The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (50 page)

20
And along the way, there were a few folks who made themselves infamous by pushing the Romantic recipe for love—break the rules to pursue intense experiences at all costs—to some particularly ugly (if undoubtedly interesting) ends; think of the Marquis de Sade, Edgar Allan Poe, and Oscar Wilde. Here’s Wilde in the last dry desert he got to, following Romantic boredom with happiness to its ultimate conclusion: “In Algiers, Wilde remarked, ‘I have a duty to myself to amuse myself most frightfully.’ Then he added, ‘Not happiness. Above all not happiness. Pleasure! You must always aim at the most tragic.’ He bore Gide off to a café, where the young man was captivated by a young Arab boy playing the flute. Outside, Wilde asked him, ‘Dear,
vous voulez the petit musicien
,’—do you want the little musician?’ Gide, ‘in the most choked of voices,’ said yes. Wilde burst into what Gide called ‘satanic laughter’ and made the arrangements.” Richard Ellman,
Oscar Wilde
(Vintage, 1988), pp. 429–30.

21
Not a caricature like Laura and Sophia.

1
Marianne is a genuine heroine, not like the minor characters whose mistakes we looked at in chapter 1. In a literary-critical sense, Lydia Bennet and Charlotte
Lucas and Maria Bertram are just “foils” for our heroines—more modern and sophisticated versions of the clownish characters in a Shakespeare comedy whose rough courtships and mock heroics show off the pure love and noble heroism of the main characters all the more brightly.

2
Elinor’s instinctive tact smoothes over the tensions created by Marianne’s too obvious impatience with people who don’t meet her high standards. (It’s against Marianne’s Romantic principles to pretend to be interested in boring people, or to show respect for people she thinks are ridiculous.) And prudent Elinor’s advice about money is of real value to their impulsive mother, whose enthusiastic temperament Marianne has inherited.

3
“But I thought it was right, Elinor,” says Marianne, expressing her own Romantic insistence on authenticity, in contrast with Elinor’s more conventional ideas, “to be guided wholly by the opinions of other people. I thought our judgments were given us merely to be subservient to those of our neighbours. This has always been your doctrine, I am sure.” Elinor’s answer: “My doctrine has never aimed at the subjection of the understanding.”

4
Marianne and Elinor love each other dearly, but each sister thinks the other one is very wrongheaded. It’s not just Marianne’s feelings; “her opinions,” too, “are all romantic.”

5
Marianne respects her sister’s mind and her taste, if not her good manners.

6
That’s Elinor’s opinion, in any case: “A few years however will settle her opinions on the reasonable basis of common sense and observation; and then they may be more easy to define and to justify than they now are, by any body but herself.... There are inconveniences attending such feelings as Marianne’s, which all the charms of enthusiasm and ignorance of the world cannot atone for. Her systems have all the unfortunate tendency of setting propriety at nought; and a better acquaintance with the world is what I look forward to as her greatest possible advantage.”

7
Note that Marianne’s Romantic intensity is different from gaiety, merriment, delight (not to mention solid happiness): “‘Nor do I think [gaiety] a part of Marianne’s [character],’ said Elinor; ‘I should hardly call her a lively girl; she is very earnest, very eager in all she does—sometimes talks a great deal and always with animation—but she is not often really merry.’”

8
“You know what he thinks of Cowper and Scott; you are certain of his estimating their beauties as he ought, and you have received every assurance of his admiring Pope no more than is proper. But how is your acquaintance to be long supported, under such extraordinary dispatch of every subject for discourse?”

9
“I have not known him long indeed, but I am much better acquainted with him, than I am with any other creature in the world, except yourself and mama.”
(Intensity.) Marianne admits, “I have erred against every common-place notion of decorum.” (Liberation.) But really, she’s proud of it: “I have been open and sincere where I ought to have been reserved, spiritless, and deceitful.” (Authenticity.)

10
“‘I never spent a pleasanter morning in my life.’

11
“This was the season of happiness to Marianne. Her heart was devoted to Willoughby.”

12
She runs out of the room in tears; she can’t eat. “The slightest mention of anything relative to Willoughby overpower[s] her in an instant” and makes her cry again.

13
It’s easy to see where Marianne gets her temperament, and at least some proportion of her principles.

14
Willoughby’s letter is a pack of bald-faced and insulting lies. He’s flatly denying everything that happened between them—everything that Marianne, and not
just
Marianne, knows
did
. It’s not only Marianne who thought from the way Willoughby behaved toward her that he was in love with her. Her family, friends, and neighbors have all been expecting to hear that she’s engaged to him.

15
Apart from anything else, Willoughby’s fiancée owed Marianne “no duty, and therefore could have transgressed none,” as Jane Austen says in a different context.

16
“Pursuing fresh schemes, always gay, always happy.”

17
The passage from
Sense and Sensibility
that perfectly answers Charlotte Brontë’s attack on Jane Austen—“I understand you.—You do not suppose that I have ever felt much....”—is Elinor’s answer to Marianne’s initial reaction when she finds out that Elinor has been living with her own secret heartbreak for all the weeks when she’s been comforting Marianne in her distress. Just like Charlotte Brontë, who thought that Jane Austen must not have “even a speaking acquaintance” with the “stormy sisterhood” of the passions, Marianne is sure that Elinor doesn’t understand real pain. Why? Because Elinor believes in self-control, and she keeps her eyes on the ultimate prize—to be happy with the man she loves, if she can, and to do her best to be as happy as she can without him, if she has to.

18
Marianne still prides herself on the intensity of her emotions. Her self-image is tied up with the idea of herself as a person who can feel more keenly, judge more authentically, and act more freely than other people.

19
Marianne purposely seeks out situations that will exacerbate her misery: “In such moments of precious, of invaluable misery, she rejoiced in tears of agony.”

20
His vanity was flattered by her too-obvious preference for him. And so, he explains, he “endeavoured, by every means in my power, to make myself pleasing to her, without any design of returning her affection.”

21
“To re-establish my circumstances by marrying a woman of fortune,” as Willoughby puts it. “To attach myself to your sister, therefore, was not a thing to be thought of ....”

22
And, what makes it much worse, who
knows
he doesn’t love her.

23
And pines for “a comparative poverty, which her affection and her society would have deprived of all its horrors.”

24
Elinor to Willoughby: “You have proved your heart less wicked, much less wicked. But I hardly know—the misery that you have inflicted—I hardly know what could have made it worse.”

25
See the next chapter for more on the strange phenomenon in which indulging the Romantic sensibility is, paradoxically, likely to make you more vulnerable to
“settling,” while a more balanced, Jane Austen-style approach will inoculate you against cynicism.

26
“That Marianne found her own happiness in forming his, was equally the persuasion and delight of each observing friend. Marianne could never love by halves; and her whole heart became, in time, as much devoted to her husband, as it had once been to Willoughby.”

27
“His expensiveness is acknowledged even by himself, and his whole conduct declares that self-denial is a word hardly understood by him. His demands and your inexperience together on a small, very small income, must have brought on distresses ....
Your
sense of honour and honesty would have led you, I know, when aware of your situation, to attempt all the economy that would appear to you possible; and perhaps as long as your frugality retrenched only on your own comfort, you might have been suffered to practice it ... had you endeavoured, however reasonably, to abridge
his
enjoyments, is it not to be feared, that instead of prevailing on feelings so selfish to consent to it, you would have lessened your own influence on his heart, and made him regret the connection which had involved him in such difficulties?”

28
Assuming that Elinor is right about Marianne’s approach to household finances.

29
Especially as long as we keep other pictures out of our minds—of Willoughby’s sincere repentance for what he’s done; of his powerful charm and “ardour of mind” so perfectly suited to Marianne’s own temperament; of his passionate love for Marianne, stronger than ever now that it’s entirely hopeless. Even sensible Elinor has to allow some time to pass before she can shake Willoughby’s “influence over her mind” and judge the situation on “reason” and “merits.”

30
That’s Mr. Collins’s cut-rate way of dealing with disappointment in love: “I have often observed that resignation is never so perfect as when the blessing denied begins to lose somewhat of its value in our estimation.”

31
Especially for the first Mrs. Willoughby—an excellent candidate for the First Wives’ Club.

32
It seems to be a type much
more
common today than then.

33
I’d say five years, tops.

34
She’s busy establishing that she and Willoughby agree exactly about music and poetry, that they share the same “taste” and “enthusiasm,” that he’s capable of making her feel the powerful emotions that she’s been looking forward to whenever she’s imagined being in love.

35
Which Angela, thank heavens, did.
Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters
, Meg Meeker (Regnery, 2006), pp. 106–8.

36
Complete with sleepless nights, running out of rooms in tears, and so forth.

37
This is a special kind of blindness in love. Marianne’s not just enchanted with Willoughby despite his faults, or telling herself his flaws don’t really matter. She’s blind to his actions, intentions, and motivations, and to the whole reality of the situation he’s created, because she’s enchanted with Romantic love.

38
Please see chapter 13, note 4 below for more on my cluelessness in this instance.

1
Elizabeth is talking about Mr. Collins; she’s setting off to visit Charlotte Lucas, now Collins, in her married home the next day.

2
He has deserted her to court another young woman, whom he had paid “not the smallest attention” until she inherited ten thousand pounds.

3
By warning her early on that he can’t afford to marry Elizabeth, and that she’d better not encourage either him or herself to fall in love.

4
For tips on how to distinguish them, see chapters 11 and 14 below.

5
“I should deserve utter contempt,” Anne says, “if I dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy were known only by women.”

6
Mary Eberstadt, ed.,
Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys
(Threshold, 2007)
,
p. 19.

7
Not coincidentally, Jane Austen brought the same clear-eyed eighteenth-century ambition to the problem of domestic happiness as the American Founders brought to the problem of the public welfare. It’s hard to think of a group of men in world history with a less sentimental view of nature. And yet it’s also hard to think of a more ambitious project than the founding of the American Republic.

8
Remember how Bridget Jones breaks up with Mark Darcy under the influence of an all-men-are-bastards-go-girl-power state of mind.

9
Mrs. Bennet complains incessantly about Mr. Bennet, and he has zero respect for her: “To his wife he was very little otherwise indebted, than as her ignorance and folly had contributed to his amusement. This is not the sort of happiness which a man would in general wish to owe to his wife; but where other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.”