Armour Craig usefully added, “Emma does not justify its heroine nor does it deride her.” Rather, it treats her with ironic love (not loving irony). Emma Woodhouse is dear to Jane Austen, because her errors are profoundly imaginative and rise from the will’s passion for autonomy of vision. The splendid Jane Fairfax is easier to admire, but I cannot agree with Wayne Booth’s awarding the honors to her over Emma, though I admire the subtle balance of his formulation:
Jane is superior to Emma in most respects except the stroke of good fortune that made Emma the heroine of the book. In matters of taste and ability, of head and of heart, she is Emma’s superior….
(Wayne C. Booth, “Point of View and the Control of Distance in Emma,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 16, no. 2 [Sept. 1961])
Taste, ability, head, and heart are a formidable fourfold; the imagination and the will, working together, are an even more formidable twofold and clearly may have their energies diverted to error and to mischief. Jane Fairfax is certainly more amiable even than Emma Woodhouse, but she is considerably less interesting. It is Emma who is meant to charm us and who does charm us. Austen is not writing a tragedy of the will, like Paradise Lost, but a great comedy of the will, and her heroine must incarnate the full potential of the will, however misused for a time. Having rather too much her own way is certainly one of Emma’s powers, and she does have a disposition to think a little too well of herself. When Austen says that these were “the real evils indeed of Emma’s situation,” we read “evils” as lightly as the author will let us, which is lightly enough.
Can we account for the qualities in Emma Woodhouse that make her worthy of comparison to George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth and Henry James’s Isabel Archer? The pure comedy of her context seems world enough for her; she evidently is not the heiress of all the ages. We are persuaded, by Austen’s superb craft, that marriage to Mr. Knightley will more than suffice to fulfill totally the now perfectly amiable Emma. Or are we? It is James’s genius to suggest that, although Osmond’s “beautiful mind” was a prison of the spirit for Isabel, no proper husband could exist anyway, since neither Touchett nor Goodwood is exactly a true match for her. Do we, presumably against Austen’s promptings, not find Mr. Knightley something of a confinement also, benign and wise though he be?
I suspect that the heroine of the Protestant will, from Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe through to Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, can never find a fit match, because wills do not marry. The allegory or tragic irony of this dilemma is written large in Clarissa, since Lovelace, in strength of will and splendor of being, actually would have been the true husband for Clarissa (as he well knows) had he not been a moral squalor. His death cry (“Let this expiate!”) expiates nothing and helps establish the long tradition of the Anglo-American novel in which the heroines of the will are fated to suffer either overt calamities or else happy unions with such good if unexciting men as Mr. Knightley or Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch. When George Eliot is reduced to having the fascinating Gwendolen Harleth fall hopelessly in love with the prince of prigs, Daniel Deronda, we sigh and resign ourselves to the sorrows of fictive overdetermination. Lovelace or Daniel Deronda? I myself do not know a high-spirited woman who would not prefer the first, though not for a husband!
Emma is replete with grand comic epiphanies, of which my favorite comes in Volume 3, Chapter XI, when Emma receives the grave shock of Harriet’s disclosure that Mr. Knightley is the object of Harriet’s hopeful affections:
When Harriet had closed her evidence, she appealed to her dear Miss Woodhouse, to say whether she had not good ground for hope.
“I never should have presumed to think of it at first,” said she, “but for you. You told me to observe him carefully, and let his behaviour be the rule of mine—and so I have. But now I seem to feel that I may deserve him; and that if he does choose me, it will not be any thing so very wonderful.”
The bitter feelings occasioned by this speech, the many bitter feelings, made the utmost exertion necessary on Emma’s side to enable her to say in reply,
“Harriet, I will only venture to declare, that Mr. Knightley is the last man in the world, who would intentionally give any woman the idea of his feeling for her more than he really does.”
Harriet seemed ready to worship her friend for a sentence so satisfactory; and Emma was only saved from raptures and fondness, which at that moment would have been dreadful penance, by the sound of her father’s footsteps. He was coming through the hall. Harriet was too much agitated to encounter him. “She could not compose herself—Mr. Woodhouse would be alarmed—she had better go;”—with most ready encouragement from her friend, therefore, she passed off through another door—and the moment she was gone, this was the spontaneous burst of Emma’s feelings: “Oh God! that I had never seen her!”
The rest of the day, the following night, were hardly enough for her thoughts.—She was bewildered amidst the confusion of all that had rushed on her within the last few hours. Every moment had brought a fresh surprise; and every surprise must be matter of humiliation to her.—How to understand it all! How to understand the deceptions she had been thus practising on herself, and living under!—The blunders, the blindness of her own head and heart!—she sat still, she walked about, she tried her own room, she tried the shrubbery—in every place, every posture, she perceived that she had acted most weakly; that she had been imposed on by others in a most mortifying degree; that she had been imposing on herself in a degree yet more mortifying; that she was wretched, and should probably find this day but the beginning of wretchedness.
The acute aesthetic pleasure of this turns on the counterpoint between Emma’s spontaneous cry, “Oh God! that I had never seen her!” and the exquisite comic touch of “she sat still, she walked about, she tried her own room, she tried the shrubbery—in every place, every posture, she perceived that she had acted most weakly.” The acute humiliation of the will could not be better conveyed than by “she tried the shrubbery” and “every posture.” Endlessly imaginative, Emma must now be compelled to endure the mortification of reducing herself to the postures and places of those driven into corners by the collapse of visions that have been exposed as delusions. Jane Austen, who seems to have identified herself with Emma, wisely chose to make this moment of ironic reversal a temporary purgatory, rather than an infernal discomfiture.
Paul H. Fry, like the late Geoffrey Hartman, an astonishingly erudite scholar of the transition from the Age of Sensibility, commencing with the death of Alexander Pope, on to the High Romanticism that ended with the early deaths of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, wrote a brilliant essay on Emma in regard to the influence of Romance on Jane Austen’s most rugged personage:
Emma is not, then, a victim of bad reading. Rather her tendency not to read is a facet of her more subtle sort of quixotism. Like Quixote, and in this regard like Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote (1752), she lives in isolation, estranged partly by circumstance and partly by preference from suitable company. This is one of the many conditions she shares unwittingly with Mrs. Elton: “all her notions were drawn from one set of people, and one style of living” (IV:272). As is the case with Lennox’s Arabella, Emma’s mother is dead and her father cannot discipline her. Her regal bearing at Hartfield, where she favors frightened girls with her notice, suggests the tempting self-isolation of royalty, and her frustration at Mrs. Elton’s usurping her function as “ ‘queen of the evening’ ” (IV:329) at the Crown is much too pronounced.
(Paul H. Fry, “Georgic Comedy: The Fictive Territory of Jane Austen’s Emma,” Studies in the Novel, vol. 11, no. 2 [summer 1979])
One can agree with the learned Paul Fry and still enjoy his own ambivalence in that judgment. Like the rest of us, Fry very nearly falls in love with Emma:
“If you were as much guided by nature in your estimate of men and women,” says Mr. Knightley to Emma, “and
as little under the power of fancy and whim in your dealings with them, as you are where these children are concerned, we might always think alike” (IV:98–99). Emma thinks, again, like a very bright and autocratic child. Readers have puzzled over Jane Austen’s fondness for a heroine “whom no one but myself will very much like.” But if we see that even Emma’s most disagreeable blunders stem from a single remediable flaw—imaginism in an empty space not wholly self-created, mind without object—then we can see that the remedy awaiting Emma, her discovery of clear-sightedness through the embrace of Experience in the person of Mr. Knightley, is not at all an arbitrary or miraculous conversion.
That admirable observation yields to Jane Austen’s own redemption of the charming Emma. Still more subtle is Fry’s apprehension of Austen’s own ambivalence:
Like her ethics and her politics, Jane Austen’s territory is determinate and fixed. Being quite aware that it is potentially stultifying, she is ambivalent about any comic dance that remains disagreeably “ ‘a crowd in a little room’ ” (IV:249). Without the fresh air and “grown-up health” (IV:39; re Emma) of the “home-farm of Donwell,” and without “the beauty of truth and sincerity” made available to Emma as an acceptably open vista, the absence of Prospect, of the invigorating scope even of mystery and exile, is a depressing condition which the passage of time, in the land of nonfiction, could only worsen. Georgic marriage, with its “perfect happiness,” is a generic solution, an artifice, but unlike the topographically and morally displaced unions of Romance, it finds near at hand, in “English culture,” a familiar and attractive mirror of itself. The unsituated “Garden of England” is transformed by Jane Austen to a rus conclusus, an enclosed farmland ample enough in range to unite adjoining parishes, but firmly immured against outlying fictions.
To be “firmly immured against outlying fictions” is part of Austen’s triumph and yet remains a touch disquieting. It was not until she composed Persuasion that she fully met the challenge of the Age of Wordsworth, and of its intricate dialectics of memory, resolution, and a reopening to Romance. Persuasion, like the greatest Wordsworth, is almost a renaissance of the Renaissance, a return to Shakespearean capaciousness, sorrow, and the ending of sorrow.
CHAPTER 6
Persuasion (1817)
JANE AUSTEN
“PERSUASION” IS A WORD derived from the Latin for “advising” or “urging,” for recommending that it is good to perform or not perform a particular action. The word goes back to a root meaning “sweet” or “pleasant,” so that the good of performance or nonperformance has a tang of taste rather than of moral judgment about it. Jane Austen chose it as the title for her last completed novel. As a title, it recalls Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice rather than Emma or Mansfield Park. We are given not the name of a person or house and estate, but of an abstraction, a single one in this case. The title’s primary reference is to the persuasion of its heroine, Anne Elliot, at the age of nineteen, by her godmother, Lady Russell, not to marry Captain Frederick Wentworth, a young naval officer. This was, as it turns out, very bad advice, and, after eight years, it is mended by Anne and Captain Wentworth. As with all of Austen’s ironic comedies, matters end happily for the heroine. And yet each time I finish a rereading of this perfect novel, I feel very sad.
This does not appear to be my personal vagary; when I ask my friends and students about their experience of the book, they frequently mention a sadness which they also associate with Persuasion, more even than with Mansfield Park. Anne Elliot, a quietly eloquent being, is a self-reliant character, in no way forlorn, and her sense of self never falters. It is not her sadness we feel as we conclude the book: it is the novel’s somberness that impresses us. The sadness enriches what I would call the novel’s canonical persuasiveness, its way of showing us its aesthetic distinction.
Persuasion is among novels what Anne Elliot is among novelistic characters—a strong but subdued outrider. The book and the character are not colorful or vivacious; Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice and Emma Woodhouse of Emma have a verve to them that initially seems lacking in Anne Elliot, which may be what Austen meant when she said that Anne was “almost too good for me.” Anne is really almost too subtle for us, though not for Wentworth, who has something of an occult wavelength to her. Juliet McMaster notes “the kind of oblique communication that constantly goes on between Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, where, though they seldom speak to each other, each constantly understands the full import of the other’s speech better than their interlocutors do.”
That kind of communication in Persuasion depends upon deep “affection,” a word that Austen values over “love.” “Affection” between woman and man, in Austen, is the more profound and lasting emotion. I think it is not too much to say that Anne Elliot, though subdued, is the creation for whom Austen herself must have felt the most affection, because she lavished her own gifts upon Anne. Henry James insisted that the novelist must possess a sensibility upon which absolutely nothing is lost; by that test (clearly a limited one), only Austen, George Eliot, and James himself, among all those writing in English, would join Stendhal, Flaubert, and Tolstoy in a rather restricted pantheon. Anne Elliot may well be the one character in all of prose fiction upon whom nothing is lost, though she is in no danger of turning into a novelist.
The aesthetic dangers attendant upon such a paragon are palpable: how does a novelist make such a character persuasive? Poldy, in Joyce’s Ulysses, is overwhelmingly persuasive because he is so complete a person, which was the largest of Joyce’s intentions. Austen’s ironic mode does not sanction the representation of completeness: we do not accompany her characters to the bedroom, the kitchen, the privy. What Austen parodies in Sense and Sensibility she raises to an apotheosis in Persuasion: the sublimity of a particular, inwardly isolated sensibility. Anne Elliot is hardly the only figure in Austen who has an understanding heart. Her difference is in her almost preternatural acuteness of perception of others and of the self, which are surely the qualities that most distinguish Austen as a novelist. Anne Elliot is to Austen’s work what Rosalind of As You Like It is to Shakespeare’s: the character who almost reaches the mastery of perspective that can be available to the novelist or playwright, lest all dramatic quality be lost from the novel or play.
More even than Hamlet or Falstaff, or than Elizabeth Bennet, or than Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, Rosalind and Anne Elliot are almost completely poised, nearly able to see all around the play and the novel. Their poise cannot transcend perspectivizing completely, but Rosalind’s wit and Anne’s sensibility, both balanced and free of either excessive aggressivity or defensiveness, enable them to share more of their creators’ poise than we ever come to do.
Austen never loses dramatic intensity; we share Anne’s anxiety concerning Wentworth’s renewed intentions until the novel’s conclusion. But we rely upon Anne as we should rely upon Rosalind; critics would see the rancidity of Touchstone as clearly as they see the vanity of Jaques if they placed more confidence in Rosalind’s reactions to everyone else in the play, as well as to herself. Anne Elliot’s reactions have the same winning authority; we must try to give the weight to her words that is not extended by the other persons in the novel, except for Wentworth.
Even the reader must fall into the initial error of undervaluing Anne Elliot. The wit of Elizabeth Bennet or of Rosalind is easier to appreciate than Anne Elliot’s accurate sensibility. The secret of her character combines Austenian irony with a Wordsworthian sense of deferred hope. Austen has a good measure of Shakespeare’s unmatched ability to give us persons, both major and minor, who are all utterly consistent in their separate modes of speech, and yet completely different from one another. Anne Elliot is the last of Austen’s heroines of what I think we must call the Protestant will, but in her the will is modified, perhaps perfected, by its descendant, the Romantic sympathetic imagination, of which Wordsworth was the prophet. That is what he
lps to make Anne so complex and sensitive a character.
Jane Austen’s earlier heroines, of whom Elizabeth Bennet is the exemplar, manifested the Protestant will as direct descendants of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe, with Samuel Johnson hovering nearby as moral authority. Marxist criticism inevitably views the Protestant will, even in its literary manifestations, as a mercantile matter, and it has become fashionable to talk about the socioeconomic realities that Jane Austen excludes, such as the West Indian slavery that is part of the ultimate basis for the financial security most of her characters enjoy. But all achieved literary works are founded upon exclusions, and no one has demonstrated that increased consciousness of the relation between culture and imperialism is of the slightest benefit whatsoever in learning to read Mansfield Park. Persuasion ends with a tribute to the British navy, and with Wentworth on land, gently appreciating the joys of affection with Anne Elliot. But once again, Austen’s is a great art founded upon exclusions, and the sordid realities of British sea power are no more relevant to Persuasion than West Indian bondage is to Mansfield Park. Austen was, however, immensely interested in the pragmatic and secular consequences of the Protestant will, and they seem to me a crucial element in helping us appreciate the heroines of her novels.
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