What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (22 page)

Amis’s novel is alert to the sexual coding to be found in Austen – what it means when Catherine Morland’s figure gains in ‘consequence’; why the word ‘stout’ might be used of Lydia Bennet – but it also follows a trend of both recent film adaptations and some recent academic criticism, discovering more sex implicit in Austen than narrative logic allows. Keith Nearing’s inaccuracy is a fault precisely because Austen does require her reader to think about sex. She requires us, for instance, to think about Lydia Bennet having had sex, repeatedly and, we must infer, enjoyably. Lydia has lived with Wickham for almost a month before their marriage. When Mr Darcy discovers the couple cohabiting he talks to Lydia and tries ‘to persuade her to quit her present disgraceful situation’, but she is having none of it (III. x). According to the letter written to Elizabeth by her uncle, Mr Gardiner, ‘She was sure they should be married some time or other, and it did not much signify when.’ The Wickhams arrive at Longbourn on their wedding day, already knowing each other intimately. Elizabeth notes that Lydia is ‘exceedingly fond’ of her new husband (III. ix). Not only is she sexually unabashed, she is, it seems, sexually gratified. Mr Collins solemnly regrets ‘that their living together before the marriage took place, should be so generally known’ (III. xv). He and the foolish Mary Bennet adopt a language of moral absolutism about this. The ‘lesson’ Mary finds is ‘that loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable—that one false step involves her in endless ruin’ (III. v). Elizabeth reacts with ‘amazement’, but not because she has never heard such sentiments before: the novels of Samuel Richardson, which, according to her brother Henry, Jane Austen so admired, proceed on exactly Mary’s assumption.
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The eponymous heroine of
Pamela
(subtitled ‘Virtue Rewarded’) took her ‘virtue’ to be synonymous with her virginity. ‘Arm yourself, my dear Child, for the worst; and resolve to lose your Life sooner than your Virtue,’ writes her father when he hears of her master’s seductive advances.
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Elizabeth is presumably ‘amazed’ because her sister so smugly parrots the formulae of novelists and conduct book writers. It is on a par with Mr Collins’s ‘The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison of this’ (III. vi).

Lydia’s sexual adventures naturally become the stuff of local gossip. The narrator comments drily on responses in the ‘neighbourhood’ at the news of Lydia’s planned marriage. ‘To be sure, it would have been more for the advantage of conversation had Miss Lydia Bennet come upon the town; or, as the happiest alternative, been secluded from the world, in some distant farmhouse’ (III. viii). Local
schadenfreude
, that is to say, would have been best satisfied by Lydia becoming a prostitute, as she might have done in a Victorian novel. Lydia is highly unusual in the fiction of her day and earlier in going to bed with a man before marriage and emerging unbowed. Her punishment of being sent to live in Newcastle is mild by the standards of other novels. Her youth – she is sixteen less than two months before her elopement – makes her immunity the more striking. But though she escapes unbowed, Austen cannot resist telling you about the future of the Wickhams’ relationship. ‘His affection for her soon sunk into indifference; her’s lasted a little longer’ (III. xix). ‘Affection’ here surely means something like sexual interest. Passion’s trance passes rapidly, as it does in
Mansfield Park
: Mrs Rushworth has been willing to go off with Mr Crawford because ‘she loved him’, but he has ceased to be interested after ‘a very few months’ (III. vii).

She was not to be prevailed on to leave Mr. Crawford. She hoped to marry him, and they continued together till she was obliged to be convinced that such hope was vain, and till the disappointment and wretchedness arising from the conviction rendered her temper so bad, and her feelings for him so like hatred, as to make them for a while each other’s punishment, and then induce a voluntary separation.

Mrs Rushworth’s first sexual passions are, we infer, the more powerful because she can compare Henry Crawford’s caresses with those of her unappealing husband. Sexual intoxication ends with the repeated inflicting of that ‘mutual punishment’ which, we have just heard, she will suffer interminably in her adulteress’s imprisonment with Mrs Norris. The author is doing plenty of punishing, and imposing just the exile – ‘an establishment . . . remote and private’ – that the denizens of Meryton might have liked for Lydia Bennet.

After eloping, Wickham and Lydia go to stay in London lodgings recommended by the corrupted Mrs Younge, presumably calling themselves man and wife. For those who wish to stay close to home, having illicit sex would not be easy. In
Northanger Abbey
Henry Tilney corrects Catherine’s Gothic fantasy about his father having murdered his mother by reminding her of the ‘voluntary spies’ who surround them (II. ix): these must mostly have been servants, constant observers of their masters’ and mistresses’ improprieties. Surveying his case histories of divorce from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, as detailed in court records, Lawrence Stone draws one unambiguous lesson: ‘All stories of female adultery in high society prove that it was virtually impossible for persons surrounded day and night by servants who waited on them hand and foot to conduct a love-affair without it becoming known below stairs.’
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In
Mansfield Park
it is a servant who knows just what has been going on between Henry Crawford and Mrs Rushworth, and who sharpens the crisis. Sir Thomas’s friend Mr Harding tries to make it possible for Mrs Rushworth to return to the marital home, but it is not easy. ‘The maid-servant of Mrs. Rushworth, senior, threatened alarmingly’ (III. xvi). Clearly she is threatening to make public her knowledge of the relationship, and is in a position to give an account considerably more lurid than what has already been offered in the newspapers. She ‘had exposure in her power’. When Mary Crawford talks to Edmund of the ‘folly’ of her brother and his sister, she shakes her head in a worldly way about Maria’s cardinal error – ‘her putting herself in the power of a servant’.

Usually, in order to seduce a genteel young woman in an Austen novel one must elope with her. In
Sense and Sensibility
we discover that Willoughby has eloped with the sixteen-year-old Eliza from Bath. She disappears for eight months before Colonel Brandon, her guardian, finds her: she has a baby, and she and her child are ‘removed . . . into the country’ (II. ix). Willoughby has since abandoned Marianne, but, Colonel Brandon muses, ‘who can tell what were his designs on her?’ In a confession scene with Elinor, late in the novel, Willoughby admits that he was once a ‘libertine’ but claims that he truly loved Marianne (III. viii). He persuades Elinor to think better of him than she did after hearing Colonel Brandon’s story. Yet, while professing guilt, he cannot contemplate marrying the girl he has seduced and is free to forget her. Encoded in
Sense and Sensibility
is the suggestion that acceptance of gentlemen’s sexual indiscretions was widespread. Mrs Jennings’s stage whispers about Colonel Brandon’s supposed ‘natural daughter’ acknowledge that, while ‘young ladies’ were supposed to be appalled by such a thing, it was a norm (I. xiii). (In the first edition of
Sense and Sensibility
, Austen tells us that ‘Lady Middleton’s delicacy was shocked’ by the mention of ‘so improper a subject’, but this is excised from the revised second edition.
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) Despite Elinor’s resistance, Mrs Jennings persists in believing in the existence of Colonel Brandon’s ‘love-child’ (II. viii). This phrase was a novel one in 1811 (the OED records the first use in English as 1805) and would have had a peculiar weight with the novel’s first readers. Mrs Jennings finds all too readily a modish euphemism for a sexual indiscretion. The girl to whom she refers is in fact the illegitimate daughter of Colonel Brandon’s now-dead sister-in-law. ‘I called her a distant relation; but I am well aware that I have in general been suspected of a much nearer connection with her’ (II. ix). He is too honourable to say anything publicly to scotch this rumour.

Austen’s stories rely on an acknowledgement of men’s sexual appetites, which explain why that ‘truth universally acknowledged’, an affluent bachelor’s desire for a wife, is in fact true. There are several men in Austen’s fiction who do ‘want’ a wife for reasons beyond financial calculation. Mr Collins wants one; Charles Musgrove wanted one. The former might hope to please Lady Catherine de Bourgh, but surely has other reasons. The latter, having been turned down by Anne Elliot, rationally turned to her younger sister. Both men being proper in their different ways, and both being called ‘young’, we might surmise that a desire for sexual release motivated them, and that an early nineteenth-century reader would understand this. Similarly, Mr Elton, the Highbury vicar, is ‘a young man living alone without liking it’ (
Emma
, I. iii). That last phrase seems to carry a weight of already understood meaning. Only a wilfully innocent reader could think that he yearns for a wife just to choose his fabrics and argue with his cook. Austen’s narratives sometimes depend upon our imagining male sexual needs. Catching us wondering how Mr Palmer in
Sense and Sensibility
, an intelligent if ill-natured man, could possibly have married a woman as idiotic as Charlotte Jennings, Austen lets Elinor reflect on the puzzle. ‘His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman—but she knew that this kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be lastingly hurt by it’ (I. xx). It is an extraordinary judgement, for Mr Palmer surely is ‘lastingly’ affected by his rash inclination: he is married to a fool for the rest of his days. Elinor’s word for what he has done – ‘blunder’ – diminishes its consequences and implies that she has seen this happen often. His error has been his yen for ‘beauty’ – or we might say, his susceptibility to ‘sex appeal’. At this stage of the novel, Charlotte Palmer is heavily pregnant with their first child (though he is scarcely able to talk to his wife, he does make love to her). Perhaps her advanced state of pregnancy means a temporary denial of sex. More reason for his peculiar grumpiness.

Why does Robert Ferrars marry Lucy Steele in
Sense and Sensibility
? All the evidence is for a process of sexual intoxication that she manages with great skill (III. xiv). He marries her ‘speedily’ because he wants her. Lucy has ‘considerable beauty’: it is the first thing we know about her (I. xxi). She trades on sexual allure (not mere bluff – we are explicitly told of the ‘great happiness’ of their honeymoon). Mr Bennet’s choice of Mrs Bennet has also been sensually determined. In the first chapter of
Pride and Prejudice
his joke about his wife not accompanying his daughters to meet Mr Bingley lest he ‘like you the best of the party’ has a hint of ruefulness (I. i). As a young man he had been ‘captivated by youth and beauty’ (II. xix). Having made his mistake, he lives with it. ‘Mr. Bennet was not of a disposition to seek comfort for the disappointment which his own imprudence had brought on, in any of those pleasures which too often console the unfortunate for their folly or their vice’ (II. xix). This is suitably evasive. Some have taken it to mean that Mr Bennet did not take a mistress; it seems more likely to mean that he did not take to the bottle. After all, we can infer that Mr and Mrs Bennet have carried on an active sex life well into middle age as, ‘for many years after Lydia’s birth’, Mrs Bennet is sure that they will eventually have a son (III. viii).

One wonders too about Mr John Knightley, who is clever and, like his brother, has ‘penetration’. He is openly irritated by most of his wife’s preoccupations and must perceive her foolishness. Why did he marry her? Presumably because of physical attraction; their five children after only seven years of marriage might be evidence of this. Similarly, we guess that Sir Thomas Bertram has chosen his wife for her sex appeal. And we joltingly realise that Henry Crawford has committed himself to marrying Fanny Price because of sexual longing. ‘“How the pleasing plague had stolen on him” he could not say’ (
Mansfield Park
, II. xii). Rakish he might be, but he knows that he can only sleep with Fanny by becoming her husband. His sister confirms our sense of his yearning later in the same chapter when she observes, ‘a wife you
loved
would be the happiest of women’, before adding, with a flat acceptance of an inevirable logic, ‘even when you ceased to love, she would yet find in you the liberality and good-breeding of a gentleman’. Here, as Austen expects the reader to notice, ‘love’ is synonymous with sexual appetite. Her brother cannot acknowledge the possibility of ‘ceasing to love Fanny Price’, but Mary Crawford’s confident prediction invites us to understand the basis of his addiction. It also clearly implies that, at this stage, Henry will eventually begin looking elsewhere for his sexual pleasures.

If Austen’s novels acknowledge men’s sexual needs, it is hard to know what to think about some of the bachelors with whom her heroines are finally paired. Historians have found, in diaries and journals, the pains of sexual longing to which some gentlemen confessed, and to which some succumbed, visiting prostitutes or enjoying sexual relationships with servants.
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Can we think that Colonel Brandon, Mr Knightley or Captain Wentworth are indeed virgins before their marriages? Or that Mr Weston has remained chaste during the long years between the death of his first wife and his second marriage? In this last case, Austen does want us to realise that Mr Weston’s marriage to Miss Taylor is not just a matter of genteel companionship. The widower is sexually reborn. Mr and Mrs Weston marry in late September or early October and Mrs Weston is pregnant within a month (her baby is born in late July). Fertility is one indicator of an active sex life. The nine brothers and sisters that Austen gives to Catherine Morland in
Northanger Abbey
, and the thirteen siblings Charlotte Heywood has in
Sanditon
, are evidence of the robust marital affection of their parents. (They are also a good reason for allowing these heroines to leave the family home, with a chaperone, for some comic adventures.) In Fanny Price’s family, in contrast, procreation betokens an unruly sex drive. Mr Price is invalided out of the navy, so always at home; the strong implication is that the unaffordable getting of children goes with his other unrestrained habits, notably his drinking. Jane Austen famously said in a letter to her niece Fanny that she would recommend to Mrs Deedes, her brother Edward’s sister-in-law, who had just given birth to her eighteenth child, ‘the simple regimen of separate rooms’ (
Letters
, 151). It is an option that the Prices, in their cramped lodgings, do not have.