Marriage According to Jane Austen
An excerpt from my final exam essays in a Jane Austen seminar
In 2015, I was part of a Jane Austen seminar at the Louisiana Scholars’ College in Natchitoches, LA. I was an NSULA undergrad and was very honored and privileged to partake in quite a few courses at the Scholars’ College on the same campus. Here’s an excerpt (the first, of more to come) from my final exam for the Jane Austen course, taught by the charming and brilliant Dr. Holly Stave:
Austen explores marriages of many kinds, both positive and negative aspects. The common thread of every successful marriage in Austen’s novels is respect. Her novels, indeed, leave us with a strong sense that respect, probably to a degree more than even love, is a key ingredient of success in marriage. Marriage, whether we are talking about the 18th or the 21st century, is an absurdly prevalent topic in daily life. Turn on the television and try to find a show that is not about someone looking to fall in love and be married. The media idealizes marriage and degrades singleness. People today are told that marriage will solve all the problems of life—loneliness above all. In Jane Austen’s time, marriage was also widely regarded as the solution to life’s problems.
For the Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice, marriage was the solution to their father’s ineptitude in financial concerns. Although Elizabeth and Jane resisted the notion of marrying for convenience, even Elizabeth admits to Jane that it was necessary to take care to fall in love with a rich man. Elizabeth knows she could never marry Wickham because they are both poor. Ironically, Elizabeth is disdainful of Charlotte Lucas marrying Mr. Collins in order to have a comfortable security.
Austen's novels present the conflict between surviving in a harsh, patriarchal society and being able to respect one's partner. She shows us several couples, all with their own ways of working out this conflict. Men of Austen's time had to either inherit property or work in some profession to survive. The women of the gentry had to marry, or if they were amongst the gentrified poor like Jane Fairfax in Emma, they might work as a governess. It was unseemly for a woman of the gentry to write novels for a living or do anything at all merely for profit. When alive, Jane Austen's novels were published by "A Lady." The only people who knew it was she who wrote such novels as Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Mansfield Park were people intimately connected to her. Normally, it would have been an economic imperative for a daughter of a clergyman, with seven siblings, to marry. But George Austen, her father, did fairly well for a clergyman, and his wife had aristocratic connections. Also, to supplement his two livings, he owned a share in some property in the West Indies. He had six sons, five of whom were of sound mind and able body to go out into the world and earn money. If either of his daughters had married, he probably could have paid a reasonable dowry. His son Edward Austen Knight did particularly well, having inherited several properties from his surrogate parents, and, by that means, always able to provide a house for his widowed mother and unwed sisters. All these circumstances put together made it possible for Jane Austen to do what she loved doing and to give pleasure to generations of readers for centuries to come.
It was and is to this day generally assumed (falsely) that every woman desires to be married because of the way marriage is presented to us. Spinsters were and are perceived as lonely creatures. The fates of “cat ladies” and librarians who never marry are unjustly satirized to no end. Emma Woodhouse, the eponymous heroine in the novel Emma, tells Harriet Smith it would be a pity, indeed, to end up a “poor old maid” like Miss Bates, and yet Miss Bates is probably the happiest of Austen’s entire collection of characters.
Happiness neither depends on marriage itself nor on being passionately in love. Lady Elliot (in her posthumous novel, Persuasion) is said to have been “not the very happiest being in the world herself,” but nowhere does Austen say she was unhappy. She “found enough in her duties, her friends, and her children, to attach her to life, and make it no matter of indifference to her when she was called on to quit them.” She had a true friendship with Lady Russell and was very conscientious as a mother and as the patroness of the village near Kellynch Hall. Friends, children, and duties can give as much pleasure as marriage to one’s daily life. In short, I think Austen had a wise and wide perspective on marriage. In her novels, marriage is complex and she explores it as such. She explores every layer—love, survival, and occupation. Mrs. Elton (in Emma) says much about the importance of a married woman having “resources”—things to keep her occupied, be they hobbies or duties. Although Mrs. Elton is presented in such a light as to convince the reader that she, indeed, has very few “resources,” her words contain grains of truth. Hobbies and duties—or we may say, the balance of recreation and responsibility—contribute much to our search for meaning in life.
