Tag: Austen Jane

Marriage is What Brings Us Together

Here is a controversial statement: Marriage is an important source of happiness for most people.

Once upon a time, that statement would have elicited a yawn. It is akin to a “people need food to live” variety of comment.

Nowadays, however, them’s fightin’ words on a college campus and many other places beyond the gates. Hold that thought.

That Jane Austen is wildly popular is a truth universally acknowledged. Why? I have been puzzling about devotion to Austen for years. After all, she is not the only person who wrote romantic novels in the era. Sir Walter Scott was, once upon a time, vastly more popular. He also writes ridiculously well and his novels are set in that bygone era full of romance, fancy balls, and evening outdoor strolls.

Reading Mansfield Park, it became obvious that there is a huge difference between Scott and Austen. Indeed it is so obvious I wondered why I never noticed it before. Scott’s novels are about all sorts of things; politics and love and freedom loom large. Austen’s novels? Well, it turns out they all revolve around precisely one topic: marriage.

A plot summary of Mansfield Park would simply be a list of engagements and marriages, both desired and actual. Our heroine, Fanny, spends the whole novel waiting for the love of her life to shake off his infatuation with the beautiful, witty, mean girl and discover the wonders of his quiet, pleasant, devoted cousin. Along the way, Fanny must ward off the advances of the callow, scheming bad boy.

“My dear aunt, you cannot wish me to do differently from what I have done, I am sure. You cannot wish me to marry; for you would miss me, should not you? Yes, I am sure you would miss me too much for that.”
“No, my dear, I should not think of missing you, when such an offer as this comes in your way. I could do very well without you, if you were married to a man of such good estate as Mr. Crawford. And you must be aware, Fanny, that it is every young woman’s duty to accept such a very unexceptionable offer as this.”
This was almost the only rule of conduct, the only piece of advice, which Fanny had ever received from her aunt in the course of eight years and a half. It silenced her.

Fortunately in the end, the match made in Austen happens, just like it should in any fairytale. This is of course exactly the same ending as in every other Austen novel.

He was my epiphany…well assuming the definition of epiphany includes a new question. What if the popularity of Austen these days is simply a longing for a day when the importance of marriage was indeed a truth universally acknowledged?

Talking with college students about marriage is a curious thing. Most of my students do indeed want to get married, but they know better than to say that in public. On a college campus, marriage is, of course, a heteronormative institution reinforcing the patriarchy. Students know that the only goals they can discuss in public are their career plans. If a student were to say “You know…getting married and having kids is actually going to be a greater source of happiness in my life than my career will be,” I am pretty sure the sky would fall.

Even in private when a student talks about marriage the preferred form is universal: “First, I need to establish my career. Then I can marry someone and have kids.” When I ask the optimal age to get married, the answer is almost always “27 or 28.” It’s like they are all in the same social circle.

Then, when I ask how they are going to meet the person they want to marry when they are 27 or 28, there is an instant look of terror. No idea. If I ask what makes a good marriage, again no idea. We have an entire generation which has never contemplated the nature of love and marriage. We talk all the time about careers, and nothing about marriage.

As one of my insightful students recently remarked:

There are no cultural or societal models to explain how couples should structure expectations into their relationships. The old model that has the man that goes to work and is the head of the household and the woman as the person who watches the children, cleans and largely follows the man’s lead is something most people reject. Heterosexual couples especially struggle because they feel compelled by both traditional dynamics but also feel the need to reject them because they do not work today and leave most people unhappy. However, there is no new model for people to use so most couples fail because they cannot figure it out. No one teaches you in any part of your life how to structure a long term relationship or how to gain fulfillment from a marriage. We are just kind of expected to figure it out.

Now this student is every bit as clever and poised as Jane Bennet, but it is inconceivable that Jane would ever say something like that. Everyone in an Austen novel knows what marriage is and they all spend an enormous amount of time dreaming about and planning their married lives.

What happens when an entire generation grows up having absolutely no idea how to think about marriage? One thing that seems to happen is a fascination with Austen (and, truth be told, the Brontes). I am beginning to suspect that there is an inchoate yearning for a society in which marriage is not treated as that thing you might do when you are old, but rather that thing you desire when you are young. Few of my students will agree with that statement…in public.

Want Some Advice?

“Should I read Persuasion?” you ask.

How shall I reply?

It is rare that a book creates such a problem of recommendation.

The novel is, as you know, by Jane Austen. Generally speaking, it is always a simple matter to recommend Austen. Pride and Prejudice is a serious candidate for Best Novel Ever. So, presumably if someone can write the Greatest Novel of All Time, the rest of her output is at least minimally worth reading. Right? Ah, but can I answer that?

Now only a churlish sort of person would ever disrecommend Austen. She writes beautifully about beautiful people in a beautiful world. There is a reason that a Jane Austen Ball has the tinge of the romantic hanging about it. But, does that mean it is OK to recommend reading Persuasion?

Why the angst? Persuasion the novel is about Persuasion the act. Before the story starts, our heroine Anne Elliot wanted to marry the dashing Captain Frederick Wentworth, but was persuaded to avoid this romantic entanglement by the well-meaning Lady Russell. Fast forward nearly a decade, the novel begins and Anne, still single, meets Wentworth, also, mirabile dictu, single. You know how it ends. It’s Austen.

A novel with a plot that hinges on the idea that persuading people to do things is a really bad idea. Should I persuade you to read it?

Is persuasion itself an ethical act? The act of persuading is an assertion that the persuader knows something the persuadee does not. The persuader has decided that the persuadee should act in a certain manner. There is no escaping the fact: if I try to persuade you to do something, then I am fundamentally asserting that I know better than you what will be best for you.

This raises a pair of deep problems. If you are trying to persuade me of something, how do I know that your motives are pure? After all, you are trying to change my behavior by asserting that your advice is in my interest, but you might equally well be trying to persuade me to do something because it is actually in your interest, not mine. This is exactly what you and everyone else does when playing games—admit it, you have tried to convince your opponent to do something because you thought it would help you win. Do you do that in life too?

Second, if you are genuinely trying to improve my lot by persuading me that a certain course of action is best, how do I know that you actually understand what is best for me? Why should I trust that your advice is good? And, now flip the matter around. If you are trying to persuade someone of something, how do you know that your advice is good? How do you know that you are right in what you are trying to persuade someone to do? Do you really know the other person and the situation that well?

It’s a tricky problem. You have a friend who is dating a person who is fundamentally unsuitable for your friend. But, your friend is in love, blind to the massively obviously failings of the beloved. Is it your right to try to persuade your friend that this relationship is manifestly not good? Is it your obligation to do so? Or do you stand by and watch your friend go down a path which you know will only end in misery?

That question is probably unsolvable. Persuasion is just a fact of life. Obviously, if I think you should do something, I will try to persuade you to do it. It’s hard to be a college professor and not think that I should, at a minimum, try to persuade students that learning is fun.

So, should you read Persuasion? Depends. If you have not read Pride and Prejudice and Emma, then you should most definitely read those two novels before you pick up this one. Having read those two, if you want more Austen, then this is a fine book.

Fine, not truly great, though. The prose is marvelously Austenish and the world is fun, so that redeems the book. But the novel itself is woefully undercooked. Other than Anne Elliot there is not a filled-out character in the book. Anne’s father, Sir Walter Elliott, is impeccably sketched. Nobody else in the novel rises to the level of three-dimensional or even interestingly two-dimensional.

The plot reads more like the outline of a plot than a plot itself. By two-thirds of the way through the novel, Anne has three suitors. You know which one she will end up with, so it isn’t like sitting on pins and needles. But, these two other suitors show up out the blue, begin something akin to courting Anne, and then abruptly vanish. There is also a whole coterie of other relatives and acquaintances, all of whom are interrelated and none of whom are terribly distinguishable from each other. In other words, the world of Persuasion is nowhere near as complete as the world of Austen at her best.

In fairness, it is worth noting that this novel was not published in her lifetime. Maybe she was planning to add another 100 pages and fill out the world. Indeed, even the title was not her own; the manuscript was entitled The Elliots, which would have been a much better title.

Other than the meditation on the nature of Persuasion, is there anything else to discover herein? Yep. And, it is one of the tragedies of the College Shutdown that I have missed the opportunity to have what would have been an incredibly merry discussion. I had assigned this book in one of my reading groups for the semester. We were slated to discuss it right after Spring Break.

Toward the end of the novel, there is a lengthy discussion on the difference between the affections of men and women. Which one is more constant? If a man and a woman love one another and then are torn asunder for a time, who is more likely to retain affection the longest? It’s a lively debate in the novel. I would have loved to have raised that question in a room full of Mount Holyoke students. It would have been an incredible conversation about love, gender roles, and innate sexual differences. To say the conversation would have been lively is an understatement. Curse you, coronavirus! (Insert raised shaking fist.)

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