William Deresiewicz

by Unknown

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  self-sacrificing. Calmar, the Nisus figure, survives the bloody encounter and is found by his comrades, but insists on dying and being buried with Orla anyway. 50. Though the same may be said of Rousseau, we have already seen how very different is his conception of friendship as something that arises only in the wake of sexual maturation. 51. For the idea of youth as the Byronic Eden, see Robert Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), pp. 5ff. 52. Though the poem of that name, written around the very same time, was not published until after his death, Byron supplies the original of the proverb in a note. 53. For the early poems’ idealization of love and friendship as that which “heaven and paradise” are associated with, see Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, pp. 4ff. 54. See “To a Lady, On being asked my Reason for quitting England in the Spring,” “Fill the Goblet Again,” and “Stanzas to a Lady, on leaving England.” 55. We also find the same complex of ideas in Scott. In The Lady of the Lake, one of the verse romances named in Persuasion, we read that in James’s dreams, “Again returned the scenes of youth, Of confident undoubting truth; Again his soul he interchanged / With friends whose hearts were long estranged” (I.xxxiii.1720). 56. Note Coleridge’s uses of the word in “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison” (ll. 6, 16, 20, 37) and “The Nightingale” (ll. 40, 110). It is not for nothing that he named his shortlived journal The Friend. 57. Caleb Crain, American Sympathy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 4. As Wollstonecraft put it, “The most holy band of society is friendship” (A Vindication of the Rights of Women, p. 30). 58. Crain, American Sympathy, p. 4. It was therefore male friendship that was of particular interest, since women were not full citizens. 59. See above, note 12. 60. Claudia L. Johnson notes that Pride and Prejudice eventuates in the creation of a “band of good friends” related by marriage, with the friendships having come first (Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, p. 92). See also my article on “Community and Cognition in Pride and Prejudice,” ELH 64 (1997): 518. 61. As well as, in an extended sense, by the ill health and arbitrary tyranny of Mrs. Churchill. As Mr. Woodhouse checks Emma’s youthful vitality and Miss Bates Jane’s, Mrs. Churchill does Frank’s. 62. As a proof-text for the commonplace notion of Highbury as a self-enclosed world, we may note that the Crown’s post-horses are kept “more for the convenience of the neighborhood than for any run on the road” (p. 164). 63. Mr. Weston—whose moral imbecility almost matches Mrs. Elton’s, as their conversation in chapter 36 demonstrates—is similarly indiscriminate, regarding seemingly everyone as his “old friends” (264), though the temperature of these relationships seems to be more like those of Mr. Woodhouse than of Mrs. Elton. 64. Trilling, “Mansfield Park,” p. 133; emphasis in the original. Trilling is referring to Mary Crawford and notes that she is “the first brilliant example” of this “distinctively modern type.” Each of the last three novels contains such a figure, Persuasion’s William Walter Elliot being the final example.

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  65. Trilling, “Emma,” p. 57. 66. Most importantly in Duckworth, Improvement of the Estate, and Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. 67. This not to say that Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey are not also playful novels, or that Elizabeth Bennet and Henry Tilney are not every bit as playful as Emma. For Emma as a playful novel, see J. M. Q. Davies, “Emma as Charade and the Education of the Reader,” in Emma, ed. David Monaghan, pp. 7788; as well as Alastair M. Duckworth, ” `Spillikins, Paper Ships, Riddles, Conundrums, and Cards’: Games in Jane Austen’s Life and Fiction,” in Bicentenary Essays, pp. 279297. Modert also suggests that the novel plays “a hidden calendar game” with the reader, situating many of its events on holy days or holidays but often in ways concealed from immediate view (“Chronology Within the Novels,” p. 57). 68. Most of whom, like Marianne, are far more likely to have trouble finding a minute to themselves. For discussions of Emma’s loneliness, see James Thompson, “Intimacy in Emma,” in Emma, ed. David Monaghan, pp. 119123; and Tanner, Jane Austen, p. 203. 69. For a discussion, along different lines, of Emma’s friendships with Mrs. Weston, Harriet, and Jane, see Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature, pp. 274301. 70. Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature, pp. 284285. See also above, note 3 71. For a discussion of Emma’s thwarted friendship with Jane, see Ruth Perry, “Interrupted Friendships in Emma,” in Emma, ed. David Monaghan, pp. 127147. Perry notes that Emma cannot imagine the possibility of friendship based on equality (p. 133). For a similar point, see Thompson, “Intimacy in Emma,” p. 113. 72. For a different discussion of this passage in the context of English and French cultural stereotypes, see Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, p. 201. For other discussions of the way the novel pits French against English, see Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution, pp. 3342, and Sales, Jane Austen and the Representation of Regency England, p. xx. 73. To my knowledge, the first important English novel after Austen to deal with malefemale friendship outside of marriage in any significant way is Jude the Obscure, where, in a leading instance of her modernity, a “friend” is precisely what Sue Bridehead wants to be to both Jude and Phillotson, albeit to their continual torment (e.g., Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure [London: Penguin, 1998], pp. 148, 233, 234). 74. See Bruce Stovel, “Comic Symmetry in Emma,” in Emma, ed. David Monaghan, pp. 2034, who remarks that “the action of the novel can be seen as Emma’s search for, and triumphant discovery of, a true friend” (p. 25). For a negative view of Emma and Knightley’s marriage as involving an incestuous turning inward, see Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels, p. 15. 75. On Mansfield Park, see Ruoff, who remarks that “[b]ecause of their interest in presenting complex and often unlikely experience, Romantic writers were nervous about compartmentalizing either sensation or emotion” (“Sense of a Beginning,” p. 184). 76. Nor are these hand-takings the only relevant ones. Emma asks Knightley to “shake hands” in token of their reconciliation after Harriet’s refusal of Martin (84), then finds “her hand seized” by Elton during his proposal of marriage (108). 77. See Moretti, Way of the World, pp. 35, for a discussion of youth as symbolic of

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  modernity, as expressed especially in the emergence of the Bildungsroman as the chief novelistic form in the nineteenth century. “Youth,” Moretti writes, “becomes for our modern culture the age which holds the `meaning of life’ ” (p. 4). But he also goes on to talk about the inevitable ephemerality of youth, the fact that “[y]outh does not last forever,” as essential to the form and meaning of the Bildungsroman (p. 6). I am suggesting that in recent decades, with the rise of youth culture to centrality in Western society, and also proleptically in the marriage of Emma and Knightley, youth is prolonged forever, as a set of attitudes and practices within adulthood itself. 78. Susan Morgan, Sisters in Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 2355. 79. Relevant here is Claudia L. Johnson’s discussion of Emma as a manly woman and of Knightley as a new kind of man (Equivocal Beings, pp. 191203). 80. For the general statement, see above, note 12. For the specific one, see Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings, who remarks that Knightley’s love for Emma is “fraternal rather than heterosexual” (p. 201; emphasis in the original). 81. Friends and Lovers, p. 17. As does Rousseau, as we have seen, in favor of the first and the exponents of classical-romantic friendship in favor of the second. This prejudice also helps explain why the English, the exponents of the ideal of companionate marriage, have acquired a reputation for sexlessness: by uniting marriage with friendship, that ideal has necessarily been seen as sundering it from sexuality.

  chapter 5 : Persuasion: Widowhood and Waterloo

  1. See Julia Prewitt Brown, who notes that “[m]ost of the major characters are literally or figuratively widowed” (Jane Austen’s Novels, p. 148); Wiltshire, who speaks of the novel as setting Anne against a “continuum of other mourners who freely display their grief” (Jane Austen and the Body, p. 156) and regards the adjust
ment to loss as the novel’s major theme (pp. 165ff.); Duckworth, who also discusses the novel’s engagement with questions of loss (Improvement of the Estate, pp. 190193); Elaine Showalter, who sees the novel as involving a movement between retrenchment and advancement (“Retrenchment,” in Jane Austen’s Business, pp. 181191); and especially Mooneyham, in her chapter on “Loss and the Language of Restitution in Persuasion,” who takes up these and a range of other related issues (Romance, Language, and Education, pp. 146175). 2. Given that both Mansfield Park and Persuasion deal with loss and deprivation, it is worth delineating the difference between substitution (the way characters deal with them in the earlier novel) and widowhood or mourning (the way they deal with them here). Substitution refuses to acknowledge loss in the first place; the problem with widowhood, as we will see, is that it might never do anything other than acknowledge it. Anne’s dilemma, as the novel opens, is that she has never tried to find a substitute for Wentworth (or more properly, has never finished mourning him). For Benwick, Louisa Musgrove does not constitute a substitute for Fanny Harville, since he falls in love with Louisa only after having acknowledged and digested—mourned—the loss of Fanny. (Whether he does so too quickly is a point I take up below.) We may note that the difference between substitution and widowhood accounts for the two novels’ differing atmospheres: Mansfield Park’s tense unease, Persuasion’s melancholy.

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  3. “Lord Byron’s `dark blue seas’ ” (129) quotes the first line of the poem, an allusion first traced, according to Wiesenfarth, by Chapman (“Persuasion: History and Myth” [p. 168 n. 18]). 4. The climate of critical opinion surrounding the novel has shifted considerably since Litz’s judgment that Byron and Scott are present in its pages only as objects of satire (“Persuasion: Forms of Estrangement,” p. 225). In fact, Adela Pinch has noted recently that Persuasion is the novel of Austen’s that critics are most likely to discuss in relation to lyric poetry (Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996], p. 145). Efforts to trace Byronic parallels tend to focus on character types. Wiesenfarth (“Persuasion: History and Myth,” p. 165) and Waldron (Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time, p. 146) have both seen Wentworth as a version of the Corsair, while Juliet McMaster sees him as akin to Childe Harold, another “gloomy wanderer o’er the wave” (Jane Austen the Novelist [New York: St. Martin’s, 1995], p. 146). Waldron (pp. 146147) also sees Anne as resembling the Giaour, at least at the start of the narrative, a point I will take up below. Knox-Shaw, in a first-rate study of Byronic analogies and echoes, draws a number of such parallels, seeing Wentworth, Anne, and Louisa as reenacting the roles of the Corsair, Medora, and Gulnare (“Persuasion, Byron, and the Turkish Tale,” pp. 5865). Interestingly, although Jane Millgate (“Prudential Lovers and Lost Heirs: Persuasion and the Presence of Scott,” in Jane Austen’s Business, pp. 109123) has examined Persuasion as a response to Scott’s second novel, Guy Mannering (itself, in Trumpener’s reading [Bardic Nationalism, pp. 183192], a rewriting of Mansfield Park), no one, to my knowledge, has traced the connections between Persuasion and those works of Scott it explicitly mentions, the verse romances. 5. Of course, loss and its consequences are also central to Wordsworth, as I discussed in chapter 3. Indeed, Mooneyham notes that loss is “the central theme of the Romantics” (Romance, Language, and Education, p. 151). Still, it makes sense to discuss the novel in terms of the poets it explicitly mentions. 6. In Peter J. Manning’s words, the Giaour’s “self-incarceration in a monastery is the emblem of a psychic arrest as total as Hassan’s actual death” (Byron and His Fictions [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978], p. 37). For Byron’s preoccupation with death from the very beginning of his career (Byron and the Ruins of Paradise, p. 3), and especially in The Giaour, see Gleckner, who describes the world of the poem as one of “love and death, beauty and death, freedom and death, nature and death, man’s human and heroic virtues and death” (p. 100). For Byron’s handling of loss throughout his work, see Fry, A Defense of Poetry, pp. 159180. 7. “The sad but living cypress glooms / And withers not, though branch and leaf / Are stamped with an eternal grief” (ll. 11481150). 8. For a related discussion, see Jerome J. McGann, Fiery Dust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 160164. 9. Trilling, for example, calls it “unconscionable” (“Mansfield Park,” p. 139). 10. Of this passage Brown remarks that it is “one of the few instances in Jane Austen in which we sense a loss of control” (Jane Austen’s Novels, p. 133). 11. I will refrain from speculating as to whether Austen, someone well acquainted with the “Rears, and Vices” of the Royal Navy (Mansfield Park, p. 51; emphasis in the original),

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  meant to suggest that Wentworth, out of sexual frustration over his loss of Anne, did indeed “go to the bottom” on the “Asp.” 12. For different readings of the sea in Persuasion, see Clark, “Transfiguring the Romantic Sublime in Persuasion,” pp. 3335, who sees it as a symbol of the threat of radical change, and Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment, pp. 3854, who sees it as a symbol of both danger and liberation. 13. For other discussions of the function of memory in Persuasion, see Ruoff, “Anne Elliot’s Dowry: Reflections on the Ending of Persuasion,” Wordsworth Circle 7 (1976): 342351; Morgan, In the Meantime, pp. 185188; and Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion, pp. 150ff. 14. “Young” is not meant here in the sense I quoted it in the previous paragraph, as the context makes clear: “You must remember, Captain Harville, that your friend may yet be called a young mourner—Only last summer, I understand.” 15. Interestingly, the seasonal logic of Benwick’s period of bereavement and renewal parallels that of one of Wordsworth’s subtlest pictures of mourning, “The Childless Father,” whose title character also leaves off mourning after six months. The poet, however, employs the more expected timing, which makes the revival of hope coincide with the coming of spring. 16. Wiltshire speaks of the novel as posing physical change and decay against a narcissistic fantasy of changelessness (Jane Austen and the Body, p. 164). 17. Wiltshire remarks on the mechanical rather than renewing nature of Elizabeth’s springs in “Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion,” p. 76. 18. See chapter 1, note 15. 19. Most importantly, by Wiltshire in Jane Austen and the Body, especially pp. 164ff., but see also Sales, Jane Austen and the Representation of Regency England, who discusses the novel in terms of the contemporaneous debate over the status of midwives. 20. Anne’s homelessness and eventual finding of a home have been discussed by a number of critics, including Mooneyham (Romance, Language, and Education, pp. 158159) and Brown (Jane Austen’s Novels, pp. 138140). For an extended discussion of the idea of hospitality in Persuasion in particular and Jane Austen’s novels in general, see McMaster, Jane Austen the Novelist, pp. 4758. 21. I am adapting the notion of a winter solstice or symbolic death from Northrop Frye’s discussion of the “point of ritual death” through which romance plots typically pass (Anatomy of Criticism [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957], p. 187 [and see also p. 179]). 22. That last word has only recently become an Americanism, and not entirely even now. The relevant entry in OED II cites several eighteenth-and early-nineteenthcentury examples and gives the following note on usage: “In N. Amer. the ordinary name for autumn; in England now rare in literary use, though found in some dialects; spring and fall, the fall of the year, are, however, in fairly common use.” “Spring and fall,” of course, is precisely the usage of most relevance here. 23. I have refrained, for reasons mentioned above, from making this chapter into another discussion of Austen’s reception of Wordsworth, but it is certainly suggestive that she gave her hero a name so similar to that of one of the most famous poets of the day, and in a novel where the “richness of the present age” of poetry is explicitly mentioned (121).

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  24. Brown compares the novel to Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” in this respect, arguing that both exhibit a “consciousness tha
t spring will come,” but that in both “this consciousness is held in check” (Jane Austen’s Novels, p. 148). “The dominant experience of the novel,” she concludes, “is one of loss.” 25. Mary begins her letter on February 1 (174) and concludes it the following day (175). The Crofts arrive in Bath on February 3 or thereabouts (175176). “About a week or ten days after the Crofts arrival”—sometime between February 10 and 15—Anne runs into the Admiral in town (179). A day or two later—February 1117—she runs into Wentworth (184). It is ten days after that—February 2127—that Wentworth dashes off his note and that, later in the day, he and Anne take their walk up Union-street (240). 26. Rory Muir, Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, 18071815 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 344. Wiesenfarth notes that “Jane Austen knew that Napoleon would escape from Elba the very month Anne and Wentworth were engaged” (“Persuasion: History and Myth,” p. 167), but he does not note how close the coincidence is nor discuss its implications. 27. Letters, p. 191 (31 May 1811). 28. Letters, p. 235 (11 Oct. 1813). Frank is her brother Francis-William, a captain in the Royal Navy. 29. Letters, p. 298 (23 Nov. 1815). 30. Letters, p. 327 (24 Jan. 1817). 31. Southam, “Was Jane Austen a Bonapartist?,” p. 29. 32. See chapter 1, note 47. 33. The poem proper also contains a complex thematics of resurrection, one that allegorizes Scott’s own endeavor—an ancient book is unburied—but that considerations of space prevent me from discussing here. 34. In The Giaour: Thy Heroes, though the general doom Hath swept the column from their tomb, A mightier monument command, The mountains of their native land.—(ll. 130133) In Childe Harold: Each hill and dale, each deepening glen and wold Defies the power which crushed they temples gone … … … … … … … … … . The Sun, the soil … Unchanged in all except its foreign Lord— Preserves alike its bounds and boundless fame. (II.lxxxviii.78, II.lxxxix.13) 35. In fact, he is referring to his source for the tale, “the venerable Lord Hailes, as well entitled to be called the restorer of Scottish history, as Bruce the restorer of Scottish monarchy”—a parallel that makes explicit the connection between national political revival and the kind of cultural revival Scott himself was practicing, two forms of “restoration.”