Persuasion (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (5 page)

The heroine’s traditional solution to this classic problem of the novel, the conflict between categories marked “feeling” and “reason,” or “individual” and “community,” is love and marriage. Through the social legitimation of her personal feeling, her personal worth is recognized, her social status as wife established, and her economic future as middle-class or better secured. Lady Russell is the temporary impediment in that she has a “value for rank and consequence” that “blinds her”—in this trait she is partly aligned with the social traditionalists, though also partly with the new ranking by feeling, since she alone is capable of appreciating Anne’s worth. Though Lady Russell is not entirely condemned—she is said to have a “more tempered and pardonable pride”(p. 25)—her decisive victory over the lovers at this point groups her with those who defend social hierarchies as fixed and given, so that she stands in need of correction by Anne.

The title of the novel,
Persuasion,
points to the causes and consequences of this momentous decision in Anne’s life. Feeling and reason are commonly categorized as inimical to each other in regard to the behaviors that determine lives, but here the treatment of persuasion is not confined to the reasonability of the external world versus the anarchy of internal selfish drives. On the contrary, the exploration of the internal world of the mind that constitutes much of this novel is given over to a remarkable literary description of what we would now call the process of rationalization and its consequence, the inability to trust to reason: “How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!” remarks the narrator (p. 15). Like Sir Walter and his inability to see Mrs. Clay’s freckles, we all see only what we want to; we are all of us blinded by desire, as much as Lady Russell is blinded by rational pride. Even thoughtful Anne can convince herself that giving up the engagement is for Captain Wentworth’s own good. As in the psychological novels of George Eliot and Henry James, or the psychoanalytic theory of Freud, emotion dominates over wisdom and clear thinking. This unreliability gives much finer shadings to the idea of “persuasion” than the plot at first seems to suggest.

When Anne stays home to nurse her nephew, she is selfless in volunteering, but her goodness is admixed with the unad mitted desire to avoid an awkward first meeting with her former lover. In this she is not as unlike her sister Mary and brother-in-law Charles, who are more obviously self-centered, as she at first appears. All are united in their willingness to be persuaded by what they want to think. In this scene in chapter 10 the free indirect discourse that reveals Anne’s thoughts melds with the author’s in forming a standard for valuing behavior. The implication is that there is a universal and stable standard available, but it is rendered unstable because of feeling. Though Anne knows this about others as a silent watcher and “longs” to represent the truth to them all, we soon see that she too rationalizes her own behavior: “From some feelings of interest and curiosity, she fancied now that it was too late to retract” when she realizes her former lover is going to accompany her party on a walk (p. 79).

Jane Austen’s characteristic style has an interesting relation to the ambiguity surrounding thinking and feeling. Her famous tongue-in-cheek satire or irony consists in a radical disconnection between what a character says and means, as when Anne, nervous about meeting her former lover’s relatives, now tenants at her own home, “found it most natural to be sorry that she had missed the opportunity of seeing them”(p. 31) or between the conventional and real meanings of a narrative description, as when Anne’s sister Mary and her husband are said to be “always perfectly agreed in the want of more money” (p. 42). Mary does unknowingly what the narrator does knowingly. She is deficient in “understanding” and “temper,” and has the “Elliot self-importance” and “no resources for solitude”(p. 36); but she says “I made the best of it; I always do” about supposedly feeling ill, when she so clearly does the opposite. Characters correct each other’s view while the narrator corrects our view of all of them, forcefully demonstrating a radical instability of perspective quite unlike the harmonized world associated with Austen’s work.

Mary’s character is based on the high comedy of rationalization, in which we are in on the joke of her selfishness. But Mary’s function is not simply comic; she shows off Anne’s temper, her restraint, patience, gentleness, moderation, self-suppression, even what Jane Austen calls her “forced cheerfulness.” In her extreme obedience to her own egotism, Mary belongs to those who are “romantic” in their suffering—that is, self-indulgently dramatizing and thinking highly of the importance of their own feelings. In contrast with her two selfish sisters, Anne is praised for her “elegant and cultivated
mind”
(my italics; p. 39). Anne’s visit to Uppercross, home of Mary’s in-laws, the Musgroves, is a corrective to the Elliot pride, a lesson to Anne “in the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle”(p. 40). Yet all those at Uppercross are also in the “self-delusion” of egoism, barely listening to any concerns but their own. Where the Elliots are cold and unfeeling, the Musgroves are feeling but dim.

Captain Wentworth’s relatives, the Crofts, by contrast, one of the number of “three or four families” that Jane Austen acknowledged she liked to write about in each novel, are the rare happy couple in Austen’s works. Their mutual devotion is based on companionship and “open, easy and decided” manners—they are neither cultivated nor proud but frank and honest. Mrs. Croft, Captain Wentworth’s sister, is Mary’s opposite number, cheerful and hardy where Mary is self-indulgent and whining. Mrs. Croft castigates Captain Wentworth because he speaks of women as if they “were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures [who don‘t] expect to be in smooth water all our days”(p. 66). She is a woman willing to exert herself and bear discomfort rather than aim for the social status of the privileged fine lady. In this she repudiates the fixed hierarchical idea of women as weak vessels who are unreasonable, delicate, and docile by nature.

Austen draws together both emotion and prudence, “agitation” and “composure,” in relation to Anne’s first meeting with Wentworth since their engagement was dissolved, in which Anne struggles to check her feeling. During the walk, Captain Wentworth admires Louisa Musgrove’s self-description as “not easily persuaded,” firm of mind, the nut that endures autumn with its hard shell. This implies that Anne is too weak and passive, lacking what he calls “powers of mind.” Yet the accident that is the climax of the novel occurs because self-will triumphs over reason, motivated by feeling: Louisa, in an effort to flirt with Captain Wentworth and show off the resoluteness that he has claimed to value, stubbornly acts against prudence and has a near-fatal blow to the head when she falls from the Cobb on a pleasure trip to Lyme. Captain Wentworth must learn to temper his feelings with “justness” as Anne must learn to temper reason with legitimate desire.

But neither feeling nor reason is depicted as simple or easy to discern as values to rely on: Thus even socially conservative, rational, and “prudent” Lady Russell is motivated by antisocial, narcissistic feelings of “angry pleasure” and “pleased contempt” (p. 116). An important character who illustrates the anti-romantic point of view is Captain Wentworth’s melancholy friend Captain Benwick, whose love of romantic poetry and showy sincerity is belied by his falling too quickly in love with a less than worthy object after a romantic pining for his lost love. Anne briskly recommends he read less poetry and more prose. Strong emotion, it seems, is a value only when tempered and managed. Yet at the same time the irony is directed at Anne as well as at Captain Benwick: Anne is conscious (and we are made conscious of the fact that the author is conscious) of her own hypocrisy in preaching patience and resignation, since she is growing more and more aware that she is still in love and suffering by the knowledge of her desire.

Since we the readers are in the privileged position of knowing that Captain Wentworth is also increasingly attracted to Anne, we spend much of this novel watching unacknowledged worth in the process of being discovered, the neglected cared for, the invisible made visible. This is a notion of love based on friendship, the modern idea of loving for “character” (or personality, as we would say). The Crofts admit they married quickly, she for his character (meaning manly virtue) and he for her beauty. “And what were we to wait for besides?” they say, emphasizing the naturalness that is implied by the simplicity of it. This view of romance as friendship represents the avoidance of both cold alliance for social privilege and the moral risks of passion.

By contrast, Mr. Elliot, heir to her father’s estate and name and Anne’s suitor, assumes that “rank is rank” and argues for the happiness that results from “due consideration.” When Mr. Elliot enters the novel, Anne is able to see through his pretense of liking the family and valuing the ancestral name because she has less vanity than the others and so can be more reasonable and perspicacious. Mr. Elliot is not open and honest like Captain Wentworth or the Crofts—he is too conscious of being visible and pleasing. He has “artificial good sentiments” that are not borne out by behavior, so that Anne being “persuaded” to marry him (as Lady Russell tries to persuade her) would be to repeat her mother’s mistake in choosing external superiority over internal worth.

Another character who figures into the evaluation of hierarchies is Mrs. Smith, Anne’s impoverished childhood friend, wellborn but downwardly mobile (the converse of the Crofts). Mrs. Smith’s spirited struggles against misfortune and her ability to retain feeling and pleasure in the face of hardship is not so much a Christian resignation to providence as it is an exertion by mind and heart that is part of character. Mrs. Smith acts like a lady even when destitute, as opposed to those who have money and are vulgar. The true hierarchy, it is implied, is not of wealth or rank, but of the merit of character. Yet Mrs. Smith is also a realist, not a sentimentalist: “Human nature may be great in times of trial, but generally speaking it is its weakness and not its strength that appears in a sick chamber,” she says in reply to Anne’s Christian moralizing (p. 147). One of the intricacies of
Persuasion
is that Anne is eventually “rewarded” for her democratic impulse in “not slighting an old friend” in spite of the present difference in rank.

When the plot moves Anne and her family to Bath, she is exposed to all the “littlenesses of a town”(p. 129) with its sharp social distinctions and fine gradations of who stays where and appears with whom. Many characters in
Persuasion
are openly judged (like Mr. Elliot’s first wife) as to how they rank, but never more so than in Bath, where people and places and habits and speech are constantly classified. We are taken on a search for systems of classifications, through a range of discriminations among lovers, friends, relations, levels of income, taste in art, fashions, and fashionability of location. Austen furnishes us with a kind of cultural geography, and makes it clear that our point of view on these gradations differs with our position in the social web.

As the novel brings the lovers together in its final chapters, their reunion is said to be better than the first love because it is “fixed in a knowledge of each other’s character, truth, and attachment”—in other words, in realism and mutuality (like the Crofts), which makes them “more justified in acting”(p. 227). Anne and her lover learn to distinguish anger from pride, caution and fear from duty; in other words, they overcome the split between mind and heart by splitting the difference in views.

But startlingly to a modern reader, Anne tells Wentworth that she was “right in submitting” to Lady Russell
even though her advice was wrong.
This is because it’s especially a woman’s duty to submit to authority. And so Anne—and Jane Austen—come down squarely on the traditional side, after all, trusting in providence to make it all come out right, the “event” (consequence) deciding the rightness of judgment. The two—no longer very young, but still young enough—have their way in getting approval for their marriage. The confluence of “maturity” and “right” feeling with “independence of fortune,” rather than posed in opposition as in the beginning, legitimate romance. Anne is given her own “woman’s estate” at last as a reward for discovering this.

Our last glimpse of the Elliots returns us once again to the power hierarchy—which turns on dominating and being dominated rather than the equality and mutual feeling of friendship and romantic love based on it. As the novel draws to a close, Anne’s sister Elizabeth is saved from much suffering over the situation by her “internal persuasions,” a stream of consciousness that “satisfies” her twin urges to “propriety and vanity” (p. 207). But it is Mrs. Smith who is last glimpsed in the novel, emphasizing the earned value of the individual, independent of the classification system of social worth. Since she is what came to be known as “shabby-genteel,” come down in income through no fault of her own, but still ladylike and moral, the character of Mrs. Smith combines both old and new values, and so has the last word.

Persuasion
is on its surface yet another “voyage of discovery,” the story of a woman fully arriving as an adult through marriage. By the novel’s conclusion Anne Elliot has acquired competence in the psychology of love and mastery of its fit into the moral and social worlds. She learns how to read men through the comparison of paired suitors, as in
Pride and Prejudice
or
Sense and Sensibility,
who represent categories of personal worth within a newly defined classification of difference, a “modern” sense of what one should be and what one should not. Captain Wentworth, fully endorsed by the heroine and narrator at the end, is the modern man, with his belief in his own authority, his optimistic crediting of his own future worth (a species of investment in himself), and his demonstration of the power of the individual to overcome the constraints of traditional classifications. But this scheme argues not so much for meritocracy as for what Marilyn Butler calls a “natural aristocracy.” Class attributes are shown to be important in love, as part of the definition of “character,” which also means personality, morality, and right living. Clearly Jane Austen is on the side of “the duties and dignity of the resident landholder,” which Sir Walter has corrupted; she does not unequivocally endorse a society in which the middle-class or the upward striver wrenches authority from the historically privileged class.