A Jane Austen Education(18)
No suffering, no growth—and no recollection, no suffering. We have to see what we’ve done, we have to feel it, and finally, we have to remember it. Even after her disgrace, Lydia seemed to have “the happiest memories in the world. Nothing of the past was recollected with pain.” Why was she able to have so clear a conscience about the things she’d done? Because she just pretended that they never happened. Nor was she the only one; the Bennets’ whole social circle was no better. After they discovered the awful truth about a young gentleman with whom they had all been delighted, “every body declared that he was the wickedest young man in the world; and every body began to find out, that they had always distrusted the appearance of his goodness.” It takes courage, Austen was telling us, to admit your mistakes, and even more courage to remember them.
How tempting it is to rewrite our personal history in a more flattering way, and how familiar we all are with the person who experiences a moment of self-knowledge—after a breakup or a failure or a sin—only to go right back to being the same person they always were. For Austen, maturation means refusing to forget. Humiliation, for her, is a gift that keeps on giving. “Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure,” Elizabeth remarked at the end of the novel, but as usual, she was being ironic. In fact, she said it to the very person who she knew would keep her honest by continuing to point out her mistakes and remind her of what she had done.
Elizabeth had come to understand, at last, what growing up means, and she had also come to recognize that if you do it right, it never stops. Not only wasn’t I born perfect, in other words, I was never going to be perfect, either. Becoming an adult was not going to give me the right to become complacent. Again, Austen offered a perfect example of what not to do. Elizabeth’s father was a good man who had allowed his character to go to seed by choosing a wife who was never going to be able to challenge him, someone to whom it was far too easy to feel superior. Living with a woman like Mrs. Bennet had made him self-satisfied and morally lazy, and his children suffered as a result. He could have done a lot more to make his daughters financially secure, and when the great crisis came for his family, he turned out to be pretty much useless. If I was going to keep growing, Austen was telling me, I needed to stay on my toes. Fortunately, I had something to help me do so that Elizabeth and her father didn’t. I had Pride and Prejudice.
Jane Austen was about a year old when another English author wrote a statement that could serve as a motto for all her books. “Life is a comedy for those who think,” said Horace Walpole, “and a tragedy for those who feel.” Everyone thinks, and everyone feels, but Jane Austen’s question was, which are you going to put first? Comedies are stories with happy endings. I could grow up and find happiness, Austen was letting me know, but only if I was willing to give up something very important. Not my feelings, but my belief in my feelings, my conviction that they were always right.
This was not easy to swallow. We tend to believe that our emotions are reliable indicators of the way things are in the world. How many times have you heard someone say, “I have a good feeling about this”—a college application, a lottery ticket, a new relationship—only to discover that things don’t necessarily work out just because we have a good feeling about them? Older relatives are particularly fond of these kinds of pronouncements. “I know you’ll do well.” “I can’t imagine they won’t hire you.” “I’m sure everything will work out fine.” Really? You’re sure? What makes you so sure? Just because you happen to like me?
This was exactly Elizabeth’s problem, I realized, as Pride and Prejudice began. She thought she was right because she felt she was right. Mr. Darcy offended her, so he must be a terrible man. Her sister Jane was lovable, so how could anyone not want his friend to marry her? Elizabeth thought she was thinking, but she was really only feeling—resentment, affection, desire—and her great intelligence made her more susceptible to this delusion, not less. Only later did she realize, after the humiliating recognition of her many mistakes, that head and heart can disagree, and that when they do, the head should win.
This was the conflict that Austen expressed in the title of her very first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, and embodied in its two main characters. Elinor Dashwood was sensible; her little sister Marianne was full of sensibility or feeling. Early in the book, the two had an argument that laid out the matter very squarely. “I am afraid,” Elinor said, rebuking Marianne for having gone about unchaperoned with a young man, “that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.” The fact that something feels good, in other words, does not make it right. “On the contrary,” Marianne replied, “nothing can be a stronger proof of it . . . if there had been any real impropriety in what I did, I should have been sensible of it at the time, for we always know when we are acting wrong.”
We always know when we are acting wrong: how simple life would be if only that were true. Marianne was a romantic, in both senses. She believed that love is more important than anything else, and certainly more important than what her straitlaced older sister thought was proper. And she was also a devotee of the Romantic movement that was sweeping the West in Austen’s day. Austen viewed that movement with alarm precisely because of what it said about the proper relationship between feeling and reason. Romanticism taught that society and its conventions are confining and artificial and destructive, and that reason was simply another one of those conventions, not a source of truth. It taught that the real source of truth was Nature, and that if we only followed the nature within us—our spontaneous impulses and feelings—we would be good and happy and free. A romantic is someone who thinks that if their heart is in the right place, it doesn’t matter where their brain is. That was what Marianne meant: that our emotions are a moral compass that can never steer us wrong. If something is pleasant, it must be proper. If it feels good, it is good.