The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (55 page)

20
“Yes, Mary, my Fanny will feel a difference indeed: a daily, hourly difference, in the behaviour of every being who approaches her; and it will be the completion
of my happiness to know that I am the doer of it, that I am the person to give the consequence so justly her due. Now she is dependent, helpless, friendless, neglected, forgotten.”

21
Their niece Louisa Knight remembered overhearing the sisters discussing this point.

22
If Jane Austen had been writing sentimental melodrama, a rake like Henry Crawford might actually have had a better chance of getting the girl. His wicked past could be redeemed by his love for a pure woman. Jane Austen was more realistic. Her clear-eyed understanding of human nature told her that a man of Henry Crawford’s habits with women is, in fact and reality, very unlikely to pull off a happy ending with one woman—even if he has truly fallen in love with her. Henry Crawford’s punishment doesn’t come from some deus ex machina arranged by the novelist. Henry just simply and naturally falls right back into the old ruts that his past choices have worn into his personality, and loses Fanny as a result. If he’d been a little less used to grabbing at “immediate pleasure” in general (and more accustomed to occasionally doing without something he wanted), or if he’d been less addicted to the heady ego trips he reguarly gets from breaking down women’s resistance and making them fall in love with him against their better judgment, then things with Fanny might have worked out for him: “But he was pressed to stay for Mrs. Fraser’s party; his staying was made of flattering consequence, and he was to meet Mrs. Rushworth there. Curiosity and vanity were both engaged, and the temptation of immediate pleasure was too strong for a mind unused to make any sacrifice to right; he resolved to defer his Norfolk journey, resolved that writing should answer the purpose of it, or that its purpose was unimportant—and staid. He saw Mrs. Rushworth.... He was mortified, he could not bear to be thrown off by a woman whose smiles had been so wholly at his command.”

23
On “true merit” on both sides, in fact, as well as on “true love.”

24
Think how, at the end of
Persuasion
, Anne Elliot’s love for Captain Wentworth is heightened by the possibility of a naval war: “She gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to a profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than its national importance.” Anne’s tender heart has to stretch to bear the risks that make Wentworth the truly admirable man she loves.

25
Almost all of us having had more love affairs than any Jane Austen heroine. And if we haven’t, we’ve at least seen more up close.

26
In the worst cases (where what Jane Austen would call a man’s “character” is really bad) he’ll deliberately refine whatever works with one woman—what feels at the
time like something arising naturally from the unique chemistry of their relationship—into a technique that he uses deliberately on a succession of women, like the double headphones Rob Lowe used to get Demi Moore into bed in
About Last Night
.

27
What Jane Austen calls “infatuation” or being “bewitched.”

28
And obviously Jane Austen’s heroines
do
feel the chemistry; they experience real love as intense, intoxicating, bewitching.

29
“She respected, she esteemed, she was grateful to him, she felt a real interest in his welfare; and she only wanted to know how far she wished that welfare to depend upon herself, and how far it would be for the happiness of both that she should employ the power, which her fancy told her she still possessed, of bringing on the renewal of his addresses.” After Jane’s letters about Lydia arrive, Elizabeth’s heart tells her the answer: “It [Elizabeth’s fear that Darcy won’t want to marry her now, because of Lydia] was, on the contrary, exactly calculated to make her understand her own wishes; and never had she so honestly felt that she could have loved him, as now, when all love must be vain.”

1
Which, incidentally, was Jane Austen’s earlier title for
Pride and Prejudice
.

2
“At present, I know him so well, that I think him really handsome; or, at least, almost so.” In fact, Jane Austen tells us Edward is “not handsome.” Elinor may be wearing rose-colored glasses, but at least she has enough self-knowledge to realize she’s got them on.

3
Fanny exclaims scornfully, about Mary Crawford: “The woman who could speak of [Edmund], and speak only of his appearance!” But there’s all the difference in the world between keeping looks in proportion to more important qualities—Jane Austen thoroughly approved of that—and not being able to see them clearly. It’s the clear-sighted Fanny who “still continued to think Mr. Crawford very plain, in spite of her two cousins having repeatedly proved the contrary,” while the deluded Maria and Julia are undergoing this transformation in their perceptions: “[Henry Crawford] was not handsome: no, when they first saw him he was absolutely plain ... but still he was the gentleman, with a pleasing address. The second meeting proved him not so very plain: he was plain, to be sure, but then he had so much countenance, and his teeth were so good, and he was so well made, that one soon forgot he was plain; and after a third interview, after dining in company with him at the Parsonage, he was no longer allowed to be called so by anybody.”

4
Notice what Fanny Price thinks when her uncle is trying to pressure her into marrying Henry Crawford. Her uncle asks her, “‘Have you any reason, child, to think ill of Mr. Crawford’s temper?’ ‘No, sir.’ She longed to add, ‘but of his principles I have.’” Fanny takes it for granted that everyone (including the overbearing Sir Thomas Bertram) knows it’s a terrible idea to marry a man whose principles you can’t trust. Besides this dialogue between Sir Thomas and Fanny, think of Anne and Captain Wentworth canvassing the match between Benwick and Louisa Musgrove: “But it appears—I should hope it would be a very good match. There are on both sides good principles and good temper.”

5
“Break Your Heart,” written by Taio Cruz and Fraser T. Smith and performed by Taio Cruz (2009).

6
Perhaps not quite as clearly as Henry’s sister, who has actually heard him brag about it, but clearly enough.

7
It’s no accident that Jane Austen uses the word “character” to mean two things that we think of today as very different, but that she knew often coincide. “Character” in Jane Austen’s day could mean the actual reality of what you’re like as a
person, as when Elizabeth says, about Wickham, “When
my
eyes were opened to his real character....” But it could also mean just your reputation, as when Mr. Gardiner hopes, about Lydia and Wickham’s future, that “among different people, where they may each have a character to preserve, they will both be more prudent.” In reality, there’s more overlap between people’s reputations—especially if those reputations are grounded in knowledge of their past behavior—and their real characters than we recovering Romantics like to think.

8
“Henry Crawford had too much sense not to feel the worth of good principles in a wife, though he was too little accustomed to serious reflection to know them by their proper name; but when he talked of her having such a steadiness and regularity of conduct, such a high notion of honour, and such an observance of decorum as might warrant any man in the fullest dependence on her faith and integrity, he expressed what was inspired by the knowledge of her being well principled....”

9
Which is one reason that it’s very foolish to ignore any information about how a man talks and acts when you aren’t around, as Emma does when Mr. Knightley tells her that Mr. Elton “does not mean to throw himself away. I have heard him speak with great animation of a large family of young ladies that his sisters are intimate with, who have all twenty thousand pounds apiece.”

10
“Though they had now been acquainted a month, she could not be satisfied that she really knew his character. That he was a sensible man, an agreeable man,—that he talked well, professed good opinions, seemed to judge properly and as a man of principle,—this was all clear enough. He certainly knew what was right, nor could she fix on any one article of moral duty evidently transgressed; but yet she would have been afraid to answer for his conduct. She distrusted the past, if not the present. The names which occasionally dropt of former associates, the allusions to former practices and pursuits, suggested suspicions not favorable of what he had been. She saw that there had been bad habits... and, though he might now think very differently, who could answer for the true sentiments of a clever, cautious man, grown old enough to appreciate a fair character?”

11
“The manoeuvres of selfishness and duplicity must ever be revolting, but I have heard nothing that really surprises me.”

12
See, for example, Nicholas Carr,
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
(W.W. Norton and Company, 2010); William Powers,
Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age
(HarperCollins, 2010); and Sherry Turkle,
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
(Basic Books, 2011).

13
If you don’t believe me, check out those rare early color photos from the Great Depression. Everyone in the 1930s and ’40s, and I mean
everyone—
frighteningly skinny people in the Dust Bowl, sharecroppers actually chopping cotton—dressed with more formality than we do now. “Captured: America in Color from 1939–1943 [sic],”
Denver Post
online July 26, 2010,
http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2010/07/26/captured-america-in-color-from-1939-1943/2363/
.

14
Hitting a watershed with the 1970s jogging craze, when suddenly it was the done thing to be seen in public in your sweats, and yet every middle-aged woman still had that one last hat from the Jackie O. era gathering dust on a shelf in her closet, and one last pair of white gloves in a drawer somewhere.

15
Miss Manners permitted an e-thank you note only as a prelude to an ink-and-paper letter. Sticklers for grammar and punctuation fretted that email would be the death of formal correspondence, possibly even killing off standard English.

16
Jane Fairfax would be able to sympathize with William Powers’s concerns (op. cit.) about the harried lives we live today because of continual demands on our attention via electronic media, and with Sherry Turkle’s worry (op. cit.) that teenagers are stressed by the need to be constantly “on” to respond in a timely manner to every text from their friends: “‘Oh, Miss Woodhouse, the comfort of being sometimes alone!’ seemed to burst from an over-charged heart....”

17
“She had never heard of him before his entrance into the—shire Militia.... Of his former way of life, nothing had been known in Hertfordshire but what he told himself.” That’s one reason soldiers and marines are typically very risky suitors in Jane Austen novels: Wickham, Fanny Price’s father, and Captain Hunter in
The Watsons.
(Jane Fairfax’s father is the exception that proves the rule.) They were the one class of strangers who
could
typically get themselves introduced to girls without anybody really knowing their past—just on the strength of their military rank and the short-term relationships they’d formed with the other officers. (Jane Austen’s family connection with and enthusiastic boostership for the British Navy probably comes into play here, as well. There’s absolutely no doubt which side Jane Austen would cheer for in the Army-Navy game.)

18
An introduction was no longer a guarantee that a trustworthy social network had enough collective knowledge about a guy to give him a recommendation.
People had more freedom to reinvent themselves, to start again with a clean slate; guys were judged mostly on what they did and said in the present.

19
Today if you meet a new guy, it’s harder for him to confine what you learn about him to what he tells you about himself. You can always google him, and he knows it.