William Deresiewicz Read online

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  feeling “that Uppercross was already quite alive again” (148). As that leavetaking shows, exile and return, desertion and repopulation, are also related to isolation and companionship (or resocialization, for lack of a better word—the process of rejoining or being rejoined by others), a process whose systole and diastole make themselves felt throughout Anne’s story. Related in turn is the cycle of parting and reunion, so important to Anne’s relationship with Mrs. Smith—and, one might say, with Wentworth, but for that relationship a stronger pair of terms is required: estrangement (“alienation,” in the novel’s language) and reconciliation. It is a process widely dispersed throughout the novel, not only on a small scale in the doings at Uppercross—Charles and Mary Musgrove, Henrietta Musgrove and Charles Hayter, the Cottage and the Great House—but more importantly, in the long-term affairs of the Elliots. Just as the characters’ comings and goings in the first half of the novel are largely governed by the cycle of illness and convalescence, so is much narrative energy focused in the second half around Sir Walter’s reconciliation, first with William Walter Elliot, then with the Dowager Viscountess Dalrymple. These breakings and reforgings of the Elliot family links may not ultimately matter much to Anne and Wentworth, but they amplify the lovers’ own process of rupture and repair, figuring it as a cyclical phenomenon parallel with others and ultimately with the deepest movements of nature. Finally, Austen works her master pattern of decline and recovery, down and up, into the narrative at the most elementary, physical level, as if to emphasize its fundamentality and drive home its ubiquity. Everywhere in Persuasion we find characters literally descending and ascending, be it hills, stairs, or walls—an image-pattern that echoes The Giaour’s own landscape, literal and metaphorical, of highs and lows. Hills form an essential part of the topography of all three of the novel’s major settings: Uppercross, Lyme, and Bath. The culminating scene at Uppercross is a walk that, as we are frequently reminded, takes the party down and up a series of hills and that itself culminates at “the summit of the most considerable” (108). Just a few pages later, Lyme is introduced with a long (and in Austen, unique) disquisition on its cliffs and the cliffs and chasms of its neighboring villages. The narrative of the characters’ arrival and stay in the town makes us continually aware of the fall of the land there—“the long hill into Lyme” (116), “the still steeper street of the town itself” (116), “walk directly down to the sea” (117), “the steps, leading upwards” (124), “as far up the hill as they could” (126)—and that of Anne’s return journey to Uppercross is marked by a similar consciousness—“the same hills and the same objects,” “going up their last hill”

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  (136). The same may be said of the chapters in Bath. It is always: “the lower part of the town” (179), “ascending Belmont” (181), “returning down Pulteney-street” (188), “as high as Belmont” (242), “at the bottom of Union-street” (243). Not all of the novel’s descents are voluntary. Little Charles’s injury is the result of a fall; Wentworth praises his famous nut for having clung to its high perch “while so many of its brethren have fallen” (110); and even the cliff at Pinney has experienced a “partial falling”—height itself tumbling down (117). But of course, the most important of the novel’s falling bodies is Louisa’s, the imagery of descent and ascent reaching its apogee of importance at the novel’s very pivot-point. Indeed, Louisa’s fall is an event that, with her repeated climbings and jumpings, possesses an emblematic significance. What goes up must come down, but by the same token, what goes down eventually comes back up—just as (the pun is inevitable) the season of “spring” inevitably succeeds that of “fall.“22 But our account of things that fall and rise is not yet complete, and extending it will enable us to see the full complexity and essential unity of the system of parallel cyclic processes around which Austen structures the novel. Two other things that fall and rise are Anne’s bloom—no longer, at the novel’s outset, at its “height” (37)—and her spirits—after her mother’s death, “not high” (165). These are not incidental things, but rather the essential indices, respectively, of the heroine’s physical and mental health; as such, their risings and fallings are of persistent concern. And in this novel in which depression is so frequent a psychological peril, the height or depth of other characters’ spirits—Louisa’s, Benwick’s, Mrs. Smith’s—is also a matter of frequent comment. But of course, bloom and spirits rise and fall only metaphorically. These examples show that the novel’s many down-and-up processes are not merely analogous, they are mutually interlinked and ultimately mutually identified. The interlinkages are made through metonymy, the identifications through metaphor. The former include the fact that Sir Walter’s homelessness is a result of his indebtedness; that his estrangement from the Viscountess is a consequence of his illness; that Mrs. Smith’s invalidism is exacerbated by her poverty, in turn a product of her widowhood; that Anne’s exiles are consequent on her bereavements; and—a particularly subtle example—that the return of her bloom first becomes apparent as she climbs the stairs from the beach at Lyme. The causal relationships we noted earlier among the processes of homelessness, exile, desertion, isolation, and so forth are also instances of such interlinkages. The many metaphoric identifications Austen weaves into the novel’s lin142 Persuasion

  guistic texture include, of course, the very term “bloom” itself. We also find the Musgrove sisters in a “fever of admiration” for Wentworth (105), Anne likening his possible estrangement from Benwick to the “wound[ing]” of their friendship (183), and, as we noted, the fumbled possibility of a “cure” for her loss of the man she loves (57). Illness and injury are indeed, like the natural world itself, among the most common sources of metaphors for other processes; one of Austen’s slyest involves the fact that the injury little Charles sustains is a “dislocation”—the very “injury” that universally afflicts the novel’s cast of homeless exiles. We began this chapter by noting that Austen extends the idea of widowhood to include other forms of bereavement; we have seen by now that she ultimately expands it into something in fact far vaster. Widowhood in Persuasion becomes the central metaphor for a great array of losses, bereavement and mourning the template for the process of loss and recovery as such. It is a process, as we have seen, that is understood as essentially natural, so that the novel’s archetype of the healthy response to loss is the farmer whose presence Anne discerns as the party ascends the final hill during that long walk at Uppercross, the one who has been plowing his fields in the face of the oncoming winter, “meaning to have spring again” (108). And yet the novel is shadowed from the start by a knowledge of that other natural process, the one form of loss that cannot turn back toward recovery: death itself. Nature as whole may return to life, but natural creatures do not. Two deaths mark the Eliot family in the novel’s opening two pages, that of Sir Walter’s stillborn son and heir, and that, as we have seen, of his wife. Lady Eliot, we might say, is widowed of life itself, a bereavement from which there is no recovery. So while we have been able to see, with the advantage of hindsight, that the novel’s many down-and-up processes ultimately bend back toward “spring,” the characters who must endure them, unable to see beyond the present moment, have no such reassuring perspective. Just as it does to the Giaour, loss, to them, feels like death. That is why so many of the novel’s metaphors for loss are drawn from the language of death. Anne, as we have seen, submits to Wentworth’s judgment on her loss of bloom in silent “mortification” (85, and see also 135). Charles Hayter, bereft of Henrietta, is in danger of “studying himself to death” (105). Wentworth, in his note to Anne, speaks of the end of love as a “death” (240). And not only does Louisa look dead after her fall, so does Wentworth, his face “as pallid as her own” (129). The novel’s pivotal event is a symbolic death, as if to reinforce the idea that mortality lurks in every loss, and that every loss is an image of mortality.

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  A symbolic death, a
t the novel’s center, followed by a symbolic resurrection—a falling to the bottom followed by a raising up. That is also the story of Anne and Wentworth’s love; it is no accident that their reunion is figured as a resurrection. Not only, as we have seen, do Anne’s feelings for Wentworth resurface out of the depths of her memory. He had been prevented from proposing sooner, he later tells her, because a knowledge of her true character had been “overwhelmed, buried, lost” beneath his feelings of bitterness (246). She had been lying at the bottom of his consciousness— silent, deep, mortified—just as he had been lying at the bottom of hers. Anne and Wentworth recover the future by recovering the past, move forward by moving backward, an idea that pervades the scene in which the two are finally reunited. Not only do they literally walk uphill, “slowly pacing the gradual ascent,” as they repeat their vows and avowals; as they do so— the syntax makes the two journeys exactly parallel—they “retur[n] again into the past” (243). The logic of the novel’s accumulated imagery could not be clearer: Anne and Wentworth’s “many, many years of division and estrangement” are a long downward slope that memory now allows them to reascend. The past is recaptured, but as always, it has suffered a sea change. As Lady Elliot had “revived” in, not been mechanically repeated by, Anne, so Wentworth now experiences a “revival” of his attachment for his beloved (245). It’s never as good as the second time: Anne and Wentworth are now “more exquisitely happy … more tender, more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other’s character, truth, and attachment” than they had been eight years before (243). Nor will memory resurrect the past only; in a novel about death and some dozen analogues for death, recollection will also bestow upon this climactic “present hour” nothing less than “immortality.” “[O]f yesterday and to-day,” we are told of Anne and Wentworth’s retellings of the preceding week’s events, “there could scarcely be an end.” Past and present are brought forward together, immortal, into the future. Finally, as the scene closes, we read that “[a]t last Anne was at home again” (247). Home—the home she had lost, not half a year before, but eight and a half before—is both Wentworth and the past, the underworld or underwater world into which, Orpheus-like, she had had to descend to retrieve him. We might pause for a moment to ponder more deeply one of the phrases I just quoted. Austen tells us that Anne and Wentworth, in their reminiscences, “returned again” into the past. The redundancy might mean nothing, or it might be an index of overflowing feeling, but a different passage suggests that something more may be intended. Austen’s description of the cliffs and

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  chasms of Lyme and its vicinity constitutes the only passage in her work that seems wholly gratuitous—reason enough to suspect that it is not. The topography of course prepares us for the heights and depths, the fallings and risings, that will be experienced at the place, but the whole momentum of the passage has the effect of propelling us, like the characters themselves—“descending the long hill into Lyme … entering upon the still steeper street of the town itself … passing down … and still descending”—to the sea (ll. 116117). Given the sea’s symbolic importance in the novel, this passage down to it is no incidental event, and the narrator herself calls our attention, obliquely, to its importance: “The party from Uppercross … soon found themselves on the sea shore … lingering … as all must linger and gaze on a first return to the sea, who ever deserve to look on it at all.” Only those who recognize the power of the sea, in all its meanings, deserve to look—to read—at all. But why “first return”—an apparent oxymoron that closely anticipates “returned again”? Doesn’t the narrator mean “first visit”? Or is that first visit itself a return—as it is if the sea is the past, but as it is anyway if one understands Austen to have a national rather than a personal bearing in mind. England is an island; the English people perforce came from across the sea, so that any visit to the sea is necessarily a return. That it is appropriate to read this larger dimension into the passage—that such ideas are close to the novel’s mind, that the sea is paid homage to here not just for reasons of natural beauty or symbolic importance, but also because of its role in the life of the nation—is an argument to which I will return in a moment. For now, let us note that the logic that makes a first visit into a return picks up language from earlier in the passage, where the narrator had declared that the wonderful and lovely places she has just enumerated “must be visited, and visited again, to make the worth of Lyme understood” (117). No single visit, no matter how extensive, no single experience, is sufficient for understanding. True knowledge, for us as for Anne and Wentworth (and as, for that matter, for Wordsworth23), is a product of layered associations, a function of seeing with the eyes of memory as well as of the body. It is not that a first visit is a return, but that only a return is a true visit. Understanding, like the landscape of England itself—for “many a generation must have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff”— is a work of time. Anne and Wentworth return again to the past, and they will continue to return to it again and again. Yet for all that Anne and Wentworth’s reunion strikes so many of the novel’s most prominent imagistic and symbolic chords, it fails to strike the one that

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  is most obvious and most easily struck. The novel’s main action begins in autumn, and given its underlying seasonal logic, nothing would have made more sense than for Austen to have set its climactic events in spring. Instead she sets them in late winter—February, to be exact.24 Why? To answer this question is to reveal an entirely new range of reference and meaning, that national and historical dimension I just alluded to, one that, for all that recent criticism has done to uncover the extent to which Austen’s novels engage contemporaneous social and political debates, is still largely regarded as beyond her interest and even her grasp. Persuasion begins in the aftermath of Napoleon’s surrender in the spring of 1814, and although she leaves the exact dates somewhat vague, she runs its concluding events right up to the end of the following February.25 Now the very end of February 1815 is the exact time of Napoleon’s flight from Elba—he escaped from the island on February 26 and landed on the mainland on March 1.26 Subtly, covertly, without announcing as much, Austen makes the events of the novel coincide precisely with the period of Napoleon’s first exile. To put it differently, Persuasion is a novel that takes place in the shadow of Napoleon’s return—the shadow of Waterloo. Lest anyone doubt that Waterloo was at the forefront of Austen’s mind as she wrote the novel, we have only to consult her letters. Prior to 1815, her engagement with the war seems to have been minimal. In May 1811, we find her responding to news of the Battle of Albuera with, “How horrible it is to have so many people killed!—And what a blessing that one cares for none of them!“27 In October 1813, in the midst of Napoleon’s collapse, she writes, “I am tired of lives of Nelson, being that I never read any. I will read this [Southey’s] however, if Frank is mentioned in it.“28 But in November 1815 we find her thanking her publisher, John Murray, for sending, at her request, a copy of Scott’s Field of Waterloo, and in the letter that accompanies her return of that volume three weeks later, she is asking—“supposing you have any set already opened”—for Paul’s Letter to His Kinfolk, which gives the same author’s impressions of conditions in France in the wake of Waterloo and includes a detailed account of that battle.29 In her very next letter, she happily reports that Murray has supplied not only the Scott, but also Helen Maria Williams’s Narrative of the events which have taken place in France, from the landing of Napoleon Bonaparte on the first of March, 1815, till the restoration of Louis XVIII. More than a year later, her appetite is still keen: “We have been reading the `Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo’ “—by Southey, an author she does not ordinarily like very much—”& generally with much approbation.“30

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  But surely the most telling evidence that Austen was obsessed with the final acts of Napoleon’s drama is the fact, mentioned in chapter 1, that she took the troubl
e to copy out Byron’s dramatic monologue “Napoleon’s Farewell”—even making a few modifications as she did so, as if to turn the poem into a statement of her own—when it first appeared in periodical form on July 30, 1815. (On July 24—the event that clearly inspired the poem— the British warship on which Napoleon was imprisoned had “arrived off the English coast and tourists flocked out to see the fallen Emperor.“31) Persuasion was begun nine days later.32 So while there are symbolic implications to Persuasion’s failure to reach its promised spring, as I will discuss below, the first ramification of its chronology is to synchronize the novel’s personal drama of loss and love with the national drama of war and peace. And it is here that we begin to see the relevance of Scott. I noted before that the overriding theme of his verse romances, as it is that of the Turkish Tales, is survival after loss. In Scott’s case, that means, first and foremost, national survival and national loss. Those themes are only residually present in the main plots of Marmion and The Lady of the Lake, the two romances Persuasion mentions by name, but it is a conspicuous fact about these works—as well as about the one that precedes them, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (the three together comprising the first and most celebrated of Scott’s halfdozen efforts in the form)—that their framing devices are as important as the stories themselves. The six cantos of Marmion, for example, are each prefaced by lengthy introductions that together account for some one-fourth of the entire work. The purpose of these frames, as is often the case, is to give the poet an opportunity to reflect upon both the story and his telling of it. The frames, in other words, tell the story of the story. And the story of the story is, in each case, the story of the senescence of Scottish literary traditions and their laborious revival at the poet’s own hands. This, of course, is always Scott’s story, Scott’s question: how can the past be restored—not relived, but remembered? How can the lost be recovered, the nation put in contact again with its own spirit? “Harp of the North!” (I.1), The Lady of the Lake begins: O wake once more! how rude soe’er the hand That ventures o’er thy magic maze to stray; O wake once more! though scarce my skill command Some feeble echoing of thine earlier lay. (I.1922)