A Jane Austen Education(58)

Maybe the problem, I finally realized, was the myths. Marianne thought that Willoughby reminded her of the heroes of her favorite stories, and I had clung to that relationship because the way it started seemed like something from a movie. We had both been deluded by our expectations about what love was supposed to look like. It was Northanger Abbey all over again: conventional beliefs, derived from fiction, that turned out to bear no relationship to reality.

But didn’t Austen’s other books promote those same beliefs? Now that I really thought about what made them feel romantic, I saw to my chagrin that the answer was no. She made us adore her heroines and admire her heroes, made us long to see them get together, devised ingenious ways to keep them apart and finally unite them, teased us with a whole array of traps and feints and surprises, but search as I might, I could never find a single one of those clichés in which I’d put such faith.

I had simply imposed my ideas of romance on Austen’s novels without really thinking about it—just as the people who make those adaptations always seem to do. The Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice may not alter the basic story, but it does embellish it with all the trappings of movie love: swelling music, windswept vistas, glowing sunsets. Elizabeth strikes moody poses, her lover strides towards her through waving fields of grass, the two lock lips with hungry urgency. But why shouldn’t they? The young woman whom Mr. Darcy called “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me” is drop-dead gorgeous now. Patricia Rozema’s travesty of Mansfield Park (the one with Harold Pinter as Sir Thomas) turns prudish little Fanny Price into a naughty and bold young rebel with teasing eyes and a sensuous mouth. The 1995 Persuasion ends, unthinkably, with a public, premarital kiss. Even the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice, more faithful to Austen than most, plunges the overheated hero into the water (a sigh goes up around the world) in scarcely more than his skivvies.

But Austen, of course, was way ahead of us. She knew what we’d be thinking, and in Sense and Sensibility, I now saw, she headed us off at the pass. Which was where Mansfield Park came in. That novel told us something essential—that goodness was more important than wit—that her other books allowed us to miss. And it did so by separating the two qualities into different characters (Fanny on the one hand, Mary Crawford on the other) and challenging us to go against our instincts as to which one we ought to prefer. So it was, I now saw, here. Austen’s other novels were all so romantic in obvious ways that we didn’t need to pay attention to what really made them so. Now, by putting the two on different sides, she forced us to tell them apart. Elinor was to Marianne what Fanny was to Mary Crawford: the less appealing choice, but the right one. Marianne got the storybook romance; Elinor got what Austen called true love.




Once I opened my mind to this possibility, it started to make perfect sense. For Elinor-love—and Elizabeth-love and Emmalove and love in all the other novels, now that I really thought about it—was perfectly consistent with everything else I’d learned from Austen: about goodness, about growing up, about learning, about friendship.

For her, I saw, love is not something that happens to you, suddenly or otherwise; it’s something you have to prepare yourself for. As long as Elizabeth thought that she was right about everything, as long as Emma disdained the people around her, as long as Marianne ignored her sister’s advice about the things she owed her neighbors and family, their hearts remained closed. For Austen, before you can fall in love with someone else, you have to come to know yourself. In other words, you have to grow up. Love isn’t going to magically transform you, make you into a better or even a different person—another myth that I’d bought into—it can only work with what you already are.

Like it said in Northanger Abbey, we have to learn to love. I knew those words applied to loving things like hyacinths or novels, but I never really thought that they applied to, you know, love love, romantically loving another person. What could be more natural than falling in love? Strange as it seemed, however, Austen was saying that we aren’t actually born knowing how. Youth is not a necessity in her idea of romance; it’s an impediment. Yes, most of her heroines were quite young by our standards, but by the time they fell in love, they had shed their innocence and ignorance. One, of course, was even as old as Marianne’s dreaded twenty-seven, and two of Austen’s heroes were at least thirty-five. As for Marianne herself, she began the novel at sixteen but ended it some three years older—as old as her sister, and finally as wise, as when the story started.

But knowing yourself, Austen taught me, is not enough. You also need to know the person you fall in love with, and despite what Marianne and I believed, this doesn’t happen overnight. To Austen, love at first sight is a contradiction in terms. Lust at first sight, a whole train of fantasies and projections at first sight—those she recognized. But love at first sight, never. As dull as it sounded, I now saw, Elinor’s way of going about things is the right one: to see a great deal of a person, to study their sentiments, to hear their opinions. Needless to say, neither a moment nor a week can suffice for such an operation; only a long, patient acquaintance is enough. A person’s character, as Marianne—and Elizabeth Bennet, and I myself—all discovered to our sorrow, could not be read at a glance. And it is a person’s character, not their body, with which we fall in love.

None of this happens rationally, though, as if you drew up a checklist of pros and cons—another cinematic cliché—and toted up the sum. Elinor’s way, I recognized, is every bit as intuitive as Marianne’s, and, if anything, takes place at a deeper level. Not only does love not strike you in an instant, it turned out, it doesn’t even “strike” you at all. You never know the moment that you fall in love, in Austen’s vision; you only discover you already have. “Will you tell me how long you have loved him?” Elizabeth was asked near the end of Pride and Prejudice. “It has been coming on so gradually,” she replied, “that I hardly know when it began.” As for Elinor and Edward, I realized, we never even heard about it. At one point it was “like,” at another it was “love,” and Austen simply trusted us to understand that the first had slowly turned into the second.