Comparing Jane Austen’s comedy of manners to Bridget Jones’s Diary and The Rules tells us something about the road love and marriage have travelled. Published in 1813, though begun before the turn of the century under the title ‘First Impressions’, the novel coincides with the period when the sentimental marriage, a union based on love, was effectively consolidated as a cultural wish, if not quite a reality: the book still bears many of the traces of marriage’s older aristocratic form in which property and family alliance took precedence over any sentimental attachment, let alone those spurred by sex. Part of its contemporary drama arises precisely in the tug between these forms of union.
Marriage, indeed, is the book’s subject: it is as much a social and economic imperative as it may be a sentimental one. The famous opening line makes this clear: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ The corollary of this is that women, particularly if not in possession of a good fortune, which is the five Bennet daughters’ case, must be in want of a husband.
If the search for the ‘right’ partner is a modern gloss on the book’s theme, Austen emphasizes that success in the endeavour entails inward adjustments and a recognition of one’s own failings: it is not only a matter of behavioural ploys. Both her male and female characters undertake what we would now call the ‘emotional work’ of relationship, something the film versions inevitably make less clear. Both sexes, too, are in search of partners. Austen gives us various possible kinds of marriage, together with an ironical gloss on what ‘rightness’ may mean. Her principal heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, like Bridget Jones with Daniel Cleaver, is initially greatly taken by the charming Mr Wickham. But her ‘first impressions’ prove faulty here, as they do in her assessment of her eventual Mr Right, Fitzwilliam Darcy, considered for a good half of the book to be a disapproving prig, overblown with pride in his superior status.
Austen imbues Lizzy with wit, intelligence and independence of mind: she is hardly a submissive, simpering puppet obsessed only by the chase that will allow her to be caught. In that sense, she is something of a protofeminist. Despite the real possibility of future insecurity, she refuses her first offer of marriage from the sententious and fawning Mr Collins. When Darcy initially proposes to her, stating that he does so against his will, she adamantly refuses him: passion is not enough to justify union with a man who manifests so much simultaneous contempt for those she values. Only when he has recognized his own lacks as Lizzy has hers, only when she garners an insight into his character as composed of more than pride, does she begin to fall in love with him. Judgement, good sense and some of those traditional virtues–generosity, just action, helpfulness, devotion–rather than an excess of ‘sensibility’ are always core values for Austen. The choice between one partner and another is not a matter of romance, but of argument and discussion, of shared values and hopes of the world.
If attraction at first sight can be said to play its part in the eventual union of Lizzy’s sister Jane to the affable Mr Bingley, it hardly makes the path towards it smooth. Jane may not have read The Rules, which advise women ‘not to open up too fast’, but her temperament is such that she conceals her special affection for Bingley. As a result ‘he cannot trust it’, while his interventionist friend Darcy can’t see it at all and shepherds him quickly away from what he understands as a less than perfect match, one in which a rise in social status alongside financial advantage would be all on Jane’s side. Lizzy’s friend Charlotte, an unmarried twenty-seven-year-old, who is the wise pragmatist in the novel, says to her:
There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost every attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin freely–a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels. Bingley likes your sister undoubtedly; but he may never do more than like her, if she does not help him on.
Charlotte herself accepts a marriage proposal from Mr Collins after the briefest acquaintance, even though she considers him ‘neither sensible nor agreeable’ and thinks highly neither of men nor of matrimony. Nonetheless, it is the only honourable provision for ‘well-educated young women of small fortune’. Indeed, Charlotte’s views on marriage counterbalance the high hopes Lizzy and Jane have of it: ‘Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance,’ Charlotte states. ‘If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation.’ Lizzy’s silly and effervescent sister Lydia, who elopes (at the dizzy age of sixteen) with the ever charming Wickham, soon to be strong-armed into marriage with her, will be proof of that, Austen suggests at the end of the book. Nor is there much ‘felicity’ in the central marriage we are shown: that of the intelligent, diffident, passive Mr Bennet and his coarse, controlling, histrionic wife, a union propelled by lust and lived in estrangement. Bridget Jones’s parents live out its modern parallel, which includes an affair on the mother’s part, yet the author, Helen Fielding, seems intent on having them come together in happiness at the end.
Despite easy access to divorce and the knowledge that half of marriages will end in one, despite women’s greater economic freedom, despite an abundance of youthful sex and cohabitation figures which in Britain estimate that some two million people are living together, we seem to want marriages based on love to work ‘till death do us part’ even more than Austen did. A YouGov poll commissioned by the Sunday Times in 2008, based on interviews with cohabiting, married and once divorced men and women in almost equal numbers, found that 66 per cent of people who were cohabiting and 77 per cent of those in their first marriage thought that marriages should entail a commitment for life. Broken down into age groups, 80 per cent of the under-forties believed in lifelong marriages, as did 76 per cent of the over-forties.
Though in 2010 actual marriage figures in England and Wales had fallen for four consecutive years and cohabitation figures had risen, 60 per cent of those cohabiting believed in marriage, and simply wanted to be sure. Some, of course, like Hugh Grant in the perennially popular Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), may be sceptical about the formal trappings of weddings and humorously contemptuous of conventional marriage. But what they seek in cohabitation is a marriage in all but name. In America, cohabitation figures increased by 88 per cent between 1980 and 2007, while about 55 per cent planned to marry their partners.
The young men and women I interviewed talked of marriage as a wish or a lack, even if their parents had divorced. Like gay men and women, they spoke of it as a public and symbolic act: an important ritual–of which we now have so few–in which a community witnessed their vows. As the Flemish writer Erwin Mortier said to me about his marriage after twenty years of ‘sinful cohabitation’: ‘It’s a triumph of endurance over hope.’ So even if we marry late, often having cohabited first, marriage maintains its aura as a good ignited and inhabited by love.
Can it be that marriage is simply the best way human beings have found to live together even though it may also sometimes be the worst? And what kinds of love precipitate and inhabit it? Are we talking about the romantic swoon of the courting lover, the anguished heights and obsessional lows of passion, a contract between admired master and submissive or pampered servant, a companionship based on attraction, affinities and mutual projects, a shelter against loneliness and the terrors of mortality, or a union that mingles several of these?
Inventing Love
Western ideas of love have their source in fiction as much as in lived history. Like fairy-tale, the fictions carry an element of wish, rather more than they may reflect any immediate and widespread reality. But shaping aspirations and daydreams as they do, as well as delineating appropriate behaviour, fictions help to form the psychological bedrock
of the way we live love. As that mordant seventeenth-century French aphorist La Rochefoucauld observed, ‘People would never fall in love if they had not heard talk of love.’ Indeed, fictions are society’s way of carrying on a conversation with itself about what it values and what it detests, about what may invoke happiness or produce despair, and what we mean by both.
Notions of romance and courtship find one starting-place in the select atmosphere of the Provençal courts of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. The very word ‘courtship’, which has now taken on its more specific sense of anyman wooing anywoman, derives from the courtesy, the good manners and behaviour expected of a courtier in the presence of queenly beings more elevated than himself. Love and seduction here are part of a civilizing enterprise exacted by high-ranking women of lower-born men. These codes of civility spread through the Renaissance courts. They played an important part in the entourage of Louis XIV, and were very gradually disseminated through the rising middle classes of Europe. Here they eventually–and always unevenly–found themselves bound into the union of love and marriage.
In the love poetry of the Provençal troubadours, the mistress is inaccessible. Like Lancelot’s Guinevere, she is married. Courtship is secret. She is wooed through brave deeds and through verse which sings her beauty and ineffable charms, as well as the lovesickness of the poet-lover. The sickness or madness is central: romantic love, often unrequited, is tantamount to a mental or imaginative imbalance, an anguish which catapults the lover into an obsessive concentration on the beloved. His idealization of her makes him blind to all faults and other concerns.
The secrecy is important, too. It heightens the meanings the twosome takes on. Gradually, in the eighteenth century, one aspect of this secrecy was transmuted into an idea of individual privacy: matters of love and sentiment became emphatically personal, something to be enacted far from the prying eyes of other family members and everpresent servants. It was then that the new family houses of aristocrats and bourgeoisie sprouted separate bedrooms and boudoirs with closed doors, as well as halls to reach them by: sex became a private matter.
The arts of seduction spelled out in courtly poetry were formalized by Andreas Capellanus sometime between 1174 and 1190 in The Art of Courtly Love–perhaps at the behest of King Philip II of France, or, as earlier scholars assumed, of Marie de Troyes, the daughter of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. The social and amatory forms the book describes were those of Queen Eleanor’s ‘Court of Love’, the most sophisticated court of its period. Here love of the highest courtly kind was believed to ennoble both lover and beloved. Capellanus used Ovid’s notorious Ars Amatoria as his source text, an earlier rule book where seduction consists of a series of cunning ploys with a distinct sexual end in view. This was not an altogether compatible source if, as scholars agree, the Provençal poets had a rather more spiritual process in mind, one in which Platonic influences, transported and revivified through early Arabic mystical writings and the Cordoban philosopher Ibn Hazm’s The Ring of the Dove, played their part. In these, the mistress’s earthly beauty is an intimation of heavenly beauty and angelic wisdom. These inspire the lover to great deeds. Love’s labours are a quest, here, for a transcendental truth, an ideal Platonic form, more akin to the Christian saint’s love of God than to Ovid’s altogether carnal seductions.
Capellanus’ De Amore takes the form of a letter addressed to a friend who is being initiated into the civilizing art of love. It proceeds through various dialogues between men and women of different classes. Capellanus embraces the more spiritual form of courtly love due to the most highly placed of ladies, as well as the more mundane variety which includes lust and a tumble in the hay with peasant girls. There is an assumption that affection, even if immoderate, between man and wife is in no way akin to ‘true’ love’s highest calling, which has no place in marriage. Capellanus’ famous ‘rules’ of love grow out of these dialogues. They include the following:
A true lover does not desire to embrace in love anyone except his beloved.
When made public, love rarely endures.
The easy attainment of love makes it of little value: difficulty of attainment makes it prized.
Every lover regularly turns pale in the presence of his beloved.
When a lover suddenly catches sight of his beloved his heart palpitates.
Good character alone makes any man worthy of love.
He whom the thought of love vexes eats and sleeps very little.
Every act of a lover ends in the thought of his beloved.
A true lover considers nothing good except what he thinks will please his beloved.
Though Capellanus includes the rule that ‘It is not proper to love a woman whom one would be ashamed to seek to marry’, marriage is not the aim of courtly love. It is assumed that whatever the strength of the passion or the suffering it entails, both lover and beloved can be displaced by others. Yet for the length of time it lasts, ‘true love’ is based on faithful devotion.
Beatrice, the guiding spirit who finally leads Dante out of Purgatory and into the Paradiso of The Divine Comedy, is an instance of the idealized beloved of the courtly love poets. So, too, is Petrarch’s Laura, immortalized in the famous sonnets of the Canzoniere (Song Books). In both cases, the real women served as inspiration for poetry, but had little lived contact with the poets who translated them into the iconic mistresses of their work. Dante first met Beatrice when she was eight and he nine–a ‘first love’, one might say, which stayed with him for life, though both of them married others. Petrarch only glimpsed Laura in a church in Avignon, yet this fugitive beauty ignited a passion.
During the seventy-two-year reign of France’s Sun King, Louis XIV (1638–1715), those early bluestockings, the précieuses, took on the subject of courtly love. They debated and refined it in their salons to give love both a new psychological depth and a woman’s perspective of estimable values. In La Carte de Tendre, that map of an Arcadia of love which forms the frontispiece to her ten-volume novel Clélie (1654–60), Madeleine de Scudéry set out the correct and gallant path to winning a woman’s heart, as well as the dangers on the way. After the moment of ‘new friendship’, what count on the journey along the river of inclination towards love–apart from gallantry, little trinkets and billets doux–are characteristics such as sincerity, integrity, sensibility, respect and generosity. Persistence, too, is key. Amongst the pitfalls in this country of love, the Lake of Indifference and the Sea of Hostility loom, plus negative attributes such as indiscretion, pride, treachery and, interestingly, inequality. Women’s place in courtly love is at least equal–if not superior.
Madame de Lafayette’s hugely successful La Princesse de Clèves (1678) plays itself out, with new psychological intricacy, on this terrain of love. Set amidst an astutely observed court filled with envy and intrigues, the novel charts her introspective heroine’s trajectory from the age of fifteen when she is married off to the older Prince de Clèves. Soon, the Princess develops a closely analysed passion for the dashing Duc de Nemours. But their love, though she sees how it alters her relationship with her husband, is not one that can be fulfilled. Torn, like one of Racine’s classic heroines, between love and duty, even after her jealous husband dies, the Princess ends her days in a convent. Love here bows before the time’s aristocratic demands of form and honour.
It could be said that courtly love separated out to shape two different, though not always utterly distinguishable, trajectories: the profane focused on carnal passion; the sacred emphasized the romantic, the soulful, the transformative heights and depths of passion. The first tradition is a libertine one. Casanova and Byron or the fictional Valmont and Don Giovanni are its male exemplars, rakish and gallant by turn but ever concentrated on the seduction and pursuit of women, who are their prey, however willing or complicit. The chase, here, is as important and arguably more satisfying than any ultimate consummation, whatever its pleasures. As for the prey, unless they are already married and protected by class,
they suffer the anguish of abandonment, and the wrecked lives that illegitimate pregnancy entailed. Amongst the female libertines are all those coquettes and courtesans of yore and the sirens of today, more often in search of fortune than fornication, who use their wiles to play the amoral mating game. Love here is mental and carnal, but rarely strays, except unwittingly, into the emotions.
In its playful, flirtatious French version, seduction can indeed be an art. Embedded in a tradition which understands passion as pleasure, it makes of love a titillating game, one that inhabits so special a place in life that even when it bursts out of the rules of the game to engage ungovernable emotions, laws as well as social forms are bent to give it room: a crime of passion is not an everyday crime. Passion is understood to have its own logic, which is in a certain measure beyond the law. Women in this tradition have a heightened, often civilizing, importance: they are, indeed, the mistresses of love, most particularly once they are already married.
Translated into contemporary manuals of behaviour, the arts of seduction gain a deadly earnestness which robs them of much of their allure and any of their potential link to love. They become utterly instrumental, as well as hard toil. In his racy The Art of Seduction (2001), Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power (1998), demonstrates seduction tactics for both sexes: ‘how to cast a spell, break down resistance, and… compel a target to surrender, all in the twenty-four maneuvers and strategies of the Seductive Process’. Manipulation, though it involves pretence, is never altogether art, and seduction here can look more like stalking than an engagement with pleasure. In a world where women are equal and sex casual, the attentiveness of a seducer, if unwanted, is less titillation than bullying.
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 11
