Persuasion - second half of Vol I

First half of Vol I


AND ALL THAT ANGST WAS BEFORE WE EVEN SAW CAPTAIN TIGHTPANTS, DAMN

-- As far as I'm convinced this is the book that should be called Pride and Prejudice, not Persuasion, no matter how many Brills (Mc)Gills go on about Lady Russell's persuading Anne and persuasion as seduction and the rhetoric of convincing and make you quake in awe of their giant brains. 'Persuasion' has nothing really to do with it. Both Wentworth and Anne are too proud to get over the disastrous end of their engagement, although Anne seems more simply mortified whenever she sees him, but that's probably due to Mary's utterly tactless "oh, he was so ungallant and called you old and withered." Anne's being withered by age seems more like she's actually staled from custom to the people around her: they see her as the spinster aunt, good for nursing children and invalids, so that's all she is in their circle. (She can't be that withered if a couple of days in Lyme produces that much of a change in her looks. More likely, she's withdrawn and depressed.) -- Austen seems to present Mary as being more thoughtless than mean with that remark, but I don't know, Mary is pretty horrible; then again, seeing Mary as insensible to everything is probably the right default.

You can see Austen still sort of feeling her way around with Wentworth, though; he was shocked into saying Anne was "wretchedly" altered (to her family? jeez, Fred), he never got over her, he never met a woman he thought was her equal, he's still unhappy, blah, blahblah. I....don't like him that much? He seems a bit full of himself, although that's probably him overcompensating in Anne's company (although even when she's gone he blathers on to Louisa about the damn hard nut). I do like how he obviously cares for Anne: he gets the kid (literally) off her back (this is later mirrored when she helps manage the stunned Louisa), he sees she is tired, he's rather stunned himself when he learns she fended off Charles and then exchanges speaking glances with William, he wants her to nurse Louisa and asks her opinion of how best to break the news -- tiny little crumbs, to be sure, but Anne eagerly feasts on them, like poor Lucy Snowe with her non-love letters. He does have a lot of very dry witty asides, and Anne reads his face constantly (especially the contemptuous or fed-up expressions), and they even exchange glances and know what the other is thinking a few times. Austen does do her thing where the real hero's past good deed is recounted by someone else, like the housekeeper's testimony of Mr Darcy, and even if Austen doesn't underline it, surely Anne is thinking Wentworth understands Benwick's pain at losing his fiancee all too well.

I'm struck by how silent this book is; poor Anne still has had barely anything to say, except in the very droll bit where she tries prescribing good solemn prose to poor Benwick, as if it were castor oil. By contrast everyone else soliloquizes like Hamlet. People think of Fanny Price as the doormat, but she's always weeping and judging and refusing to act and refusing to marry Henry and rejecting being obedient to society by remaining true to her own conscience instead in general, as Tomalin so rightly points out. (Yes, I am a partisan in the Fanny Wars. I think she's adorable, if a bit wet.) Fanny observes, but she is young and heroic enough that she still stands up for herself (yes she does); we are flatly informed as far back as the second chapter in this first volume that nobody cares what Anne thinks about pretty much anything. And even when someone, i.e. only Lady Russell, does, she still overrides Anne anyway. Anne is numbed but remarkably unbitter; about the closest she gets to bitchy is thinking at Wentworth "how do you like your so-spirited girl NOW," after Louisa literally throws herself at him and lands on the Cobb instead. But even that doesn't seem mean-spirited as much as accurate, you can  just picture Louisa on one of those frigates they keep talking about: "I'll lean over the side only a little bit more! -- " (Splash.)

Mary and Charles seem like the worst couple in Austen; you know Lydia is heedless and hedonistic enough to make Wickham dance to her tune, at least while she's young and juicy, and Lucy Steele determinedly gets just what she wants, famously, "with no other sacrifice than that of time and conscience." (I always love that it amuses Austen to give somewhat-happy endings to her villainous characters: Willoughby does not die of a broken heart, but holds Marianne as his eternal secret standard for women, which must make his wife at least unhappy enough.) Mary is completely self-centered without being that amusing and absolutely unable to be on her own, or to see anyone else get the least bit of attention, and Charles doesn't seem to care about much other than hunting, probably because it enables him to gallop far away from Mary. Mr Bennet at least justifies his existence by being funny, and sheltering Elizabeth somewhat. There is nothing redeeming about Charles and Mary, and Elizabeth and Sir Walter will be just as awful in Bath. Anne is the most alone of all Austen's heroines: even Fanny has Egburp, and gets to know Susan. Anne's sisters either ignore or exploit her, her cousins don't really see her, and the person she truly loves as a mother substitute doesn't know her either (you cannot marry Frederick, you should marry Charles, you must like Bath). The poor thing needs a job, a Hitachi wand, and several dozen issues of Ms.

But this being an Austen novel, she goes to Lyme instead, which is very charmingly portrayed (Austen is rather lovingly dry, just like Wentworth: "a fine south-easterly breeze was bringing in [the tide] with all the grandeur which so flat a shore admitted.") And she gets to talk Byron and Scott (this is another book in which Marmion is lauded, besides my beloved JE; I must try to read it through one of these days), with the palely loitering James Benwick (dry Austen again: "He had a pleasing face and a melancholy air, just as he ought to have").  I think this is the only Austen novel in which the best society, and the pool of possible suitors, is so completely made up of non-titled men who have made their own fortunes: Captain Harville is stuck in a poky lodging house, but has fitted it up very nicely, the Admiral is steered along very well by Wentworth's sister, and the natural openness and freshness of the sea and wind seem to be embodied in the hospitality and high spirits of the sailors. This heroine will not have the reward of a fine country estate or even a settled parsonage, but the social mobility and possible adventure (I particularly love Mrs Croft's rattling off all the places she's been, and Mary absolutely unable to say anything back) are entirely new and exciting.

-- That's what the book is about for me, really: risk, and the decision to take it or not, and the mutability of feeling, which is portrayed in poor Benwick and Louisa but even the main characters. They could stay confined in their roles as rejected, resentful suitor and pining, fading spinster, but Anne and Wentworth in the end are both heroic in speaking out their feelings, even if indirectly. I was confused at first because I kept thinking of this story as a kind of weird Regency Gatsby, an attempt to recapture the past which is apparently successful, but it is really about the kind of emotional risk which lets us overcome the past, not entomb and fetishize it.* Gillian Beers brilliantly compares Persuasion to The Winter's Tale, which is just right: true reconciliation does involve restoration, or perhaps only the realization that what was thought lost has always remained, imperishable. Anne and Frederick change and age, but their love remains constant, their Northern Star.

-- But to get to the completed circle in the gravel path, we must go through Bath UGH. I know Janeite tourism doesn't work this way, but I wonder anyone goes to Bath after reading her books, the associations are usually so unpleasant.


*Relatedly, I just read the last essay in Meghan Daum's new book and I'm sure I'll be naive until I'm ninety, because I was rather shocked by its ending: "I went through this life-changing experience and thought I would change and be better but nothing really happened at all except I did survive a near-fatal infection, so inasmuch as there's a happy ending, that's it, except it's not really that happy because life is so mundane to those who are truly wised-up, like me." Of course true insight is always hard to even hang onto, much less act on, but that seemed to me like nothing so much as her brattily pushing even the possibility of change away. I guess living such an existence truly would be its own sort of punishment, as she more or less points out herself, except that having a major book deal with FSG doesn't seem to be much of a slap on the wrist.