Comediva of the Week: Jane Austen

1.  Have a bunch of really nice brothers who would inherit their father’s money and take care of their sisters.

2. Fall in love with a guy who had enough money to get married and take care of a wife.

3.  Marry some dude you didn’t love and be miserable.

4.  Starve.

Because you can’t really control whether you’re born with number one, and number four blows, if you lived in Jane’s day, you either fell in love or you prepared to live (and do the nasty at least enough times to have a male baby) with Mr. I-Just-Happen-To-Have-Asked-For-Your-Hand-in-Marriage.  Imagine the worst first date you’ve ever been on.  Now imagine if he asked you to marry him and your choices were to either say “yes” or to pull up a nice box on a street corner.

Romantic comedy not lookin’ so frivolous and fluffy anymore, eh?

Jane had to face some of the dilemmas that her novels laid out in such definitive fashion that only Shakespeare has been copied or stolen from more.  She fell violently in love (or at least in lust) at age 20 with an Irishman named Tom LeFroy.  Jane wrote to her sister Cassandra about him:

“I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved.  Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.”

Scandalous, Jane.  Scan-da-lous.  Sitting down?  With a guy?  You floozy, you.  Of course, if Tom was ACTUALLY as hot as James McAvoy makes him look in Becoming Jane, we totes don’t blame you.  Sadly, James McAvoy hot or not, Tom had no money, and neither did Jane.  And without an authoress to write in convenient inheritance to save the day, the romance was doomed.

Jane never married, and never appears to have fallen in love with another man (her family destroyed most of her correspondence, so she could have had tons of scandalous affairs, but it seems a tad unlikely).  Jane did, however, have one marriage proposal.  A marriage proposal she accepted.  For a day.  Then she changed her mind.  A decision for which we give her a solid high-five.  See, Harris Bigg-Wither, Jane’s momentary fiancé, was an unattractive, ill-spoken stutterer who was described as aggressive and completely tactless.

So WTF, Jane?  Why would she have even considered marrying this dude?  Because it was the smart thing to do.  Bigg-Wither was an old friend of the family, and a rich one.  Any sensible girl would have said yes.  But our dear Jane knew better, and after sleeping on it for the night, she apparently couldn’t bring herself to betray her own principles.  Thank.  God.

All evidence of how Jane felt about the situation has been lost, but 12 years later she wrote this to her niece, Fanny Knight:

“I shall now … entreat you not to commit yourself farther, and not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection.”

In other words, don’t get married just ’cause you need to marry.  Get married because you as a human being, who happens to have boobs, wants to be in a partnership with another human being.  If you don’t want to, have the ovaries to find another way.  Jane did.  And with her dry, snappy little romances she redefined not just what it meant to fall in love, but what it meant to be a woman.

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