What Does Jane Say? Thoughts on Romance from a Realist

Literature Faculty Blog

by Kristin Samuelian

What Does Jane Say? Thoughts on Romance from a Realist
Kristin Samuelian

Because I often teach and write about Jane Austen, over the years well-meaning family members have given me what, for lack of a better term, I will call Austen-themed literary novelty gifts: bookmarks with quotes from her novels or letters; a palm-sized hardcover book with gilt-edged paper called What Would Jane Do? Quips and Wisdom from Jane Austen; a “Jane Austen Journal” with an image on the cover of a Regency lady in blue writing in a notebook and a quote from Austen’s Mansfield Park, “We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” I keep these out on tables rather than in bookcases, I suspect in an unconscious recognition of what they are: decorations. Who, after all, would see Emma’s disastrous advice to her friend Harriet Smith—to reject the kind and sensible Robert Martin in favor of the shallow, mean-spirited, social-climbing Mr. Elton—as an example of Austenian wisdom? Or would think Marianne Dashwood wise when she declares to her mother, “When I fall in love, it will be forever”? Not anyone who actually knows either of those novels, surely. But these little books are nice to look at, and their content is clearly not the point.

Around this time of year, as Valentine’s Day approaches, gifts like these are everywhere. For $12 on Etsy you can buy your valentine a watercolor print of Mr. Darcy’s second proposal to Elizabeth Bennet; for $34 you can buy a box of organic tea tied up in a pink bow, with, on the cover, a picture of Chatsworth (the ducal estate that stood in for Pemberly in the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice) and, in the corner, that same literary lady from my journal, this time in a brown dress.

What Does Jane SayHow are we to understand this market for Austen-themed romance? Austen, after all, was a realist. She was the novelist who made no bones about the fact that marriage for her heroines was essentially transactional; whose Miss Watson, in the unfinished novel The Watsons, says to her sister, entirely without irony, “you know, we must marry….my father cannot provide for us”; who writes, in a letter to her niece, that “single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony”; and whose most beloved heroine expresses nothing stronger than “gratitude” when she finally accepts that second marriage proposal. Retired Mason professor and Austen scholar Deborah Kaplan points out that one possible reason Austen herself never married was that she knew it would be the end of her writing career. Marriage for a typical middle-class woman in Austen’s era meant enduring, on average, eleven pregnancies, raising and educating children, and running a household. There would have been little time for novel writing. As scholar Claudia Johnson notes, she never shied away from the fact that women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had a difficult time of it. Her finished novels all have happy endings. But on the way to those endings they, in Johnson’s words, “expose and explore those aspects of traditional institutions--marriage, primogeni­ture, patriarchy--which patently do not serve her heroines well.” It’s hard to understand how such an exploration could make for good, satisfying romantic reading, and yet, for most consumers of Austen’s novels and their film adaptations, it does.

I’d like to suggest that the satisfaction of reading Austen’s fiction comes because, not in spite, of their insistence on the material conditions of courtship. Emma Woodhouse may be handsome, clever, and rich with or without matrimony. But for the Dashwood and Bennet sisters, for Fanny Price, and for secondary characters like Charlotte Lucas, Harriet Smith, and the scheming Lucy Steele, finding a partner is a matter of economic necessity. It’s not too far-fetched to say that courtship is about survival; for some, like Emma’s Jane Fairfax or Sense and Sensibility’s Eliza, it can be a matter of life and death. Paradoxically, I think that might be a part of what draws readers to her novels. They're funny rather than grim, but they are in essence survival tales. What we experience at the end is perhaps closer to relief than elation. We may filter that relief through our twenty-first-century conviction that finding a partner is about the excitement and thrill of romance, but what we encounter at the end of an Austen novel is safe harbor after an uncertain and possibly dangerous journey. It is the relief of seeing characters we’ve come to care about restored, as Austen puts it in the end of Mansfield Park, “to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.”