Happy Ever After
Norman Geras has a post discussing the endings of Jane Austen’s novels, inspired by a sighting of one of Emma Tennant’s Austen sequels (which always mess with the happy endings) and Emma Campbell Webster’s Guardian column, which we blogged about last week.
Two things strike me about this. First, even in Jane Austen there is plenty of material from which we can see that marriage is a beginning as well as an end, and that the beginning which it is isn’t always of a state of unalloyed bliss. In Pride and Prejudice the happy ending for Lizzy Bennet sits beside Charlotte Lucas’s earlier settling for a life with Mr Collins – something that is going to take considerable endurance. We also have Lizzy’s observations on her father’s not having been the best of husbands to her mother, as well as a rather vivid impression of the tests the daily company of her mother would have involved. In Mansfield Park we see what kind of a life Fanny Price’s mother has lived, thanks to her marriage to a man who is ‘coarse and indifferent’; and this is to say nothing of Maria Bertram’s marriage to Mr Rushworth, both the motives for and the early fate of it. In Emma, though the heroine’s mother is already deceased when the novel begins, you don’t have to have too much imagination to figure out what it would be like to be hooked up with a ninny like Mr Woodhouse. Likewise in Persuasion, Sir Walter Elliot doesn’t come across as everyone’s cup of tea for a lifelong companion. One is also given a painful sense – albeit ultimately resolved – of what it can mean to be kept apart from someone you love, when marriage to them is what you actually want. And so on. Austen’s is a world of happy endings, it is true, but it isn’t a simple – blind – world of them, unless we wilfully isolate those endings from the life surrounding them.
Nicely said. While the challenges for these couples do not end with the marriage ceremony, in general Jane Austen does a nice job of putting together complementary personalities in her fictional couples, and it’s not hard to see them having long, happy, if not necessarily quiet, marriages.
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It is unfortunate that allthough Jane Austen is now very well known, people who are on the outskirts of her work tend to see her as a “happy ever after” kind of traditional romance author. An Austen ending is never 100% happy as she deals out the fate for all major person and does so with impressive insight. Yes Mary Musgrave will be jealous of her sisters new laundalette etc. My favorite ending is how she descriped Willoughbys future. Now he will not be a better person or chrushed by his loveless marriage. His wife is not always in a bad mood and Marianne will be reduced to a soppy memory over a bottle of red wine
Most of us American girls grew up with a Cinderella mentality: some day, an astute young man will realize what a treasure I really am, and we shall live happily ever after. Experience does not bear witness to this idea, however.
Jane Austen does not promise married bliss to her self-centered characters (Lydia or Maria, for example), but neither does she lead us to believe that even her best characters will have a fairy tale marriage. I think that Mr. Darcy would be a difficult husband, but I also think that Lizzy would enjoy the challenge. Edward Ferrars might always be a bit weak, but Elinor would be a loving and steady wife. So, we are heart-satisfied with Jane Austen’s endings. They ring true to life, but they are still very happy endings.
“One is also given a painful sense – albeit ultimately resolved – of what it can mean to be kept apart from someone you love, when marriage to them is what you actually want.”
Poignant, indeed. At least Jane was kind enough to create a resolution in the end. Real life is often not as forgiving, nor other fiction as well, such as Deepa Mehta’s Water, where the lovers, Kalyani and Narayan, are tragically never to be united through no fault of their own.
But dear Jane was compassionate enough to not forsake even those who normally would been left behind from the turn of events, such as the valetudinarian Mr Woodhouse (hey, that’s Jane’s choice of words, not mine) after his daughter is wed.