Persuasion - first half of Vol I

I'm breaking my posts on this book into four parts because there's only two volumes, and I don't want to focus on either big volumes or small chapters. The story fits quite nicely in that frame anyway: in chapter 7, Anne sees Wentworth for the first time again (they don't speak) and in Vol II's chapter 7 (chapter 24 continuously) she sees him in Bath. (It is always worth investigating the structure in Austen's novels; she was a very symmetrical plotter.) At the end of chapter 6, which I have just finished, Anne finds out that not only is it that Captain Wentworth, and not only will he be at Kellynch but the Musgroves are determined to introduce themselves to him, which means he will come to Uppercuts* as inevitably as the tide rolls in.

I really did not click with this book at all back when I first read it, and I think now at least part of it was due to my beloved Margaret Drabble's loving descriptions of its mature happiness -- fulfilled romance, second bloom, Austen opening out into new worlds, blahblah. Virginia Woolf famously said that Persuasion was dull because it was a transition novel and "the writer is a little bored" with her own schtick, but I don't think the word is bored so much as bitter. As everyone notes, Austen's humour here is not just sarcastic but caustic: Sir Walter and Elizabeth Elliott are never much more than flat ugly stereotypes, ditto Mary Musgrove and Mrs Clay (in a really nasty strike, Austen names the latter PENELOPE in chapter 3, when she is the exact opposite of loving fidelity), and even Lady Russell, the closest thing Anne has to anything like a friend, is rather dull and conventional, and gives Anne terrible advice although she loves her -- indeed, Austen's point is, probably because she loves her, which is a truly depressing insight into human nature. We are about as far away from lovably flawed Mr Bennet and Mrs Jennings as it is possible to get. This is the one book of Austen's set at the time of its writing, where the heroine is older (and still about ten years younger than Austen when writing), isolated, with no real friends, protection or prospects, caught in between being ignored and exploited, with the one great chance of her lifetime missed and far behind her. Anne is fading; her creator was dying.

In fine, I would not describe this novel as sober or grown-up or dull as much as horribly depressing, in its first movement, not just adagio but ritardando. All that joyous reading of The Letter comes late in the game, people! Anne is effaced even in the telling of her own story: the first chapter is devoted to detailing how very unimportant she is (famously, "she was only Anne"): nobody listens to her, and even if they do, like Lady Russell, still nobody takes her seriously. (Again, famously: "She disliked Bath, and did not think it agreed with her -- and Bath was to be her home.") (We also gain a serious clue in the second chapter when Lady Russell wants Anne to go to Bath against her own wishes, for her own good, just as she opposed Anne's marrying Wentworth years ago.) We don't even hear Anne until the third chapter, when she (another clue) defends the navy as a worthy profession, touchingly claiming for them "all the comforts and all the privileges which any home can give" -- as Gillian Beer notes, in this novel the domestic and political spheres are pretty much welded together. Anne only speaks out three times in this whole long scene (Sir Walter and Mrs Clay both rattle away dreadfully), only when other people are silent, and twice only to supply objective information: identities, ranks, as if she were a reference book opened just when someone else wants something. Only at the very end of the scene, and the chapter, when everyone else's more important business is concluded, can Anne slip away to find relief in the night outside (a bit like Marianne Dashwood) and gently sigh about how in a little while "he" may be where she is now. And with this most appropriate consideration of future time becoming time past, the narration slips fully into the subjunctive as we are introduced to the story of the lost suitor who will take Anne's place in the to-be-lost favourite grove. Not Mrs Croft's brother the curate Mr Wentworth, but his brother, the dashing young captain who had no parents, no employment and no permanent home of his own, like Anne when he met her. Austen sidles up on Wentworth, deliberately distancing; his character becomes clear gradually, first far back in time.

Young Captain Wentworth was very dashing indeed: he is described as intelligent, spirited, brilliant, witty, fearless, headstrong and confident ("He had always been lucky; he knew he should be so still") and his confidence is entirely justified as Austen rewards him with not just a job but a promotion, not just success but a great fortune (I think by our terms he's at least a millionaire; what he earns is about equal to what Emma only inherits). Like Colonel Brandon, he builds a strong career on disappointment; like Marianne, Anne loses her "bloom and spirits." The following chapter shows us what Anne's yielding to the "over-anxious caution which seems to insult exertion and distrust Providence" has brought her to: "nobody will want her in Bath" (in neither a social nor familial sense), her other sister wants her mainly as an unpaid governess and buffer between both her husband and mother-in-law, and she is sunk in an atmosphere of a hundred daily little hypocrisies and insults. On the banishment of the to-be prince, she became a Sleeping Beauty. The horror indeed is that this is no horror, "only" a life, in Charlotte Bronte's words in Shirley, that is not a life at all, but "a black trance like the toad's, buried in marble....a long, slow death" of useless "service." One of the most engrossing things for me about these buildup chapters (really, they give new meaning to the words slow burn) is watching Austen show, very carefully and subtly, how someone whose existence is so limited and unsatisfying can turn to a kind of masochistic automatic martyrdom to find their only sense of achievement, and indeed worth. Under cover of the socially acceptable Romance of rediscovered long-lasting love is a far more radical presentation of how how unacceptable what "ordinary" women are forced to accept daily really is.

But behind Anne's loss of Wentworth is a deeper, more permanent loss that can never be healed: the narrative suddenly baldly cries out, "excepting one short period of her life, she had never, since the age of fourteen, never since the loss of her dear mother, known the happiness of being listened to, or encouraged by any just appreciation". She has truly been left "alone in the world," and not just regarding music, either. This puts everything into new perspective: Anne's first, and only, love affair happened when she was nineteen, five years after the death of her mother, and about two years spending three years at school in Bath after that great loss, divorced from family and home. Much is made of the novel's autumnal atmosphere, but the point is that a human being's autumn is followed by the winter of old age and death, not nature's eternal renewal. In the words of Housman's translation of Horace:

Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring
Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers
Comes autumn with his apples scattering;
Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

But oh, whate'er the sky-led seasons mar,
Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;
Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

It was Anne's loss of this first love, and her desire to keep even a semblance of it in Lady Russell's ("one who had almost a mother's love, and mother's rights") that made her reject a later, truer, consolatory replacement. The true tragedy of her life is not that she rejected a marriage proposal, but that in attempting to keep emotional security she instead sentenced herself to a life unlived, sterility and numbness, "a sort of desolate tranquility." And society, not only in the persons of her vain and unloving father and eldest sister, but her loving godmother, told her this was nothing but good.

But even if Anne finds that romantic love, it never will make up for that first, greatest loss, or all the years wasted in fear after it. (And indeed at the end of the novel the only flaw in Anne's happiness is the fear she will lose it; but, one way or another, she will lose her husband eventually, and their shared happiness, and even her own life, and our truest bravery consists in welcoming our mortal joy without fearing its inevitable end.)


*Sorry, sorry.