The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (58 page)

2
Even women who aren’t models of constancy themselves still grossly underestimate men’s capacity for not being committed. Isabella Thorpe fails as a heartless gold-digger because she’s not callous
enough
; she lets Captain Tilney definitively detach her from her engagement to Catherine’s brother without making sure of Tilney first. The giddy Lydia Bennet, with “continually fluctuating” affections—“sometimes one officer, sometimes another had been her favourite”—consents to live with Wickham without benefit of clergy, not seeing that he’s less attached than she is.

3
From the “Opinions of
Mansfield Park
” collected by Jane Austen: “Henry C.s going off with Mrs. R.—at such a time, when so much in love with Fanny, thought unnatural by Edward.” James Edward Austen also “Objected to Mrs. Rushworth’s elopement as unnatural.”

4
Here’s Fanny confronting the possibility that Henry may put off going to Norfolk to make sure his tenants are treated justly—a project inspired by his love for Fanny—so that he can stay for a party at which he’ll see Maria for the first time since her marriage: “Whether Mr. Crawford went into Norfolk before or after the 14
^th
, was certainly no concern of hers, though, every thing considered, she thought he
would
go without delay.” And of course Fanny’s shock at Henry’s adulterous elopement with Maria when he’s “a man professing himself devoted, even
engaged
to” Fanny herself is even greater.

5
“I only want her to look kindly on me, to give me smiles as well as blushes, to keep a chair for me by herself wherever we are, and be all animation when I take it and talk to her, to think as I think, be interested in all my possessions and
pleasures, try to keep me longer at Mansfield, and feel when I go away that she shall never be happy again.”

6
“I have no inclination ... to think that with so much tenderness of disposition, and so much taste as belonged to her, she could have escaped heart-whole from the courtship (though the courtship of only a fortnight) of such a man as Crawford, in spite of there being some previous ill-opinion of him to overcome, had not her affection been engaged elsewhere.”

7
These “unconquerable ladies of eighteen” are obvious figments of the imaginations of authors whose grasp of female psychology is less firm than Jane Austen’s.

8
Now clearly, there are some men—less attractive than Henry Crawford—whose attention is not intoxicating. The more we see of
them
, the more we want to run screaming. As Jane Austen says in
Northanger Abbey
, “Every young lady may feel for my heroine in this critical moment, for every young lady has at some time or other known the same agitation. All have been, or at least all have believed themselves to be, in danger from the pursuit of some one whom they wished to avoid; and all have been anxious for the attentions of some one whom they wished to please.” And of course women break men’s hearts, too. But by and large men don’t seem to fall prey to the pattern we see repeated over and over again in women’s lives—both in Jane Austen novels and in our own experience—in which a guy’s attention fixes our heart on him prematurely, so that we’re ready to belong to him before he’s ready to belong to us.

9
“To think as I think.”

10
As Jane Austen would say.

11
“Revealed: The Mufti Uncut,”
Australian
, October 28, 2006,
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/revealed-the-mufti-uncut/story-e6frg6z6-1111112429963
.

12
Michael S. Kimmel,
Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men
(Harper, 2008), especially pp. 172–77.

13
Men can be as ashamed and frustrated about their characteristic weakness as we are about ours. Though it’s easier for them to see in
other
men—especially when those other men take an interest in their own female relatives. In worst-case scenarios involving men who think along the lines of the Australian mufti, the whole thing can end in “honor killings” and other horrors. But it’s something that even much more civilized men know about their own sex. There’s a story in my family about my grandparents and a date that my sixteen-year-old Aunt Mary went on, circa 1954. She stayed out really late, and my grandfather was pacing the floor restlessly in the wee hours of the morning waiting for her to get home.
My grandmother reassured him: “Don’t worry, Billy, he’s a nice boy.” In response to which, my grandfather exploded, “
I
was a nice boy! There’s no such
thing
as a nice boy!”

14
As Darcy suggests Elizabeth and Caroline Bingley are doing when Elizabeth accepts Caroline’s invitation to “take a turn about” the drawing room at Netherfield—“because you are conscious that your figures appear to the greatest advantage in walking.”

15
Marguerite Fields, “Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define,”
New York Times
, May 4, 2008,
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/fashion/04love.html
.

16
Pretty much the same way that Fanny Price, if Henry’s scheme against her had turned out just the way he planned, might have tried reminding herself that she’d always known Henry was an unprincipled man, unworthy of her good opinion.

17
Shades of Elizabeth Bennet’s “permanent happiness.”

18
By David Chelsea.

19
And for us, who’ve been living inside Elizabeth’s head for most of the novel.

20
The one time in the novels when Jane Austen directly challenges the infamous “double standard,” according to which society shames women more than men for sexual transgressions, her complaint isn’t that women suffer too much, but that men get off too lightly! In other words, if she could have changed the double standard, she might actually have changed it in the direction of
more
societal disapproval for male adulterers and other men who make selfish and destructive choices where sex is concerned, not
less
for women.

21
This friendly debate between Anne and Captain Harville is the conversation that Captain Wentworth overhears, so that he guesses Anne still loves him, and is emboldened to approach her again.

22
Whose “disposition,” according to Captain Wentworth, is “of the sort which must suffer heavily, uniting strong feelings with quiet, serious, and retiring manners”—in other words, he’s a steady, decent guy, no Willoughby or Henry Crawford.

23
“If the change be not from outward circumstances, it must be from within; it must be nature, man’s nature, which has done the business for Captain Benwick.”

24
It has also outlived the deconstruction of a lot of other “social constructs” that used to prop it up, and even some very significant fooling with Mother Nature. Our astonishment at male inconstancy has survived the invention of the Pill and the legalization of abortion—both of which have gone some distance to equalize the consequences of sex to men and to women. If those things haven’t made sex less risky for women, they have at least changed what women’s risks are. They’ve certainly made the negative consequences less publicly humiliating for women than they were in Jane Austen’s day (think about where sex with Willoughby took Eliza), so that women today are less keenly aware of sexual vulnerabilities. The difference between men and women when it comes to sexual constancy has also outlasted Second Wave feminism, the erosion of “the virginity fetish”—i.e., the sexual double standard raised to the n
^th
degree, according to which a single sexual experience “ruined” a woman—and the complete reversal of how we’re educated about sex: the point of the current system being to give young women greater acquaintance with and fewer inhibitions on the subject, rather than the other way around. (In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson tried to defend the sexual double standard on a kind of “cultural construct” basis, by arguing from the fact that the main point of girls’ education at that time was sexual restraint. Messing up there, he claimed, was justly punished by society because it meant failing at the one thing women had been taught to get right. It’s interesting that Jane Austen, just two or three generations after Dr. Johnson, and with a considerably subtler understanding of female psychology, leans instead toward the “nature” understanding of the question.) Despite huge changes in both biological and social repercussions, the differences between men and women’s sexual behavior, assumptions, and desires—a gap so wide that men are continually astonishing us with their comparative detachment—persists. As Horace warned two thousand years ago, “Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret”: “You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, and still it will come back.”

25
The chemical that floods our brains during childbirth and breastfeeding. But we manufacture oxytocin in response to interactions with men, too. Almost any
kind of physical contact with a guy—not just having sex with him, though that can certainly do it, but even just a twenty-second hug—can result in the release of oxytocin, and a spike in our trust and “attachment.” In fact, once we’ve begun to get attached, even just seeing the man we’re interested in can boost our oxytocin levels. See Louann Brizendine,
The Female Brain
(Morgan Road Books, 2006), pp. 37, 65–74.

26
Attributed to William James, who is supposed to have scribbled it while high on nitrous oxide and under the impression that he was recording the great secret of the universe. See “Hogamous, Higamous,” Tony Percy’s investigation of the attribution,
http://coldspur.com/HogamousHigamous%28V2%29.htm
.

27
The time she has to spend pregnant, breastfeeding, and rearing even one child to ensure that it can reach adulthood and reproduce.

28
Review of Judith Stacey,
Unhitched: Love, Marriage, and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China
(New York University Press, 2011), in
Publishers Weekly,
January 31, 2011, p. 37. Apparently Stacey reached this tentative conclusion after spending more than ten years studying family structures on three continents.

29
Dorothy Parker: