Strong Esteem and Lively Friendship - a good basis for a marriage? |
 Jan 24 2009, 02:50 PM
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Professional Diagon Alley Window Shopper Posts: 72 Joined: 10:45am November 9, 2008  |
Of course Jane Austen no sooner forces Marianne to discover the fasehood of her opinions and to counteract her favourite maxim by marrying without love, than she reprieves her. Two paragraphs later she is as much devoted to her husband as she had once been to Willoughby. And even in book time, as Margaret is still of an age for dancing and flirting, it can't have taken very long.
Jane Austen's books are romantic comedies, so the happy endings always do have the heroines marrying with love, respect, friendship and money all boding happiness. And we do not generally see even as much of their marriages as we do in the last pages of Sense and Sensibility. But what about the marriages we do see? They are mostly of the older generation, and I can actually find very few that could fairly be described as enviable. But those that are happy all do seem to me to always indicate stronger feelings than respect and friendship binding the partners together. At the most explicit, Jane goes out of her way to comment on the Crofts as an ideal of married happiness, noting specifically their constant companionship, far above the customs of society. I can imagine a happy relationship without strong passion, although I know that I could never have coped with learning to live with my husband if I had not been in love with him. But, although she says it would be right and proper, I am not sure that Jane can really imagine it. |
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