The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After by Elizabeth Kantor Page A

everything that’s really important. They’re London sophisticates, too worldly wise to marry for love. They think only naïve people believe in “disinterested attachment.” To them, it seems much smarter to marry for money and status than to be “taken in.” And when their mercenary, ambitious marriages don’t after all make them happy, they have no clue what went wrong.
    Back among this London set, Mary relapses into cynicism. She’s “cooled” toward Edmund “by a return to London habits.” Fanny is appalled by the letter Mary writes her, and particularly by the way Mary thinks about Edmund now that she’s back in London: “The woman who could speak of him, and speak only of his appearance!—What an unworthy attachment! To be deriving support from the commendation of Mrs. Fraser! She who had been intimate with him half a year! Fanny was ashamed of her.” Mary is thinking about Edmund’s looks and how his attachment to her gives her status in the eyes of her friends, but also about how his profession will lower her status if she marries him. 8 She sees everything in terms of money, ambition, and sex appeal.
    Edmund knows that proposing marriage is risky while Mary is with her London friends; they’ll advise her against such an unworldly match. So he hesitates. And events intervene. Edmund is called away by his elder brother’s dangerous illness—which makes Mary suddenly more interested in Edmund, who will inherit Mansfield Park and be a baronet if Tom dies.
    And then Edmund’s sister Maria horrifies the whole Mansfield family by leaving her husband for Mary’s brother Henry. And Mary’s reaction to this adulterous affair finally opens Edmund’s eyes. He can hardly believe that the woman he wanted to marry thinks that Maria’s only real mistake in her affair with Henry was ... getting caught. Edmund is deeply upset by his sister’s adultery, and he finds Mary’s flippant way of talking about it painful. He tells Fanny,
    I do not consider her as meaning to wound my feelings. The evil is yet deeper; in her total ignorance, unsuspiciousness of there being such feelings, in a perversion of mind which made it natural to her to treat the subject as she did. She was speaking only as she had been used to hear others speak, as she imagined every body else would speak.
    Mary’s cynicism kills Edmund’s feelings for her, and he ends up marrying Fanny—to the reader’s delight! Mary is so careful not to be “taken in” by the illusion of love that she misses the real thing.
    So what application can Mary Crawford’s failure with Edmund possibly have for us? We’re not likely to meet many men as straitlaced as Edmund Bertram.
    Still, the hard shells we grow to protect our hearts can keep out the good guys as well as the heartbreakers. The cynical way Mary judges Edmund when she’s with her friends in London has a very familiar flavor. If we haven’t done it ourselves, we’ve heard women talk about men in that calculating way—as if the dating game were some kind of competition in looks, money, and status. We don’t like it when men judge women in that brutal manner, and particularly when they get together in groups and rate us like meat. 9 It doesn’t improve matters if we fall into a similar habit, setting up with our girlfriends to judge men in hotness, or other competitive categories.
    Dawn Eden, a veteran of the sex-and-the-city-style New York dating scene who gave it up because of a religious conversion, 10 describes how the longer she did that kind of dating, the more she saw sex and romance as a competition, ranked men in terms of how they measured up in alpha male qualities, and consequently lost the ability to notice the kind of man with whom she might find real love. 11 She had to recover from the female version of the disease my husband calls “shopping
for a sports car”—when a male friend’s love life is a series of predictable disasters because he insists on picking girls for