I wasn’t the type of young person to seek out Jane Austen on my own. Period manners and marriage plots? Thanks, but pass; I’d seen Clueless and was pretty sure I got the gist. But with few discernable interests apart from books (and tastes that, I’m mortified to report, leaned more toward Bukowski than Brontë), combined with an even less developed sense of professional aptitude, my undergrad self ended up settling into a new identity as an English lit major. Austen, naturally, became a part of my new life. My eighteenth-century British lit professor, an affable young adjunct with a clump of Day-Glo orange hair, put Pride and Prejudice squarely on the syllabus during our semester on the Romantic era. This novel, he told us, signalled a major shift in social values, and was therefore important to understand. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
Pride and Prejudice famously concerns the courtship of a family of sisters who need to marry into money to preserve the family’s social standing as members of the landed gentry. The new, period-specific catch is that the sisters should also, ideally, be fond of the well-off dudes they marry – and it’s this new requirement of affability, even maybe something akin to love, that leads to dramatic tension and lessons learned by all. But to me, it barely seemed worthy of being called a predicament.
When I encountered Austen’s Bennet sisters, I was nineteen, and newly into a relationship with someone who was prematurely wise, financially stable, and a clear marrying type – in other words, my exact opposite in at least three non-trivial areas. I felt utterly unequipped to parse the competing priorities of my romantic future, the balance of love and stability, companionship, and eroticism. It seemed much less intimidating to accept an eligible suitor on the simple grounds of mutual regard and material security – to say, ‘I like your bank account and can tolerate your person,’ and move on. The clear directive to simply secure an economically advantageous match would have certainly taken the guesswork out of my own romantic future. I’d been brought up with the same expectations of a majority of my straight-leaning female friends: that it was not just possible but preferable to expect everything from one person, forever.
Austen’s era marked a relatively new way of thinking about the role of marriage, one organized on the individualistic notion of personal happiness rather than the participation in a tradition of social and family organization. The Romantic period made way, you could say, for romance. And in Austen’s novels, the folly implicit in the pursuit of romance drives the action. Not that Austen was herself a fool for love; as a writer and thinker she acutely recognized that the ideal relationship is a tough one to come by. (It feels mean but important to mention here that Austen died alone.)
Even considering how she put love on the agenda, the expectations of marriage Austen laid out in her works, by the standards of their twenty-first-century analogs, verge on the enviably quaint. Contemporary relationship narratives apply unending pressure to settle down without ever settling for. We are told, loud and clear and over and over, that Mr. Right will come along, and he’ll give us butterflies and the feeling of home, he’ll be our best friend and the man of our dreams. To compromise would guarantee a lifetime of regret and undermine our self-respect – the opposite of the girl power we’ve grown up with.
Austen’s heroines have been beloved through the ages because they still read as wise, rising above the bullshit that their more tragic foils inevitably succumb to. Elizabeth Bennet only accepts the hand of wealthy suitor Mr. Darcy once she recognizes his strength of character. Her younger sister Lydia, meanwhile, narrowly escapes social ruin by taking up with the moneyless cad Wickham, who then has to be bribed into marrying her. Austen’s heroines do not compromise; they just happen to gravitate toward their most ideal outcome, as though self-interest were commensurate with moral fortitude.
Likewise, it’s only by holding ourselves to the implausible-on-paper standards of mate selection that we might arrive at the end game of a forever-match equipped to tick off any remaining ‘to-dos’ from our self-actualization checklists. I grew up understanding that, for a smart and self-sufficient woman, a partner wasn’t necessarily the be-all and end-all of life … except that it sort of, actually, was.
When considering coupledom as something that eventually leads to a lifelong commitment, we, understandably, weigh the pros and cons of a given relationship carefully. Do we aim for security or sustained chemistry, we might ask ourselves, or risk shooting for both at once (and then some)? Do we factor in our attachment to our partner’s families or treat our significant other as an independent entity and our union as an island – or maybe a two-island archipelago in the variably navigable waters of life? (Do two islands even count as an archipelago? Are fixed land-masses an appropriate analogy for beings that move – maybe even apart – through time?) And, possibly, a scale-tipping question that pertained just as much to the Bennet sisters as it does to the average woman today: when men continue to hold significantly greater earning power than women, is it vulgar to consider economics?
A recent analysis by the American Association of University Women shows that women in the US bear approximately two-thirds of the nation’s student-debt burden, borrowing more and more than our male classmates, only to earn less after graduation. These figures are comparable in Canada, according to data from the Government of Canada’s Budget 2017 Gender Statement, and nearly identical in the UK as well. In truth, I simply would not have weathered the financial unpredictability of an early writing career if I hadn’t met and loved a good man with a great job, one who shouldered the bulk of our shared bills. While a sizable number of my creative-aspirant peers quietly bridged sporadic paycheques with parental subsidies, my boyfriend and I shared a cheap apartment where the distribution of expenses was income-proportional, and the only strings attached were our shared and indefinite future.
My ambivalence over this state of financial affairs has continued to linger beyond the borders of that relationship. To be clear: we were in love. Yet, it’s also true that during the years that I racked up the chops and bylines I hoped would eventually secure my financial independence, I felt like a kept woman. I wanted a relationship that was altruistic and fair, but I also wanted the experience of self-sufficiency. I hated feeling beholden. And I continue to reap what I hated.
We weren’t technically married, but in Canada, where we lived, our common-law partnership was legally regarded as though we were. I didn’t make the choice to be there simply because he made more money than I did, even if I benefited from it; on the contrary, I believe this dynamic contributed to the relationship’s demise. Studies have found that financial harmony within a long-term partnership is essential for that partnership’s success. And being partnered at all is considered essential for financial harmony, period. Even so, I’m not above speculating who has or hasn’t ‘married for money’ with the judgmental undertones that imply I would only tie the knot for some other reason. But most of us, speaking frankly, are marrying for money. At least in part. The contract of marriage was founded as an economic alliance and it remains as much today: shared roof, shared bills, shared wealth or lack thereof. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t need to involve the state to make it real, nor lawyers to make it stop.
What has been par for the course throughout the history of courtship, and under scrutiny by Austen, remains true today. Somehow, still, it’s a (white) man’s world. Men of means in particular hold disproportionate power in the heterosexual quest for companionship, a cliché echoed on celebrity tabloid magazine covers and in romantic comedy plot lines, recurrent in a subclass of New York Times wedding announcement that may or may not make mention of a much younger bride’s ‘wisdom beyond her years.’ My best friend and I sometimes joke about the distant-future day when our devoted male partners will decide to direct their gravity-yielding anatomy toward tenderer – yet improbably still willing – pastures. Neither of us believes this would actually happen to us, but there’s a fatalism to our breezy texts.
Possibly for better than worse, ours is an era of technologically enhanced sexual transparency. Everyone’s on Tinder and OkCupid, Bumble and/or any other number of apps for managing the burden of finding love (be it for life or the afternoon). There are even nakedly transactional dating sites for married couples seeking an affair, and for facilitating ‘sugar baby’ configurations between (usually) young women and wealthy older men, though same-sex and sugar momma pairings are also brokered by such sites. The latter cohort are seeking an ‘arrangement’ – one of the aforementioned sites is literally called SeekingArrangement – that blurs the boundaries between sex work and plain old-fashioned dating, typically involving an exchange of material provisions for companionship and sex.
The trademarked slogan of SeekingArrangement is ‘Mutually Beneficial Arrangements,’ only barely euphemistic. The site’s implied market exchange of young female sex and older male wealth replicates a cultural paradigm so familiar to the average North American adult that there’s barely a need to elaborate on what exactly an ‘arrangement’ entails. (As it happens, the site operates across 139 countries worldwide.)
To either cover its tracks or assuage the moral hang-ups of its pricklier clientele, the website’s language uses the words ‘relationship’ and ‘arrangement’ interchangeably. It’s a clever bit of branding, given that while most people are able to suss out what’s beneath the wink-and-nod, anyone who’s ever been in a relationship will agree that all partnerships require some degree of compromise. The basis of every partnership is matching one’s preferred give-and-takes with those of someone else. SeekingArrangement reasons that its site gives couples a leg (or something) up on coupledom by letting each party be upfront about at least a few major expectations off the bat. Aren’t we all, in some way, seeking an arrangement?
There have been moments when I’ve found myself sheepishly jealous of what SeekingArrangement calls ‘the Sugar Lifestyle,’ a transactional approach to partnership that doesn’t pretend to ignore the economic imbalance between parties, nor the dating-market commodity of youth. Not that it’s in my constitution to feign approval at the type of man who believes he has ‘earned’ lots of money, but maybe life would have been easier in the medium term if I’d held my nose and plunged headfirst into the sugar bowl as a twenty-four-year-old. Even then, I was acutely aware of the specific time-sensitive desirability I held, as a woman just over the threshold of my twenties, and I also appreciated that I still held the cards to play that deck if I felt like it – an insurance policy whose finite nature no woman recognizes more than one who is only barely an adult.
But these days it seems unromantic, at best, to suggest that romance and pragmatism are diametrically opposed ideals, even if people’s mating habits often tell a different story. Nearly one in five Americans will fess up to having cheated on their partners, despite a widely held understanding of infidelity as an ultimate act of betrayal. While I agree with pretty much everyone that partnering for romantic compatibility is ideal, I’ve also spent many agonizing hours interrogating the odds of my own ability to sustain romantic connectivity with the same human being over the course of a lifetime. It feels good to be devoted to a person you love and who loves you back, yes. But people grow, either in parallel, together, or apart, and emotional compasses don’t hold fast to magnetic north.
Social values are the product of conditioning, informed by our own living conditions and what we’ve learned from those who came before us. And, where it comes to following your heart, ‘those who came before us’ is a relatively short list. Love hasn’t always been conceptually tied up in the context of a singular forever-marriage. In fact, it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that anyone really did the marrying-for-love thing at all. A majority of people, across the history of humanity, had agreed that the risk was simply too high.
The ancient Romans, for instance, viewed marriage as a necessary drudge for securing wealth, property, and the continuation of the (patriarchal) bloodline. Likewise, it didn’t need to last forever. By the late Republic era, both men and women could divorce and remarry at will and, though technically illegal among women, adultery was common and even playfully encouraged. In his Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), the poet Ovid instructs aspiring male side pieces to ‘be courteous’ to the husbands of their would-be female lovers. ‘Nothing could better serve your plans than to be in his good graces,’ he adds, in what reads something like a prim Latin prologue to The Ethical Slut.
Roman life was hard, and the consensus seems to have been that marriage was too serious an endeavour to be muddled by the irrational demands of the heart. I’m not kidding: a Republican Roman senator named Manlius was booted from the Senate for kissing his wife in front of their own daughter. Maybe Stoicism was to blame for the distrust of capital-F Feelings with regard to sex and marriage (and sex in marriage), and it was a line of thinking that trickled into early Christian thought – and, arguably, continues to be echoed in the family-values rhetoric of some religious conservatives.
Stoic teachings like the philosopher Seneca the Younger’s apprehension that ‘there is nothing more disgusting than making love to your wife as if she were your mistress’ found parallels in early Christian writings on the subject of sex. The Apostle Paul, arguably the chief architect of the Church, was in fact a contemporary of Seneca the Younger. There still exists a series of back-and-forth letters attributed to the pair, and while this correspondence has been broadly dismissed as apocryphal, there are clear similarities in the two figures’ lines of thinking. In his letters to the Galatians, Paul issued an anti-lust warning that framed sexual desire as, if not allout gross, definitely a hindrance to one’s spiritual purpose: ‘Walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you would.’
Only later, in the seventh chapter of Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, he tweaks his directive. People should absolutely gratify their fleshly desires, he allows, so long as the act takes place within the confines of marriage. Yet, one hardly gets the impression that Paul had undergone some sex-positive change of heart. On the contrary, he implies that self-denial tempts more lust than a person might be able keep a lid on, which would make the suffering party susceptible to extramarital fornication: ‘Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.’ Paul basically prescribes non-procreative marital sex as a type of carnal harm reduction, and it’s safe to presume that he was less than overjoyed about this provision.
Over three centuries later, Saint Augustine (who brought to his sex-cautious writings the wisdom of exhaustive firsthand knowledge, detailed in his Confessions) would be the first to confer sacramental status onto marriage. The North African bishop wrote two of the foundational texts of early Christian theology and undertook a rigorous study of the Old and New Testaments in order to arrive at a theological framework for the early Church’s position on corporeal desire. He decreed that sex within marriage was inevitable, if not ideal; outside of marriage, a definite no. Marriage was recast as a permanent union, and divorce a venial sin.
Augustine’s influential ascetic streak was reinforced by the writings of his comparably rigid contemporary, Saint Jerome, who viewed sex that was not conducted for the explicit purposes of procreation (even in marriage) as a mortal sin. These early Christian moral constraints on desire, which maintained an idealized incarnation of sexuality that kept itself contained in the proverbial pants, further reinforced the idea of marriage as specifically a conjugal union between two people.
Courtship, the historical precursor to the concept of the love marriage, was also a by-product of the Christian Church, if indirectly. Some academics attribute the medieval trope of courtly love, which emerged in the twelfth century, to changes in Church doctrine that emphasized both a woman’s consent in her own marriage and, alongside that, a more spiritual relationship to God that emphasized personal connection and emotional attachment. This shift coincided with the Crusades, during which the literary tradition of courtly love sprung forth. These were typically stories about romances between married noblewomen, whose husbands may or may not be off fighting religious wars, and amorous knights. Courtly romances extolled chivalrous ritual in place of overt libido, the High Middle Ages’ version of breathless high school affairs.
As the spread of Christianity bumped against the whims of aristocrats and kings, both men and (more discreetly) women had continued conducting their own private romances outside the confines of marriage. But the cult of courtly love elevated these extramarital pursuits beyond the carnal and into the spiritual realm. The romances these stories sketched were intense and fleeting, consumed by an audience of bored noblewomen – one-handed reads for the medieval set.
Sometimes the authors of courtly romances were in direct patronage of their intended audience. Both Chrétien de Troyes and Andreas Capellanus, who authored The Art of Courtly Love, were beneficiaries of Marie of France, Countess of Champagne. The countess was herself the daughter of a renowned muse of courtly love, Norman queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose legend includes tell of a likely consummated romance with a renowned troubadour. In Marie’s narrative role as courtly love rule-maker in Capellanus’s etiquette guide, the (married) countess explicitly warns that it is impossible for love to ‘exert its powers between two people who are married to each other.’
The cult of courtly love was probably more of a fictional trope than an insight into the sex lives of medieval nobles. Neverthelesss, it offered a template for the union of ritualized romantic pursuit and emotional drama that would re-enter the fore during the time of Austen – this time, in the context of marriage. In the interim, the average European marriage probably had little in common with any courtly romance. Historian Stephanie Coontz, in her book Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, drops this sixteenth-century English rhyming proverb: ‘A spaniel, a woman, and a walnut tree, the more they’re beaten the better they be.’ If this startling suggestion of spousal relations reads as a precursor to the misogyny of contemporary men’s-rights discussion boards online, that’s probably because it is. (Also, please don’t hit your pups.)
But a change was in motion, albeit slowly. Beginning in the fourteenth century, a revived pan-European interest in classical philosophy and literature emerged to challenge the no-fun chokehold of the Roman Catholic Church. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, a century later, only hastened the process, and, with the concurrent Protestant Reformation, a newly splintered Western Church decentralized religious control.
Meanwhile, advances in science fuelled a proliferation of information that supplanted religious doctrine with reason, a humanistic movement that culminated with the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment. A cultural secularization that touted the pursuit of individual rights and happiness became easier to actualize with the advent of industry and the spread of a market economy. Some scholars, including Coontz, believe that the combined cultural and economic forces of the eighteenth century – the age of Austen – normalized the ideal of marrying for love. Industrialization gave rise to a new class of people whose access to wealth wasn’t limited to agrarian land inheritance. As Friedrich Engels put it in his 1884 treatise The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, ‘The creation of these “free” and “equal” people was precisely one of the main functions of capitalistic production.’
Industrialized economies also pulled people out of their kinship communities and into urban centres – a socially alienating experience that perhaps demanded the intimate salve of so-called romantic love. Cambridge University professor emeritus Alan Macfarlane writes in The Culture of Capitalism: ‘Depending on how one regards the “romantic love complex,” it could be seen as one of the compensations for the loneliness and isolation of a disintegrated, associational, society, or as yet another curse produced by the disintegration of the old community bonds.’ The economic makings of his so-called ‘romantic love complex’ break down simply enough:
Markets opened up, mobility increased, people were caught up in a new and open environment with money and market values dominant. Secondly, capitalism improved the standard of living. This altered the material conditions of life. Thirdly, capitalism, or more particularly its manifestation in a particular industrial form, led to the break up of the rural communities. People were sucked into an urban and industrial proletariat.
This new urban and industrial proletariat eroded the reliance on extended familial networks and political allegiances that had, throughout history, ensured economic survival. In its place sprouted the individual, left to their own devices. And so began the emergence of some idea that the love-marriage was, if not precisely a human right, then at least a definite possibility. Suddenly, there was the impetus to make partnership decisions that satisfied a spectrum of needs that had previously been met by more than one person or, more likely, sublimated in service of family, the Church, and the gruelling demands of agrarian life.
In Colonial New England, a similar change was taking place. The period’s conduct books (predecessors to the self-help book) give a comparatively hard-edged insight into the changing attitudes surrounding courtship and domesticity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Letters to a Young Lady, an etiquette manual whose first edition dates to 1791 (twenty-two years prior to Pride and Prejudice), the Reverend John Bennett dispenses criteria for optimal partnering that wouldn’t be out of place in a contemporary self-help manual. (Then, as now, these books were written to impart upon readers the etiquette of the age, while also offering advice for making productive – and pragmatic – choices.)
A Connecticut preacher, Bennett gently puts forward that a woman should absolutely consider the realities of economics when choosing a husband. But his view of spousal selection factors a prospective spouse’s displayed decorum in addition to financial stability, and places greater emphasis on the former. With decency of character, he argues, comes contentment – a view that’s not altogether shocking from a Yankee Protestant man of the cloth. Even so, Bennett acknowledges that ‘fortune surely should be considered’ in the husband hunt, and especially when weighed against any romantic attachment that might or might not endure: ‘It [would be] absurd to think of love, where there is not some prospect of a decent provision for your probable descendants.’ But he also advises eligible ladies to knock down their expectations of what exactly constitutes ‘decent provision’ if the gentleman in question proves to be a decent human – suggesting, implicitly, that women should not consider prospective husbands as untapped wells of personal fortune and also, perhaps, that decent men are not a free-flowing commodity. ‘Virtue and affection have an amazing power of inspiring contentment,’ he writes. In other words, ladies, seek out a reliable provider who treats you with whatever qualifies as respect in your given social context, and upon whose sterling reputation you might build your own. It’ll be fine!
This pragmatic, companionate view was not confined to the fledgling United States. Published in London, Mrs. Elizabeth Lanfear’s 1824 Letters to Young Ladies on Their Entrance into the World takes the ‘good man’ directive a step further. In her view, ‘affection may … be found a necessary ingredient with which to sweeten the cup of domestic care,’ but feelings should be considered nice-to-haves and not necessities when separating the Husband Material from the chaff. Rather, ‘the first and the most important considerations which should be attended to by a woman, before she forms a serious and irrevocable engagement, are the personal character, moral qualities, and mental endowments of the man who is to be her fellow-traveller in the great journey of life.’ The image of marriage as a shared, companionate trek through earthly existence is gently egalitarian, but not exactly aligned with a heady pursuit of romance – nor reflective of the legal reality that a married woman was essentially an extension of her husband. So where, then, does good old-fashioned eros fit into this marital configuration?
Because the copyright laws of the eighteenth century weren’t quite what they are today, entire phrases or chapters from one conduct manual might also appear, word for word, in dozens of others. This meant that one person’s interpretation of a moment’s social norms could be reproduced and repositioned as common wisdom time after time, over a span of decades. One warning dispelled verbatim in a handful of both men’s and women’s conduct manuals from the 1830s to the 1850s (and even an 1832 volume of the Phrenological Journal) echoes what we can assume, from its prolific and prolonged replication, was a popularly held view of women’s character that we have yet to fully shake:
Most women are inclined to be romantic. This tendency is not confined to the young or to the beautiful; to the intellectual, or to the refined. Romance is, indeed, the charm of female character … [But it] is associated in the minds of many with folly alone.
There’s a lot to unpack in this ostensibly well-meaning passage, which was reproduced for mixed-gender audiences and with both male and female author credits. On the surface, it assumes that women are biologically wired to feel ‘in love’ more intensely than their male counterparts. But it also pathologizes this presumed imbalance between the genders as ‘folly’ – a deficit in judgment and, perhaps, in character. Women’s silly little feelings are partly why they’re so darn irresistible to the opposite sex; they are also, ultimately, why a woman’s capacity for reason is inferior and, as such, requires that we be repeatedly reminded of what’s best for them. For us.
Pronouncements that effectively align women’s so-called inborn traits with their own oppression might feel retrograde, but versions of this rationale continue to be recycled into contemporary discussion, sometimes even under a guise of women’s empowerment. It’s not a massive leap from the gendered character dismissals of 1830s conduct manuals to, for instance, one bestselling self-help tome from the mid-2010s whose driving hypothesis was that women’s continued workplace inequality sprung partly from a naturalized failure to self-advocate or, in the parlance of the author, to ‘lean in.’ One might observe that it’s hardly a leap at all.
The passage also affirms a view of romantic tendency that has barely evolved in the two centuries since its first printing. We still tend to associate women with hearts that demand wooing, and men with a clumsy approach to getting the job done. A hugely influential (if also widely mocked) 1992 pop-psychology bestseller by John Gray went on to sell over 50 million copies under a gender-essentialist premise that purported that heterosexual women subconsciously continue to ascribe to the courtly love conventions of a damsel in distress waiting for her knight in shining armour to just rescue her, already. I will admit that I live in a cosmopolitan, careerist bubble. That said, I can’t think of a single one of my millennial contemporaries who would seriously cite Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus as a work that contributed to their understanding of romantic relationships. Yet, the casual clickbait churn that occupies our social-media zone-outs often draws on similarly simple black-and-white dichotomies about identity and human relationships. Articles like ‘9 Things Guys Think Are Romantic, but Aren’t’ (in Cosmo) and ‘This Is Why Guys Should Stop Giving “I F**ked Up” Flowers’ (on Buzzfeed) litter the internet, suggesting that men are disinclined to receive women’s emotional memos.
And, despite the British boy bands and Dominican bachata stars whose first-person testaments to tender masculinity endearingly stack twenty-first-century playlists, popular wisdom enforces a stereotype of emotionally integrated, heart-eyed women waiting for men to eventually either ‘get it’ or not. So widespread are these simplistic gendered notions of emotional incompatibility that I’ve often found myself – a self-diagnosed unromantic – assigning a dismissal of ‘ugh, typical men’ to moments where male paramours have failed to meet my emotional expectations. It’s a thing I’ve intermittently allowed myself to believe, in a caveat-studded way, despite my resistance to universal truths.
But intermittent incantations to ‘end all men’ aren’t driven by a belief that men are simply not wired to comprehend, let alone meet, my emotional needs. Rather, I’ve internalized at least some version of the view that men and women tend to be socialized to develop different skill sets, and that women get the ones that make them less infuriating. You could even say that the expectation has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In real life, the scope of humanity is vast and multifaceted. The notion of gender itself as an intrinsically hardwired, anatomical either-or is being progressively dismantled by social theorists and a growing populace of nuanced thinkers who’ve lost patience with the status quo. It’s a measure of progress that, as society relies increasingly less on adhering to emotional and economic labour roles defined by gender, individuals can opt out of that system of classification altogether. For now, the decision to do so takes on an identity charged with political implication and social repercussions, threats of ostracism and violence. But one day, it likely won’t. To (yes, unironically, though with all applicable caveats in place) borrow from John Grey’s 2017 follow-up to his initial foray into Venus and Mars, couples today expect to be soulmates rather than gendered ‘role mates.’ The conscious expectation for equal emotional fulfillment has come to absolutely supplant the previously prescribed heterosexual desire for a male breadwinner counterpart to the caregiving matriarch. The germ for just such a dynamic was planted in the Enlightenment and nurtured to fruition in its Industrial aftermath.
As a market-based economy enriched an expanded bourgeoisie throughout Europe and the Americas, growing numbers of men and women were given access to a pageantry of courtship that had previously been confined to the aristocracy. Women ‘came out’ into society and were pursued by male suitors, whom they were then able to either accept or reject in an artificially inflated rite of agency.
Whether we’ve escaped the woman-as-object/man-as-actor dichotomy is a matter of perspective. Yet, it’s hard to believe that within such a short period, we were given the basis for a romantic ideal that has grown to shape a multi-billion-dollar dating industry, an even more profitable wedding-industrial complex, and the barely tenable fairy tale that keeps the two afloat: that every woman can be the author of her own happy ending. But with autonomy comes great responsibility to either choose exactly right or to undermine the very existence of our own freedom to follow our hearts.
Viewed through this historical lens, the works of Jane Austen are all the more poignant. That they concern the specific matters of marriage and love at a moment in time where both concepts were shifting is why they remain so satisfying, and even relatable, two centuries later. Marrying for love in addition to security was not yet something to be taken for granted; it was loaded, and it was stressful. Pride and Prejudice in particular imbues its depiction of the mechanics of spousal selection with what I think is a rare, appropriate amount of ambivalence.
The novel also gives an over-the-top worst-case scenario in the Bennet parents’ unhappy marriage. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet’s cartoonishly wretched match reads as a peripheral plot motif on the novel’s surface, but its cautionary message drives the internal conflict of the Bennet daughters’ own respective quests to pin down a mate. Mr. Bennet is beneath Mrs. Bennet’s financial station; Mrs. Bennet is, in turn, completely daft. Equal footing never stood a chance. The bookish (but economically sub-optimal) Mr. Bennet married his beautiful, airheaded wife on a youthful whim and has spent the intervening decades in sullen regret, alternately brooding in his study and making belittling cracks at his wife and daughters. But he has a soft spot for the shrewd Elizabeth, and warns her to avoid repeating his mistake: ‘Unless you truly esteemed your husband … [y]our lively talents would place you in the greatest danger in an unequal marriage. You could scarcely escape discredit and misery.’
Austen doesn’t exactly beat around the bush in making sure readers recognize that the elder Bennets were an ill-suited match from the start, with their incompatible temperaments and asymmetrical bank balances. The consequences of such a careless union, she proposes, are far from whimsical. By marrying beneath her financial station, Mrs. Bennet has shortchanged her daughters’ future prospects. But the real emphasis here is on Mr. Bennet, bitter and withdrawn after two decades of marriage to someone he doesn’t particularly respect or enjoy being around; Mrs. Bennet, in turn, has no choice but to endure the sarcastic barbs of a husband who can’t stand her, and whom she doesn’t understand. It’s hell for both parties, and a cautionary tale for Austen’s readers.
The Bennet parents’ marriage might be one of the most loudly flapping red flags of modern literary history. Both husband and wife are paying a price for an impulsive union built upon a superficial mutual attraction and, boy, the result is sub-ideal. Mr. Bennet’s advice to Elizabeth against an ‘unequal marriage’ serves as a literary aha moment, and becomes our protagonist’s guiding star. Discredit and misery: hardly ideal planes of existence, and incidentally also the precise flavours of doom that careless women can expect from marrying someone they don’t respect.
Austen’s works are a gleaming full-length mirror of the society that informed them. As with most revolutionary social developments, the transition from an ideal marriage of pure pragmatism to one of romantic companionship wasn’t immediate. Fledgling understandings of romantic autonomy did little to calm people’s anxieties around choosing the wrong spouse; if anything, the birth of love-marriage elevated the sense of stakes involved in mate selection. Austen’s Regency heroines belonged to a landed gentry that relied on well-chosen marriages to preserve class respectability and protect individual families’ wealth, but, further to that, there was no legal recourse – short of provable catastrophe – for a man or woman who felt they’d made the wrong choice.