Jane Austen’s Rake Problem
What can genetics teach us about marriage in Austen’s novels?
Today we have a guest post by Edward McLaren, a DPhil candidate in English Literature at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where he specialises in 18th-century literature with a focus on Jane Austen and evolutionary psychology. Edward is on Substack as writing .
Marrying the wrong man…
In Jane Austen’s novels we know that the heroine will get her husband. The question is whether she gets the right husband. Can she pick the good man?
As Timothy Peltason said in “Jane Austen and the Wrong Man” (2022) her plots are all about whether the right man “can be discerned.” To show the real complications of courtship “Austen deploys the reappearing figure of the wrong man”. The wrong man is a “plausible but mistaken romantic choice that the heroine is at least tempted to make.”
But why don’t those wrong men get harsher punishment? Why is it so often the case that the Wickhams and Willoughby get away with their bad behaviour?
Could it be that Jane Austen actually finds the Willoughby types not just immoral but rather attractive? Does Jane Austen love a rake?
To answer that question, I’ll first show you how easily Austen lets her rakes off, and then look at how evidence from genetic research can give us an interesting new perspective on this question of why Austen lets her rakes off so lightly.
Going easy on the rake
So often, what makes a potential partner desirable in Austen is also what makes them turn out to be the wrong man. Characters like Willoughby are so attractive and quick-witted that they get their pick of the women. Alas, they are not willing to surrender their romantic power for a monogamous relationship, even with an intelligent and attractive Jane Austen protagonist.
Wickham will never reform himself for Lizzy. Indeed, when Wickham elopes with Lydia in Pride and Prejudice we realise that if Elizabeth Bennet had decided to marry him (as she was considering) he may well have dallied with the other sister regardless.
By the end of the novel, the union of party-girl Lydia and the incorrigible Wickham reads like the Regency equivalent of an “open marriage” as opposed to anything that could be desired by our conservative heroine or author. Once married, Wickham repeatedly goes off “to enjoy himself in London or Bath”, while Lydia invites her sister Kitty to go to balls. (Not that Mr. Bennet will allow that…)
What befalls Wickham is hardly the undesirable fate portrayed in William Hogarth’s sequence A Rake’s Progress (1732-1734), showing the syphilitic mental breakdown of the spendthrift character “Tom Rakewell”. And yet it is not the happy marriage of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy either.
The rake is not done away with, but contained.
Attracted to the wrong men
Perhaps if Maria Edgeworth had written Pride and Prejudice, Wickham would have been killed in the duel he almost fights with Mr. Bennet. Yet Austen allows him to live: she even offers him Lydia in the place of Lizzy.
In Sense and Sensibility (1811), John Willoughby is so attractive that he causes Marianne’s sister Elinor and indeed her mother Mrs. Dashwood to fall speechless before him:
Elinor and her mother rose up in amazement at [Marianne and Willoughby’s] entrance; and while the eyes of both were fixed on him with an evident wonder and a secret admiration which equally sprang from his appearance, he apologised for his intrusion, by relating its cause, in a manner so frank and so graceful, that his person, which was uncommonly handsome, received additional charms from his voice and expression.
In the other novels, the Willoughby-type figure risks displacing the monogamous, dependable hero. In Mansfield Park, it is Henry Crawford versus Edmund Bertram; in Pride and Prejudice, it is Mr. Wickham versus Mr. Darcy; in Emma, it is Mr. Knightley versus Frank Churchill; and in Persuasion Austen produces her most compelling rake, Mr. William Elliot. Lady Russell, the confidante of our heroine Anne Elliot, observes on properly meeting him for the first time:
His manners were an immediate recommendation; and on conversing with him she found the solid so fully supporting the superficial, that she was at first, as she told Anne, almost ready to exclaim, “Can this be Mr Elliot?” and could not seriously picture to herself a more agreeable or estimable man. Everything united in him; good understanding, correct opinions, knowledge of the world, and a warm heart. He had strong feelings of family attachment and family honour, without pride or weakness; he lived with the liberality of a man of fortune, without display; he judged for himself in everything essential, without defying public opinion in any point of worldly decorum.
Who wouldn’t be attracted to Mr. William Elliot? Austen is not afraid of showing us just how attractive these “wrong men” can be. This is a pattern in her work.
The Rake’s Accommodation
These intelligent, highly effective, and beautiful men prioritise reproducing a lot, not investing in a single family; they thus prefer smartly managed appearance over commitment.1 Naturally, they leave a trail of pregnant (often very clever women) before meeting Austen’s heroines. And yet in almost every novel, Austen tries to re-accommodate these men after their true nature is discovered.
Mr. Wickham marries Lydia; Willoughby marries Miss Grey and becomes friends with the Dashwood family again; Mr. Elliot tactically makes Mrs. Clay his wife to prevent her from marrying Sir Walter Elliot (and thus displacing him as heir to Kellynch Hall). It is only Henry Crawford whose reputation is jeopardised for his committing adultery with Maria Rushworth, and still he does not receive the deferred punishment of “instant annihilation” from Austen’s judge of Hell as does his female partner. To be direct, something funny is going on here.
We expect marriage to be the natural end of the female protagonist. Instead, it is insisted on by Austen at the expense of a more exciting but ultimately less desirable relationship with the male rake.
It’s not an ideal but a compromise.
No ideal heroes…
In Sense and Sensibility Marianne, heartbroken over Willoughby and exerting her ongoing lovesickness to the point of “self-annihilation”, marries Colonel Brandon, who is “On the Wrong Side of Five-and-Thirty”, whereas she is only seventeen. By this point, we know that Willoughby has impregnated Colonel Brandon’s ward. He is also engaged to a Miss Grey who has a fortune of £50,000. Still, when Willoughby expects Marianne will die, he confronts Elinor, professing that he did fall in love with Marianne, even though he did not intend to. Elinor is left in distress, but Marianne eventually persists in her marriage to Brandon. Notably, Mrs. Dashwood says:
I am very sure myself, that had Willoughby turned out as really amiable, as he has proved himself the contrary, Marianne would yet never have been so happy with him, as she will be with Colonel Brandon.
To this, Elinor’s reaction is as follows: “She paused.—Her daughter could not quite agree with her, but her dissent was not heard, and therefore gave no offence.”
To me, this is a deep and important silence. What Elinor stumbles upon is an instance of the inadequacy of marriage to approximate love. Marianne is “settling” for Colonel Brandon. And yet the alternative, Willoughby, who would make a good lover, would be a bad husband. Elinor is willing to accept that her sister will have a better life as Colonel Brandon’s wife than one of Willoughby’s many partners. We know this because Brandon’s cousin Eliza is said to have died of “lovesickness” for Willoughby after he abandons her. That is the same “lovesickness” that nearly kills Marianne. Marrying Willoughby really might have been the death of Marianne.
So Colonel Brandon it is—but at what cost? When she is in love with Willoughby Marianne’s eyes are “bright”, or “bewitching”, whereas after her recovery she has “a rational, though languid, gaze.” Now that she has recovered from the effects of overlapping physical, medical and psychological pain, Marianne is so without a need for passion she can set her mind on a new “cured” rationality and therefore the prospect of marrying Colonel Brandon. Instead of being tempered, the fire is snuffed out. The romantic, passionate Marianne is transformed into a happy little drone and an acceptable wife.
There is no ideal man for her.
The “dual mating strategy” and Marianne’s marriage
As Elinor realises, the best case scenario would have been for Marianne to have married a Willoughby who was “really amiable.” Someone who was as romantically appealing as Willoughby but as reliable as Brandon. The problem is that such a man doesn’t exist. There are men that a woman can marry, who are willing to invest lots of time in them, and there are men that a woman can truly erotically love, who are frequently the target of other women’s conquests.
Why does Austen do this? Why must her heroines compromise in this way? The answer might be found in biological research.
The geneticists Macken Murphy, Caroline A. Phillips, and Khandis R. Blake published a paper last year called “Why women cheat: testing evolutionary hypotheses in a multinational sample.”, which emphasises the significance of the “dual mating strategy”. After a rigorous survey and statistical analysis, they concluded:
Women in our sample are more sexually attracted to their affair partners, and more parentally attracted to their primary partners, implying a bias geared towards obtaining “good genes” from affairs and parental benefits from relationships.
In other words, there seems to be a strong basis—aligned with previous scientific literature (Pillsworth and Haselton, 2006)—for the idea that women seek extramarital partners for high quality genes and then get their less physically attractive (but more committed) spouses to help raise the extramarital children.
Given the high-risk nature of infidelity as a mating strategy, the majority of women do not mate with more than one partner at a time. (It should be noted that men always cheat more than women do.) However, a “dual-mating psychology” will exist in some women.
On this view, Marianne’s desire is to have Willoughby as an affair-partner and Brandon as a marriage-partner. This, I conjecture, is why Austen insists that Willoughby
lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself…always retain[ing] that decided regard which interested him in every thing that befell [Marianne], and made her his secret standard of perfection in woman.
Even though Willoughby is married to Miss Grey, Austen implies a developing friendship between Marianne and Willoughby. There will not be an affair—and yet Willoughby, after all he has done, will not “[flee] from society, or [contract] an habitual gloom of temper, or [die] of a broken heart.” Austen’s conservative solution is to allow the paternally attractive Colonel Brandon to be Marianne’s husband whilst Willoughby is a distant friend of the family, perhaps occasionally inspiring a romantic dream.
Pragmatic marriages
The ideal man, a hero that would combine Brandon’s paternal attractions and Willoughby’s sexual ones, simply isn’t real. Marianne must learn to happily accept one over the other—but with the comfort of the other’s approval from afar. This suggests that marriage in Jane Austen isn’t a big romantic affair, as we see in adaptations, but is a tool for a functioning society. Jane Austen was still a conservative, and she still approved of marriage, but she kept a twinkle in her eye for the rakes.
They use what the biologist Edward O. Wilson called the “r-type reproductive strategy”.
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Thanks again for the exposure, Henry!
Your editing skills are unparalleled.
Great piece, thanks. Very creative and interesting approach.
I'd be curious to hear more about what you see evolutionary psychology adding to the analysis or clarifying beyond what historical sociological analysis could provide. I say this as someone who is interested in the application of evolution to culture and aesthetics and thinks this is a very useful direction to pursue. But there often ends up being a certain circularity: evolutionary ideas illustrate principles that we could (and do) extract from the text or from sociology or history without the evolutionary theory. (The same is true, IMO, with cognitive literary studies.) It's made more difficult because evolutionary psychology is still really in its infancy. How do you avoid that? Or am I thinking about this wrong, and just proving that the two are in alignment is an end in itself? What do you think is the way forward for this kind of research?