The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (8 page)

Anne’s “what I did for love”-style choice was painful at the time. But it was only over the next seven years that she truly came to understand what she had done. She never met another man she could love. Anne seemed to be forever trapped in the old prison cell that she’d retreated back into, after that brief interval of warmth and sunshine with Wentworth.

And then he comes back into her life. All his ambitions have been realized. His courage, resourcefulness, and hard work have gained him advancement and wealth. But he’s no longer interested in Anne. They’re thrown
together by accident, and he meets her almost as a stranger—as less than a stranger, in fact, “for they could never become acquainted.”

While Wentworth meets her with cold indifference, Anne loves him more intensely than ever. “No: the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look, in no respect lessening his personal advantages. She had seen the same Frederick Wentworth.” Like any woman deeply in love, Anne suffers a hyper-awareness of the man’s physical presence. The narration of the first scene in which Wentworth comes close enough to touch her after eight years apart is a masterpiece of psychological realism.
¹⁶

Gradually Anne gets used to the new footing she’s on with Wentworth. The painful embarrassment of the first few meetings subsides, along with the last precious hopes that he might care for her still, or ever again. He is cold and distant to Anne, but open, enthusiastic, and engaging with everyone else. Wentworth’s behavior soon creates speculation about his possible interest in two young women in Anne’s circle. For the Musgrove girls, the world is full of new enjoyments and possibilities opening up. And Anne’s world seems to be contracting. She’s more clearly than ever the quietly fading not-so-young woman whom love has passed by.

Anne’s situation, like Fanny’s, is all too realistic. It’s “the fate,” as they said in Jane Austen’s day, of countless thousands of real live women—some significant multiple of however many of us have ever wrought ourselves up to Brontë-scale Romantic agony—to wake up too late to the realization that the balance of power between the sexes has shifted over time. A man can easily seem even more attractive as he ages into his thirties and forties and beyond. His “personal advantages” can be increased by the passage of the same years that sap a woman’s “youth and bloom.” Pace Harold and Maude (and the real-life Demi Moore), not very many women find themselves courted by men decades younger than they are.

But Anne’s heartbreak isn’t just about how her chance for happy love has faded with her youth. Everything she sees in Wentworth now and learns about the life he’s made for himself makes it much worse. Not only does she still love him as much as ever, now she understands so much better what marrying him would have meant for her. It would have been a real liberation.
Not just from a humdrum existence into passion, or from the constraints of life in her father’s house to adult independence. But from the prospect of spending the rest of her life with people so consumed by their own snobbery and selfishness that they barely acknowledge her existence—into real love, and life as a valued member of a circle of warm and generous friends. Anne’s pain, like Fanny’s, is real, and worthy of our respect.

If we can’t help asking: “But is their suffering as
intense
as what a Brontë heroine feels?” well, that’s just evidence that Romantic sensibility clings to the insides of our minds like cobwebs to the corners of an unswept attic. After all, we think, Anne’s broken heart makes her suffer nothing worse than a bit of depression.
¹⁷
And even more damning, from the Romantic point of view, she can still “struggle against” it. If Anne were really in love, wouldn’t she be forced to surrender to hopeless agony? In our more Romantic moments, we can’t help thinking that, after all, love is real love only to the degree that, as Nicolas Cage says in
Moonstruck
, “it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess.”
¹⁸
The more we hurt, the more we know we’re really in love. Right?

Wrong. Jane Austen’s answer to these questions is
No
. Her heroines in pursuit of happiness admittedly don’t suffer as much as the Brontës and their ilk. When Jane Austen describes Elinor Dashwood as “suffering almost as much, certainly with less self-provocation and greater fortitude” than her equally heartbroken (but much more Romantic) sister Marianne, she’s conceding that Elinor’s pain
is
a degree less.

Elinor hurts less than Marianne, but it’s not because she loves less. It’s because of that “greater fortitude” in the face of suffering. UnRomantic Jane
Austen heroines don’t wallow in heartbreak. Their struggle to get a firm grip on themselves, and on reality, gives them extraordinary dignity. It makes them less miserable—but not any less in love.

For Jane Austen, love is a happy thing. If it makes you miserable, something’s gone badly wrong. Possibly just with your circumstances: accident and chance, not to mention the lack of enough money to live on, are bound to cause plenty of misery in this imperfect world. But quite often what makes women unhappy in love in Jane Austen novels is something wrong with the man they love—or with themselves. When her heroines have to bear up with “fortitude” through heartbreak, they’re sometimes coming to terms with the fact that the man they love has failed them. If only Edmund weren’t dazzled by Mary Crawford ... if only Captain Wentworth had come back to Anne once he could afford to marry ... if only Edward hadn’t persuaded Elinor to love him when he was already secretly engaged to Lucy Steele. But sometimes Jane Austen’s heroines realize that
they’re
the ones who’ve made a terrible mistake.

And they’re never more admirable than when they’re seeing their own mistakes clearly and undertaking the painful process of setting them right. They’re also never more likely to be headed in the direction of their happy endings. There’s nothing less like the hopeless agony of the Brontë heroine than the fortitude that an Emma Woodhouse, say, shows under the realization that she’s put her own happiness at risk.
¹⁹
And there’s nothing more classically Jane Austen.

If we want to emulate Jane Austen’s heroines, we’re going to have to learn to admire their ability to “struggle and endure” just as much as Brontë fans admire their heroines’ Romantic self-flagellation. This is real growing up—not the Romantic counterfeit, where breaking away from your parents’
rules or your friends’ standards feels like instant maturity. It’s assuming responsibility for the kind of person you’re going to become.

Jane Austen isn’t trying to talk you out of real adventures. It’s just that she believes in adventures in love, not in drama and narcissism. We have to decide whether those Romantic experiences are worth having—not to mention, worth having if, in pursuit of them, we end up missing the kind of happy love that Elizabeth finds with Darcy. Because remember,
of course
everybody wants to be happy. But only a few of us will pursue happy love as our real goal, ignoring all the shiny distractions.

We twenty-first-century women are in a better position to give up Romantic illusions and learn from Jane Austen than women have been in any generation since her own. We’re more primed to see through this cult of selfishness masquerading as passion than at any time in the past two hundred years. For one thing, we know so much more about where Romanticism in love actually leads.

On the broader cultural front, we can look back on successive waves of Romantic illusion that ended in real pain. There was the original Romanticism, the Byrons and Shelleys breaking all the rules and leaving a trail of wrecked lives behind them. The Victorians cleaned up after the Romantics, and then successive waves of Romantic revolt broke out and were squelched by successive waves of reaction, all the way up to the mid-twentieth century.
²⁰
The liberating 1960s and ’70s were the definitive eruption of that volcano the Victorians were sitting on. After that party, an awful lot of people woke up in a trashed house with a splitting headache. If we’re tired of ping-ponging back and forth between those two extremes, Jane Austen offers something entirely different. She’s an emissary from the pre-Romantic world, from a time before happiness had become boring.

Living as we do in the long wake of Romanticism, we’ve spent all our lives liberated from the constraints the original Romantics chafed at. We’ve mostly already experienced the heady delights of Romantic-style love—and the hangover that inevitably follows. We’ve been able to pursue intensity,
authenticity, and liberation in relationships to our hearts’ content. Except our hearts aren’t content. And happiness doesn’t seem so boring anymore.

So we’re ripe for Jane Austen’s pitch against Romanticism and for happy love. On the other hand, actually learning to manage love the Jane Austen way is going to be harder in our post-Romantic era than it looks. To understand love as Jane Austen heroines experience it, in all its firm realism, sparkle, exhilaration, and solid hope of happiness, we have to shake free of the Romantic trap. In aid of that goal, Jane Austen wrote a whole novel giving us a flesh-and-blood heroine
²¹
who misses her happy ending because she approaches love the Romantic way—paired with another heroine who does manage to find happy love à la Jane Austen.
Sense and Sensibility
is a blow-by-blow account of the serious havoc that capital-R Romantic love can wreak in a woman’s life, plus a template for successful unRomantic romantic love. It’s the subject of the next chapter.