,” even an engagement, between Louisa and himself:

It’s quite clear to Wentworth that his own feelings aren’t yet engaged. But he suddenly sees that Louisa’s may be. He has been living in the moment, enjoying her company and her admiration, and only “trying” to see whether it all might lead him to commit his heart. But what if she—being a woman, being more likely to freight present intimacy with future significance—has already become attached? If so, he decides he’s “hers in honour if she wished it.” In Jane Austen’s world, a decent guy doesn’t encourage a girl to jump unless he’s going to be there to catch her.

To us, this seems completely over the top. We really, really don’t want men to marry us out of a sense of duty when they’re in love with other women. We’re delighted when Jane Austen extricates Captain Wentworth
from his obligations of “honour” to Louisa by arranging for her to fall in love with Captain Benwick.

On the other hand, you can’t get around the fact that Captain Wentworth’s acting the gentleman about Louisa makes him an even more attractive man. There is something particularly impressive about a guy who actually takes responsibility for the effect his attention is having on a woman. Captain Wentworth’s readiness to act as if Louisa’s understanding of what’s between them is just as valid as his own makes him a sort of anti-Henry Crawford, a model for the kind of man you can respect and trust. Because when Wentworth comes to the same fork in the road as Crawford or Willoughby—when the momentum of what he’s enjoying and admiring in the present propels him to a place where he has to choose whether to commit to selfishness or to care about another human being—he makes the right choice.

Captain Wentworth’s standard of “honour” points up a deficiency in the way we manage the expectation gap between men and women. The shock that Wentworth feels on realizing that what’s happened between Louisa and him may mean more to her than to him is something that men still experience daily. They’re as likely to be blindsided by our readiness to attach as we are by their easy “Zenlike nonattachment.” What’s different is that today everybody agrees “honesty” is the solution. This cliché—that as long as all parties are honest about their expectations, then all obligations have been met and no one can complain—is so widely accepted that you can find it in such unlikely places as the
www.seduction.com
blog that I mentioned, where “Ross Jeffries Uncensored” advises the students of his “Speed Seduction® Student” program on “the thorny problem of having women fall for you and fall for you hard, when all you want is a little bit of fun.”
¹¹

Okay, let’s stipulate that the pitiful specimens of masculinity who subscribe to the “Speed Seduction® Student” vision may be indulging in extreme wishful thinking, and that Jeffries is just puffing his brand when he warns them, “As guys, we have to be aware that even the most bitter, cynical, hardened woman can have her heart burst wide open and her feelings of wanting to be
loved really come to the surface when she is properly seduced.” Still, when the universal ethic of “The key here is to be honest about your intentions” is providing cover for the bottom-dwellers at this sub-basement level of the sexual culture, you begin to suspect it’s a universally acknowledged truth. And if our “honesty” standard is elastic enough that it can be worked into Speed Seduction® then there’s something seriously wrong with it. Don’t get me wrong. Male honesty is certainly an improvement over the typical scuzziness of cut-rate Henry Crawfords like Ross Jeffries. But it falls far short of Jane Austen’s standard for heroes.

Of all Jane Austen’s men who are “afraid of commitment,” only Henry Crawford might be said to fall short of our honesty-about-his-intentions standard. And even Henry squeaks by all right if you add on the rather weaselly “if she asks” qualifier that Ross Jeffries is careful to append. None of Jane Austen’s heartbreakers actually lie to women. The worst they do is act like they feel more than they do. And most of them don’t go even that far. But as we’ve heard from Elizabeth Bennet, even “without scheming to do wrong, or to make others unhappy, there may be error, and there may be misery.” Captain Wentworth is a remarkably admirable and attractive man precisely because he (eventually) figures out that honesty is not all that’s required.

After all, Captain Wentworth was 100 percent honest about his intentions the whole time with Louisa. By the honesty standard, Wentworth hasn’t done anything wrong, or even anything that should lead Louisa to form any particular expectations of him. His deeds have been as forthright as his words. The attention that he has paid her is entirely honest, in the sense that he has truly felt exactly as interested in her as he has shown himself to be, throughout. He has really enjoyed her company to the precise degree that he has expressed that enjoyment. His heartfelt expressions of admiration—the “words of interest, spoken with such serious warmth” that Louisa can’t readily answer them—are true expressions of
what he actually felt and believed in that moment. Captain Wentworth has made no attempt to deceive or manipulate Louisa in any way. Quite the contrary. As he confesses above, he’s been blundering along with no design at all, trying to see whether he might be able to fall in love with her. Isn’t that fair enough, as long as he was up front about the whole thing?

Well, no. Wentworth ultimately realizes it isn’t. The problem, as Marguerite Fields of
New York Times
essay contest fame could tell you, is that a woman who welcomes this kind of attention from a man is likely to be disappointed if his enthusiasm—real at the time, and expressed honestly, with no promises about the future—turns out to be less lasting than her own. And it’s not just women who keep being surprised by the inadequacy of honesty to navigate the gap between the sexes. It’s apparent that men today are continually surprised by women who want more than the men are spontaneously interested in giving them, and more than they’ve ever promised. Modern men’s surprise arises from the same source as Wentworth’s shock after Louisa’s accident. If the standard is only that everybody has to be honest about how they feel now, then that standard will continually trip up the person whose sexuality is oriented toward the future, instead of the passing moment. The current regime is so out of step with what women are actually like that normal female psychology ends up looking abnormal. In the immortal words of “Ross Jeffries Uncensored”—and I promise this is the very last time I will quote him: “Of course, if a girl is desperate and needy enough, she will CREATE those bonds, even though you never used any patterns
¹²
at all! That’s when we can get into some trouble even though we proceeded with care. The problem isn’t with us, but with our ‘subject’; she’s just too friggin’ needy to deal with it.”

It would totally rot to be a “ruined” woman like Eliza. But are the societal conventions we modern women have to contend with really all that big an improvement? At least nobody claimed that the aching need Eliza felt for Willoughby after he seduced and deserted her was some bizarre psychological deficit.

Just imagine living in a context where men were forced by their consciences—or, if they should happen not to have consciences, by the people around them—to take into account the effect their present attentions were
likely to have on a woman’s future happiness. That’s the standard Captain Wentworth holds himself to.

In all eight cases we’ve looked at so far, we’ve been dealing with men who are “just not that into” the women they seem to be courting. At least not yet. That’s the best possible scenario out of all these cases: a Bingley or a Wentworth who’s on the way to a point at which, if he doesn’t get sidetracked or change his mind, he’ll eventually commit himself to loving you. He’s moving along the same path you are, if at a slower rate. In worse cases, what you seem to be sharing with him means something very different to him from what it means to you. Possibly he’s simply playing you. Or maybe he’s feeling pulled toward you, but he’s choosing to commit to his own freedom instead. All these cases of male “fear of commitment” require generous doses of caution on a woman’s part. She needs to be on the look-out for the players and the guys who are married to their own immaturity. And even if the man is a grownup who seems to be falling in love with her, she needs to remind herself that until he definitively does, it’s not a sure thing. Even a Captain Wentworth is capable of leading you on unintentionally, before he clues in.

 

But Jane Austen also gives us one more type of case in which men appear to be afraid of commitment. Look at Wentworth with Anne at the end of
Persuasion
, or at Mr. Knightley at the end of
Emma
. Why do they hesitate to tell the women they love that they love them? Emma is so late understanding her own heart that she doesn’t have much time to suffer from Mr. Knightley’s hesitation—she’s still beating herself up for her own blind folly when he gets back from London and takes her out of her misery. But Anne is on tenterhooks, watching Wentworth advance and retreat. When they see each other in Bath for the first time after Louisa’s accident, he’s noticeably embarrassed to meet Anne; his front of “apparent indifference” has melted. But then, at the concert the next night, he seems ready to walk right by her with only a
bow. Then again, when she makes it easy for him to talk to her, he’s even warmer; he seems to have “a heart returning to her at last.” And then
again
something seems to go wrong; after their “interesting, almost too interesting conversation,” she can’t catch his eye again, and she becomes anxious.
¹³
Finally, when he does approach her toward the end of the evening, “the difference between his present air and what it had been” makes it clear that “something must be the matter.” She’s “encouraging,” and his mood seems to improve; he looks like he’s ready to sit down next to her. But then her attention is distracted by Mr. Elliot, and Captain Wentworth retreats.

It looks like another classic case of “fear of commitment.” Except in this case, it turns out that Captain Wentworth
is
just that into her. But he’s jealous of Mr. Elliot; that has been “the retarding weight, the doubt, the torment” that’s kept him from telling her he loves her. Mr. Knightley has exactly the same motive for keeping out of Emma’s way by going to London after the Box Hill excursion: “It was jealousy of Frank Churchill that had taken him from the country.”
¹⁴

Notice that while jealousy—when it amounts to the belief that the woman he loves is actually encouraging another man’s attentions, or is (as we might say) “already taken”—has a “retarding” effect on the courtship of a Captain Wentworth or a Mr. Knightley, the mere “admiration” of other men has the opposite effect. Captain Wentworth is “roused” to notice Anne’s physical attractions again by the fact that Mr. Elliot is checking her out at the hotel in Lyme. And Mr. Knightley’s initial jealousy of Frank Churchill, before Emma even met him, seems to have “enlightened him” to the fact that he loved Emma himself. Jealousy of this milder sort can spark men’s competitive natures and make them notice us. But the genuine Jane Austen hero doesn’t want to be (as we might say) the kind of creep who goes after another guy’s girlfriend. That smacks of “the haphazard of selfish passion”—the sort of thing an egoist like Henry Crawford would do. In short, other men’s admiration ought to help you with the kind of man who can turn out to be your Jane Austen hero, or at least it shouldn’t hurt. What
won’t
help you with him is if he gets it into his head that you’re already attached to somebody else.

Thus Anne has to let Wentworth know that she’s not committed to Mr. Elliot
¹⁵
and hint that she still loves him.
¹⁶
Notice that we’ve
finally
reached a species of apparent “fear of commitment” that’s an exception to the general rule. Extreme caution is generally requisite in these cases. It makes sense to slow yourself down if you suspect deliberate manipulation, selfish immaturity, or even just that the guy’s not falling in love as fast as you are. Jealousy is the only case I can see in Jane Austen where it actually makes sense to apply the opposite strategy—the one we’re always tempted to resort to: helping him along, reassuring him that we’re interested. Encouragement comes so naturally to us, but it’s only in the rarest cases that it’s the right move. And even in those cases, the most important thing you can do is to be sure that when your Jane Austen hero comes along you don’t already look “taken” by some other, not so heroic guy.