William Deresiewicz Read online

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  meta-ambiguity, as the hero and heroine’s relationship becomes a space in which different forms of friendship, each themselves ambiguous, can meet and combine into ever-new possibilities. The novel begins by asking “what will become” of Emma (35); it ends by inviting us to imagine what will become of Emma and Knightley’s friendships—and our own.

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  Emma

  c h a p t e r

  f i v e

  Persuasion

  Widowhood and Waterloo

  … a state of alteration, perhaps of improvement …

  ersuasion, it has been noted, is a novel of widows.1 Sir Walter Elliot, Lady Russell, William Walter Elliot, Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Clay, and the Dowager Viscountess Dalrymple are all literally widowed, as is, by a slight extension of the term, Captain Benwick. Anne, bereaved of Wentworth, is clearly marked as being figuratively so, as is, of course, Wentworth himself. Charles Hayter briefly suffers a similar figurative bereavement at the hands of Henrietta Musgrove, one that, given Wentworth’s preference for Louisa, would have insured a complementary fate for Henrietta herself. And once we recognize widowhood as the novel’s metaphor for bereavement of all kinds, we see that all three of the Elliot girls, who have lost a mother; Captain Harville, who has lost the sister Captain Benwick was to have married; and Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove, who have lost their son Richard, are all widows, as well. Austen has shown us widows before, but of a very different kind. Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mrs. Jennings, Mrs. Norris—widowhood, for these women, has nothing to do with bereavement (remember that Mrs. Norris consoles herself for the loss of her husband “by considering that she could do very well without him” [MP 21]) and everything to do with possessing power, independence, and stature beyond the reach of married women. For them, it is an office of dignity, rather something to be congratulated on than

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  regretted. Nor are Mr. Woodhouse and General Tilney (Catherine’s fantasies notwithstanding) any more marked, in their lives or their feelings, by the loss of their wives, whom they never mention nor, apparently, even think of. But in Persuasion, widowhood, and all that it implies—grief, memory, wrenching adjustments, the painful attempt to move forward or the refusal to try—becomes the central fact in nearly all the lives of the bereaved, and the novel takes shape as a meditation on its dimensions and implications.2 It is no wonder that near the center of the novel we come upon a discussion of two of Byron’s Turkish Tales, The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos (a third, The Corsair, is quoted in the following chapter3), and two of Scott’s verse romances, Marmion and The Lady of the Lake.4 For the central theme of each of these bodies of work, the Tales and the romances, is survival: who and what lives on, and on what terms, after the experience of loss—of bereavement, of war, of cultural extinction.5 That this is true in Scott is less immediately obvious and is a point I will defer until later. That it is true in Byron is most evident in The Giaour, the first of the Tales and the one to which Persuasion gives special emphasis. The poem’s very form embodies the idea of survival. It is, according to the conceit named in its subtitle, “A Fragment of a Turkish Tale”—or to be precise, a set of fragments, its twenty-six disconnected sections coming to us like so many pieces of narrative flotsam, the sole remnants, the sole evidence, of the explosive passions of which they tell. One of the things that survive a loss, Byron suggests, is stories—just as, by the end of the poem, the Giaour’s own story is the only thing he has left to show for his bereavement. But even stories—passing from teller to teller, as this one claims to do, subject to the fallibility of memory and the uncertainties of repetition—provide no guarantee of survival. And therein lies the source of the Giaour’s dilemma and of his extreme response to it. The problem is stated implicitly in the first narrator’s remarkable simile of the Greek shore as akin in appearance to a corpse in the first hours after death, its features so beautiful, reposeful, and tender that one bending over them might still fancy them inhabited by life. It is the false hope expressed in these lines to which the Giaour wishes to cling. Having suffered an unacceptable loss, he desires to arrest time at the very moment of that loss, achieving his wish the only way he can, by forcing his own psyche into a state of suspended animation.6 For the Giaour knows—or least, his poem does— that to move forward emotionally is to subject the dead to a second death, the death of one’s own grief. The irony is that grief will die eventually anyway, when the mourner himself dies. Hence the poem’s evocation of the

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  cypress as “still sad when others’ grief is fled, / The only constant mourner o’er the dead” (ll. 286287), a sentiment echoed in The Bride of Abydos.7 Hence also the poem’s opening glance at the tomb of Themistocles “gleaming o’er the cliff” (l. 3), as well as the fisherman-narrator’s description of the Giaour as having a face as “pale as marble o’er the tomb” (l. 238). Cypresses and marble slabs are what people never can be: lasting witnesses to loss. Still, the Giaour does his best to make himself into a living monument, so that when the fisherman sees him six years later, his face “breathes the same dark spirit now, / As death were stamped upon his brow” (ll. 797798). An apt figure, this suggestion of a living death, one that reinforces the immediately preceding curse, in which the narrator had foreseen a future for the Giaour as a “Vampire” or “living corse” (ll. 755, 762), and the later simile of the desolate heart as like a sentient corpse that can feel the worms crawling over it in the grave (ll. 945948). Indeed, death-in-life and life-indeath are the poem’s mirror-image master metaphors: the Giaour dies while alive so that Leila may remain alive, for him, in death.8 Grief, undigested, becomes itself a kind of death, and a willed death, at that, a morbid identification with the lost beloved. These are the chief concerns Austen takes over from The Giaour—and indeed from all four of the Turkish Tales, for The Corsair and Lara, its sequel, rework these same issues of unacceptable loss and psychic arrest, while The Bride of Abydos avoids doing so only by having its lovers die simultaneously, leaving their strangely animate monuments—his wandering marble slab, her eternally blooming rose—to carry on a posthumous love affair. Before the novel even arrives at Anne, it gives a sketch of three psyches arrested in the wake of irreparable loss, albeit under conditions very different from those experienced by the Giaour or Lara. We looked, in chapter 2, at how thoroughly the loss of her mother disrupted Anne’s life and damaged her psyche, and by the same arts of subtle but devastating implication, Austen shows us the effect that loss has had on the rest of her family. For the seventeen years of her marriage, Lady Elliot was the rudder that had kept her husband from foundering on his own silliness and conceit, the protector who had “humoured, or softened, or concealed his failings” (36). There is no way of knowing how deep Sir Walter’s passion for her had run—given his narcissism, probably not very deep at all—but without her he is lost, and not just financially. Vanity alone does not explain the freeze-dried quality we noted in him in chapter 2, and the mirrors that are his emblem, instruments of sterile repetition, signify more than just the intensity of his self-regard. If we can imagine the suppressed panic that succeeded his wife’s loss, we will

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  recognize that while his reasons for wishing to arrest time at the moment of his partner’s death may have been very different from the Giaour’s, they were no less urgent. Sir Walter’s widowhood is a psychic stasis not of intense passion, but of stunned numbness, and we are pointedly told, right after the account of Lady Elliot’s death, that despite everyone’s expectations, he “did not marry” again (36; emphasis in the original). The woman he “did not marry” is Lady Russell, herself a widow—indeed, given her great friendship with Lady Elliot, a widow twice over. There the two abide, Sir Walter and Lady Russell, one at Kellynch-hall, one at Kellynch-lodge, “one remain[ing] a widower, the other a widow,” paired remnants of Lady Elliot’s demise endlessly mirroring each other in their inability to move forward from that loss (37). (By the end of the novel, Sir
Walter will have also not-married Mrs. Clay.) The third member of the trio is Elizabeth Elliot, “still the same handsome Miss Elliot that she had begun to be thirteen years ago,” still unmarried, as well, still trapped in the annual cycle of “revolving frosts” and brief social springs (38). Had Lady Elliot lived, and had she been anything like the woman the narrator says she was, Elizabeth would surely have been married long since, and even Sir Walter might well have begun, at age fifty-four, to let go of his youth. Without her, the family comes to a virtual standstill, bearing continuous witness to her death in their lives if not in their hearts. In the opening chapters, then, her father and elder sister do not serve merely as contrasts to Anne. They also help define and contextualize her own Giaour-like mourning for Wentworth, that state of wan hopelessness and perpetual regret every bit as monastic as the Giaour’s and enlivened only by a self-tormenting addiction to the navy lists—a state that, but for the authorial miracle of the Croft-Wentworth coincidence, would undoubtedly have persisted to the grave. In fact, the Elliot family bereavement allows Austen, with her more socially and narratively complex novelistic canvas, to explore dimensions of widowhood unavailable to Byron, with his narrower focus, in all the Tales, on a single character living in self-willed isolation. Widowhood, she shows, is not only a matter of what is lost, but also of what is left behind. In the case of Lady Elliot’s death, what is left behind are “[t]hree girls, the two eldest sixteen and fourteen … an awful legacy for a mother to bequeath” (36). No wonder Sir Walter has been so much at sea all these years. Lady Elliot’s “legacy” points, in turn, to another aspect of widowhood, one that will assume increasing importance as the novel goes on: how the survivors adjust their relations with one another in the wake of their bereavement, how the family circle reforms itself without its lost link. In the

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  case of the Elliots, not surprisingly, it does not do so terribly well: Lady Russell and Elizabeth each inherit a share of Lady Elliot’s role, but Anne is cut out almost entirely. Hence, another aspect of widowhood: with the loss of the loved one come other losses. In Anne’s case, these include more or less her entire family. She finally gets a family back only when she finds other people more generous in adjusting to bereavement. After Fanny Harville’s death, the young woman’s brother and sister-in-law reconstitute their family so as to include Fanny’s bereaved fiancé, and notwithstanding Benwick’s later departure for Uppercross, the three of them become the nucleus of the extended family that both Wentworth and Anne eventually join. But long before that, Anne has suffered other losses, other changes. Her mother’s death also bereaves her of her home, for she is immediately sent packing to a Bath boarding school for three years, a period of her life she looks back on with something less than fondness. Far more importantly, it is an open question as to whether this first bereavement does not also lead to her next. Would Lady Elliot, “sensible and amiable,” have opposed her daughter’s marriage to Wentworth, as the somewhat less sensible, because blinded by pride, and decidedly less amiable Lady Russell does (36)? And does Anne yield to Lady Russell’s persuasion out of a sense of duty to her dead mother that she can express only through unwavering obedience to her surrogate? Certainly we can see how one widowing rehearses her for the next, each of them isolating her further from those around her, each settling into an unbudgeable despondency. Anne’s grief over Wentworth, however, differs from the Giaour’s in one important respect. “[T]ime had softened down much, perhaps nearly all of peculiar attachment to him” (57). In other words, she thinks she’s gotten over him. But “down” is exactly where her feelings for him have gone, as she discovers when he returns and they come back up. Austen marshals a new range of Byronic imagery in exploring this aspect of bereavement (memory both mental and physical, and its capacity to astonish and overwhelm), imagery the thrust of which we will be better equipped to understand after examining a different character’s act of mourning, albeit one that is generally read as Austen’s picture of the wrong way to remember the dead. The scenes in question are those in which Mrs. Musgrove remembers “poor Richard.” On the surface, Austen’s only purpose in raising the subject of this long-forgotten son is to ridicule everything connected with him: the boy himself, the selective memory his mother displays in grieving for him so demonstratively after all these years, even the fact that Mrs. Musgrove, as

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  she grieves, is overweight. More than one critic has deplored Austen’s infamous gibe at her “large fat sighings,” and Austen herself seems to have been ashamed of this breach of decorum, following it with a paragraph of notvery-convincing justification (92).9 Yet she had been scarcely less excessive, some pages earlier, in heaping scorn on poor Richard himself, essentially declaring that some people are better off dead and do not deserve being mourned for.10 But these very excesses suggest that something deeper is going on, for it is always Austen’s tendency to lose her otherwise fabulous poise when the artist in her has stirred up feelings of which the critic in her disapproves. We see this tendency at work especially in Sense and Sensibility, the novel in which she seems most at odds with herself—esteem for Elinor struggling with love for Marianne—as she frequently puts her thumb on Elinor’s side of the moral scale, invariably sounding shrill and schoolmarmish as she does so. So it is here. There is something powerful about Mrs. Musgrove’s grief, something the narrator feels compelled to suppress. We can begin to understand it by noting that poor Richard comes up in conversation just after Wentworth has been talking about his first command, a ship that, as he twice says and a third time implies, almost caused him to “go to the bottom” of the sea (89, 90).11 Now the sea is not only a crucial and multivalent image in Persuasion, it is also the very central, the ubiquitous image in the Turkish Tales.12 Among other things, it is the home of the dead, the place where both Leila in The Giaour and Selim in The Bride of Abydos are buried. Leila’s burial—burial alive—is pictured in particularly rich detail; of the sack that contains her, recalling how it slipped from view, the fisherman says that “all its hidden secrets sleep, / Known but to Genii of the deep” (ll. 384385). Such a grave would have been Wentworth’s had he “gone to the bottom,” and implicitly, such a grave is Richard’s, lost some years after he had been “sent to sea” (76). But if the sea in Byron is a tomb full of hidden, sleeping secrets, so is something else. Says the Giaour: “My memory now is but the tomb / Of joys long dead” (ll. 10001001). Memory as a sea: it is at the bottom of that grave, too, that Richard has been lying—hidden, secret, asleep. For it is important to remember that Mrs. Musgrove does not habitually sentimentalize him, does not even voluntarily remember him on this occasion. Instead, in “one of those extraordinary bursts of mind which do sometimes occur,” she was “suddenly struck, this very day, with a recollection of the name of Wentworth,” and thus also, as a result, with a recollection of her son (77). With Wentworth’s return, in other words, her son bursts up at her out of the

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  depths of memory. Her grief may be greater than it was upon first hearing of his death, but it is not therefore the less genuine. That grief can grow rather than diminish through time and forgetfulness, that a chance event can startle it back into consciousness with all its original freshness and more than its original strength, is, after all, the central insight of Wordsworth’s “Two April Mornings.” Yes, Mrs. Musgrove has forgotten Richard’s faults, has even forgotten that she used to call him “Dick”; time has worked a sea change on memory and feeling alike, and even the boy’s name has been transformed by its pressure. But the moral of Persuasion, after all, is that it’s never as good as the second time. What is more, between the first time Richard is mentioned and the scene in which we watch his mother remember him, a similar and far more important act of memory has taken place.13 We already examined this scene in chapter 2; it is the one in which Anne’s feelings for Wentworth—feelings more powerful, in some respects, than those she had felt eight years earlier—burst up at
her out of the depths of her memory (the depths, it seems, of her very body), shocking her out of her Giaour-like stasis. The mere sound of Wentworth’s name sends the blood to her cheeks; with his approach, “a thousand feelings rushed on Anne”; and his actual appearance renders her scarcely able to hear, see, or eat (84). Her mind tries to reason down her body’s insurrection: “How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness!” (85). But Anne learns that time is not a road one traverses, leaving the past behind in the distance, it is a sea on which one precariously floats: “Alas! with all her reasonings, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing.” The perception echoes that of the fisherman (himself a traveler over time and the sea) as he watches the Giaour, standing on shore, lose himself in recollection: ” `Twas but a moment that he stood … But in that instant o’er his soul Winters of Memory seemed to roll, And gather in that drop of time / A life of pain” (ll. 259264). The present moment may be only a drop, but memory contains the whole ocean of time. And it is from out of that ocean of memory that Anne and Wentworth will ultimately conduct their salvage operation, their resurrection of feeling. But not quite yet, for not everyone’s feelings have yet resurfaced: “You were so altered,” Mary tells her sister, that “he should not have known you again” (85). Sea changes, after all, are not always for the better, and our heroine knows it: “Anne fully submitted, in silent, deep mortification.” Silent, deep: Anne, or at least his feelings for her, still slumbers at the bottom of the sea of Wentworth’s memory. She remains in a state of “mortification,” dead to him.