I have been waiting anxiously for several weeks for the film Becoming Jane to arrive at our art theater here in Little Rock. It finally arrived last Friday, and my husband and I were able to attend the comfortably filled theater for a matinee yesterday afternoon. The film, of course, is loosely based on the life of writer Jane Austen. It vividly contrasts the fiction she created in her famous six novels with the reality of her life as the daughter of a minister. At one point in the movie, Jane's father tells her (as she is considering marrying for money versus affection), "Nothing destroys spirit like poverty." Jane's mother had already noted that, in choosing affection over money in her own choice of husbands, "I have to dig my own potatoes."
The idea of making such a choice in American society strikes us as being very dated today, but then this movie was set some two hundred years ago in England where class has always been paramount in the minds of its citizens. Jane Austen's novels are filled with this theme: money decisions must always trump heart decisions. After all, back then one had to think of his or her immediate family as well as oneself for future financial comfort.
Is the idea that poverty will destroy one's spirit a key idea even today? Sociologists suggest that the best way to ensure a solid marriage is to have financial security. Studies also show that money arguments, not conflict over sex or children, are the key reasons for the breakup of marriages. I suspect, while we all wish we could live happily ever after on our love for one another, many people still debate the same type of choices that Jane Austen's characters made. In her fiction, her characters (like the prostitute in Pretty Woman) got it all: both love and riches. In reality, Jane Austen never married and died at age 41 of Addison's disease likely. She got neither love nor riches. I am sure she continued to dig her own potatoes until the end.
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