A Jane Austen Education(57)

And thus we feel, like Marianne, that true love is wild and free, that it knows no bounds or rules. We skip classes, make love outdoors, take crazy risks that turn us into people our friends don’t recognize. When Marianne and Willoughby first got together—this was what frightened her sister the most—they threw propriety to the wind, shamelessly displaying their intimacy for all to see, neglecting their obligations toward their neighbors (and laughing behind their backs about it), driving alone around the countryside in the most scandalous way. For Marianne—as for Romeo and Juliet, who came from feuding clans, and Paolo and Francesca, who committed adultery—true love proves itself by overrunning conventional boundaries and norms. It is, by its very nature, illicit, dangerous, rebellious.




I could certainly relate to what Marianne was going through. I had once felt something like it myself, the summer I was eighteen. It happened at camp, in youth movement, but it didn’t even wait until we got to camp to start. We were milling around the movement office in New York, waiting for the bus to take us up, when I rounded a corner and felt my face go hot. My body must’ve gotten the message before my brain figured out what was happening. There she was, sitting on a desk like she’d been waiting for me, the most beautiful girl I had ever seen—no, the only girl I had ever seen. “Hi!” she said, with a smile like the blue sky. “Hi,” I replied, beating an unsteady retreat, kind of blown back by the power of it all and not exactly sure where my arms and legs were at the moment.

But I had managed, in that split second, to catch a look on her face that told me that it wasn’t a question of if, but when. After that, no matter where I was—on the bus ride up, during our first few days at camp—it felt as though I had a rope coming out of the back of my head that was connected to wherever she happened to be, as if she were always somehow standing right behind me. It didn’t take long before we started spending an awful lot of time together. My heart had stopped flopping around quite so clumsily by then and we seemed to be drawn together by a kind of gravitational pull. Without ever planning it, we always just happened to end up sitting together, or walking together, or finally—well, finally, we became a couple.

I was eighteen, for God’s sake. There was nothing but her face, nothing but her eyes. The summer held its breath for us. I’d never said “I love you” before, and now it seemed beside the point to ever say anything else. I walked around in a trance: I couldn’t believe that anything could feel so strong, feel so pure. We kissed until our lips were chapped. One afternoon, we were sitting there beneath an apple tree. “Do you ever feel like we’re the same person?” I said. She looked down. She looked up. “Yes,” she said.

The summer breathed out: it was over. Camp was over; life was over. I felt like I was splitting apart, like there was a hole between my arms where her body was supposed to be. She was from Texas, and still in high school. We’d never said it out loud, but we both knew that we’d come to the end. We had no e-mail, of course, no long-distance, no control over our lives and no hope of seeing each other again. Even writing seemed beside the point. The only thing that didn’t seem beside the point was curling up in a ball and trying to disappear.





So I completely sympathized with Marianne. Like everyone else, I believed in her idea of love, and it drove me crazy that Austen didn’t seem to. Or at least, she didn’t seem to in Sense and Sensibility. Weren’t her other books incredibly romantic? Was I missing something here?

The movie of the novel only left me more perplexed. How had the filmmakers managed to endow the same story with so much feeling? When I went back and looked more carefully, I realized how: by cheating. They didn’t change Marianne and Willoughby’s story—they didn’t need to—but they sure changed Elinor and Edward’s. They gave Edward an adorably dry sense of humor. They gave him a sweet, big-brotherly relationship with Margaret, the youngest Dashwood sister, who scarcely appeared in the novel as more than a name. Of course, they also had him played by Hugh Grant, who not only bumbles more charmingly than anyone since Jimmy Stewart, but who’s as handsome as they come. And by granting Elinor herself a new depth of feeling—taking leave of Norland, she stroked a horse in pensive farewell, a scene that was absent from the novel—they made that character lovable, too.

The same went for the other match that ended the story—which was, in the book, even more unromantic than Elinor and Edward’s. In Austen’s version Marianne was more or less forced to marry a man she had just begun to like and certainly didn’t love, and the whole business was dispatched, as a kind of afterthought, in barely more than a page, as if to openly defy our resistance. But the movie borrowed flourishes from Austen’s other books—the surprise gift of a piano from Emma, the murmuring of verse à deux from Persuasion—to give the thing the lineaments of romance.

Now it was easy to see why both couples would fall in love. But that only left me more puzzled as to why Austen had made it so hard. The novel may have been an early effort, but it wasn’t as if she lacked the means—or desire—to write a ravishing love story at that point in her career. She had already written Pride and Prejudice, her most devastating romance of all.

And then I finally remembered two things. One was Mansfield Park, the other novel that had seemed to stand against everything that I thought Austen believed. The other was my relationship with the woman I had met at the wedding in Michigan. Of course, I thought. How could I have been so blind? I had just had a Marianne-and-Willoughby romance, and it had crashed and burned in no time flat. Fate, soul mates, love at first sight, throwing caution to the wind—it had had all the elements, adhered to all the myths, and it had all been totally wrong.