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Persuasions #15, 1993 Pages 139-147
“My sore throats, you know, are always worse than anybody’s”: Mary Musgrove and Jane Austen’s Art of Whining JAN FERGUS Lehigh University First, let me say that I’m delighted to see so much interest in Mary
Musgrove and in whining. Mary is one of
my favorite comic characters, because there is so much of her in all of us, I
think, though we may disguise it more decently than she does, and whining is
one of my favorite topics – also (with some qualification here) one of my
favorite activities. What I love about
Mary are her relentless, endlessly inventive whines; you will see that by my
taxonomy, she manages to emit both the most primitive and the most
sophisticated sorts of whines. And what
I love about Jane Austen’s presentation of Mary is first that, though most of
us hate nothing more than being in company with a relentless whiner, Austen
manages to keep Mary’s demanding misery and miserable demands comic. Even more, though, I admire Austen’s ability
to infuse so much meaning into this comic character – as I hope to suggest
later.1 But let’s start with the comedy of Mary’s
whines – a rich subject. The first of
two major functions of a whine is to communicate or vent unhappiness, I’d say,
and Mary does that often enough – but even her most open or primitive whines,
such as her frequent laments at being left alone, I will argue, are usually
embedded in much more complex exchanges.
They serve other functions, in other words, which can be loosely
described as manipulative – if you will accept that blaming involves an attempt
to manipulate others’ emotions.
Consider the first words that Mary utters in the novel, also the first
she says to Anne, who has come to help and cheer her up at Uppercross. Mary almost immediately mentions that she
has “not seen a creature the whole morning,” a fairly open whine. But listen to what comes before it: “So,
you are come at last. I began to think
I should never see you. I am so ill I
can hardly speak. I have not seen a
creature the whole morning.” (37)2 There’s a crescendo of complaint here.
No welcome, no “thank you for coming, Anne,” no “it is a pleasure to see
you.” Certainly not. Austen’s art of representing Mary’s whines
involves turning even Mary’s greeting to her sister into an accusation: “So you
are come AT LAST.” Anne is immediately
arraigned for not having come earlier. This capacity to infuse blame into nearly every
utterance is part of what distinguishes Mary’s whining, to my ear, at least,
from the simpler whines of characters like Mrs. Bennet, whose laments over the
entail of Longbourn do not usually attack anyone but Mr. Collins. Mary, by contrast, is always eager to get
the knife in. Notice her technique in
the next sentence, which continues to accuse Anne: “I began to think I should
NEVER see you.” The knife comes in with
“never.” As all family members can
witness, the word “never,” like “always,” is incendiary – “you never
take the garbage out so I always have to do it; you always get
first pick, I never do.”
“Always” and “never” raise the emotional temperature of any dialogue;
they aggravate any accusation, as Mary senses very well. In this first scene with Anne, occupying
just three pages in Chapman’s edition (37-40), Mary uses “never” five times and
“always” thrice, each time reproachfully: to say that she thought she’d never
see Anne, that her husband has never come back, that the Miss Musgroves never
put themselves out of their way to see her, that she never wants them anyway,
and that Anne has never asked her a word about “our dinner at the Pooles
yesterday” (39). She also asserts that
she always makes the best account of her health, that you always know before
hand what dinner will be at the Pooles (clearly a profound criticism of their
menu), and that Mr. Musgrove always sits forward, so Mary has to crowd into the
back seat with Henrietta and Louisa – which unhappy arrangement she thinks
might have caused her illness.
“Always" is so useful that it appears in my title whine – her sore
throats are ALWAYS worse than anybody’s.
But I’ll have more to say about this wonderful sentence later. We have now finally arrived at the third
sentence of Mary’s first speech to Anne, when she first directly mentions her
illness. “I am so ill I can hardly
speak” – “hardly” being also a fine adjunct to a whine, particularly here when
she is speaking about hardly being able to speak. Then Mary comes to her favorite lament, “I have not seen a
creature the whole morning,” one that is so central to her misery that she
repeats it three more times in less than a page: “I assure you, I have not seen
a soul this whole long morning” and “ I have not seen one of them [the
Musgroves] today,” and “though I told him [Mr. Musgrove] how ill I was, not one
of them have been near me” (37, 38).
She even laments that Lady Russell did not come in to visit: “I do not
think she has been in this house three times this summer” (37). These repetitious wails of seeing no one,
when she is finally seeing Anne, are not just contradictory, as when Mary says
she is hardly able to speak: they typify the treatment of Anne by the rest of
her family, Sir Walter and Elizabeth:
Anne is “nobody with either father or sister” (5). In these four short sentences and the brief
exchange with Anne that follows, Mary Musgrove covers the primitive and
manipulative possibilities of whining with amazing efficiency. She vents her misery at being left alone
with the repetitiveness characteristic of an inveterate whiner, and she openly
and tacitly blames Anne and others for not paying attention to her. She adopts a striking variety of roles: when
she speaks of always making the best of her health, she is the martyr; and when
she refuses all comfort from Anne, she is Job, uniquely cursed with inadequate
consolation that naturally she must reject.
When Anne suggests that Mary has had her children with her, she retorts
that their noise was unbearable and they didn’t mind her; when Anne predicts
that the Miss Musgroves will visit soon, Mary doesn’t want them because they
“talk and laugh a great deal too much for” her (38). And of course Mary makes no response whatsoever to Anne’s
concerns. When Anne excuses herself
from coming earlier because she “had so much to do,” Mary’s response is
wonderfully narcissistic: “Dear me!
What can you possibly have to do” (38). After Anne explains that she has been packing and taking leave
and cataloguing and ordering the garden, Mary’s entire response is “ ‘Oh!
well;’ – and after a moment’s pause,” comes the reproach about Anne never
having asked about her dinner at the Pooles (39). My own favorite instance of Mary’s art of
whining, however, is comprised in her letter to Anne at Bath; it is from there
that I have taken the splendid line that I’ve adopted for my title. In a letter, after all, Mary has more scope
for whines – there need be no interruption, and there is none. Every sentence in the letter manages to be a
lament and an accusation at once, that is, manages both the primitive venting
and the more sophisticated blaming. Let
us hear about her sore throat in context; it appears as her first postscript,
which some say contains the real message of every letter: “I am sorry to say that I am very far from well; and Jemima has just told me that the butcher says there is a bad sore-throat very much about. I dare say I shall catch it; and my sore-throats, you know, are always worse than anybody’s.” (164) There she is before us again, Job, uniquely, narcissistically cursed with the worst sore throats in the universe, and she manages to evoke all these past afflictions in one sentence. But it’s particularly inventive of her in the very same sentence to whine in the future tense also – about a sore throat she hasn’t yet got. The phrase “you know” is also artful: it manages to call upon Anne as a witness to her suffering and at the same time to accuse her of insensitivity. Similarly, in the first sentence of the letter, like her first words to Anne at Uppercross, she is both accusing and aggrieved: “I make no apology for my silence, because I know how little people think of letters in such a place as Bath. You must be a great deal too happy to care for Uppercross, which, as you well know, affords little to write about” (162). No indeed, no conventional apologies for not writing from our Mary! Every sentence in the letter cries out for analysis and appreciation, but just let me single out a few of my favorites, ones that will illustrate some of the features of Austen’s artful representation of Mary’s whines. After lamenting the dullness of Uppercross,
pointing out that she never had such long school holidays as the
Musgrove children, and blaming Mrs. Harville for parting with her own children
for so long, Mary announces: “What dreadful weather we have had! It may not be felt in Bath with your nice
pavements … ” (163). (It is amusing to
remember how differently Austen herself treats a similar observation about bad
weather in her own letters: “What dreadful Hot weather we have! It keeps one in a continual state of
Inelegance.”3) Back to Mary,
who wields a knife, as usual – you have nice pavements, you are
happy in Bath, better off than I am.
Mary, we know, always fears that everyone else is better off – that she
herself is not getting her due. On the
hill above Winthrop, Mary enjoys herself until Louisa and Captain Wentworth are
out of sight; then she is sure that Louisa has a better seat somewhere else and
goes in search of it and of the two people who might be having a good time
without her. As Mary says later in the
letter, in reference to Anne’s making Mr. Elliot’s acquaintance: “I wish I
could be acquainted with him too; but I have my usual luck, I am always
[always, again!] out of the way when any thing desirable is going on; always
the last of my family to be noticed” (163).
In lines like these, Mary almost anticipates Eeyore in Winnie-the-Pooh,
who also has the attitude that others are out to get him, and who also turns
every statement into an accusation. For
instance, when Pooh offers to find Eeyore’s tail, his response is “You’re a
real friend …. Not like Some.”4
Unlike Mary, Eeyore usually blames Others, not whomever he is
addressing, but like her he has an abiding sense of ill-usage: he points out
that everyone is eating “All except me … As Usual.”5 To return to what really irks Mary about the
bad weather at Uppercross: the lanes are wet and she has “not had a creature
call on me since the second week in January, except Charles Hayter, who has
been calling much oftener than was welcome” (163). We have to admire the way that Mary gets two of her habitual
whines in here, one about not having enough company, and the other about having
Henrietta’s choice of a husband be “disagreeable and inconvenient to the principal
part of her family, and … giving bad connections to those who have not been
used to them” (76). Finally, having
whined openly and tacitly about not being in Bath, Mary angles openly for an
invitation: “What an immense time Mrs. Clay has been staying with
Elizabeth! Does she never mean to go
away?” (163). Mary is troubled here by
no consideration about a possible “bad connection” between her father and Mrs.
Clay; she continues, “But perhaps if she were to leave the room vacant we might
not be invited. Let me know what you
think of this” (163). And having blamed
Mrs. Harville for leaving her own children at Uppercross for weeks, Mary adds,
“I do not expect my children to be asked, you know. I can leave them at the Great House very well, for a month or six
weeks” (163). Then a few whines at the
Navy – Admiral and Mrs. Croft have been guilty of “gross inattention” as
neighbors – and Mary is Anne’s affectionately, followed by her postscript on
sore throats and then her retraction regarding the Crofts, who have after all
offered to convey anything Mary wishes to Bath, in “a very kind, friendly note
indeed, addressed to me, just as it ought” (163, 164). And of course this letter informs Anne of
Benwick’s engagement to Louisa.6 What is interesting about Mary as a whiner is that she has so complete a sense of both deprivation and entitlement: she continually fears being ill-used, thinks she is, whines about it, thinks herself ill over it – as when in the first scene with Anne she blames her alleged illness on having to sit backward in the Musgroves’ carriage the night before. She feels entitled to sit in the best seat, of course. I have passed comparatively lightly over Mary’s hypochondria, but it’s worth mentioning how it differs from that of Mr. Woodhouse or Isabella Knightley, for instance. They focus on their health rather than whine about it. Admittedly, their focus is manipulative, particularly in Mr. Woodhouse’s case. He is completely absorbed in the activity of holding on to his habits, including his habits of ill-health; his great fear is of any change that might threaten those habits (as Miss Taylor’s marriage does), and his fears often work to get others to do what he wants. But he also is capable of worrying over others whose habits differ from his; he is capable of pitying others, not just of self-pity, albeit in his case it’s not always easy to distinguish the two. “Poor Miss Taylor” is a way of saying “poor me,” after all. Mary, however, never gets beyond
self-pity. Remember her “What could you
possibly have to do” to Anne. There is
in fact no whiner in Austen’s novels to compare with Mary. Mrs. Norris isn’t a whiner, not even when
she has “much exertion and many sacrifices to glance at in the form of hurried
walks and sudden removals from her own fire-side” (MP 188), for she is
not whining but having much “to insinuate in her own praise” to Sir
Thomas. Mrs. Norris is in fact a
boaster, like Mrs. Elton, whom one can hear droning on, but not whining. Mrs. Allen of Northanger Abbey might
at first seem to be a candidate, with her repeated wishes that she knew someone
in Bath so that Catherine might have a partner. But in fact, these remarks are delivered “with perfect serenity”
(22), so that although they have the repetitiousness of whines, they haven’t
the proper tone – the characteristic moan.
The only real whiner, again, is Mrs. Bennet, but her laments over the
entail of Longbourn do in fact register a serious grievance, and her concern
over the fate of her daughters when their father dies compares favorably with
Mr. Bennet’s indifference. Her methods
are vulgar, and they don’t work, but at least she tries. Mary Musgrove’s character was created for Persuasion,
I think, because the novel is to some extent about ways that people cope with
the sense of ill-usage as well as with loss and grief. The phrase “ill used” with or without the
hyphen appears eight times in Persuasion according to the De Rose and
McGuire Concordance, more than half the times that it appears in all
Austen’s works. Pride and Prejudice
uses it twice, Mansfield Park once, and the minor works (Lady Susan,
The Watsons, and Sanditon) four times – and that’s it.7 Though half of the eight instances of
ill-usage in Persuasion refer to Mary’s sense of it, as we might expect,
the other four occasions suggest how pervasive the notion is in the novel. We are told that Elizabeth Elliot “felt
herself ill-used and unfortunate” by having to retrench their expenditure, “as
did her father” (10); that Captain Wentworth “felt himself ill-used” by Anne’s
breaking their engagement (28); and that Anne hopes that Captain Wentworth’s
letter to the Admiral announcing Louisa’s engagement “does not breathe the
spirit of an ill-used man,” and then hopes that Wentworth’s “manner of writing”
does not convey that “he thinks himself ill-used by his friend” (172,
173). Interestingly, the Admiral
assures her in response to her first query that “there is not an oath or a
murmur from beginning to end …. No, no;
Frederick is not a man to whine and complain; he has too much spirit for that”
(172). The Admiral’s use of the word
“whine” represents Austen’s sole use of this word in any form in all her
novels. “To whine” was gendered female
by Samuel Johnson in his famous Dictionary as “To lament in low murmurs;
to make a plaintive noise; to moan meanly and effeminately.” In her single use of the word, Austen inverts
Johnson and makes whining male, using it in reference to male behavior; though
the Admiral doesn’t say that Captain Wentworth whines, the phrase “a man to
whine or complain” intimates very clearly that other men do.8 In a novel that juxtaposes Anne’s lasting grief at losing Captain Wentworth with the more malleable and fanciful grieving of Captain Benwick for Fanny Harville or Mrs. Musgrove for her son Richard, we are inclined to expect that a sense of ill-usage, too, will ordinarily prove false. Certainly Elizabeth and Sir Walter have no right to feel ill-used by the amount of his debts; Captain Wentworth feels not ill-used but profoundly relieved by Benwick’s engagement to Louisa; and Wentworth is not fully entitled to feel ill-used by Anne’s breaking their engagement, as he himself recognizes at the end, telling Anne that “I shut my eyes, and would not understand you, or do you justice” (247). But what about Mary’s thinking herself ill-used? The narrator produces the first two instances, telling us first that, “inheriting a considerable share of the Elliot self-importance, [she] was very prone to add to every other distress that of fancying herself neglected and ill-used” (37). Later, the narrator informs us that, during the walk back from Winthrop, “Mary began to complain of” Charles’s dropping her arm to cut nettles, “and lament her being ill-used, according to custom, in being in the hedge-side, while Anne was never incommoded on the other” (90). The other two instances are filtered through Anne’s consciousness. At Lyme, Anne recognizes that Mary “would have felt quite ill-used by Anne’s having actually run against” Mr. Elliot “in the passage” (107), and later at the White Hart, Anne has to find Mary’s keys and sort her trinkets, while “trying to convince her that she was not ill used by any body; which Mary, well amused as she generally was in her station at a window overlooking the entrance to the pump-room, could not but have her moments of imagining” (221). What I want to consider is whether Mary’s sense of ill-usage is to be dismissed as completely as Sir Walter’s and Elizabeth’s. That is, is there any legitimacy at all in Mary’s inveterate whines? In short, why is Mary a whiner – a person who expresses continual frustration, who makes it known that she never gets enough? Isn’t it partly right, after all? Her four initial whines to Anne about being left alone convey to us that people try to avoid her as much as they possibly can: her husband goes out, Mr. Musgrove passes by without coming in and either doesn’t tell his daughters that Mary feels ill, or does tell them, which induces them to stay away, and Lady Russell doesn’t come in. Mary is of course largely responsible for these desertions, none of them absolute – the Musgroves see each other daily in any case – but what makes her act so as to provoke avoidance? Mary was evidently a neglected child. Elizabeth was her father’s favorite, and we
can infer that Anne was her mother’s as she is now Lady Russell’s. Even if Lady Elliot conscientiously
attempted to give each daughter equal love and attention, as presumably she
did, Mary was youngest when she died, just eight or nine; Anne was about
thirteen and Elizabeth about fifteen.
Mary is less attractive than either of her sisters, and less
secure. She feels competitive with her
sisters – witness her fear that Captain Wentworth might be made a baronet at
the end. Even in her marriage she was a
second choice, and perhaps knows it, as certainly the Musgroves do: Louisa
tells Captain Wentworth that Charles asked Anne to marry him before asking
Mary. Anne was “about two and twenty”
(28) when Charles proposed to her, which makes Mary, according to the
Baronetage, either seventeen or eighteen, perhaps away at school, perhaps
not. She married Charles shortly after
she turned nineteen. It is hard to
avoid inferring that Charles married her on the rebound from Anne. She may have sought him; we are told that he
is “really a very affectionate brother” (110), so that he would be likely to
respond to affection. Curiously, their
wedding day was December 16, 1810 – Jane Austen’s thirty-fifth birthday! (I’ve always wondered what private joke
Austen was enjoying by using that date.
A friend has speculated that perhaps she was congratulating herself on
having reached thirty-five without marrying, and I think she is probably right.9) I have been arguing that whining is a form of communication – either for self-expression, venting one’s own emotions, or for power, to manipulate others’ emotions and behavior. But it is of course also a way to protest against the way one’s life is ordered, as Mrs. Bennet does. Mary’s attempts to assert her class – to precede her mother-in-law out of local dining rooms, to boast about the Elliot consequence – is certainly self-aggrandizing but it also reflects insecurity and unhappiness, as all Mary’s whines do. Does the novel ask us to view her suffering as wholly illegitimate? Claudia Johnson’s forthcoming book on Mary
Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, Equivocal
Beings, points out that the legitimacy of suffering is a gendered issue in
the 1790s.10 The gendering
of suffering, the question of who suffers longer over loss, men or women, is
certainly at issue in the famous conversation between Anne and Captain
Harville. Johnson’s compelling analyses
of The Mysteries of Udolpho and Camilla argue that only men in
those novels seem to have the right to suffer and lament; women are constantly
enjoined and exhorted to repress and deny their suffering. In Persuasion, Anne Elliot clearly
suffers from burying her unhappiness; she has had no outlet at all for her pain
at losing Wentworth – she and Lady Russell never discuss Anne’s engagement or
regrets. As a result, Anne is evidently
depressed at the start of the novel, a state reflected in her “early loss of
bloom and spirits” (28). That is, Anne
suffers in her body and in her emotional life; in my view, Anne comes out of
her depression by being forced by her visit to Mary into the pain of seeing Wentworth
again, which paradoxically makes her come alive, recovering her youth and
sexuality as she enjoys the temporary admiration of Captain Benwick and Mr.
Elliot at Lyme. Austen has, then, set up the most profound
contrast between Anne and her sister Mary in their ways of expressing female
suffering: Mary whines, venting her unhappiness, and Anne suppresses hers. Austen also sets up a profound contrast in
the way characters respond to the sisters: Mary alienates people by whining,
sometimes succeeding in driving them away; Anne is liked by the Musgroves for
her self-effacement and willingness to interest herself in them. That is, Mary is punished for her mode of
expressing unhappiness; Anne is rewarded for hers. It is not possible to dismiss this contrast by
saying that of course Anne is the heroine, “almost too good” for Austen herself
(Letters, 487), and Mary is comic, so that their unhappiness must be
treated antithetically. Captain
Benwick’s unhappiness, for example, is treated quite differently from theirs,
and much more tenderly. Admittedly, his
is openly mourning a lost love, unlike Anne, whose suffering is
concealed. As a result, his behavior
can be favorably interpreted in conventional romantic terms, as the Musgroves
do at first. His “story” ensures first
that the “sympathy and good-will excited toward Captain Benwick was very great”
(97). Then once the Musgroves meet him,
“he had a pleasing face and a melancholy air, just as he ought to have, and
drew back from conversation” (97). By
comparison, a parallel female sufferer, Anne’s friend Mrs. Smith, who is
mourning her husband, in addition to having lost health and affluence (154), is
praised for not expressing her suffering.
She is not even given full credit for stoicism, for Anne reflects “that
this was not a case of fortitude or of resignation only …. here was that
elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of turning
readily from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried her out of
herself, which was from Nature alone” (154). Benwick’s is the first unhappiness that people
treat all sympathetically in Persuasion for Mrs. Musgrove’s mourning of
Richard is indulged, not sympathized with.
The introduction of Benwick’s unhappiness is followed by Louisa’s accident,
when male emotional responses are again treated more tenderly than female
ones. Anne remains in control of
herself, Henrietta faints, Mary screams and becomes hysterical; by contrast,
Wentworth suffers first in an “agony of silence,” then asks for help “in a tone
of despair” (109, 110). Similarly,
Charles Musgrove “really a very affectionate brother, hung over Louisa with
sobs of grief” (110). The expression of
male suffering is legitimate; female suffering apparently less so.11 Even the victim, Louisa, is implicitly
blamed in Anne’s thoughts for the “very resolute character” that contributed to
the accident (116). Austen always gives us more than we expect in
her comedy. Although we may think we
have encountered simple comedy in a character like Mary, a mere whiner, we
always have something more, something deeper and more complex. Mary’s character, I would suggest, following
Claudia Johnson, forms part of a deliberate attempt by Austen to interrogate
the way the expression of suffering seems to be admirable or legitimate in men,
excessive or comical or otherwise illegitimate in women. Nonetheless, because whines are so
irritating, because Mary doesn’t really appear to be ill, because the
underlying reasons for her unhappiness are implied rather than stated, and
because nothing nasty that she says or does really hurts Anne (which would make
us take her more seriously), Mary’s unhappy whines remain richly comical,
despite the suggestions on Austen’s part of a cultural critique of the
conditions that make us laugh at Mary, not sympathize. NOTES 1 I would like to thank Ruth Portner, as usual,
for help in developing ideas for this essay, and for her patience in listening
to blocks of text over the telephone; and I am grateful to Virginia Hjelmaa for
first calling my attention to the richness of Mary’s character. 2 All citations from Austen’s novels are taken
from the R. W. Chapman edition of The Novels of Jane Austen, 5 vols.,
3rd ed. (rpt. 1965; London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1933) and will appear in parenthesis
in the text. 3 Jane Austen’s Letters to her Sister
Cassandra and Others, ed. R. W. Chapman, 2nd ed. (1952; rpt. London: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1964), p. 18. 4 A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (rpt.
1961; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1926), p. 47.
The perennial appeal of whining – in comedy – is suggested by this text. 5 Milne, p. 121. 6 Mary’s summary is worth noting: “And this is
the end, you see, of Captain Benwick’s being supposed to be an admirer of
yours. How Charles could take such a
thing into his head was always incomprehensible to me. I hope he will be more agreeable now”
(163). That Charles should notice
admiration of Anne seems particularly disagreeable to Mary, a possible sign
that she is aware of his former admiration of Anne. 7 Peter L. De Rose and S. W. McGuire, A
Concordance to the Works of Jane Austen, 3 vols. (New York and London;
Garland Publishing, 1982). The
instances from the other works are as follows: in Pride and Prejudice,
Mrs. Bennet wants to “require Jane to confess that if [Bingley] did not come
back, she should think herself very ill used” (129), and she reports to Mrs.
Gardiner that “They had all been very ill-used” since her last visit, in that
two marriages for her daughters had come to nothing (139). In Mansfield Park, Fanny feels that
Mr. Rushworth “had been very ill-used” by the failure of Maria and Henry
Crawford. and later Julia, to wait for him to fetch the key (101). Catherine Vernon reports that Lady Susan
says of Reginald that “His disposition you know is warm, & he came to
expostulate with me, his compassion all alive for this ill-used Girl [Frederica
Vernon], this Heroine in distress! (MW, 290). Margaret Watson, fearing that she might have to share her bedroom
with her sister Emma is “rather mortified to find she was not ill used” in The
Watsons (MW, 351). In Sanditon,
Charlotte Heywood imagines briefly that Clara Brereton “seemed placed with her
[Lady Denham] on purpose to be ill-used” (391), and feels later that Clara and
Sir Edward Denham are “really ill-used” in being seen by her to meet
clandestinely (427). I have not
included instances of “ill usage,” though there are some. 8 Admittedly, Johnson is probably, like the
Admiral, thinking of a male’s whining when he writes of mean and effeminate
moaning: that is, he is referring to a lover’s complaint for the loss or
coldness of his mistress, a very common use for the term “whining.” Still, what seems to Johnson to be “mean”
about whining is that it is like something women do; even if he is thinking of
male lovers in his definition, he genders their behavior as female or
effeminate. 9 A suggestion made by Virginia Hjelmaa. 10 I am very grateful to Claudia L. Johnson for
permitting me to see a good deal of this book in manuscript and for allowing me
to refer to her argument here. 11 We need not believe, of course, that Charles and Captain Wentworth actually suffer more than, say, Henrietta does. |
