by Jane Austen
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.
Jane Austen, then, is both critical of the class system and wants to maintain it; that is, she wants to buttress it with better, more humanistic foundations. As in the novel Pamela, by the eighteenth-century author Samuel Richardson, a marriageable girl must not focus on trying to be a lady, but it is a truth universally acknowledged that there must be ladies. An Austen novel proposes a new system of signs opposed to the old conventions, reworking yet supporting fundamental social and religious categories. Persuasion in particular invites us to map Anne’s and Austen’s reading of her world onto our own and evaluate for ourselves the “cheerful confidence in futurity” that marked the early promise of Anne’s love affair. Speaking of the conventional social obstacles, the traditional privileges of class and gender that stood in the way of what she called “the play of spirit” in Jane Austen’s life, Virginia Woolf remarked most insightfully about Austen, “She believes in them as well as laughs at them.”
In this context, what does the title mean? Lady Russell gives both good and bad advice in her early act of persuasion: good in that it is based on tenderness and authority, bad in that it is constrained by pride rather than true feeling. But this seems to beg the question: If feeling so often trumps reason, how then does one know what is “true” (presumably as opposed to ego istic) feeling? How does this help us to conciliate modernity with tradition, the authority of individual desire with the authority of systems, to classify the classifiers? It is the modern question—as Captain Wentworth is a modern hero and the heroine’s marriage will be a modern marriage—and the question itself is left unresolved. Those who are attracted to Jane Austen because of nostalgia for the stability of class and clarity of old-fashioned values in picturesque English villages miss this most profound theme in her writing. Celebrated for simplicity, quaintness, and old-fashioned certainties, Austen in her last novel turns out to be complicated, thorny, and, most of all, anxiously uncertain about the world developing around her. At times she appears to be talking herself into a “cheerful confidence in futurity.” It is tempting to imagine where she would have taken this direction had she lived. But this novel was to be her final attempted act of (self-) persuasion.
Susan Ostrov Weisser is a Professor in the English Department at Adelphi University, where she specializes in nineteenth-century literature and women’s studies, and teaches frequently in the Honors College. Dr. Weisser’s Ph.D. is from Columbia University. She is the author and editor of three books in women’s studies. Her research centers on women and romantic love in nineteenth-century literature, as well as in contemporary popular culture. She wrote the introduction and notes to the Barnes and Noble Classics edition of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
1
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage,1 there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents;a there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt, as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last centuryb and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed—this was the page at which the favourite volume always opened:
ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH-HALL
Walter Elliot, born March 1, 1760, married, July 15, 1784, Elizabeth, daughter of James Stevenson, Esq. of South Park, in the county of Gloucester; by which lady (who died 1800) he has issue Elizabeth, born June 1, 1785; Anne, born August 9, 1787; a still-born son, Nov. 5, 1789; Mary, born Nov. 20, 1791.
Precisely such had the paragraph originally stood from the printer’s hands; but Sir Walter had improved it by adding, for the information of himself and his family, these words, after the date of Mary’s birth—“married, Dec. 16, 1810, Charles, son and heir of Charles Musgrove, Esq. of Uppercross, in the county of Somerset,”—and by inserting most accurately the day of the month on which he had lost his wife.
Then followed the history and rise of the ancient and respectable family, in the usual terms: how it had been first settled in Cheshire; how mentioned in Dugdale2 serving the office of High Sheriff, representing a borough in three successive parliaments, exertions of loyalty, and dignity of baronet, in the first year of Charles II., with all the Marys and Elizabeths they had married; forming altogether two handsome duodecimo pages, and concluding with the arms and motto: “Principal seat, Kellynch hall, in the county of Somerset,” and Sir Walter’s handwriting again in this finale:
“Heir presumptive, William Walter Elliot, Esq., great grandson of the second Sir Walter.”
Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character: vanity of person and of situation. He had been remarkably handsome in his youth; and, at fifty-four, was still a very fine man. Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did; nor could the valet of any new made lord be more delighted with the place he held in society. He considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the blessing of a baronetcy; and the Sir Walter Elliot, who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect and devotion.
His good looks and his rank had one fair claim on his attachment; since to them he must have owed a wife of very superior character to any thing deserved by his own. Lady Elliot had been an excellent woman, sensible and amiable; whose judgment and conduct, if they might be pardoned the youthful infatuation which made her Lady Elliot, had never required indulgence afterwards.—She had humoured, or softened, or concealed his failings, and promoted his real respectability for seventeen years; and though not the very happiest being in the world herself, had found enough in her duties, her friends, and her children, to attach her to life, and make it no matter of indifference to her when she was called on to quit them.—Three girls, the two eldest sixteen and fourteen, was an awful legacy for a mother to bequeath; an awful charge rather, to confide to the authority and guidance of a conceited, silly father. She had, however, one very intimate friend, a sensible, deserving woman, who had been brought, by strong attachment to herself, to settle close by her, in the village of Kellynch; and on her kindness and advice, Lady Elliot mainly relied for the best help and maintenance of the good principles and instruction which she had been anxiously giving her daughters.
This friend, and Sir Walter, did not marry, whatever might have been anticipated on that head by their acquaintance.—Thirteen years had passed away since Lady Elliot’s death, and they were still near neighbours and intimate friends; and one remained a widower, the other a widow.
That Lady Russell, of steady age and character, and extremely well provided for, should have no thought of a second marriage, needs no apology to the public, which is rather apt to be unreasonably discontented when a woman does marry again, than when she does not; but Sir Walter’s continuing
in singleness requires explanation.—Be it known then, that Sir Walter, like a good father, (having met with one or two private disappointments in very unreasonable applications) prided himself on remaining single for his dear daughter’s sake. For one daughter, his eldest, he would really have given up any thing, which he had not been very much tempted to do. Elizabeth had succeeded, at sixteen, to all that was possible, of her mother’s rights and consequence; and being very handsome, and very like himself, her influence had always been great, and they had gone on together most happily. His two other children were of very inferior value. Mary had acquired a little artificial importance, by becoming Mrs. Charles Musgrove; but Anne, with an elegance of mind and sweetness of character, which must have placed her high with any people of real understanding, was nobody with either father or sister: her word had no weight; her convenience was always to give way;—she was only Anne.
To Lady Russell, indeed, she was a most dear and highly valued god-daughter, favourite and friend. Lady Russell loved them all; but it was only in Anne that she could fancy the mother to revive again.