A Jane Austen Education(62)
Mr. Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice—condemned to doing battle with his wife’s eternal “nerves”—was one. Sir Thomas Bertram, in Mansfield Park—the proud possessor of a useless trophy wife—was another. In Sense and Sensibility, a certain Mr. Palmer made a third—having married a silly little dumpling with “a very pretty face” who “came in with a smile, smiled all the time of her visit, except when she laughed, and smiled when she went away,” and whom her husband, only twenty-five or -six, had already made a habit of ignoring.
Somehow, though she died a virgin, Austen understood all this. For her heroes and heroines, sexual attraction was always the last thing, never the first. It didn’t create affection, it flowed from it. Her heroines were usually not paragons of beauty. (If we think otherwise, that is, once again, because of the movies.) Anne Elliot, in Persuasion, was faded. Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, was “not plain-looking.” Catherine Morland, in Northanger Abbey, was “almost pretty.” And Elizabeth Bennet, of course, was “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.” Other young ladies—Jane Bennet, Isabella Thorpe, Mary Crawford, Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove—often overshadowed them. But their looks grew on you, snuck up on you, as you got to know them, until one day you found yourself considering them, as someone finally said about Elizabeth, “one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance.” As for Austen’s heroes, they tended to the quiet, steady, sensitive type. It often took a while to be attracted to them, too. Her villains were the dashing ones, the flashy ones, the talkers and the flirters. She liked the kind of man who let his character speak for itself.
But none of this meant that her lovers—or her stories, or Austen herself—were passionless. If that was less obvious than many readers through the years have wanted it to be—Charlotte Bront? missing “what throbs fast and full,” Mark Twain feeling “like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven”—it wasn’t out of bloodlessness, but tact. Sir Walter Scott himself, in one of the earliest reviews of Austen’s work, had lodged the same complaint. In Emma, he said, “Cupid walks decorously, and with good discretion, bearing his torch under a lanthorn [i.e., lantern], instead of flourishing it around to set the house on fire.” The key word there, however, is “discretion.” If Elinor refused to admit that what she felt for Edward was love, that was only because, unlike her histrionic sister, she wanted to preserve her privacy. Such feelings were too precious to violate by talking about.
Her creator felt the same. Of course her lovers were passionate—even Elinor and Edward, as I now saw: more deeply, more truly passionate than a butterfly like Willoughby could ever understand. All the more reason, then, to shield their intimacy from our prying eyes. The most remarkable thing about the love scenes with which her novels culminated, I realized—another thing the movies never stand for—was that she always turned away at the moment of truth. The hero was about to propose, the heroine was about to accept—their passion was about to be revealed at last—and Austen knew we wanted nothing more than to hear the words that sealed their happiness. And yet she always teasingly withheld them. “In what manner he expressed himself,” we read in Sense and Sensibility, “and how he was received, need not be particularly told.” “What did she say?” she asked of Emma. “Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.” It was too private; it was none of our business. And that was the most romantic thing of all.
What did that happiness consist of—the happiness her lovers achieved? The critic who said that friendship was “the true light of life” in Austen’s view was only, I saw, half right. Friendship, he meant, as opposed to love. But for Austen, friendship was the very essence of love. However mad the statement made both Marianne and us, Elinor was onto something after all: “I do not attempt to deny that I think very highly of him—that I greatly esteem, that I like him.” When I went back and looked at the other novels, I found the very same ideas. “She respected, she esteemed, she was grateful to him,” I read of Elizabeth Bennet, “she felt a real interest in his welfare.” “He is very good natured,” said Emma’s ditzy friend Harriet Smith, getting it wrong for the right reasons, “and I shall always feel much obliged to him, and have a great regard for—but that is quite a different thing from—.” No, I finally saw, it’s exactly the same.
If love begins in friendship, I was now able to see, it has to adhere to the principles of friendship as Austen understood them. The lover’s highest role, like the friend’s, is to help you to become a better person: push you, if necessary, even at the risk of wounded feelings. Austen’s lovers challenged each other: to be less selfish, more aware, kinder, more considerate—not only toward each other but to everyone around them. Love, I saw, for Austen—and what a change this was from the days of my rebellious youth—is an agent not of subversion, but of socialization. Lovers aren’t supposed to goad each other toward extremes of transgression, the way that Marianne and Willoughby did; they’re supposed to teach each other the value of behaving with propriety and decorum, show each other that society’s expectations are worthy, after all, of respect. Love, for Austen, is not about remaining forever young. It’s about becoming an adult.
Austen understood, even cherished, the passions of youth, but she also knew that that is all they are. “There is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind,” said an older character of Marianne, “that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.” It’s natural to believe the things that Marianne and I had believed about love, but it’s also necessary, if melancholy, to give them up. Austen had respect for Elinor, but it was perfectly clear that the character she loved the most in Sense and Sensibility was her sister. Yet just because she loved her so much, she loved her enough to want to see her happy. And for Austen, as I already knew, the key to happiness was letting life surprise you.