Read Online The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After by Elizabeth Kantor - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Elizabeth Kantor
Ads: Link
now and learns about the life he’s made for himself makes it much worse. Not only does she still love him as much as ever, now she understands so much better what marrying him would have meant for her. It would have been a real liberation.
Not just from a humdrum existence into passion, or from the constraints of life in her father’s house to adult independence. But from the prospect of spending the rest of her life with people so consumed by their own snobbery and selfishness that they barely acknowledge her existence—into real love, and life as a valued member of a circle of warm and generous friends. Anne’s pain, like Fanny’s, is real, and worthy of our respect.
Love Is a Happy Thing
If we can’t help asking: “But is their suffering as intense as what a Brontë heroine feels?” well, that’s just evidence that Romantic sensibility clings to the insides of our minds like cobwebs to the corners of an unswept attic. After all, we think, Anne’s broken heart makes her suffer nothing worse than a bit of depression. 17 And even more damning, from the Romantic point of view, she can still “struggle against” it. If Anne were really in love, wouldn’t she be forced to surrender to hopeless agony? In our more Romantic moments, we can’t help thinking that, after all, love is real love only to the degree that, as Nicolas Cage says in Moonstruck , “it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess.” 18 The more we hurt, the more we know we’re really in love. Right?
Wrong. Jane Austen’s answer to these questions is No . Her heroines in pursuit of happiness admittedly don’t suffer as much as the Brontës and their ilk. When Jane Austen describes Elinor Dashwood as “suffering almost as much, certainly with less self-provocation and greater fortitude” than her equally heartbroken (but much more Romantic) sister Marianne, she’s conceding that Elinor’s pain is a degree less.
T IP JUST FOR JANEITES
Despite what we learned from
Cher and Nicolas Cage in
Moonstruck , you can’t tell whether
it’s love or not
by how much it hurts.
Elinor hurts less than Marianne, but it’s not because she loves less. It’s because of that “greater fortitude” in the face of suffering. UnRomantic Jane
Austen heroines don’t wallow in heartbreak. Their struggle to get a firm grip on themselves, and on reality, gives them extraordinary dignity. It makes them less miserable—but not any less in love.
For Jane Austen, love is a happy thing. If it makes you miserable, something’s gone badly wrong. Possibly just with your circumstances: accident and chance, not to mention the lack of enough money to live on, are bound to cause plenty of misery in this imperfect world. But quite often what makes women unhappy in love in Jane Austen novels is something wrong with the man they love—or with themselves. When her heroines have to bear up with “fortitude” through heartbreak, they’re sometimes coming to terms with the fact that the man they love has failed them. If only Edmund weren’t dazzled by Mary Crawford ... if only Captain Wentworth had come back to Anne once he could afford to marry ... if only Edward hadn’t persuaded Elinor to love him when he was already secretly engaged to Lucy Steele. But sometimes Jane Austen’s heroines realize that they’re the ones who’ve made a terrible mistake.
T IP JUST FOR JANEITES
Romantic heroines get
their self-esteem from
the intensity of their misery.
Jane Austen heroines earn their
dignity by exercising heroism
in the face of heartbreak.
And they’re never more admirable than when they’re seeing their own mistakes clearly and undertaking the painful process of setting them right. They’re also never more likely to be headed in the direction of their happy endings. There’s nothing less like the hopeless agony of the Brontë heroine than the fortitude that an Emma Woodhouse, say, shows under the realization that she’s put her own happiness
Not just from a humdrum existence into passion, or from the constraints of life in her father’s house to adult independence. But from the prospect of spending the rest of her life with people so consumed by their own snobbery and selfishness that they barely acknowledge her existence—into real love, and life as a valued member of a circle of warm and generous friends. Anne’s pain, like Fanny’s, is real, and worthy of our respect.
Love Is a Happy Thing
If we can’t help asking: “But is their suffering as intense as what a Brontë heroine feels?” well, that’s just evidence that Romantic sensibility clings to the insides of our minds like cobwebs to the corners of an unswept attic. After all, we think, Anne’s broken heart makes her suffer nothing worse than a bit of depression. 17 And even more damning, from the Romantic point of view, she can still “struggle against” it. If Anne were really in love, wouldn’t she be forced to surrender to hopeless agony? In our more Romantic moments, we can’t help thinking that, after all, love is real love only to the degree that, as Nicolas Cage says in Moonstruck , “it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess.” 18 The more we hurt, the more we know we’re really in love. Right?
Wrong. Jane Austen’s answer to these questions is No . Her heroines in pursuit of happiness admittedly don’t suffer as much as the Brontës and their ilk. When Jane Austen describes Elinor Dashwood as “suffering almost as much, certainly with less self-provocation and greater fortitude” than her equally heartbroken (but much more Romantic) sister Marianne, she’s conceding that Elinor’s pain is a degree less.
T IP JUST FOR JANEITES
Despite what we learned from
Cher and Nicolas Cage in
Moonstruck , you can’t tell whether
it’s love or not
by how much it hurts.
Elinor hurts less than Marianne, but it’s not because she loves less. It’s because of that “greater fortitude” in the face of suffering. UnRomantic Jane
Austen heroines don’t wallow in heartbreak. Their struggle to get a firm grip on themselves, and on reality, gives them extraordinary dignity. It makes them less miserable—but not any less in love.
For Jane Austen, love is a happy thing. If it makes you miserable, something’s gone badly wrong. Possibly just with your circumstances: accident and chance, not to mention the lack of enough money to live on, are bound to cause plenty of misery in this imperfect world. But quite often what makes women unhappy in love in Jane Austen novels is something wrong with the man they love—or with themselves. When her heroines have to bear up with “fortitude” through heartbreak, they’re sometimes coming to terms with the fact that the man they love has failed them. If only Edmund weren’t dazzled by Mary Crawford ... if only Captain Wentworth had come back to Anne once he could afford to marry ... if only Edward hadn’t persuaded Elinor to love him when he was already secretly engaged to Lucy Steele. But sometimes Jane Austen’s heroines realize that they’re the ones who’ve made a terrible mistake.
T IP JUST FOR JANEITES
Romantic heroines get
their self-esteem from
the intensity of their misery.
Jane Austen heroines earn their
dignity by exercising heroism
in the face of heartbreak.
And they’re never more admirable than when they’re seeing their own mistakes clearly and undertaking the painful process of setting them right. They’re also never more likely to be headed in the direction of their happy endings. There’s nothing less like the hopeless agony of the Brontë heroine than the fortitude that an Emma Woodhouse, say, shows under the realization that she’s put her own happiness
Similar Books
