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Persuasions #15, 1993 Pages 53-56
Out of the Estate and into the Rescue Boat SUZY CLARKSON HOLSTEIN Carroll College, Waukesha, WI Jane Austen’s fictive world has been described as one of interiors and,
by extension, the protected gardens attached to these interiors.1 While many of her heroines briefly venture
beyond those boundaries, all seem to find their way safely back by the end of
each novel. All, that is, except Anne
Elliot. If “inherited security is the
birthright of the self in Jane Austen’s world,” as Alistair Duckworth has
asserted,2 Anne Elliot’s inheritance has been squandered before she
comes of age. In her final completed
novel, Austen begins to question the secure order to which her earlier novels
had always returned. The garden and the
lovely interior have not yet become jungles, but they no longer provide
sanctuary or certainty. The displacement is dramatic if we compare the
opening of Persuasion to its final chapter. The novel begins: Sir
Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own
amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; … 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 …” Then
followed the history and rise of the ancient and respectable family, in the
usual terms: … forming altogether two handsome duodecimo pages, and concluding
with the arms and motto: “Principal seat, Kellynch hall, in the county of
Somerset.”3 By contrast, the conclusion of the novel celebrates the marriage of Sir
Walter’s daughter. “Anne had no Uppercross-hall before her, no landed estate,
no headship of a family” (252). The
Elliots’ social prominence has evaporated, but we have throughout come to be persuaded
that Anne’s “loss” here is indeed cause for celebration. Emma Woodhouse, the heroine created immediately
before Anne Elliot, clearly flirts with disorder: her ill-conceived projects
and her failure accurately to read Frank Churchill’s behavior bring her
dizzingly near the edge of chaos. But
Emma’s marriage to Mr. Knightley re-establishes her responsibility and
consistency, and places her securely within the patriarchal order of the
estate. In Persuasion, however, Austen
does not create a character that threatens the social order. Instead, the work seems to raise doubts as
to the value of the traditional order itself.
This reversal allows Austen to examine the character’s response to such
uncertainty. The questioning also
points towards the nineteenth-century’s growing lack of confidence in external
order. Persuasion stands as a
direct precursor to the Victorian novel and it represents a distinct shift: for
the first time in an Austen novel, the heroine’s personal society remains
fragmented, and the heroine is an “alienated” character in the modern sense of
the term.4 Unlike Emma, Anne
learns very early that she has little control over events: “She was nobody with
either her father or sister: her word had no weight; her convenience was always
to give way; she was only Anne” (5).
Transported to the younger Musgrove home, the situation for Anne is no
better: “She must now submit to feel that another lesson, in the art of knowing
our own nothingness beyond our own circle, was become necessary for her” (42).5 Anne’s literal and figurative dislocation occur
because the patriarchal estate, the symbol of inherited security, is lost to
her. When Lady Russell pushes her to
consider Mr. Elliot as a suitor, the chance to reclaim that estate tempts her
strongly (159-60). The compelling
vision of the past, the graceful charms of the old, beloved interior, vibrate
strongly within Anne. But the temptation
to restore the dead mother and reclaim the squandered estate lingers only
momentarily.6 Anne cannot
regain her inheritance without violating the dictates of her conscience and
heart; internal and external order cannot be harmonized for her as they are for
Emma. Change and “improvement,” a key word for
Austen, do not here represent clear evil as they do in most of her canon. When Anne visits the older Musgroves at the
Great House, a venerable estate, the narrator ponders the thoughts of the
ancestors as they “view” the lively family: Oh!
could the originals of the portraits against the wainscot, could the gentlemen
in brown velvet and the ladies in blue satin have seen what was going on, have
been conscious of such an overthrow of all order and neatness! The portraits themselves seemed to be
staring in astonishment. The
Musgroves, like their houses, were in a state of alteration, perhaps of
improvement. The father and mother were
in the old English style, and the young people in the new. (40) Though Anne does not completely envy the Musgrove girls and the
narrative clearly displays her superiority to them, still she has fondness and
respect for them. Further, juxtaposed
with Anne’s own sisters, the Musgrove daughters appear delightful. Perhaps most tellingly, the novel does not
hold up the family as an object of ridicule or contempt. They are clearly more valued than the more
“traditional” Elliot family. Indeed, for the first time in Austen, the
heroine’s family completely dissolves as the center of focus and is at last
essentially repudiated. When Anne
rejoins Lady Russell after the younger woman’s stay at Uppercross, Anne
realizes she has “lately lost sight even of her father and sister and Bath”
(124). Near the end of the novel, when
Mrs. Smith exclaims, “even the smooth surface of family-union seems worth
preserving, though there may be nothing durable beneath” (198), we recognize
how profound is the void within the Elliot family and, more compellingly, we
perceive the one who is truly responsible for that “nothing.” For Anne Elliot’s landless position is not an
effect devoid of cause. Her father’s
extravagance and short-sightedness have lost the estate. The social changes present in Persuasion
and Austen’s growing respect for the navy contribute to the estateless ending
of the novel, but the main force behind the loss of Kellynch remains Sir Walter
Elliot’s poor stewardship. While it is
true that this novel, more than any other Austen work, pits the individual
throughout against an unyielding and hostile social surface, culpability for
the situation can be assigned. The source
of order has failed, but order itself and its corresponding “social
possibilities” remain an ideal within reach.7 The navy provides this alternative source for
Anne and Captain Wentworth. But it is a
mistake, perhaps, to read the novel as a sweeping criticism of the old
patriarchy, for it implicates only one old patriarch and his successor. Though the Crofts are certainly the most
admirable couple in the novel. Lady
Russell, with all her flaws, and the Musgroves of Uppercross remain respected
figures throughout Persuasion.
Anne’s case, then, is an individual one and not the inevitable fate of
all daughters of the patriarchy; it points toward changes without depicting
them as inevitable. I have called Persuasion a harbinger of
the Victorian writings that lament the rapid changes of the
nineteenth-century. Yet it also remains
distinctly separate from the later tradition.
In Persuasion, as in certain other Austen novels, enlightenment
comes to the daughters in the form of disillusionment and of loss,8
and we cannot dismiss the sorrow Anne endures.
Recognizing the Crofts’ management as superior to her father’s produces
pain for the heroine, and she must also endure having a father who “had no
affection for Anne” (248), even at the novel’s happy ending. Yet in many Victorian novels the cost of
enlightenment is even higher. The
Victorian heroine’s predicament becomes less a matter of an individual
patriarch betraying the system and more a matter of systemic, even natural,
weaknesses in the face of social change.
The old ways must be supplanted by the new, and the daughters are
sometimes caught in the undertow. Even
fathers who love their daughters and attempt to maintain the old order cannot
withstand the current. Anne, of course, has no loving father, but
Austen does not let her heroine down.
First, Anne identifies herself securely with a world that makes an
absolute distinction between public and private spheres and links that
distinction to the male and female experience.
She tells Captain Harville, “We live at home, quiet, confined, and our
feelings prey upon us. You are forced
on exertion. 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”
(232). Further, in assessing at last
her earlier rejection of Wentworth, Anne maintains that she was right in
submitting to Lady Russell’s advice.
Having confronted the possibility of chaos, Anne reasserts a type of
order even while she recognizes the cost of such distinctions for both males
and females in general and for herself in particular. Perhaps Anne here echoes feelings Austen herself may have shared. But the most dramatic rescue the author
provides for her struggling heroine is Captain Wentworth’s renewed
courtship. One critic has argued that
such second-chance marriage proposals are a realization of the fantasy that the
dead loved parent is still alive and will come back to the young woman.9 In any case, the reconciliation fulfills our
wishes as readers and provides a sophisticated fairy-tale ending. Anne is not a
Mary or an Elizabeth, as are her sisters and the honored Elliot women of the
past. She will no longer reside within
the familiar interiors of earlier Austen novels, but instead, she shares Mrs.
Croft’s fate. As a naval wife she faces
more uncertainty and more dependence on the politics and necessities of the
wide world. But she undoubtedly also
shares Mrs. Croft’s clear-eyed strength as the older woman emphasizes, “We none
of us [ladies] expect to be in smooth water all our days” (70). In the end, the world opening up beyond
Anne’s garden sparkles hopefully to her across the waves.
NOTES 1 Ronald Blythe, “Notes” to the Penguin edition of Emma
(Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1966), p. 471. 2 Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of
Jane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), p.
2. 3 Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 3-4.
Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text. 4 Julia Prewitt Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form (Cambridge, Mass. and London, Eng.: Harvard University Press, 1979). p. 124. 5 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that this “nothingness” becomes
the guiding principle of Anne’s life, and that she turns herself into a
nonentity. (The Madwoman in the
Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
[New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979], p. 175). They emphasize, then, more volitional
diminishing of self than I do. 6 Katherine Dalsimer, Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections
on Works of Literature (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986),
p. 129. 7 Mary Burgan, “Mr. Bennet and the Failures of Fatherhood in Jane
Austen’s Novels,” Journal of English and German Philology, 74 (1975),
552. 8 Brown, p. 42. 9 Dalsimer, p. 123. |
