A Jane Austen Education(17)

In drama, this is known as the moment of recognition. Oedipus discovers his horrible crime. King Lear understands how terribly he has wronged his youngest daughter. Fortunately, the errors that Elizabeth made were neither so dire nor so final. Pride and Prejudice was a comedy, after all, not a tragedy, as stories about young people, who have time to correct their mistakes, usually are. But at that moment, after she had come to her awful knowledge, a tragedy was exactly what it looked as if the novel might become. Elizabeth not only saw how badly she had acted, she realized what it had cost her. A great happiness had been within her grasp, she now understood, and pride and prejudice had made her fling it away.

None of us, I knew, would ever wish this on ourselves, let alone on our children. But if we are lucky, Austen was telling me, it will happen nonetheless. Because my father was wrong: you can’t learn from other people’s mistakes; you can only learn from your own. Austen was making her beloved Elizabeth miserable because she knew that that’s what growing up requires. For it is never enough to know that you have done wrong: you also have to feel it.





If there was ever a time that I felt it, it was that very summer. The truth is that Elizabeth Bennet was not the only woman I was in love with then. I was also in the throes of a gigantic crush on a woman I had met that spring. I was twenty-eight, she was twenty-one—the ages, come to think of it, of a hero and heroine in a Jane Austen novel. She was just graduating from college, and my feelings for her were an agonized confusion of desire and protectiveness. She was lovely and gentle and smart, with a slow smile that seemed to light up from within and an ironic sense of humor that came out with a raucous laugh. Our friendship flared up fast and bright. Here was someone, I saw, who could be a true companion.

My life got very simple that summer. My exams and her were the only things in it. Sharpening my brain against those hundred books, and wringing my heart for the want of her. The two ran together. She became my muse, my goal, the face that I saw when I looked through the page. Spending time in her company was the one exception I made to my rule of monastic seclusion. We would walk around the city, talking for hours about art and ideas and all the people we knew. We went to museums, we went to the theater, we would joke and compare notes and trade observations.

But none of it was any good. Because reliably, pretty much every time we got together, I would manage to say something idiotic and hurtful: pretentious or sexist or condescending. “Notice the way Matisse plays with color” (as if I were some kind of audio guide), or, “You should really read some more Freud” (though she’d probably read more than I had), or, “You’ll understand these things when you get to be my age” (my age! all of twenty-eight!). It was a kind of compulsion. Reading Emma had helped me to become more aware of the people around me and how I affected them, and it certainly enabled me to become less callous and mean, and yet still, like Elizabeth, I thought I was just so damn smart that I couldn’t stop myself from giving the rest of the world the benefit of my wisdom. My ego was so wrapped up in feeling superior that I had to parade it even (or maybe especially) to the person I loved. And every time I did, she would just look at me, wary but brave, and let me know what a complete jerk I was being. And every single time, I wanted to sink into the ground. Because I had blown it again; now, I thought, she would never want to be with me.

And in fact, she never did. She was my friend, but she never became my girlfriend. Yet the shame of it all, and the grief at what it had cost me, burned those lessons into my brain. She wasn’t the first person to tell me I was arrogant and condescending—far, far from it—but because she mattered so much more to me than anyone ever had, she was the first to get through.

So when, after a couple of months of this, I read Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s experiences made perfect sense to me—or I should say made perfect sense of me, of what I had been going through. Our egos, Austen was telling me, prevent us from owning up to our errors and flaws, and so our egos must be broken down—exactly what humiliation does, and why it makes us feel so worthless. “Humiliation,” after all, comes from “humility.” It humbles us, makes us properly humble. So just as Pride and Prejudice taught me that it’s okay to make mistakes, it also told me that it’s okay to feel bad about them. Austen understood that growing up hurts—that it has to hurt, because otherwise it won’t happen. And if it was too late, by the time I read the novel, to have the kind of happy ending that Elizabeth eventually did, it made me see that growing up can be a kind of happy ending in itself. Or at least, the promise of one to come.





Shame, humiliation, disgrace: hard feelings to accept if you’ve been brought up to believe that you should never have to experience any pain. In fact, Austen provided a perfect example of the kind of young person who doesn’t accept them—Lydia Bennet, Elizabeth’s youngest sister—and what can happen as a result. Because Lydia was exactly like her mother—it was all too easy to imagine the empty-headed flirt that Mrs. Bennet must once have been—she had always been overindulged: never criticized, never restrained, coddled and fussed over no matter what she did. It was a classic case of overidentification: the mother eager to hold on to the last remnants of her youth by reliving it through her youngest daughter, the daughter only too happy to comply.

By the time she turned fifteen, Lydia was completely unmanageable. Always loud, always laughing, always flirting, never taking anything seriously—never taking her own life seriously. She was an embarrassment, and when she finally did something truly disgraceful, she became more than an embarrassment; she became a scandal. Yet there she was at the end of the novel, still laughing, still perfectly pleased with herself. “I am sure my sisters must all envy me,” she somehow managed to say, though her sisters probably wanted to drown her in a lake. “I only hope they may have half my good luck.” No matter how much pain she caused her family, Lydia was never going to feel the slightest bit of discomfort herself.