For the many readers who would prefer tidy and romantic endings, the brief, complex, and costly conclusions to Jane Austen’s novels can seem like disruptions to purportedly pleasant diversions. Bereft of instant uplift, they interrupt what might otherwise be a satisfying crescendo to the narrative by introducing what seems to be Austen’s own voice commenting wryly, and even sometimes dismissively, on the fate of her characters. These conclusions resist the schemes of contemporary filmmakers whose adaptations, in various ways, run against the grain of her exacting artistry, which only heightens the disjunction between readers, whose expectations are often formed by these popular films, and the actual books. This is not to say that Austen’s novels are moralistic or melancholic tracts. And perhaps, when understood from a certain perspective, her conclusions are not actually out of place. The thesis suggested by the title of Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey’s book brings us closer to the truth: Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness.
Brodey, a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, draws out Austen’s efforts to purify the sentimental sympathy readers might feel by immersing them in an ethical outlook that could be described as comic realism. After Austen teases us toward unreal expectations, her “anti-romantic details puncture but do not ruin the romance.” Rather, she courts the reader into inhabiting real estate with a realistic view. Looking out from the spy holes of her house of fiction, we discover that marriage alone is no sure recipe for resolution—that friendship and extended family and “resources for solitude” are essential elements of a flourishing future. Some critics, of course, have dismissed the novelist as little more than a spurned spinster who vents her scorn in reactionary reconfigurations of the conventional marriage plot. Brodey resists such ready-made psychoanalytic diagnoses, contending instead that “her genius was in creating realistic characters that simultaneously provide us with fantasy outlets for the lives we would wish to lead, remind us that real life usually does not live up to our ambitions, and teach us how we as readers perpetuate” idealistic projections.
Austen’s art detaches us from facile expectations about the future even as it discourages nostalgia for a simpler, smaller world of the past whose apparent order seems an easy refuge in our age of complex globalism. But while Austen’s books are rife with tough wit, they also avoid cynical ironies that could please us for an instant; aware, as Brodey notes, that “ironic detachment can easily become excessive and devolve into ‘spleen,’” she exercises satire moderately rather than savagely. Austen may dash our dubious dreams, but her answers and resolutions satisfy on a deeper level.
Brodey reminds us that during Austen’s lifetime, in theory and in practice, in world-historical regimes and in leisured living rooms, lively debates as to the nature of happiness swept the Western world: Does happiness depend on independence or on communal roots? Is happiness a matter of the head or a swell of the heart? Does “stoicism or sentimentalism” most contribute to its flowering? John Stuart Mill conflated happiness and unrestrained liberty embodied in individualist “experiments in living.” When Austen was but a baby, Thomas Jefferson famously altered Locke’s “life, liberty, and property” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Jefferson’s configuration raises all sorts of questions, not least this one: Is liberty an end in itself, or is it only a means employed to achieve something higher?
Austen’s novels certainly portray characters circumscribed by dubious conventions. But her heroines, rather than being liberated by unadulterated freedom, are freed from unmoored individualism by the demands of a good we can only call common. Both in sense and in sensibility, she carries the same spirit Catholic philosopher Charles De Koninck articulates in On the Primacy of the Common Good Against the Personalists: “The dignity of the created person is not without ties, and the purpose of our liberty is not to overcome these ties, but to free us by strengthening them. These ties are the principal cause of our dignity. Liberty itself is not a guarantee of dignity and of practical truth.”
Although a reduction of happiness to property—a removal of metaphysics in favor of attainable materialism—would not satisfy the human soul, and Brodey makes no claims that eudaimonia can be purchased, Austen makes plain how hard it is to have a life made happy by habitual goodness when one is left with pennies instead of property. She is almost as verbose on matters of cash as Balzac, that monarchist beloved of Marx and Engels. Underneath Austen’s comic tongue-in-cheek is a body politic afflicted with avarice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” David Daiches went so far as to describe the lady novelist as a “Marxist before Marx.” Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre points out that in all of Austen’s novels we learn “where the money of the main characters comes from; we see a great deal of the economic self-seeking.” To be sure, the material circumstances of many of her heroines are precarious, but, as MacIntyre argues, they search for economic security “because the telos of her heroines is a life within both a particular kind of marriage and a particular kind of household of which that marriage will be the focal point.”
MacIntyre is not wrong to highlight the significance of money and marriage in Austen, but Brodey’s judicious book is attentive to the subtext and subtler shades of Austen’s moral imagination. Which brings us back to her novels’ conclusions. Most of them comprise only five pages or fewer, so that whatever bows the author ties defy the sort of slow-moving drama that lends the rest of the novel a deeper sense of what Henry James described as “felt life.” Along with being startlingly short, the endings palpably frustrate the romantic affect by calling attention to her own artifice. Just “as the spectator in Plato’s allegory of the cave is yanked forcibly out of the cave to see the sun, Austen forces us out of our comfortable chairs in the darkness of the theater, and into the light that exposes makeup, trapdoors, and scripts,” things usually kept from the audience out of a polite fulfillment of Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief,” giving a “dose of pain and recognition” for every incarnation of an affecting match.
The abruptness of these conclusions is strikingly evident at the end of Northanger Abbey, where, though the typical heroine returns “at the close of her career, to her native village, in all the triumph of recovered reputation,” a scenario on which “the pen of the contriver may delight to dwell,” Austen’s affair is “widely different.” No immersive immediacy will steal the readers’ hearts. When the General gave permission for the heroine to marry, “the bells rang, and everybody smiled.” Brodey points out the conspicuous absence of the wedding itself, not to mention the moving dialogue that would consummate with a profession of love. “It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge,” Austen writes, “and dreadfully derogatory of a heroine’s dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own.” Her anti-romantic comic realism suffers no sentimental partisans of human dignity who would campaign for the universal right to happy endings.
The authorial intrusions and inescapable breaks between the novels’ narrative arcs and the romantic “resolutions” cause us to countenance “the essential superfluity of the final romantic resolution,” and to pause and consider what kinds of conclusions “fall within our control” and which are determined by fates or forces beyond us.
Brodey argues that in many of Austen’s stories matrimony is not the sole or even the supreme triumph. While readers may rejoice at the marriage of Edward and Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, Austen flashes forward to a mundane life made harder by indigence: “They had in fact nothing to wish for, but the marriage of Colonel Brandon and Marianne, and rather better pasturage for their cows.” Like Flaubert’s Emma Bovary (named for those bovine creatures), the reader of Sense and Sensibility, Brodey observes, “may wish to forget the dependence of romantic heroes and heroines upon such lowly details as the quality of their pastures and the health of their cows, but such self-deception is a romanticization that pulls one apart from reality.” Put another way, “romantic loss fuels self-discovery.” Given how few marriages are right and just, and given the inadequacy of individualistic achievement, “Better relations with one’s family are, generally speaking,” in Austen’s redefined marriage plot, “more readily available than proposals from an ideal mate,” says Brodey.
In other words, Austen gives readers “shades of gray where we hope for black and white, realism where we crave romance.” At the commencement of Mansfield Park, Fanny Price seemed the least likely candidate for “marriage material.” When, toward the end, Fanny marries Edmund, readers cannot rejoice robustly in this elevation of a heroine whose dignity was too often denied. Rather, the marriage is not the summit of romance. A kind of criminal against spousal humanity, Edmund is a far cry from Mr. Right. But Austen here frees us from conventional expectations, and we find that “the real happy ending of Mansfield Park is Fanny’s conquest of the esteem of others and ultimately her ‘conquest’ of Mansfield Park itself.” Instead of a purely romantic reversal, we have, in the last pages, a reversal of property: “[T]he Parsonage there, which, under each of its two former owners, Fanny had never been able to approach but with some painful sensation of restraint or alarm, soon grew as dear to her heart” as the rest of the estate she had long been allowed to inhabit. Austen retrains our focus on the happiness of overseeing an estate relative to a mediocre match, forcing the reader to reckon with the social whole. “While less romantic in an individualistic sense,” this shift from a scene with star-crossed lovers to the fates of a range of characters and estates “nonetheless signifies love—caritas rather than eros”—and, I would add, dramatizes Aristotle’s conception of human beings as political animals.
Two young people set on marrying are sure to carry through with their pursuit, be they prudent or imprudent, provided for or poor. So Austen admits at the end of Persuasion: “This may be bad morality to conclude with, but I believe it to be truth.” With good humor, Austen coyly avoids sour moralism, but in her admiration for the truth she does not give short shrift to the depths of the moral imagination.
Although, over the course of the novel, Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth overcome the obstacles that delayed their marriage for nearly a decade, we are reminded that her father, Sir Walter Elliot, “had no affection for Anne, and no vanity flattered.” Like so many others who miss the needle’s eye of virtuous bliss, Sir Walter and his unwed daughter Elizabeth find, in their final situation, that “to flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.” Surrounded by snobbish vanities, Anne experiences a “lively pain” at having “no family to receive and estimate [Wentworth] properly.” Her sister Mary, though most immediately gratified by the news, assuages her envy by asserting that Anne “had no Uppercross Hall before her, no landed estate.” In this case and others, Austen makes room in the conclusion for selfish characters who get no small satisfaction from the misfortune of the heroine. Here is no Romeo and Juliet complex of two lovers defying their families and exercising romantic indifference to all of society. As if to show that happiness must enflame not only their own hearth but also warm the wider polis, the novel’s final paragraphs are devoted to Mrs. Smith, a crippled widow whose husband’s monies were misspent by Anne’s cousin and former suitor Mr. Elliot, a Machiavelli in matters of love.
Even in the afterglow of marriage, Captain Wentworth aids the widow. Austen’s wit and irony reach a high pitch when, after Wentworth straightens Mrs. Smith’s knotted finances, we find that “Mrs. Smith’s enjoyments were not spoiled by this improvement of income…. She might have been absolutely rich and perfectly healthy, and yet be happy.” Money is here an obstacle—not an engine—to bliss, and this satire of fiscal windfalls is delivered in the same breath the novelist praises the Captain’s analogous application of naval virtues to domestic conflicts. We leave Anne and Wentworth in a sunshine dimmed by the “dread of a future war.” In the original ending, “It was necessary to sit up half the Night and lie awake the remainder to comprehend with composure her present state, and to pay for the overplus of Bliss by Headache and Fatigue,” but in Austen’s final rendering the cost is considerably higher: If Wentworth’s pecuniary worth is now much stronger than when she first dismissed him, thanks to the navy’s democratizing wages, “the tax of quick alarm”—no small price—is but one of the wages she must perpetually pay in exchange for eudaimonia. This fearfully uncertain future is set against the couple’s care for Mrs. Smith, whose friendship is in turn a solace to Anne. Here, as elsewhere, “Austen’s nuanced art teaches readers that cultivating one’s own sympathy and sense of responsibility for others’ welfare might itself—whatever else may happen—be a source of happiness.” Without the polis, unless she were a god, an Austen heroine would be beastly unhappy.