-

The Art of Courtship

or Business in a Bad Market
James Thompson
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Marriage can always perform the formal function of closure in
literature, or it can serve as a "mirror of morality" celebrating and mark-

ing fruitful union.I Marriage can even be seen as the reward of selfknowledgefor characterslikeEmmaor ElizabethBennet.2 ButJaneAusten
never lets us forget that marriage is first of all an economic institution. Here,
I want to explore the complex ways in which these several dimensions of
courtship and marriage interrelate in her novels, moral and emblematic as
well as emotional and financial. From first to last in these novels, marriage
is as much bound up with money and social status as it is with love. As
Austen summarizes the situation of Edward and Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, "they were neither of them quite enough in love to think that three
hundred and fifty pounds a-year would supply them with the comforts of

life" (p. 369).J In short, the impulses,motives,and needsof marriageare

complex and contradictory even for the best of Austen's characters.
Austen's heroines are not beset by heavy fathers or scheming mothers
so much as they are threatened with financial insecurity, for she is more
concerned with financial than familial conflict. Her heroines are born to
"comfortable" social positions (higher, apparently, than Austen's own),
but, with the notable exception of Emma, find themselves in straightened
or fallen or threatened circumstances. Only in Emma and Northanger Abbey are the family fortunes secure, and in Northanger Abbey they are
threatened by rumor. We are told a great deal about the finances and portions of the heroines, and only one clearly has sufficient resources to marry
into the class into which she was born.' Without personal fortune in the
form of a marriage portion, these characters are set out in the world to
preserve themselves by their wit and personal beauty, perishable commodities both. Austen writes about well-educated young women of small
fortune, whose only "preservative from want," as Charlotte Lucas puts
it, is marriage (PP 122). This is a period of high inflation during which
time the ratio of marriage portion to dower was steadily going up--in short,
a bad market in which to be a marriageable woman, though it is pointed

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out by many that the father of a son was inherently in a better bargaining
position than the father of a daughter; sons brought money into the family, but daughters only took money out.
By the end of the eighteenth century marriage remained a business,
despite the growth of "affective individualism" and the "companionate
marriage" which Lawrence Stone chronicles so impressively.' Despite the
prevalence of romantic novels, and a nascent ideology which celebrated personal fulfillment through marriage of affection, it is evident that marriage
as a financial transaction had by no means disappeared (or has ever disappeared). Marianne speaks scornfully of an imagined compact between Colonel Brandon and some "woman of seven and twenty" as a union between
nurse and patient: "It would be a compact of convenience, and the world
would be satisfied. In my eyes it would be not marriage at all, but that would
be nothing. To me it would seem only a commercial exchange, in which
each wished to be benefited at the expense of the other" (SS38). Marianne's
scorn echoes the language of Mary Wollstonecraft, who writes regularly
of marriage as a business: "The mighty business of female life is to please."6
Though heavily ironic, in the concluding passage on Lucy Steele's marriage
to Robert Ferrars we find similar vocabulary of business and prosperity
as the reward of labor: "The whole of Lucy's behavior in the affair, and
the prosperity which crowned it, therefore, may be held forth as a most
encouraging instance of what an earnest, an unceasing attention to selfinterest, however its progress may be apparently obstructed, willdo in securing every advantage of fortune, with no other sacrifice than that of time
and conscience" (SS 376). The point to be made about such business or
market or labor vocabulary is not that marriage had become more of a financial transaction, or even that it had become less of a financial transaction,
but rather that such vocabulary is obtrusive and angry precisely because
marriage had come to raise different expectations.7 In other words, conflicts between love and money, romance and reality, had, if anything,
become more visible and more exacerbated than they had been earlier in
the century. The currency of this metaphor of marriage as business or as
work suggests the extent to which marriage really was a form of labor, and
which, therefore, indicates the nature of the antagonism between the
economic realities of marriage and the romantic mythology which obscures
them.
Julia Prewit Brown has written persuasively of how marriage in this
period was for women what the choice of profession was for a man, a point
which Mary Wollstonecraft almost comes to in her comparison between
men's education to profession and women's education to marriage:8
In the middle rank of life, to continue the comparison, men,

in their youth, are prepared for professions, and marriage is not

considered as the grand feature in their lives; whilst women, on
the contrary, have no other scheme to sharpen their faculties.
It is not business, extensive plans, or any of the excursive flights
of ambition that engross their attention; no, their thoughts are
not employed in rearing such noble structures. To rise in the
world, and have the liberty of running from pleasure to pleasure,
they must marry advantageously, and to this object their time
is sacrificed and their persons often legally prostituted.9
Though it does not suit the present needs of Wollstonecraft's argument, which is to assert the limitingand degrading nature of women's education, neverthelessthe logical extension of her comparison here is that women
work toward marriage in the same way that men work toward their profession, as a kind of preferment or sinecure, for she writes elsewhere that

"before marriageit is their [women's]businessto pleasemen." 10 Austen's

heroines understand as well as anyone that courtship is female business,
especially if they have mothers such as Mrs. Bennet, of whom it is said,
"the business of her life was to get her daughters married" (PP 5). Mrs.
Bennet, however, does not get her daughters married--they have to do the
work for themselves, such that if marriage or courtship is a business, late
eighteenth-century women are more self-employed than they are employed
by a larger corporation of family. That is to say, the rise of personal
autonomy in choosing mates meant that young women had to do work
which in their mothers' time, would have been done for them. At the least,
the limits of responsibility and autonomy were unclear. In Persuasion, after
Anne and Captain Wentworth have their engagement disrupted by parental interference, neither knows how to resume the initiative or the authority to address the other again. Austen's heroines, in short, are sent out to
do business in a bad market, without adequate direction and without adequate training, on the sifting ground between a compact of affection and
a transfer of property. Such uncertainty is the cause of much of Elizabeth
Bennet's trouble and anxiety: though she is educated by her father to respect
her own intelligence and worth, nevertheless she finds herself in a marriage
market where she is evaluated not by some measure of intelligence or individual or inner worth but by wealth and beauty. Such characters find
themselves in a marriage market without their choosing, even before they
seem to be aware that they have been placed there. Elinor and Marianne
are assumed to be angling for husbands by all they meet, from Fanny
Dashwood to Sir John Middleton to Mrs. Jennings. Sir John tells them
that Willoughby "is well worth catching," a phrase that Mrs. Dashwood
finds objectionable: " 'I do not believe,' said Mrs. Dashwood, with a good

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humoured smile, 'that Mr. Willoughby will be incommoded by the attempts

of either of my daughters towards what you caU catching him. It is not
an employment to which they have been brought up. Men are very safe
with us, let them be ever so rich' " (SS 44). This denial has no effect, for
shortly thereafter he insists to Marianne,
"you will be setting your cap at him now, and never think
of poor Brandon."
"That is an expression, Sir John," said Marianne, warmly, "which I particularly dislike. I abhor every common-place
phrase by which wit is intended; and 'setting one's cap at a man,'
or 'making a conquest,' are the most odious of aU.Their tendency is gross and illiberal; and if their construction could ever be
deemed clever, time has long ago destroyed all its ingenuity."
Sir John did not much understand this reproof; but he
laughed heartily as if he did (SS 44-45).
Despite their objections, the women of Austen's fiction are considered
"out," whether they will or no. I I Emma's suddenly finding herself proposed to by Mr. Elton, though it is comic testimony to her social blindness, is also testimony to the fact that she is considered available for marriage, in much the same way that Mr. Collins goes after Elizabeth or
Crawford after Fanny. Thus, while it is often said that there is no real work
nor any real laborers in Austen's novels, they are, in fact, fuUof both, young
women working at courtship, working towards their pleasantest preservative
from want.
That the work of courtship had become more confusing and burdensome than it had been a few generations earlier is clear from the remarks
of Mary Wollstonecraft. Though one might expect her to be more sympathetic to the conflicting pressures felt by young women, here she blames
them for exactly the sort of prudence and circumspection which parents
had exercised earlier: "Girls marry merely to better themselves, to borrow
a significant vulgar phrase, and have such perfect power over their hearts
as not to permit themselves to fall in love till a man of superior fortune

offers." I 2 This is just the sort of prudenceof whichAustenremindsher

niece Fanny. It would seem as if the children of this period were educated
to both contradictory sets of values, romance and finance, told to expect
or hold out for affection in a world largely ruled still by salable commodity. If the" finishing" education to accomplishments was, as WoUstonecraft
insists, directed towards the "business to please men," then the practice
of female education remained focused on courtship, while the ideology of
romantic attachment, which is, of course, supposed to be natural and spon-

taneous, necessarilycontradicted the need for rules and instruction, art and
artifice: I 3
Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example
of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness,
justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience,
and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will
obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be
beautiful, everything else is needless for, at least, twenty years

of their lives.14
In short, then, women were expected to abide by strict rules of propriety, exert their training in pleasing, while living in both ideal and material
worlds of romance and commodity. For characters such as Elinor Dashwood
or Elizabeth Bennet, who are said to be especiaUyintelligent, it is no wonder
that they find the whole process of "setting one's cap" abhorrent. Neither
is shown to be comfortable or happy or at ease displaying herself as
available, being "out." Both Stone and WoUstonecraft liken being displayed
in Bath or London, to marketing: "What can be more indelicate than a
girl's coming out in the fashionable world? Which, in other words, is to
bring to market a marriageable miss, whose person is taken from one public

placeto another, richlycaparisoned.'" S In such a market, wherewomen

are no longer valued solelyby family connections or portion, stress on beauty
tends to exacerbate the tendency to reify or objectify women into a salable
commodity: as her brother so clearly sees, Marianne in sickness is scarcely
worth 400 or 500 pounds a year (SS 227). In such circumstances, it is easy
to see why Elinor Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and
the others are so alienated from the work of courtship: when the process
itself objectifies one into a commodity, and results in loss of their only selfdetermination or autonomy, the whole event is dispiriting and
dehumanizing--"the worker sinks to the levelof a commodity"; "the worker

is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object." 16

In this respect, marriage is no different from other social relationships
which were going through extreme changes under early industrial capitalism,
which can be summarized as a "reification of human relationships," where
patriarchal and feudal traditions of authority, structure, stability, and hierarchy seemed to be reduced to their exchange value.' 7As Wordsworth complains in a famous letter, "Everything has been put up to market and sold

for the highestpriceit wouldbuy." I That is to say, objectsbecamevalued,

not for some traditional values or some natural, unalienable properties they
possessed, but rather for their exchange value, for what they would fetch.
The object itself becomes meaningless, beyond what it can bring in the
market, much like the real estate boom in California in the 1970's. As

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Clifford Siskin argues, mass production transformed the value of exclusivity:

"the object of desire as value is transferred from the product, whatever

its associations,to the act of possession."19 Austen acknowledgesthese

changes in Mansfield Park, where Mary Crawford refers to that "true LondOllmaxim, that everything is to be got with money" (p. 58).20In its most
extreme form, these new practices of consumption seem to be reduced
beyond possession to acquisition itself. For John Dashwood, land has been
divorced from estates and inheritance and is now merely a commodity to
be bought and sold. Here he is complaining to Elinor of his cash flow
problems:
"And then I have made a little purchase with this half year; east
Kingham Farm, you must remember the place, where old Gibson used to live. The land was so very desirable for me in every
respect, so immediately adjoining my own property, that I felt
it my duty to buy it. I could not have answered
it to my conscience to let it fall into any other hands. A
man must pay for his convenience; and it has cost me a vast
deal of money."
"More than you think it really and intrinsically worth."
"Why, I hope not that. I might have sold it again the next
day, for more than I gave: but with regard to the purchase
money, I might have been very unfortunate indeed; for the stocks
were at that time so low, that if I had not happened to have
the necessary sum in my banker's hands, I must have sold out
to very great loss" (SS 225).
Despite lip service to the aristocratic values exemplified by the
hereditary estate, Dashwood's interest is that of a speculator; the land is
purchased, not to expand or buttress the hereditary estate, but to make a
cash profit, for it can be exchanged for more than he paid for it. 2'The attitude which John Dashwood displays towards the land is best analyzed
in Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844:
It is necessary that this appearance [the romanticized view of
feudal allegiance to the hereditary estate and its master] be
abolished--that landed property, the root of private property,
be dragged completely into the movement of private property
and that it become a commodity; that the rule of the proprietor
appear as the undisguised rule of private property, of capital,
freed of all political tincture; that the relationship between proprietor and worker be reduced to the economic relationship of
exploiter and exploited; that all personal relationship between

proprietor and his property cease, property becoming merely objective, material wealth; that the marriage of convenienceshould
take the place of the marriage of honor with the land; and that
the land should likewisesink to the status of a commercial value,
like man.22
Early industrial capitalism leads to a general dissociation of possession from acquisition, which also can be seen in marriage practices. If wives
are chosen not on the basis of their lasting family connections and power,
but simply for their portion or for their beauty, then marriage too comes
to be regarded as acquisition but not possession, that is to say, as an act,
but not as a condition--marriage is something performed once, not an ongo-

ing responsibility.23 In the caseof a wifechosenfor her beauty(a wifewho

cannot, of course, be exchanged for another), she may become like Lady
Middleton, purely ornamental. Unlike a valuable painting which can be exchanged for more than was given, a wife is rather like wall paper, attractive, perhaps, but of no exchange value, as Mr. Bennet finds to his cost
when he marries solely on the basis of looks. If, on the other hand, a wife
is chosen for her portion, as Willoughby is supposed to do with Miss Grey's
50,000 pound portion (SS 194),then the object, Miss Grey, is valuelessfrom
the start: as he says later, "She knew I had no regard for her when we married." (SS 329). Unlike laboring classes, in which women may be wed for
tangible skills such as weaving, spinning or household economy, besides
their looks, and/or possessions, or like the upper classes, in which birth
and title remained considerable values, conditions in the middle classesseem
to conspire to make a wife useless when once acquired, as is evident in this
bizarre exchange between Mrs. Jennings and her son-in-law:
"Aye, you may abuse me as you please," said the good
natured old lady, "you have taken Charlotte off my hands, and
cannot give her back again. So there I have the whip hand of
you. "
Charlotte laughed heartily to think that her husband could
not get rid of her; and exultingly said, she did not care how cross
he was to her, as they must live together. It was impossible for
anyone to be more thoroughly good natured, or more determined to be happy than Mrs. Palmer. The studied indifference,
insolence, and discontent of her husband gave her no pain: and
when he scolded or abused her, she was highly diverted (SS 112).
In short, in this transitional period young women seem to have to endure the duties, responsibilities, and blame of courtship, without much of
the benefits. We can draw a general analogy with the laboring classes, who

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may eventually have benefited from the industrial and capitalist revolution,
but nevertheless, in the period when patriarchy was crumbling, so was the
sense of moral responsibility. That is, all of the patronizing institutions of
patriarchy, such that between 1790 and 1820 (the years Jane Austen was
writing), for the laboring classes, conditions got much worse before they
got better (without any poor relief, in some cases, or relief which was
miserable beyond imagination).24 So it is for young women in the work of
courtship as well, and Austen focuses on this period in which their working conditions, as it were, declined markedly.
Part of the harshness we find in Sense and Sensibility may come from
its argument that romantic expectations have little likelihood of producing
either domestic tranquility or any form of happiness. Marianne's attraction to Willoughby, which amounts to a restrained version of "love at first
sight," is from the first viewed with suspicion. Austen represents love at
first sight not as some natural or spontaneous action, but a result of
mediated desire, the result of some romantic longing or expectation or desire,
for "something evermore about to be" in Wordsworth's phrase. Willoughby
conforms to what Marianne's "fancy had delineated. "2' Her precipitous
attraction to Willoughby is set in explicit contrast to the slow and difficult
growth of Elinor's esteem for Edward. Elinor's courtship is characterized
by labor or exertion, in short, work, while her sister's is characterized by
laxity and lassitude. The one method leads to security and happiness, the
other to disappointment, which is followed by exertion, security, and
(qualified by an indeterminately troubling policy of lowered expectations),
happiness. In all her writings, Austen maintains a consistent hostility to
the leisure class and those who do not have to work for a living, as typified
by Henry Crawford; the major action of her novels is courtship, and here
too participants must work at developing affection and respect.

'Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston (New
York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975), p. 183.
'In effect, the economic structure of marriage institutions has become ideological; that
is. the institutions and the vocabulary change less than the attitudes towards them. For an
unusually lucid discussion of how everything non-economic
becomes ideological under
capitalism, see J.M. Bernstein on Lukacs, The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukacs, Marxism
and the Dialectics of Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 83.
'Julia Prewit Brown, pp. 8-9.
'Wollstonecraft,
p. 60.
IOWollstonecraft, p. 187.
I 'The nature of coming out is explored in Chapter V of Mansfield Park.
I

'Wollstonecraft, p. 75.

"Wollstonecraft,
p. 187.
"Wollstonecraft,
p. 19.
"Wollstonecraft,
p. 170; Stone, pp. 316-17.
"Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik
(New York: International Publishers, 1964), pp. 106 and 108.
"Marx, pp. 33-36.
"The Lelters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 2nd edition, ed. Ernest De Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), #440, April 7, 1817 to Daniel Stuart, 111,375.
"Clifford Siskin, "High Wages and High Arguments: The Economics of Mixed Form
in the Late Eighteenth Century," forthcoming, pp. 11-12.
"'This episode concerns the farmer's cart which Mary Crawford is unable to hire in harvest
time: in a similar fashion. Marx argues in the 1844 Manuscripts that money is "man's estranged,
and self-disposed species nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind
That which I
am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all of my essential powers are incapable,
I am able to do by means of money." pp. 167-68.
"Raymond Williams observes that land in Austen's novels is represented as something
to own rather than as something to work. The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 108-119.
"Marx, pp. 101-2.
"In a patriarchal society where women are still almost entirely dependent financially and
socially on their husbands, this situation further exacerbates male and female difference, to
avoid and to seek marital responsibility.
"For the conditions of the working class in this period, see E.P. Thompson, The Mak.
ing of the English Working Class (1963, rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1966).
"This is not unlike the adolescent longing of Stephen Dedalus who "wanted to meet in
the real world the insubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld
They would meet
Quietly as if they had already known each other." A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1982), p. 65. It is also not unlike Donne's anticipation
of the same phenomenon in "Air And Angels": "Twice or thrice had I loved thee before
I knew thy face or name."

, On marriage as used as a device for closure, see Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 163-4; on marriage as an emblem of morality,
see Murial Brittain Williams, Marriage: Fielding's Mirror of Morality (University: The University of Alabama Press, 1973).
'Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), p. 201.
'References to Jane Austen's novels are to The Works of Jane Austen, 6 vols., ed. R. W.

Chapman (London: Oxford Univesity Press, 1923-54). SS=Sense and Sensibility. PP Pride
and Prejudice.
'For the observation that almost all of Austen's families are under financial difficulties,
see Igor Webb, From Custom to Capital, The English Novel and the Industrial Revolution
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981).
'Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage In England 1500-1800 (New York: Harper
and Row, 1977).