Jane Austen's Persuasion: Culture and Society

This is the bare beginnings of a somewhat more detailed piece which I am hoping to include in a larger project I am working on. Austen holds a very special place in my heart, I simply adore her.

Judging from modern reviewers of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, it would seem that the novels leading characteristic is that it represents Austen’s final completed novel. The qualifier “the last novel” appears in a surprising number of prefaces to actual discussions of the story ranging from contemporary critics to Virginia Woolf. The distinction seems so critical to an understanding of the book that one begins to speculate that the slogan “the last novel” may carry with it more significance than simply identifying its chronological placement among the other five Austen novels. In Persuasion, Austen presents a heroine far removed from a community like Emma Woodhouse’s Highbury, but unlike Fanny Price who is also barred from a larger role in her society, Anne Elliot seems to have made the choice for herself. Also unlike any other Austen heroine, Anne is not introduced to the reader as a woman “with very little to stress or vex her” who, over the course of the plot will be forced to confront her own personal folly as part of a ordered and fixed moral education.[1] That Austen seems to have had altered the representation of her characteristic three or four country families does not mean, however, that in Persuasion she was in effect renouncing that order or her earlier work. Rather, Persuasion is in a simple estimation a sequel to the unwritten novel of the engagement and disengagement of Anne and Wentworth, as well as a sequel to the novel of the eighteenth century. By focusing on Anne’s relationship with society, and Austen’s own awareness of her historical context, one can see past Persuasion’s reputation as “the last novel” and recognize it as a new one.

Jane Austen had long been viewed as a writer for the most part unconcerned with contemporary socio-cultural events that defined her historical context. Keeping up with new trends in literary criticism, more critics have recognized the potential folly of such a belief and have begun to look toward her personal letters for evidence against it. However, many have found that even there the mentioning of current events is scarce, and several have agreed with E.M. Forster, a self-proclaimed “Austenite” who described her letters as failing to account for “politics or religion, and non of the [Napoleonic] war except when it brings prize money to her brothers.”[2] Furthermore, the attempt to look to the novels themselves for evidence of Austen’s active historical awareness has not made a great deal of progress compared to the way later nineteenth century novels such as Jane Eyre or Middlemarch are proclaimed for the social awareness on the part of their authors. It seem fair to say that critics have not yet completely rescued Jane Austen from the image her brother, Henry Austen Leigh, made for her in the preface to the posthumously published set of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion when he said of his sisters life, “A life of usefulness, literature, and religion, was not by any means a life of event.”[3]

Persuasion seems to discount Mr. Austen’s view of his sister as a woman who did not take much notice of the outside world. Much like Sir Walter’s “book of books,”[4] the Baronetage, Persuasion chronicles how connected and communal groups of people change over time. While Sir Walter can “rouse his faculties into admiration and respect” by reading his own family’s comings and goings, Persuasion sought to engage its reader’s faculties by focusing on the changings of a society both Austen and they knew and experienced. While the principal parts of Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey were written in the 1790’s and the first five years of the eighteen hundreds, Persuasion was written during 1815; twenty years after the completion of a version of what was to be her first completed novel, ‘Elinor & Marianne.’ As a participant of the long eighteenth century, Austen knew it’s taste for fashionable and other transient delights. By the end of the two decades that were her authorial career, Persuasion can be seen as a conscientious effort on the part of Austen to feed the culture’s appetite for change. From the start of the novel the reader is aware that time and period are and will continue to be important themes. The first page is littered with dates of birth, marriage, ascension, and death. Austen even describes the Baronetage as a “history” being opened and read by a fellow reader, tempting the actual reader to treat the novel much the same. Anne Elliot’s story from her failed relationship with Frederick Wentworth to their eventual marriage eight and a half years later mirrors the novels other history which chronicles how both country and city society have changed in those two decades.[5]

 The relationship between Anne and the communities she encounters from Kellynch to Bath marks a departure from the interactions that previous heroines had with their communities. This signals that Austen must have felt that the world that Catherine Moorland experienced in the 1790’s was no longer an adequate representation of Anne Elliot’s social reality, even though the two inhabit the same city for an extended time. Therefore, the very aspects of Persuasion that make it different demonstrate Austen’s social awareness. Whereas previous novels contained strong senses of communal identity that provide all the other heroines security even in their darkest hour, community seems only to be used in an ironic sense in Persuasion.[6] It is difficult to find a true center of activity in the same way Norland Park operates in Sense & Sensibility or Mansfield in that work. Rather, Austen seems to go out of her way to carve the community into separate and defined entities. There is Sir Walter Elliot’s Kellynch Hall, Uppercross Cottage, Uppercross Great House, the Hayter’s Winthrop, Admiral Croft’s Kellynch Hall and finally Lady Russell’s house; Kellynch Lodge. These places and names seem to literally lose meaning as Anne moves from place to place only to “clothe her imagination, her memory and all her ideas”[7] as she repeats the continual “habit of running in and out of each other’s houses.”[8]

Anne’s role at each house is unique, though not as much as other characters role in society at large. It seems out of role for an Admiral in the Navy to lease a Great House like Kellynch just as much as it seems out of role for a Baronet to leave his. However, unlike her father or Admiral Croft who have been bound by their exclusive worlds of the aristocracy and the navy respectively, Anne is aware of an absence of a social world precisely because she is in effect a social orphan.[9] Because Anne is not like her stately father who must be forced to leave his house, Anne has learned “the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle.”[10] Anne (like Austen) understands that the focus is no longer just on the presence of society, but rather the question of whose society one is in. In addition to dividing the community by designating arbitrary names, Austen tells the reader that “the removal from one set of people to another, though at a distance of only three miles, will often include a total change of conversation, opinion, and idea.”[11] Each house has been transformed into an autonomous being described as “little social commonwealths” privileged with dictating “its own matters of discourse.”[12] But because Anne has already learned the lesson of knowing her own nothingness, she can freely come and go, ready to adapt to and comply with whatever environment or situation she is in.

This fragmentation of places and self takes a toll on the individual, and because Anne has already been marked as the only character aware of the physical and mental distance among the different residents she encounters, she bears the brunt of this burden. The fixed moral order that Austen’s narrator in Emma, Mansfield Park, and Pride & Prejudice guides the heroines toward can no longer apply to Anne because she lives in a world lacking in community, and therefore any overarching code. Even when Wentworth and Anne renew their engagement after eight and a half years, it has not been the consequence of some assumed or lingering moral network that each have ultimately learned. Such a moral code operates successfully in Mansfield Park because Fanny Price’s marriage to Edmund Bertram constitutes the cleansing of Mansfield and restores virtue where there had been vice. However, the marriage between Anne and Wentworth bears little on the people surrounding them and even represents Anne’s refusal of one social world and her somewhat accidental acceptance of a new home; the Navy. It is one of Jane Austen’s finest examples of wit when says of the meeting between Anne and Wentworth in the gravel walkway, “Who can be in doubt of what follows? When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by preservation to carry their point.”[13] Preservation seems farthest from what the two lovers have accomplished in their marriage.

 

While Austen seems to have intended this fragmentation of community in the first half of Persuasion to express how she saw the fragmentation of England and English society and politics, the move to Bath in the second part of the novel seems to offer something like a sense of grounding. Twenty years prior to Persuasion Austen had used the city in which she spent five years of her twenties for the center of social activity in Northanger Abbey. True to the historical framework, Bath is described as a single entity; nearly possessing enough personality to become an ever present character that provides the “heroine in training” all the dances, balls, and, gentlemen necessary for the education. However, like Anne, the Bath of Persuasion is described as only a ghost of its former self. The picture of vanity, Sir Walter laments, “there was certainly a dreadful multitude of ugly women in Bath, and as for the men, they were infinitely worse.”[14] Though Admiral Croft can still stroll up Milsom Street and greet a crowd of friendly naval figures, such men were protecting the island from possible invasion when last an Austen heroine walked that street. Whereas Bath appeared the triumph of a cultivated and improved society, Austen only ironically praises such cultivation in Persuasion. When the Musgroves arrive at Bath late in the novel, Mrs. Musgrove proposes a dinner party and Austen takes the reader into Elizabeth’s consciousness: “Old fashion notions �" country hospitality �" we do not profess to give dinners �" few in Bath do.” The dichotomy between old fashion and civilized is mocked by Austen. For even though Bath may initially appear a unified place where all the characters of the novel ultimately gather, such distance and snobbery as existed in Kellynch still remains, only here house names have been replaced with street names; Camden Place, Queen’s Square, Marlborough Buildings, even a common inn.

In Persuasion, Jane Austen introduced to the literary tradition a new kind of heroine in a new kind of situation. Her overwhelming sense of ephemerality and her definition by situation anticipate the anxieties of so many Victorian heroines, and Austen’s replacement of a fixed moral code with that of only the internal conscience of Anne Elliot have influenced writers like Henry James nearly a century after she died. The new ways in which she presents society is proof that contrary to what her brother may have wrote of her, Jane Austen was very active in recording the changes in her culture and world.

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[1] Jane Austen, Emma, 1. Though the economic situation of the Dashwood sisters at the beginning of Sense and Sensibility may not be comparable to the carefree lifestyle described of Emma, it can neither be compared to the emotional suffering of Anne Elliot either.

[2] Austen’s brothers were in the navy.

[3] Jane Austen, Persuasion, p. 5.

[4] Persuasion, p.12.

[5] The two parallel histories is further supported by the fact the Austen refers to Anne’s story as a “little history of sorrowful interest.” Persuasion, 28. The word history comes up a striking number of times in this work, even to the point where the narrator refers to Mrs. Smith as “an historian” of gossip. The Mrs. Smith character may indeed mirror Austen herself who too operates as an historian of everyday life.

[6] For example, Emma may question her place within Highbury at the climax of the novel, but help eventually comes from Mr. Knightly, a member of that community. They’re marriage further strengthens the village unity.

[7] Persuasion, p. 39.

[8] Persuasion, p. 35.

[9] I do not mean to describe the Navy as a sealed social unit; only that it is a defined unit.

[10] Persuasion, p. 38.

[11] ibid

[12] Persuasion, p. 39.

[13] Persuasion, p. 199.

[14] Persuasion, p. 157.

Author's Note

I may be a bit too conversational, but Its really just for me anyway at this point...