Jane Austen, the Secret Radical

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Jane Austen, the Secret Radical Page 31

by Helena Kelly


  The Elliots, and their cousins, are at a concert in the Assembly Rooms in Bath. Captain Wentworth is there too; Anne – and the reader – overhear Sir Walter and Lady Dalrymple talking about him:

  ‘A well-looking man,’ said Sir Walter, ‘a very well-looking man.’

  ‘A very fine young man indeed!’ said Lady Dalrymple. ‘More air than one often sees in Bath. — Irish, I dare say.’

  ‘No, I just know his name. A bowing acquaintance. Wentworth — Captain Wentworth of the navy. His sister married my tenant in Somersetshire, — the Croft, who rents Kellynch.’

  Whatever the truth of Lady Dalrymple’s ancestry, she clearly identifies herself with the Irish. For her, Wentworth, a ‘very fine young man’ with an ‘air’, must be Irish. He isn’t – or so we gather. Sir Walter is of course in a position to be reasonably certain about Wentworth’s background; a man seeking to be welcomed as a prospective son-in-law would be expected to provide plentiful information about his family and prospects. Sir Walter knows what Wentworth isn’t – he isn’t Irish, he’s ‘nothing to do with the Strafford family’. But this is all we ever learn. We discover where Wentworth has been – ‘St Domingo’, Gibraltar, the Mediterranean, the West Indies – we meet his sister, we’re told about his brother, but where he’s from, his background, his parentage, remains a closed book.

  The wider point Jane seems to be developing with the Elliots and their cousins, the larger question, is where national identity comes from, and to what extent it matters. If an Irish aristocrat can have a Scottish title and a French name; if it isn’t necessary for English monarchs to be born in England, have English parents, or even speak English; if you can be in the Baronetage of England when your ancestry is Scottish and Irish – what does being English mean? Does it mean anything at all?

  In Emma, Jane showed us, in exquisite detail, one small corner of England being altered. With Persuasion, the royal names, the repeated references to Ireland and to Scotland, the reminders of disruptive historical events, make it clear that she was working on a broader canvas – broad, but consistent. Change, continual, continuing change, is the universal theme. Nothing in Persuasion, absolutely nothing, is fixed.

  The novel begins with a removal, as the Elliots abandon Kellynch for Bath, and Anne hardly stops moving afterwards, from Kellynch to Uppercross, from Uppercross to Lyme and back again, to Kellynch Lodge to stay with her godmother, then to Bath. In Bath, she’s constantly ranging around the city. At the end of the novel, she gets, not a home, but a carriage – ‘a very pretty landaulette’. It’s a lot of movement to fit into such a short novel, short both in terms of pages and of narrative time.

  The real-life locations Jane selects for the novel very probably did have personal significance to her, but they’re thematically significant as well – all the locations are, in different ways, intrinsically unstable. The fictional Uppercross, home to the Musgroves – the family Anne’s sister has married into, the family Anne could have married into herself, if she’d chosen – is being made modern and unlike itself, changed from order into disarray. The area around Lyme was subject to landslides; so too, to a lesser extent, was Bath. There are layers of history and prehistory waiting to be exposed in these places – the ruins of a Roman city, the skull of an ancient crocodile.

  Everywhere the novel turns, we see certainties being eroded.

  Jane picked Lyme quite deliberately. She wants us to think about ichthyosaurs and ammonites. She takes some pains to set those crumbling cliffs – and what they contain – centre stage.

  The party from Uppercross visit Lyme in November, ‘too late in the year’, Jane tells us, ‘for any amusement or variety which Lyme, as a public place, might offer’. There is no sea-bathing or dancing for Anne, Wentworth, and the Musgroves: ‘the rooms were shut up, the lodgers almost all gone, scarcely any family but of the residents left.’

  But whereas, in one of Jane’s earlier novels, this might have been almost all the description offered, here we’re suddenly launched into a lengthy and lyrical paragraph which, bar a brief reference to the Cobb, is all about the landscape, the surroundings – both man-made and natural:

  [T]he next thing to be done was unquestionably to walk directly down to the sea. — and, as there is nothing to admire in the buildings themselves, the remarkable situation of the town, the principal street almost hurrying into the water, the walk to the Cobb, skirting round the pleasant little bay, which in the season is animated with bathing machines and company, the Cobb itself, its old wonders and new improvements, with the very beautiful line of cliffs stretching out to the east of the town, are what the stranger’s eye will seek; and a very strange stranger it must be, who does not see charms in the immediate environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it better. The scenes in its neighbourhood, Charmouth, with its high grounds and extensive sweeps of country, and still more its sweet retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation; — the woody varieties of the cheerful village of Up Lyme, and, above all, Pinny, with its green chasms between romantic rocks, where the scattered forest trees and orchards of luxuriant growth declare that many a generation must have passed away since the first partial falling of the cliff prepared the ground for such a state, where a scene so wonderful and so lovely is exhibited, as may more than equal any of the resembling scenes of the far-famed Isle of Wight: these places must be visited, and visited again, to make the worth of Lyme understood.

  Jane’s description of Lyme’s surroundings is unusually detailed and poetical (just think how different it is to the description of Pemberley), but the effect, in spite of the ‘extensive sweeps’, the ‘sweet retired bay’, and ‘romantic rocks’ – is unsettling. The ‘partial falling of the cliff’ may have created a ‘wonderful’, ‘lovely’ scene, but the ‘dark cliffs’ are a looming presence, their menace made visible in the ‘chasms’ and in the ‘fragments of low rock’ which litter the beach below.

  And what, exactly, is lurking among the ‘fragments’? Relics of the past, reminders of the vastness of time, of its relentless onward rush, of ‘many a generation’ which has ‘passed away’; relics of the past – fossils. Readers who had been to Lyme themselves might almost have been able to see them.n

  The trip to Lyme ends, of course, with the terrible accident on the Cobb. Louisa’s fall mirrors the falling cliffs; her catastrophic head injury signals the damage that Lyme can wreak – the lasting ‘shock’ it can inflict on people, and on their beliefs. The party are scattered; Anne goes first to stay at Lady Russell’s house, and then accompanies her to Bath.

  Anne, we’re told – told twice – dislikes Bath. She went to school there, grieving for her mother; she was taken there by Lady Russell when she was mourning the broken engagement with Captain Wentworth. It has never been a place of solace for her; it isn’t one now. She finds no order there, no beauty. The city is full of ‘the dash of other carriages, the heavy rumble of carts and drays, the bawling of newspapermen, muffin-men and milkmen, and the ceaseless clink of pattens [over-shoes]’. The ‘extensive buildings’ appear ‘smoking in rain’.

  And the street that Jane sends Anne to is not one to make her feel any more settled, or secure.

  Sir Walter, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s friend Mrs Clay are living in ‘Camden Place’. Upper Camden Place, now Camden Crescent, was developed in the 1780s, but only two-thirds of the proposed development was ever completed. During construction, a series of landslides took place on the north side of the crescent and a number of houses had to be demolished. The land there seems to be particularly unstable – there have been at least two further landslides, one as recently as 2012. It’s possible that the unstable houses were demolished while Jane was living in Bath – the Crescent looks larger on a map of 1800 than it does on one drawn up ten years later.o

  These days the centre of Bath is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It feels like walking
through history; it’s one of those places you can imagine you’re really getting close to Jane. The city centre didn’t suffer much bomb damage during the Second World War, though the Upper Assembly Rooms was all but destroyed, what you see nowadays being little more than a facsimile rebuilt, lovingly, on the same footprint. But for Jane, Bath wouldn’t have looked romantically historical. The buildings were new, few of them built before the mid-eighteenth century. Some of them were very new. Where we see warm, golden walls, Jane would have seen blindingly white ones – Bath stone changes colour as it weathers. Anne, at the beginning of the novel, ‘dreads’ the prospect of ‘the white glare’ of Bath.

  It must actually have been quite an odd experience, seeing architecture inspired by the classical world – the Circus, modelled on the Colosseum; the Royal Crescent; the Pump Room with its Greek lettering, picked out in gold, above the door – recreated in bright, dazzlingly new materials. And it must have been made odder by the fact that Bath had looked a lot like this before. The modern baths were built directly on top of the Roman ones. Almost everywhere workmen dug in Bath, they found the ruins of the Roman city which had once occupied the same space. It happened all the time. A local newspaper, the Bath Chronicle of 26th August 1813, reported the discovery of ‘several ancient relics (most probably of Roman origin)’ in ‘the Crescent fields’ – the open space in front of the Royal Crescent. These relics were particularly grisly ones – a stone coffin and skulls. Others were more appealing. So many remnants of the Romans were discovered that the city created a museum, the Repository of Bath Antiquities, specially to house them.

  As the Bath Chronicle proudly opined in 1815, the city ‘might justly lay claim, 1700 years ago, to the same character of elegance and taste by which it is at present distinguished’.7 But some classically educated visitors to Bath – perhaps even a fairly uneducated visitor, who had grown up in a boys’ school, as Jane had done – might have found in this replaying of the past a source of apprehension rather than pride. A very famous, and unsettling, passage in Book 8 of Virgil’s Aeneid describes a visit to a site which is covered in ruins but which will later become Rome. The poet conjures up the buildings he and his readers know, ghosts of the future. Weren’t the gleaming modern elegancies of Bath (the Corinthian columns, the classically-inspired pediments) equally haunted by the fallen pillars and fractured inscriptions continually being dug up? If Bath had looked like this before, and slid into ruins, what was to stop it happening again?

  Was Bath a city that England could be proud of, in any meaningful sense, when the architecture was almost entirely foreign? Earlier in the novel, Jane posed the same question pretty explicitly – what is English? Is anything? She tells us that Uppercross ‘a few years back had been completely in the old English style’, that the family live in a ‘substantial and unmodernized’ house, set about with ‘old trees’. But changes are creeping in – a ‘farm-house’ in the village has been ‘elevated into a cottage’ for the oldest Musgrove son to live in with his own family. It has a ‘veranda, French windows, and other prettiness’. We do find another ‘window cut down to the ground’ in Mansfield Park, but these are the only ‘French windows’ in Jane’s novels, and the only ‘veranda’, a word which comes probably from the Portuguese, via India, and was understood during Jane’s lifetime to be Indian. New names, foreign influences, alien architecture – Uppercross is no longer in the old English style.

  The old is giving way to the new. The ‘old-fashioned square parlour’ of the ‘Great House’ is ‘gradually’ being given what Jane calls ‘the proper air of confusion’ with ‘a grand piano-forte and a harp, flower-stands and little tables placed in every direction’. We’re invited to imagine ‘the originals of the portraits against the wainscot, the gentlemen in brown velvet and the ladies in blue satin’ coming alive again to gaze in horror at ‘such an overthrow of all order and neatness!’ The Musgroves themselves, ‘like their houses’, Jane mischievously informs us, ‘were in a state of alteration, perhaps of improvement’. The parents were in the ‘old style’, the ‘young people in the new’.

  The ‘old style’ is connected to ‘order and neatness’, the ‘new style’ is confused, chaotic. The younger generation are – almost without exception – quite remarkably fickle. The eldest Musgrove daughter, Henrietta, vacillates between her attraction to Captain Wentworth and her affection for her cousin, with whom she has long had an understanding. The eldest Musgrove son, Charles, switched his affections from Anne to her younger sister Mary; it wasn’t done quite as speedily as Mr Collins manages it in Pride and Prejudice, but it happened ‘not long afterwards’. Louisa Musgrove is set on Captain Wentworth; by the time he has been absent from her for two months, she’s engaged to another man. And it isn’t just the Musgroves whose hearts are changeable.

  Captain Wentworth flirts with Henrietta and Louisa; he marries Anne. Anne shows flickers of interest in Captain Benwick and in her cousin, William Elliot; we have to presume that at one point she showed at least a little interest in Charles Musgrove, since he doesn’t seem the sort of man to propose without perceiving any encouragement. Captain Benwick is in mourning for his dead betrothed. She dies in June 1814, and Benwick doesn’t hear of her death until the August. But he recovers apace. By November he is attracted to Anne; by February he’s engaged to Louisa. It would seem, as Mary Musgrove says, that ‘Such a heart is very little worth having’.

  Just as with poor Harriet Smith, and her infinitely changeable affections, it’s easy to be scornful about Benwick – and perhaps a little about the other characters too – but this isn’t necessarily the response Jane is urging us towards. Of the younger generation, it’s only Elizabeth Elliot who shows interest in just the one potential marriage partner; her loyalty – or her resistance to change – reaps no reward.

  At the end of the novel, in the chapter which we know was reworked almost completely, and which I think we’re justified in seeing as a deliberate reinforcement of the book’s themes, Jane has Anne and Captain Harville embark on a lengthy discussion of whether men or women are more faithful. Both characters are intelligent – too intelligent to insist, in the end, that fidelity is innate to either ‘man’s nature’ or ‘woman’s’. Captain Harville proffers an analogy between men’s physical strength and the strength of their emotions, and brings forward the evidence of ‘books’; Anne tops his analogy (‘man is more robust than woman, but he is not longer lived’), and the pair agree that a woman might reasonably object that the books were ‘all written by men’.

  What Anne really argues for all the way through this conversation, what Jane is arguing, is that women are socialised into ‘loving longest when existence or when hope is gone’. It’s a ‘privilege’, but ‘not a very enviable one’; ‘our fate rather than our merit’. ‘We cannot help ourselves’, Anne says, ‘We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You … have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.’ Society expects men to remarry, but it disapproves of women who do the same; as Jane remarks early on in the novel, ‘That Lady Russell … 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’, while ‘Sir Walter’s continuing in singleness requires explanation’.

  Is a second attachment (or even a third) really wrong? Should it be seen as some sort of moral failure to fall in love again?

  Jane had been quite as grateful as she needed to be for the long essay on her work which appeared in the Critical Review in 1816. Though the tone was generally positive, the ‘total omission’ of Mansfield Park had rightly irked her. And among the praise had been criticism, that Jane’s novels (and others) were not romantic enough, that they ‘taught the doctrine of selfishness’, linking love – ‘Cupid’ – ‘with calculating prudence’. Persuasion is Jane’s answer – and, li
ke all her novels, it twines pragmatism (‘prudence’) and romance together. Jane even borrows the language of gardening to describe how Anne, like a plant, was ‘forced into prudence in her youth’, learning ‘romance as she grew older’, ‘the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning’ – beautiful flowers on a stem made stronger by interference.

  Anne may insist that women love ‘longest’ but we, as readers, know that at the beginning of the novel she wasn’t really ‘in love’ with Wentworth any more. Look at what Jane writes: ‘time had softened down much, perhaps nearly all, of peculiar attachment to him.’ A ‘second attachment’ would, we’re told, have been ‘the only thoroughly natural, happy, and sufficient cure’. ‘Natural’ and ‘happy’; not faithless, not selfish, not to be scorned in either men or women. Romance is natural, nostalgia is natural, but so is moving on.

  There’s an element of moral judgement, of course – the fact that Anne has the potential to respond to more than one man isn’t to be compared with the duplicity of William Elliot, who marries for money, and later manages to carry on with Mrs Clay while courting Anne and stringing Anne’s older sister Elizabeth along. But we should note that Mrs Clay comes in for very little disapproval from her creator, even though she’s a flatterer, even though she deceives her friends, and becomes William Elliot’s mistress. Jane holds out the possibility that Mrs Clay’s ‘cunning … may finally carry the day’, and that, having failed in her earlier object of marrying Sir Walter, she may succeed in becoming ‘the wife of Sir William’. Jane punishes women who have sex outside marriage relatively gently – far more gently than was usual in the literature of the period – but she usually does punish them. Eliza, in Sense and Sensibility, is sent away into decent obscurity. Maria Rushworth is condemned to live with her aunt Mrs Norris. Lydia winds up married to Wickham, which is punishment enough in itself. What happens to Mrs Clay looks much more like a partial endorsement of her behaviour.

 

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