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

their looks and the status their hotness confers on him, instead of a woman he can imagine actually spending his life with.
    T IP JUST FOR JANEITES
    Don’t judge men
by whether they have
“alpha male” characteristics.
    A lot of our cynicism amounts to a kind of mimicry of the worst men’s bad habits—on the unstated theory that if we can’t beat ’em, we might as well join ’em. That’s the thinking behind the famous Sex and the City question, “Can a woman have sex like a man?” There’s a lot of evidence that most of us can’t, at least not if to “have sex like a man” means to use and discard partners casually and painlessly, the way the most callous players do. 12 But why would we want to be like those guys?

“As Much Attached to Another Person As I Can Be to Any One”
    Jane Austen did create one female character who exhibits all the callous selfishness of the deliberate male heartbreaker. Lady Susan is an early novelette Jane Austen wrote in a series of letters. The title character is Jane Austen’s version of the Marquise de Merteuil, the scheming villainess Glenn Close played in Dangerous Liaisons . Lady Susan may not “have sex like a man,” 13 but she’s as cold as any player.
    You don’t finish reading the book wanting to be like Lady Susan, the way you wish you could step into Elizabeth Bennet’s shoes, or Emma’s. Lady Susan’s mental world is a kind of desert, void of everything that makes life worth living. She sees through all the things that matter, more thoroughly than even Mary Crawford. To Lady Susan, personal integrity and honorable love are nothing but weaknesses. “There is a sort of ridiculous delicacy,” she complains about Reginald de Courcy, the idealistic young man she’s wrapping around her little finger, “which requires the fullest explanation of whatever he may have heard to my disadvantage.” Reginald loves Lady Susan only because she has cleverly managed to explain away her well-deserved reputation.
    “This is one sort of Love,” says Lady Susan, “but I confess it does not particularly recommend itself to me. I infinitely prefer the tender & liberal spirit of Manwaring, which impressed with the deepest conviction of my
merit, is satisfied that whatever I do must be right.” Lady’s Susan’s hard-bitten lover Manwaring doesn’t care that Lady Susan has deliberately broken up his marriage; has simultaneously “detached” a suitor from his sister; and is cruelly insisting that her own fifteen-year-old daughter marry a man she despises. Reginald loves Lady Susan only as long as she can trick him into believing that none of these things is true. But it’s nothing to Lady Susan to be loved by a man of integrity: “If I were not already as much attached to another person as I can be to any one, I should make a point of not bestowing my affection on a Man who had dared to think so meanly of me.” She isn’t capable of real love. Like all the cynics in Jane Austen, Lady Susan is maimed and blind.
    She overestimates her control of the situation—which is the only thing that matters to her— gets caught in her outrageous lies in spite of her considerable powers of persuasion and charm, and fails in her schemes. All she can see in the honest people she’s attempting to manipulate is a repulsive “milkiness.” But by the end of the novelette, boring domesticity and naïve sentiment look suddenly fresh and attractive in comparison with Lady Susan’s devious mind and heart of stone. One-upping the nastier members of the male sex in callous disregard for other people is no solution for the fear we have that men can never really give us what we want from them.
    T IP JUST FOR JANEITES
    Incapacity for love may
keep you from being hurt.
But it’s not a strength,
or anything to aspire to.

Take Love Seriously
    And neither is the even more common way we modern women have of answering that fear. The standard technique for protecting our hearts—one that’s woven