Well, it didn’t take long for things to go south. Fights in Boston, fights in Brooklyn, fights over e-mail (which had just come in). Fights about my feelings, fights about her feelings, fights about the fights we’d just had. Fights that spun off little subsidiary fights that had to be resolved before we could get back to the main fight. Endless phone calls where we’d talk for a few minutes until we stumbled over something to fight about, then spend the rest of the evening fighting about it.
I was so in love with the idea of having a mature relationship, of throwing around words like married, that I forgot to ask myself whether I was actually happy with this person. The truth was, we weren’t really compatible—didn’t, once the honeymoon phase was over and we started to get to know each other for real, even much like each other. But it took me months to finally give up and admit it, because I was still under the spell of that romantic beginning, the allure of the story we would one day get to tell.
Once it was over, I almost swore off serious relationships altogether. The meeting, the spark, the sense of kinship: wasn’t that what love was supposed to look like? Were my instincts that bad? And what if I hadn’t gotten out before it was too late? It was an awfully narrow escape. For someone as allergic to commitment as I was, the experience was chilling. I still wanted to find a girlfriend, I finally decided, but I was more determined than ever not to let myself get married.
Having long since finished my first chapter, I thought I was done with Austen for a while, but that was the year that all those adaptations started to come out: Clueless, Persuasion, the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice, the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma. My favorite, though, was the Ang Lee/Emma Thompson adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. It was light, it was charming, it was fun—qualities I had never associated with the book itself. Sense and Sensibility, like Persuasion and Mansfield Park, belonged to the darker wing of Austen’s fiction. It was a sober, even bitter book—satiric but not joyful, funny but not comic. It contained my single favorite line in all of Austen—“She was not a woman of many words; for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas” (a doubleedged piece of irony that left no one standing and pretty much epitomized the book’s disposition)—but the novel as a whole had never won me over.
Now I went back to it again, to see how such a delightful movie could have been produced from so frustrating a book. My problem with Sense and Sensibility was the same as the one I had had with Mansfield Park: it wanted us to accept something that I refused to believe—something that I had trouble accepting even Austen believed. The story seemed perversely unromantic, even anti-romantic. Sense and Sensibility set two visions of love before us, each exemplified through one of its heroines, and insisted that we prefer the less appealing.
Marianne Dashwood was everything that you could want in a romantic heroine. She was young, beautiful, passionate, and unreserved. She sang like an angel, read poetry with feeling, and took long, solitary rambles at twilight. Her ideas of love were high and exacting. “The more I know of the world,” she said, “the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love.” Not only would such a man need virtue and intelligence, but his figure would have to be striking, his eyes full of spirit and fire. And to be worthy of her passion, something still more was required. “I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter into all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both.” Marianne was not just looking for a husband; she was seeking a soul mate.
Amazingly, such a man soon appeared. Running home one blustery morning to escape the rain, Marianne fell and twisted her ankle. Out of nowhere, it seemed, a gentleman rushed to her rescue, sweeping her up in his arms and carrying her to safety. He was young, handsome, elegant, and manly. His manner was charming, his voice expressive, his movements graceful. What was more, it soon turned out, he shared all of Marianne’s passions: for music and poetry, dancing and riding. Fate, it seemed, had destined them for one another. Before long, Marianne had come to feel that she understood this man as well as she knew herself. “It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy,” she said, “it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.” His name was Willoughby, and they fell quickly and deeply in love.
Her older sister, Elinor, meanwhile, was involved in a romance of her own—if you could call it that. As the novel opened, the heroines were about to lose their childhood home of Norland. Their father had died, and they and their mother and younger sister were going to be displaced by their half brother, John, and his wife, Fanny. John “was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted, and rather selfish, is to be ill-disposed,” and Fanny was even worse. He might have allowed the Dashwood women to remain at Norland, if only grudgingly, but she was determined to send them packing, especially once Elinor had struck up a friendship with her brother Edward.
Bland and halting and practically paralyzed by shyness, with no conspicuous talents and no particular ambitions, Edward was the very opposite of Willoughby, and no one’s idea of a lover. The poor guy wasn’t even handsome. But then again, Elinor was not exactly going to set the world on fire herself. Prudent where Marianne was passionate, merely pretty where she was beautiful, proper where her sister scorned conventional expectations, she did everything she could to restrain and downplay her feelings (and caution Marianne about not running away with her own). She and Edward had become friends, but their attachment hardly seemed to go any deeper than that.
In what counted for Elinor as an unguarded moment, she admitted to her sister that, as she put it in her typically schoolmarmish way, “I have seen a great deal of him, have studied his sentiments, and heard his opinion on subjects of literature and taste; and, upon the whole, I venture to pronounce that his mind is well-informed, his enjoyment of books exceedingly great, his imagination lively, his observation just and correct, and his taste delicate and pure.” It was a wonder that she managed to stay awake until the end of the sentence. Pressed a little harder, she rose to what passed with her for passion: “I do not attempt to deny that I think very highly of him—that I greatly esteem, that I like him.” She seemed to be willing to use every word but the one we wanted to hear. “Esteem him! Like him!” Marianne replied, as if she were reading our minds. “Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment.”
And yet it was Elinor and Edward’s tepid relationship, not Marianne and Willoughby’s wild, impassioned romance, that turned out to be the novel’s idea of true love. Elinor’s way was validated, as the plot went on to unfold, Marianne’s discredited. I understood, of course, from having absorbed Austen’s lessons about growing up, that Marianne put too much faith in her feelings, was too much of a capital-R Romantic. It took her seven exclamation points, after all, just to say good-bye to their old house. (“Dear, dear Norland! . . . when shall I cease to regret you! . . . Oh! happy house!”) Yes, Marianne was often made to look naïve and overwrought, but that only told me how biased Austen was against her, as well as how hard the author needed to work to convince us—at times, it seemed, to convince herself—of the superiority of Elinor’s version of love. I knew that Austen wanted us to place reason over feeling, but choosing Elinor-love over Marianne-love was not about doing that. It was about choosing between two kinds of feeling, two notions of what love really means.