William Deresiewicz Read online

  Persuasion 133

  Having examined Mrs. Musgrove’s style of mourning, we should look at Captain Benwick’s, for his is also almost universally regarded as a negative example. A jaundiced view says that his very indulgence in grief and great show of bereavement foretell his rapid inconstancy—that if he had felt more, he would have displayed less and been more true. But this view ignores Anne’s own response to her fellow mourner. Yes, she later joins Captain Harville in deploring the rapidity with which Benwick gets reengaged, but she not only recognizes the genuineness of his grief, she had encouraged him to overcome it and had foreseen, with envy rather than condemnation, that he would. “I cannot believe his prospects so blighted forever,” she thinks to herself. “He is younger than I am; younger in feeling, if not in fact; younger as a man. He will rally again, and be happy with another” (119). Anne recognizes that it is the very strength of Benwick’s passion—the passion of a younger person, in her understanding, and of a man (for elsewhere she avows, whatever we may think of such a judgment, that men’s “feelings may be [i.e., are] the strongest” [236])—not its superficiality, that insures that he will soon fall in love again. And she also helps bring that eventuality to pass, not only by “recommend[ing] a larger allowance of prose in his daily study” and supplying the requisite syllabus (122), but much more importantly, by becoming the first woman to arouse his interest since Fanny’s death (for there can be little doubt, as Charles Musgrove sees, that she does so). Once those feelings have put forth their first tentative shoots, it is only a matter of time before they come to full flower. I use a vegetative metaphor here because Austen does (“I cannot believe his prospects so blighted forever”), and in so doing points to the logic that underlies the whole question of widowhood in Persuasion—that underlies, indeed, the entire novel: structurally, imagistically, ethically. It is the logic of nature. Mourning, for Austen, is a natural process, with its own cycle of birth, growth, aging, and death. The idea both picks up Byronic language and inverts its logic. The Giaour declares himself “a scattered leaf, / Seared by the autumn blast of Grief!” (ll. 12551256), but Austen knows that every autumn is followed by a spring. That is why Anne can call Benwick, as someone recently bereaved, a “young mourner” (128),14 and it gives a sense to the six-month period of his mourning, born in summer, dying in winter.15 The mourning that violates nature—the mourning that, if we come to Persuasion looking for pictures of right and wrong ways to handle grief, is certainly not the model Austen would have us choose—is Anne’s. The narrator makes it clear that her grief at the loss of Wentworth was badly mishandled;

  134 Persuasion

  had she been given a proper change of scenery, she would have been able to form a “second attachment, the only thoroughly natural, happy, and sufficient cure, at her time of life” (57). “Natural” is the cardinal adjective here, making possible both happiness and health. In fact, the theme of sterility, of a violation of nature through the refusal of natural forms of continuity, underlies the entire initial presentation of the Elliot family.16 It is a presentation that, while demonstrating that Anne has yet to break out of the family pattern of Byronic psychic arrest, differentiates her from her father and elder sister and foretells the later course of her story by placing her on the side of natural growth and decay. Sir Walter’s resistance to the aging process, his and others’, needs little emphasis. This is someone who thinks that sailors should be “knocked on the head” before their fortieth birthday, so much does their profession age them (50). Nor is his eldest daughter any less disconnected from natural processes of change—“still the same” Elizabeth, “as blooming as ever,” her seasons those of the social rather than the natural calendar, her springs those of London rather than the country, and as if perpetually nipped in the bud, only ever a few weeks long (38).17 I noted before that Sir Walter is a man of mirrors, his unchanging image endlessly repeated without change, and we may note further that “[v]anity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character” (36). Its beginning is vanity, in other words, and its end is vanity, and from one end to the other, his character is all unchanging vanity. The novel’s opening lines tell us, emblematically, of his contempt for “the almost endless creations of the last century” (35). Creation of any kind, let alone almost endless creation, is Sir Walter’s abhorrence. This is the man who wants to preserve his “pleasure-grounds”—preserve their virginity, as it were—from Admiral Crawford’s violation (48), and it is a fine irony to have him noticing—in the course of complaining about how old everyone else is “growing” (38)—“the rapid increase” of crow’s feet on Lady Russell’s temples, as if the deplorable procreative habits of natural creatures were leaving their disfiguring marks everywhere. Sir Walter is a kind of Lord of Sterility, letting copulation die everywhere in the Elliot kingdom. The marriage of his heir, William Walter Elliot, produced no children, and though that of Mrs. Clay produced two, they remain absent and unthought of, essentially erased, for the length of the novel. Even when Elliots do beget, virtually all they can do is repeat themselves. Mary and Elizabeth descend from the long line of “all the Marys and Elizabeths [the Elliot men] had married” (35). The latest Mary, daughter of Walter, marries Charles, son of Charles, and gives birth to one Walter and

  Persuasion 135

  one Charles. As for Elizabeth, daughter of Elizabeth, her father is delighted to find her “very like himself” (37). But this vision of continuity as unchanging repetition is precisely what Sir Walter’s notion of family entails. As I noted in chapter 2, “family” to him means the Elliot lineage, the unbroken line of eldest sons, and his vision for it is that “[t]he Kellynch estate should be transmitted whole and entire” from generation to generation—the legalistic doubling of adjectives reinforcing the notion of repetition without change (41). This vision is threatened when Sir Walter runs into debt, eating up more then he produces, and the various characters’ plans to address the situation exhibit the novel’s competing ideas of continuity. Some “retrenchment” is required (we hear the word in one form or another nearly half a dozen times), but while Lady Russell argues for “reductions” and “regulations”—the same style of living, only less of it—Anne hopes for a thorough “reformation”—continuity, yes, but with change. In the event, Sir Walter rejects even Lady Russell’s proposals as necessitating intolerable “restrictions,” and is forced to accept his lawyer’s alternative, “removal” from Kellynch altogether (4246). As the linguistic pattern suggests, the issue is what kind of “re-ing,” of doing again, will enable Sir Walter to redeem himself. We are reminded, once more, that Persuasion is a novel of second times. Anne herself, stuck in a state of mourning though she may be, is the exception to this principle of sterile repetition. Literally the exception: the one Anne, the one variation, that slips in to the production line of Marys and Elizabeths. And while her father may be seen to repeat in her elder sister, in Anne, Lady Russell imagines, her mother “revives” (37). In a novel of deaths and widows, that word carries enormous thematic importance. Lady Elliot lives again in Anne, but to live again is not to live the same way and assume the same form as one had the first time—any more than to grieve again, as Mrs. Musgrove knows, or to fall in love again, as Anne and Wentworth will learn, is to do so the same way one had before. It is telling that Sir Walter, so quick to see Elizabeth’s near-identity with himself, completely misses Anne’s subtler continuity with his wife. And Austen plays a marvelous linguistic trick around this circumstance. To Sir Walter, Anne is “only Anne,” but two sentences later, it is “only in Anne” that Lady Russell can imagine Lady Elliot’s revival (37). “Only Anne … only in Anne”: the phrase, modulating from a context of sterile mechanical repetition to one of procreative natural renewal, becomes pregnant, gets an “in” in it, becomes big with inner possibility. The novel’s and its heroine’s attentiveness to nature have been widely commented on, especially with respect to the question of whether Persuasion is or is not a “Romantic” novel, but
the presence of nature in its pages goes far

  136 Persuasion

  deeper than a few walks in the grass.18 The natural world forms the deepest stratum of its imagery, and the natural—not the moral or the Christian as such—provides its normative standards. Nature imagery clusters around Anne in particular. Her loss and retrieval of “bloom”—the possibility that she will enjoy a “second spring” (139)—is, of course, at constant issue. Her disappointment over Wentworth “cloud[s] every enjoyment of youth” (57). Moving to Uppercross, she thinks of herself as being “transplanted,” and she eventually learns that she has never been “supplanted” in Wentworth’s affections (70, 243). But such imagery does not attach to her alone, and Austen sometimes goes out of her way to make her use of the natural register too obvious to miss. To the scheme of the Elliots’ quitting Kellynch, an additional aspect of the plan, the renting of the estate, becomes “engrafted” (45). In a novel in which the social fabric is so clearly fraying, and in which the heroine in particular is largely isolated from the social world, characters are repeatedly set against the kind of monumental natural backdrops—vast meadows, the sea—that mark them as natural creatures rather than social actors. The town of Bath, by contrast, is represented as a place of spiritual oppression and false values. Of course, this is precisely the way Byron and Scott place their figures in the Tales and the romances—figures whose free and passionate existence draws its energy from, and gives them a creaturely intimacy with, the Greek seas and Scottish mountains, in pointed contradistinction to the stifling confines of Turkish and Scottish courts. (It is no coincidence, as has been widely noted, that English landscape painting was entering its golden age at just this time.) For no one in Persuasion is this fact of creatureliness more pronounced than for Anne, as her intense sympathy with the natural world suggests. It is, after all, a “fine wind,” not Gowland’s lotion, that first restores to her “the bloom and freshness of youth” (125). Perhaps no statement about her is more important than the one in which the narrator sums up the history of her aborted engagement and its aftermath: “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning” (58). Anne’s troubles begin in a denial of nature, and it is a reembrace of nature that cures them. When the imperatives of the social world run contrary to nature—and they do so here under the aegis of an unnatural, a social, mother—those imperatives are void. Anne’s story can be seen as that of a young woman, forced out of her natural patterns of growth, being reclaimed by Mother Nature as her own. Nature furnishes the novel’s main set of images and is the source of its ethical norms, and it also provides the template for an entire system of

  Persuasion 137

  processes that structure its action. The chief of these is widowhood itself— the process of bereavement and the overcoming of bereavement—as we have already seen in the cases of Benwick and, as yet largely as a negative example, Anne. Mourning, as we said, is for Austen a cyclical natural process: birth, growth, decay, death. But parallel to that process, amplifying and universalizing it, Austen constructs an entire array of others, each implicitly echoing one another and all of them ultimately echoing the cycle of the seasons. Actually, it will be simpler and more accurate to think of these processes as comprising not four stages, but two: growth and decay. This is in part because the initiation of a given process, its “birth,” is often incidental, and in part because these processes do not always reach their termination—a fact that, as I will discuss later, assumes enormous importance. Finally, because these processes all begin negatively, it will make more sense to think of their two stages not as growth and decay, but—thinking of widowhood again—as loss and recovery. In terms of the natural cycle, it is simply a matter of starting at a different point: autumn, as the novel’s main action itself does, rather than spring. The most visible of these parallel processes, and the one most commented upon in the critical literature, is illness and recovery.19 The number of the ill or injured in Persuasion nearly matches the number of bereaved: Louisa, of course; Mary, with her sore throats; her son Charles, with his dislocated collarbone; Anne herself, whose sister’s family gives her a headache; Sir Walter, whose illness at the time of Viscount Dalrymple’s death led to his estrangement from the Viscountess; Richard Musgrove, left ill at Gibraltar; Dr. Shirley, the aging vicar whose curate Charles Hayter hopes to become, taken ill two springs back; Captain Harville, wounded in battle; the gouty Admiral Crawford; his wife, who develops a blister accompanying him on his medicinal walks; the invalid Mrs. Smith; and even, by the days’ lights, Mrs. Cornwallis, in the final stages of her confinement. In almost every case, we watch or learn of the entire process of illness and convalescence, and are taught to think of it as a cycle, a complete two-stage process, a worsening and an improving—an autumn and a spring, a loss and a recovery. It is no wonder that the novel is also so well stocked with nurses: Anne herself; Mrs. Harville; her nurserymaid; the Musgroves’ old nurse Sarah, who now lives to “dress all the blains and bruises she could get near” (137); and of course, the well-informed and intriguing Nurse Rooke. Indeed, much of the action in the first half of the novel revolves around the increasingly serious illnesses or injuries and increasingly protracted recoveries first of Mary, then of her son, then of Louisa.

  138 Persuasion

  Of equal structural and thematic importance is the process of losing and finding a home.20 The Elliots’ loss of a home incites the novel’s action—or rather, their loss of a house, for it is Anne alone who feels the surrender of Kellynch as the loss of home, and who wanders homeless from Uppercross to Lyme to Kellynch-lodge to Bath in search of the home she has lost. Her quest parallels—with beautiful aptness, given whom she finally marries—that of the nation’s naval officers after the peace, for “[t]hey will all be wanting”— note the exact choice of words—“a home” (47). Once ashore, Wentworth also wanders from home to home, until he and Anne find one in each other. But where and what is it to be? The suitability of naval ships to provide a home is explicitly discussed, but more fundamentally, the novel constitutes an extended exploration of the nature and meaning of home, an essay in comparative domesticity. Nowhere else in Austen’s work do the appearance and atmosphere of different domestic settings receive so much emphasis: the boisterous joviality of Uppercross, the coldness of the Elliot lodgings at Bath, the greater fitness of the Crawfords than the Elliots as caretakers of Kellynch, and, most emphatically of all, the Harville lodgings in Lyme, with their lovingly described “ingenious contrivances and nice arrangements” making for a “picture of repose and domestic happiness” (119120). In a novel in which homes are so easily lost (by spendthrift baronets and naval officers alike), the ability to make a home away from home becomes a leading mark of character. Mary is conspicuously unable to make a home, or even feel at home, in her new home at Uppercross; she is, as she readily admits, “of no use at home” (82). Anne, by contrast, with her “domestic habits” (57), is justly matched to a member of “that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance” (254). But if domesticity is a high virtue in such a world, hospitality is an even higher one. Early on, Anne deplores the Musgrove habit of having to include everyone in whatever anyone is doing, but as the novel unfolds, she— or Austen—learns to love a home where everyone is always welcome, even if things get a little loud. The novel’s elect are not the Elliots, with their careful doling out of invitations, but the Harvilles, who “invite from the heart” (119). The loss and recovery of home is related, not just analogously but also in terms of cause and effect, to an array of subsidiary processes, each of which also represents some form of loss and recovery. The most important of these is exile, or, in the novel’s language, “removal.” Just as the idea of place is related but not identical to that of home, as we saw in chapter 2, so too are their losses to each other. Naval service constitutes a kind of continual exile from England, as Wentworth�
�s stories of his cruises remind us, and just as

  Persuasion 139

  that service provides Persuasion’s standing symbol of homelessness, so must the novel’s other instances of exile be understood in relation to it. Anne’s experience again parallels that of the man she will marry, for she suffers removals after each of her widowings, both times to Bath: after the death of her mother, those three years in boarding school; after her disappointment with Wentworth, a visit with Lady Russell, one during which, as we are told in the kind of savagely bleak understatement Austen employs in the novel’s opening chapters, she “happen[ed] to be not in perfectly good spirits” (45). Both removals prefigure her exile in Bath throughout the second half of the novel. Her earlier exiles, like Wentworth’s exiles at sea, receive their eventual “springs” of return, but it is not at all certain, despite the hope that Sir Walter will someday clear his debts, that this one ever will. Anne eventually shares her exile with the entire cast of characters, and one might even say that the novel itself goes into exile—or rather, that Austen’s entire oeuvre does, an exile that continues in Sanditon, a removal from the country estate that (save for her own youthful excursion to Bath in Northanger Abbey) is the only world Austen’s art has ever really known, and certainly the only one it has ever valued. Austen points her prow to sea and, like Childe Harold, bids her native shore adieu. A beloved place, a beloved England, has been taken leave of—a point I shall return to below. Mention of Sir Walter’s financial troubles alerts us to indebtedness and repayment as another parallel process. A number of Austen’s novels include characters who get into debt, as both Willoughby and Wickham do; what entitles us to think of Sir Walter’s indebtedness in the way I have outlined is, again, that it is presented as a development that unfolds over time, reaches a nadir (a winter solstice or symbolic death,21 in this case the crisis that forces him to surrender Kellynch, though in other instances, as we have seen, the crisis can prolong itself into an extended winter of stasis), and finally turns back toward regeneration (in this case, repayment). Akin in content to Sir Walter’s financial troubles but in structure more like Anne’s bereavements is Mrs. Smith’s long gloom of impoverishment, one that is finally redressed through a process of reenrichment. More immediately related to the cycles of homelessness and exile we were just examining is that of desertion and repopulation. We are told that the Musgroves’ nurserymaid dwells in a “deserted nursery”—one that is sure to be repopulated sooner or later—just one page before we see Anne wandering through a Musgrove manor-house that has itself suddenly become deserted (137). And only a few pages after that, once the Musgroves have returned from Lyme, we have Anne, thinking back to that solitary ramble,