Jane Austen on the Disasters of Love
Barbara Confino
Narcissistic con-men are the currency of the day in contemporary America; but the early nineteenth century was not unfamiliar with the type. Jane Austen would have recognized one immediately. Predatory narcissists, both male and female, feature prominently in her novels.
In Sense and Sensibility Willoughby goes around cheerfully ruining young girls lives, until, stuck with the one he finally marries, he feels something like regret for the one who got away. George Wickham in Pride and Prejudice also finds himself married to someone he will soon grow to detest, the ever prattling Lydia.
Indeed, considering her reputation as a writer of romance and courtship, it is curious how often Jane Austen uses marriage as a type of punishment. It is like a permanent form of house arrest — a legitimized hell. Once in, only death can get you out. Men who marry for sex (and beauty) or for money are singled out as foolish.
But it is women, most especially women, she truly worries about.
Female high spirits in general seem to frighten her. Too close to hysteria, perhaps, for her liking. Marianne in Sense and Sensibility is a rather histrionic young woman, the kind that today would get a passionate crush on a rock star and pass out at a concert. This behavior, she spares no pains to tell us, is a very bad thing. Like the Maenads who tore Orpheus to pieces, these hysterical young women could very easily rip their idols to shreds.
Often enough she punishes her effervescent young females by marrying them off to dull men. Louisa in Persuasion, Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, Emma in Emma — all three are placed under the guardianship of extremely sober and unexciting men. For these vivacious and lively young girls — heedless rather than wicked — marriage becomes a kind of perpetual chastisement.
Underneath the charming prose is a cautionary tale: excessive emotion endangers women. By their own heedlessness as well as the unscrupulous devices of others, their well-being is threatened.
What is it she so distrusts about spontaneity? About impulsiveness? Are they the direct expressions of an animal nature that culture tries, often unsuccessfully, to control? Is it au fond the battle between our biological drives and our social and economic needs? The very thing the Romantics extolled — pure unfettered action — Austen thinks liable to land a young woman in permanent hot water. Pregnancy and poverty.
In this respect no one could be further from the Romantic point of view than Jane Austen. Although she mocked personality flaws and laughed at social absurdities whenever she could, she revered the social rules that governed people’s lives. When they transgress, as Lydia does in Pride and Prejudice, they court disaster, for themselves and their families.
For male lust and female emotionalism are the Scylla and Charybdis of biological life from which both men and women need protection, and culture, Austen seems to say, was designed to do just that.
In our post-Romantic age restraint is an unpopular virtue, as the
#metoo movement attests, but one from which we might benefit as well.
