CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1
Julia Bertram makes no “endeavour at rational tranquillity for herself” after she realizes that Henry Crawford doesn’t love her. But Fanny is suspicious of Henry, supposing “that he wanted ... to cheat her of her tranquillity, as he had cheated [her cousins].” And Elinor hopes in time, if Edmund marries Lucy, to get over her broken heart and “regain tranquillity.”
2
“For a day or two after the affront was given, Henry Crawford had endeavoured to do [Julia’s resentment at his preference for her sister] away by the usual attack of gallantry and compliment, but he had not cared enough about it to persevere against a few repulses; and becoming soon too busy with his play to have time for more than one flirtation, he grew indifferent to the quarrel, or rather thought it a lucky occurrence, as quietly putting an end to what might ere long have raised expectations....”
3
“There was a return of [Mr. Rushworth’s] jealousy, which Maria, from increasing hopes of Crawford, was at little pains to remove.”
4
There’s a P. J. O’Rourke story about a girl he was in love with in his misspent youth. The way he tells the tale, everything was perfect: “She was the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.... We slept in a hug, arms and legs tangled together. I’ve never been able to sleep that way with anyone else. It’s claustrophobic now, or an arm goes to sleep.”
He was in love with her. But he couldn’t bring himself to commit: “She wanted to get married. But I was a poor kid who could see the future. Me with a teacher’s salary and her at home with the kids—a sea of small debts, rented homes, and used cars stretched out before us, a life like my parents’ or hers.... I was too cowardly to go through with it.... I’d never made love
to anyone but Juanita. I wanted to fuck all the women in the world. So I did not do the decent thing and make her breasts and belly swell and buy a pair of matching goldlike rings. I didn’t even treat her very well.” “Ghosts of Responsibility,”
Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut
(The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995), pp. 78–80.
I don’t think this is at all an uncommon attitude among men, and particularly among men who feel that they haven’t got their own lives together yet—which is, unfortunately, a large and increasing proportion of the men out there these days. When they feel their enthusiasm for you pulling them to get beyond living in the moment and make a commitment, they dig in their heels and commit in the other direction—to their own freedom, to have the option to enjoy themselves with multiple women in the future. Some guys just aren’t ready to commit to any woman. As O’Rourke has said more recently, it’s a good thing he and his wife were grownups when they fell in love, so they knew what to do about it. He’s now happily married with three children.
5
Like Captain Wentworth: “It was now his object to marry. He was rich, and being turned on shore, fully intended to settle as soon as he could be properly tempted; actually looking round, ready to fall in love with all the speed which a clear head and quick taste could allow.” He tells his sister, “‘Yes, here I am, Sophia, quite ready to make a foolish match. Anybody between fifteen and thirty may have me for asking. A little beauty, and a few smiles, and a few compliments to the Navy, and I am a lost man.’”
6
“Some Enchanted Evening,”
South Pacific
, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, music by Richard Rodgers.
7
As a matter of fact, the high tide of Frank’s belief that Emma guesses his secret love for Jane is also the high point of Emma’s belief that he’s in love with herself—his farewell call to Hartfield to say good-bye to Emma at the end of his first visit to Highbury. For a while Emma
was
interested in Frank Churchill, and it’s not his fault that his attention doesn’t end in a lot of pain for her. Later, Emma tells Mr. Knightley, “I will farther tell you, that there was a period in the early part of our acquaintance, when I did like him, when I was very much disposed to be attached to him—nay, was attached—and how it came to cease, is perhaps the wonder.” And Mr. Knightley justly remarks to her that Frank was “playing a most dangerous game. Too much indebted to the event for his acquittal.—No judge of his own manners by you.—Always deceived in fact by his own wishes, and regardless of little besides his own convenience.” As we’ve seen, even though Emma isn’t really in love with him, she can’t help making the characteristic
female errors about Frank: she thinks his attention to her means more than it does, and she’s astonished to discover that he’s really in love with another woman. And even though he is in love with somebody else, Frank can’t help making the characteristic male errors about Emma: he pays her the kind of attention that’s bound to seem more serious to her than to him, and he underestimates the power that attention has on her.
8
Though this is a judgment that Elizabeth has to back down from to some extent after she reads Darcy’s letter. Bingley’s lack of “resolution” in courting Jane against the advice of Darcy and his sisters wasn’t really blamable if he had no reason to believe she was in love with him. And, Jane, Elizabeth eventually realizes, is particularly hard to read; there’s an unusual disconnect between her “fervent” feelings and the “constant complacency” of her manner.
9
It’s not likely to be his social-climbing sisters and overbearing friend deciding that your family’s inferior connections, ignorance, and lack of propriety make you unworthy of him—and besides, they hope he’ll marry the overbearing friend’s younger sister.
10
“All In,” by Lifehouse (2010).
12
Here Jeffries is referring to his branded “four doorways into any woman’s mind and emotions.”
13
The last hour of the concert is “an hour of agitation” to her. “She could not quit that room in peace without seeing Captain Wentworth once more, without the interchange of one friendly look.”
14
“He would save himself from witnessing again such permitted, encouraged attentions.—He had gone to learn to be indifferent.”
15
That’s why she feels she has “acquitted herself well” when she manages to say in Wentworth’s presence that she “might not attend” to what Mr. Elliot had said about where and when he was leaving Bath; every bit of evidence of her indifference to Mr. Elliot that Anne can make clear is so much encouragement to Captain Wentworth.
16
Which she does so beautifully in her discussion with Captain Harville about men and women in love.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1
Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider,
The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right
(Warner Books, 1997), p. 82.
2
Wentworth to Anne: “Tell me if, when I returned to England in the year eight, with a few thousand pounds, and was posted into the Laconia, if I had written to you, would you have answered my letter? Would you, in short, have renewed the engagement then?”
3
Except Marianne, until it’s too late.
4
Remember Elizabeth Bennet’s conversion from the Romantic “method” of falling in love, “arising on a first interview with its object, and even before two words have been exchanged,” to the genuine Jane Austen “esteem”-based “mode of attachment.”
5
As Fanny says about Henry Crawford, incidentally pointing up the absurdity of Richardson’s tongue-in-cheek rule according to which a woman would wait to fall in love until the man had actually proposed: “I had not an idea that his behaviour before had any meaning; and surely I was not to be teaching myself to like him only because he was taking, what seemed, very idle notice of me .... How then was I to be—to be in love with him the moment he said he was with me? How was I to have an attachment at his service, as soon as it was asked for?”
If Fanny had fallen in love with Henry when he started taking notice of her, that would have been too soon. Almost certainly he’d have been happy just to mess with her head, satisfied with the success of his “wicked project on her peace.” Henry would have amused himself by winning her heart and then moved on, exactly as he did with Maria and Julia. But now that Fanny has been indifferent to him long enough to spark his real interest, she’s too slow for him. He’s already passionately in love with her, and she hasn’t even begun to care for him.
6
“When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,” by Bob Dylan (1985).
7
When Mr. Collins deludes himself that she’s refusing his proposal for that reason, she answers that she has “no pretension whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man.”
8
As she explains to Darcy when, long after the fact, she can see how it all happened.
10
Notice that only some of the men in Jane Austen fall in love or are hurried along that path because they’re unsure of the woman, because she seems immune to their charms, or because they’re jealous: Henry Crawford with Fanny, of course (and note that Edmund is entirely unaware of how Fanny loves him until he’s
already decided he wants to marry her); Darcy with Elizabeth; Mr. Knightley with Emma. Others begin to love or take encouragement only because the woman loves them first: Henry Tilney with Catherine, Willoughby with Marianne.
11
How Lucy captivated Robert Ferrars, while engaged to his brother: “Instead of talking of Edward, they came gradually to talk only of Robert,—a subject on which he had always more to say than on any other, and in which she soon betrayed an interest even equal to his own.”
12
Whose “wheedl[ing]” and “caress[ing]” of Sir Walter may eventually succeed in persuading him to marry her.
13
In answer to Elizabeth’s scruples, Charlotte falls back on the cynical idea that “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance,” so there’s no need for Jane to take any more time to study Bingley’s character.
14
Consider the description of Charlotte’s “scheme” to catch Mr. Collins: “Miss Lucas perceived him from an upper window as he walked towards the house, and instantly set out to meet him accidentally in the lane. But little had she dared to hope that so much love and eloquence awaited her there.”
15
They laugh at themselves, or else they’re “secretly forming a desperate resolution” if they take even such innocuous measures as when Anne manages to sit at the end of a row at a concert so that Wentworth can approach her more easily, or as when Elizabeth gets up her courage to thank Darcy for helping arrange Lydia’s marriage, hoping the subject will make an opening for him to propose again.
16
Though Jane Austen heroines are quite alive to the sad fact that our suffering does entertain other people, and quite eager to avoid, where possible, being fodder for that kind of amusement. After Louisa’s accident: “By this time the report of the accident had spread among the workmen and boatmen about the Cobb, and many were collected near them, to be useful if wanted; at any rate, to enjoy the sight of a dead young lady, nay, two dead young ladies, for it proved twice as fine as the first report.” And Mr. Bennet: “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”
17
“She could not enter the house again, could not be in the same room to which she had with such vain artifice retreated three months ago, to lace up her boot, without
recollecting
. A thousand vexatious thoughts would recur.”
18
“Catching” husbands is “not an employment to which” Jane Austen heroines “have been brought up,” though the Romantic Mrs. Dashwood does say so. They’re not susceptible to John Dashwood’s cynical advice: “But some of those little attentions and encouragements which ladies can so easily give, will fix him, in spite of himself.”
19
According to Mr. Allen’s advice in
Northanger Abbey
.
21
Though her preparation isn’t perfect, of course. When Lucy tricks the Dashwoods’ servant into reporting that she has married Edward, Elinor “found the difference between the expectation of an unpleasant event, however certain the mind may be told to consider it, and certainty itself.... She condemned her heart for the lurking flattery, which so much heightened the pain of the intelligence.”
22
“To think of him as Miss Crawford might be justified in thinking, would in her be insanity. To her he could be nothing under any circumstances; nothing dearer than a friend. Why did such an idea occur to her even enough to be reprobated and forbidden? It ought not to have touched on the confines of her imagination. She would endeavour to be rational, and to deserve the right of judging of Miss Crawford’s character, and the privilege of true solicitude for him by a sound intellect and an honest heart.” We’ve seen that, if Edmund had married Mary Crawford, Fanny’s self control would have prepared her for what Jane Austen calls elsewhere “the only thoroughly natural, happy and sufficient cure” for lost love—falling in love with another man.
23
“How she might have felt [about Mr. Elliot] had there been no Captain Wentworth in the case, was not worth enquiry; for there was a Captain Wentworth; and be the conclusion of the present suspense good or bad, her affection would be his for ever. Their union, she believed, could not divide her more from other men than their final separation.”
24
Not to mention a guarantee that he can’t blindside her after ten apparently happy years by announcing that he no longer loves her, he wants a divorce, and their family home will be sold out from under her and the proceeds applied to two new separate, unwelcome futures.