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Authors: Elizabeth Kantor
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at risk. 19 And there’s nothing more classically Jane Austen.
If we want to emulate Jane Austen’s heroines, we’re going to have to learn to admire their ability to “struggle and endure” just as much as Brontë fans admire their heroines’ Romantic self-flagellation. This is real growing up—not the Romantic counterfeit, where breaking away from your parents’
rules or your friends’ standards feels like instant maturity. It’s assuming responsibility for the kind of person you’re going to become.
Jane Austen isn’t trying to talk you out of real adventures. It’s just that she believes in adventures in love, not in drama and narcissism. We have to decide whether those Romantic experiences are worth having—not to mention, worth having if, in pursuit of them, we end up missing the kind of happy love that Elizabeth finds with Darcy. Because remember, of course everybody wants to be happy. But only a few of us will pursue happy love as our real goal, ignoring all the shiny distractions.
Before Happiness Was Boring
We twenty-first-century women are in a better position to give up Romantic illusions and learn from Jane Austen than women have been in any generation since her own. We’re more primed to see through this cult of selfishness masquerading as passion than at any time in the past two hundred years. For one thing, we know so much more about where Romanticism in love actually leads.
On the broader cultural front, we can look back on successive waves of Romantic illusion that ended in real pain. There was the original Romanticism, the Byrons and Shelleys breaking all the rules and leaving a trail of wrecked lives behind them. The Victorians cleaned up after the Romantics, and then successive waves of Romantic revolt broke out and were squelched by successive waves of reaction, all the way up to the mid-twentieth century. 20 The liberating 1960s and ’70s were the definitive eruption of that volcano the Victorians were sitting on. After that party, an awful lot of people woke up in a trashed house with a splitting headache. If we’re tired of ping-ponging back and forth between those two extremes, Jane Austen offers something entirely different. She’s an emissary from the pre-Romantic world, from a time before happiness had become boring.
Living as we do in the long wake of Romanticism, we’ve spent all our lives liberated from the constraints the original Romantics chafed at. We’ve mostly already experienced the heady delights of Romantic-style love—and the hangover that inevitably follows. We’ve been able to pursue intensity,
authenticity, and liberation in relationships to our hearts’ content. Except our hearts aren’t content. And happiness doesn’t seem so boring anymore.
So we’re ripe for Jane Austen’s pitch against Romanticism and for happy love. On the other hand, actually learning to manage love the Jane Austen way is going to be harder in our post-Romantic era than it looks. To understand love as Jane Austen heroines experience it, in all its firm realism, sparkle, exhilaration, and solid hope of happiness, we have to shake free of the Romantic trap. In aid of that goal, Jane Austen wrote a whole novel giving us a flesh-and-blood heroine 21 who misses her happy ending because she approaches love the Romantic way—paired with another heroine who does manage to find happy love à la Jane Austen. Sense and Sensibility is a blow-by-blow account of the serious havoc that capital-R Romantic love can wreak in a woman’s life, plus a template for successful unRomantic romantic love. It’s the subject of the next chapter.
A DOPT AN AUSTEN ATTITUDE:
Take a minute for Jane Austen-style “serious reflection.” How do you picture the kind of love you’re looking for?
Are you pursuing happy love, or are you in the market for drama?
Are you waiting for a relationship to liberate you? (Why do you feel trapped and stifled, and what can you do about it?)
Are you looking for a
If we want to emulate Jane Austen’s heroines, we’re going to have to learn to admire their ability to “struggle and endure” just as much as Brontë fans admire their heroines’ Romantic self-flagellation. This is real growing up—not the Romantic counterfeit, where breaking away from your parents’
rules or your friends’ standards feels like instant maturity. It’s assuming responsibility for the kind of person you’re going to become.
Jane Austen isn’t trying to talk you out of real adventures. It’s just that she believes in adventures in love, not in drama and narcissism. We have to decide whether those Romantic experiences are worth having—not to mention, worth having if, in pursuit of them, we end up missing the kind of happy love that Elizabeth finds with Darcy. Because remember, of course everybody wants to be happy. But only a few of us will pursue happy love as our real goal, ignoring all the shiny distractions.
Before Happiness Was Boring
We twenty-first-century women are in a better position to give up Romantic illusions and learn from Jane Austen than women have been in any generation since her own. We’re more primed to see through this cult of selfishness masquerading as passion than at any time in the past two hundred years. For one thing, we know so much more about where Romanticism in love actually leads.
On the broader cultural front, we can look back on successive waves of Romantic illusion that ended in real pain. There was the original Romanticism, the Byrons and Shelleys breaking all the rules and leaving a trail of wrecked lives behind them. The Victorians cleaned up after the Romantics, and then successive waves of Romantic revolt broke out and were squelched by successive waves of reaction, all the way up to the mid-twentieth century. 20 The liberating 1960s and ’70s were the definitive eruption of that volcano the Victorians were sitting on. After that party, an awful lot of people woke up in a trashed house with a splitting headache. If we’re tired of ping-ponging back and forth between those two extremes, Jane Austen offers something entirely different. She’s an emissary from the pre-Romantic world, from a time before happiness had become boring.
Living as we do in the long wake of Romanticism, we’ve spent all our lives liberated from the constraints the original Romantics chafed at. We’ve mostly already experienced the heady delights of Romantic-style love—and the hangover that inevitably follows. We’ve been able to pursue intensity,
authenticity, and liberation in relationships to our hearts’ content. Except our hearts aren’t content. And happiness doesn’t seem so boring anymore.
So we’re ripe for Jane Austen’s pitch against Romanticism and for happy love. On the other hand, actually learning to manage love the Jane Austen way is going to be harder in our post-Romantic era than it looks. To understand love as Jane Austen heroines experience it, in all its firm realism, sparkle, exhilaration, and solid hope of happiness, we have to shake free of the Romantic trap. In aid of that goal, Jane Austen wrote a whole novel giving us a flesh-and-blood heroine 21 who misses her happy ending because she approaches love the Romantic way—paired with another heroine who does manage to find happy love à la Jane Austen. Sense and Sensibility is a blow-by-blow account of the serious havoc that capital-R Romantic love can wreak in a woman’s life, plus a template for successful unRomantic romantic love. It’s the subject of the next chapter.
A DOPT AN AUSTEN ATTITUDE:
Take a minute for Jane Austen-style “serious reflection.” How do you picture the kind of love you’re looking for?
Are you pursuing happy love, or are you in the market for drama?
Are you waiting for a relationship to liberate you? (Why do you feel trapped and stifled, and what can you do about it?)
Are you looking for a
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