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Persuasions #15, 1993 Pages 131-138
Private and Public in Persuasion JULIA PREWITT BROWN Department of English, Boston University, Boston, MA I would like to speak today about an essay I have been working on on Persuasion,
on what I will call the new historical experience of privacy in Austen’s
world. My thoughts at this stage are
centered on three areas of concern: moral, philosophical, and biographical. I have no neat thesis. In the biographical area, I’m interested in
the relation between Austen’s personal or private life and her public ambition
as an artist. In moral terms, I’m
interested in the way private and public experience is judged in Persuasion. And in philosophical terms, my focus will be
on the terms nearness and distance, philosophical and aesthetic
categories that are very present in Persuasion. Private and public are not
synonymous with nearness and distance. The relation between the moral and biographical meanings of
private and public and the philosophical meanings of nearness and distance is
of course very complicated. I have yet
to work this out fully. All I want to
point out today is that there is a homologous relation among these three
categories; they seem to correspond in position, value, or
structure. The relation between
Austen’s personal life and her art, between private and public in Persuasion,
and between nearness and distance in Persuasion are all paradoxical
relations; they represent polarities that define one another. A good place to begin is with the word
private. This word is often used in
descriptions of Jane Austen’s world in a way that constitutes a major
misconception. It has often been said
in criticism of the novels, for example, that they are too narrow in their
exclusive attention to the private marriage decisions of a single class; this
complaint is found in traditional and feminist critics alike. Even when it is not used as criticism, it is
taken for granted. Yet this use of the
word private is based on a later conception of social organization, with its
separation of the public and private domains.
The word private is itself applied anachronistically to her world. What is its opposite? Is it perhaps public? Yet for much of the nineteenth century, the
public authority of the state was only in the process of extending its
territory to include all that it would encompass in this century. For most people living in Austen’s society,
it could be argued that all of life was private, because it was centered on the
private estate. Of course there is a
sense in which at least for the man, this could mean that all of life was
public. In Emma Mr. Knightley
speaks of his responsibilities as a magistrate in the same breath as his
deliberations about the plan of a drain. Perhaps we should define the opposite of private
as social or communal and then see if we can locate this nonsocial,
noncommunal presence in Austen’s novels, especially within the
institution that she places at the center of society: marriage. Austen permits us to overhear so-called
“private” conversations between husband and wife in several novels, and there
we notice that even when alone, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet address one another as
“Mrs. Bennet” and “Mr. Bennet,” suggesting a social and formal dimension with
the “private” experience of marriage that has all but disappeared today. At the same time, the fact that Austen makes
us privy to such conversation points to one of her greatest overriding themes:
the growing privatization of marriage.
In Austen’s earlier novels, marriage is linked to the general functioning
of society and to the land; in her last, it is separated from the land and from
stable community. In Persuasion
particularly we see the origins of modern marriage, with its intense focus on
the private “relationship” that a secular society imposes and its anticipation
of the egalitarian marriage of companionship, represented by Admiral and Mrs.
Croft. This shift from marriage as a
public, social institution to a private relationship is apparent in all the novels
and is attended by Austen’s ever increasing attention to what we might perhaps
fuzzily call the “private self,” most particularly in her rendering of the
heroine’s inner life. Austen understood privacy in its deepest
historical and etymological sense to be a social concept. The experience of privacy arose
simultaneously with the emergence of a public domain. It is a social concept, probably going back to the Romans;
the word itself comes from the Latin privatus meaning simply not in
public life – that is, not a positive state in itself but merely the state
of not being public. Privacy cannot be
articulated alone, it implies a public world from which we withdraw, retreat,
or from which we may be excluded, but a public world with which we are in relation
in spite of and because of the fact we are severed from it. The adjective privatus comes from the
verb private which has two antithetical meanings: first, to deprive of,
and second, to free from. The etymology
suggests that to be private is to be in a state of both freedom and
deprivation. The contradictory character of private
experience makes itself felt in earlier novels but in Persuasion gains a
new clarity and complexity. Take, for
example, the remarkable passage at the end of the novel which envisions the
reunited Anne and Wentworth together outside on a street in Bath: Their “spirits dancing in private rapture”
(240), Austen writes, at the prospect of being left alone by Charles Musgrove,
they seek a secluded place, a “quiet and retired gravel-walk” where they can
speak intimately. “And there, as they
slowly paced the gradual ascent, heedless of every group around them, seeing
neither sauntering politicians, bustling house-keepers, flirting girls, nor
nursery-maids and children, they could indulge in those retrospections and
acknowledgements, and especially in those explanations of what had directly
preceded the present moment, which were so poignant and so ceaseless in
interest” (241). This passage may be
unique in Austen. I can think of no
other passage in earlier works in which she places an image of private,
intimate reunion of hero and heroine in what is so clearly a public, democratic
milieu, on the busy street of a town with its “sauntering politicians” and its
Dickensian vision of a lively, anonymous population. The closing image of the novel repeats this
dichotomous, private-public image: His profession was all that could ever make her friends wish that tenderness less; the dread of a future war all that could dim her sunshine. She gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished for its domestic virtues than in its national importance. (252) By means of the reference to Navy life and the
possibility of another war, the lovers are placed in relation to English
history, specifically to what Austen knew would occur about six months after
the story closes: the Battle of Waterloo.
This image of the sustaining private love of two people, of atomistic
personal life, understood in terms of its polar opposite: large scale political
history and war, brings to the mind the close of Arnold’s famous poem, “Dover
Beach,” in which a private relationship is placed in a world-historical
perspective, defined and justified by it.
In both instances, private life is realized only by means of public,
historical consciousness; that is, we feel private and near only when we are
conscious of a public history and a distant perspective. Or, to word it more exactly given Austen’s
lines: we feel private and near only when we are conscious of being unconscious
of what is public and distant. (In the
passage just read Austen keeps emphasizing what the lovers do not see and hear,
rather than what they do.) In both
Arnold and Austen, to be private is to be in a state of both freedom and
deprivation, to be free from public life yet deprived of it. The moral implications of the new historical
experience of privacy in Persuasion further confirm this
antithesis. The traditional question
posed by ethics – how to live one’s life – is given no clear answer in the
novel. To the moral questions related
to privacy such as: how private, solitary, or introspective should I allow
myself to be? Is the more extroverted
life superior to the more introverted one? – no answer is suggested. Instead of a clear ideological or partisan
position on these questions, we find a finely wrought, absolutely irresolvable
set of contradictions. At every point
at which the novel suggests that privacy is bad, for example, it also suggests
that privacy is good. The private
“seclusion of Kellynch” and solitude within an unsympathetic family have led
Anne to be too passive and self-pitying, unwilling and unable to make Spring
come, as the farmer she gazes at during the walk to the Hayter’s farm is doing
as he tills the field. At the same
time, the private and secluded character of Anne’s life has led to the
cultivation of inwardness, and it is precisely this inwardness that makes her
the heroine, that makes her morally superior to the other characters. With all the criticism of Anne’s
estrangement then, she is surrounded by people who are seen as shallow and
coarse precisely because they cannot be alone, because they have no inner life. Her sister Mary cannot be alone for more
than a half hour without whining, and Mrs. Musgrove is ridiculed partly because
she cannot be alone with her grief. The
two houses at Uppercross get together continually, as Anne notices, because
neither can bear solitude. The
shallowness of social intercourse at Uppercross fully acknowledged, Anne
nonetheless “admired again” the necessity of “every thing being to be done
together” (83). There are as many
moments in the novel in which we cannot “admire again” the necessity of
everything being done together and are in fact invited to sneer at it, as there
are moments in which we can. We are
continually invited to deplore Anne’s estrangement yet feel contempt for all
the characters in the novel who would lack the moral strength to sustain
it. In other words, no Aristotelian
ethical mean is put forth as a solution – in the way it is repeatedly in
relation to all sorts of ethical questions raised in Pride and Prejudice,
from mercenary vs. prudent marriages to how responsive one should be to the
request of a friend. Instead,
unsatisfactory ethical choices are represented – a damned-if-you-do,
damned-if-you-don’t perspective. The
separation of private and public has brought about two unsatisfactory states of
being. The ethically undecidable rendering of solitary
life in Persuasion is perfectly embodied not only in the character of
the heroine but in that of Benwick, whom Anne encounters as a minor reflection
of her own strengths and weaknesses.
Later Wentworth praises Benwick in the highest terms for his character
and intelligence: Louisa Musgrove is “very amiable,” he admits, but “Benwick is
something more. He is a clever man, a
reading man …” (182). Yet we know from
an earlier scene that, like that of Anne, Benwick’s reading has made him
introspective to the point of neurotic.
To say, as Anne does to him, that he should read less of some authors
and more of others, is no answer – i.e. achieve an Aristotelian balance –
because Austen suggests that Benwick’s reading has made him what he is. Much like Anne’s inwardness – her liability
and her strength – which has made her what she is. Her friends “could wish that tenderness less,” as Austen writes
at the close of the novel, but all they can do is wish. In other words: while characters in Persuasion
often behave as if there are moral choices to be made, the narrator is
showing us there are none. There are many more examples of this
“solutionlessness,” as it were, like the Medieval debate at the end of the
novel between Anne and Captain Harville on the relative constancy of women and
men. This is one thing that
distinguishes Persuasion from earlier novels. For example, in Pride and Prejudice, the traditional
values represented by Pemberley and Darcy and the new, democratic values
represented by Elizabeth are synthesized in their marriage and in their life at
Pemberley where they receive the Gardiners, representatives of the new business
class. Both Darcy and Elizabeth
consciously admit to mistakes in their point-of-view; they educate one
another. All of this has of course been
written about at length. What is
remarkable is how thoroughly Austen abandons such syntheses in her last
novel. The heroine won’t even admit
that she was wrong in taking Lady Russell’s advice. In the private-public polarity in the novel (Wentworth has a
public life; she has only a private one) no compromise is made. She was right, she says, to give way to her
passivity, her emotional vulnerability to her dead mother’s friend – to all the
things associated with the secluded, private, withdrawn life at Kellynch. Whereas at the end of Pride and Prejudice,
an ideal vision of community is offered in the vision of life at Pemberley,
where traditional English values are revitalized by new ones, the community
controlling the end of Persuasion, ironically, is a military
institution, a “community” to be sure, as institutional communities are, but
limited by the fact of its institutional and military purpose and
character. Only “the dread of a future
war” we are told can disturb the idyllic domestic life enjoyed by those in this
community in times of peace, a qualification that Austen’s readers must have
taken seriously, given the moment in history at which Austen chooses to end the
story. Persuasion is like Pride and Prejudice in having a marriage that brings
together the lower aristocracy or high gentry and the rising middle class. But the hero and heroine don’t change one
another – no real inward revitalization has taken place. And at the end of the novel they are
heading, not for an estate or a secure place in the social structure, but for
war. The classical balance of Pride
and Prejudice gives way in Persuasion to a world of determined
paradox, in which private and public, inner and outer, peace and war, the self
and history are at something of a deadlock. Written at a time of increasing separation of
private and public, the novel records all the social and psychological dangers
that come with this separation: both for England and for the individual. The passage I read earlier which envisions a
public population of “sauntering politicians, bustling house-keepers,” and
“flirting girls” is almost Pickwickian; it resembles the cheerful vision of
social life in the early chapters of Pickwick Papers published 18 years
after Persuasion. This seems
a safe world, yet like Pickwick Papers, it really is not. The novel is full of curious and rather dark
prophecies. The Musgroves lose a son in
the war, have a daughter who cracks her head, and a grandson who breaks his
collarbone. Why is it that this most traditional
English family – whose Englishness is alluded to more than once – is so
accident prone? hh I would like to use Louisa Musgrove’s accident as a jumping off point
for the second area of concern: philosophical and aesthetic. The power of this remarkable scene has a lot
to do with the fact that in it Austen overcomes the opposition of nearness and
distance, showing them to be intertwined, categories that belong to one
another. In terms of psychological and moral
themes, the way to put this is to say that it is only within the most expansive
landscape that Anne and Wentworth finally make close contact. When her characters arrive at Lyme, Austen
emphasizes vista: “its high grounds and extensive sweeps of country … its sweet
retired bay, backed by dark cliffs …” (95-96).
Words like chasm, rock, and cliff place the
characters in a grand and distant frame.
The accident itself occurs next to the ocean on a sunny and windy
day. Earth, sky, water, and wind
provide a vast context for the first moment of real intimacy between Anne and
Captain Wentworth. The accident, that
catapults every person present into a state of vertigo or disorientation,
strips Wentworth of his defenses, and only under these conditions does he turn
to Anne, as she knows, when he cries out, “Is there no one to help me?”
(110). Our attention is finally on the
lovers in this scene, not the accident or Louisa. Their mutual sense of distance is as great as the sense of
nearness at the moment of crisis. “Is
there no one to help me?” he cries, as though alone in the world, yet the cry
itself, the loss of his defenses, binds him to Anne. The accident itself is also rendered in
antithetical images of high and low, up and down, perfectly summed up in the
antithetical image of the “steep flight” of stairs. A great deal more could be said about the temporal and spatial
genius of this scene: for example, it is a symbolic reenactment and reversal of
the mistake that was made eight years before the novel opens, when Anne was not
precipitate enough in falling into Wentworth’s arms. Fittingly, the lovers come back together in
the same critical atmosphere in which they parted. But I would like to turn instead to the latter half of the novel
in which Austen’s equation of nearness and distance intensifies. In Persuasion, what is nearest is
paradoxically most remote. From the
first appearance of Anne, the ordinary linear conceptions of time is shown to
have little to do with her sense of what is near. “Alas! with all her reasonings, she found, that to retentive
feelings eight years may be little more than nothing” (60). Measurable distance in either time or space
is not what is important. To give an
everyday example of this philosophical problem, as one critic suggests: when we
speak on the telephone, the telephone speaker that we hold to our ear is far
more remote than the distant party to whom we speak. Or, the eyeglasses resting on my nose are never as close, as
present to me as the things I see through them. Such objects come to seem strange in their very familiarity if we
meditate on them. Although they are
literally present in our world and always near, they are also always absent and
far. Presence, or what seems present or
near to us, is what is being meditated.
In Anne’s case, Wentworth is present when he is absent (“To retentive
feelings, eight years” are as nothing) and absent when he is present: Dining in
his company Anne can think: “Once so much to each other! Now nothing!” (63). Anne puzzles over the fact that “Now they
were as strangers” (64). She observes
him: “When he talked, she heard the same voice, and discerned the same mind”
(64) yet he is nonetheless absent, a stranger.
(Physically, you could say that he is like the telephone receiver.) Anne can “find” Wentworth in this scene only
through memory: “she heard the same voice” and his conversation with Louisa
Musgrove “reminded Anne of the early days,” Austen writes, in which she had had
similar conversations with him. It
comes as no surprise that Virginia Woolf tied this novel to those of Proust. The interplay of near and far, past and present
is constant in Persuasion, and especially concentrated in the latter
half of the novel. Seeing Captain
Wentworth walk down the street, Anne starts: “For a few minutes she saw nothing
before her. It was all confusion”
(175). The surprise of seeing him is
“blinding” to her. Later, in the
concert scene as Anne senses their impending reunion, “Anne saw nothing,
thought nothing of the brilliancy of the room” (185). And finally, in the reunion scene itself, “Anne heard nothing
distinctly; it was only a buzz of words in her ear, her mind was in confusion”
(231). The cognitive order of Anne’s
visual, aural world is effaced in these scenes in which the distinction between
inner and outer, past and present, near and far is virtually erased. The word “nothing” is used repeatedly. Anne’s experience of Wentworth is a blank:
both a nothing and an everything.
“Presence,” in other words, is what is here but also what is out there. What Austen shows here is that we are never
simply “here” but by virtue of our ranging concern, we are first of all
“there.” We come to a “here” only from
afar. Thus, we exist as individuals in
a field of concern, in which near and far are at every moment potentially intertwined. hh Jane Austen was dying when she was writing Persuasion. The telescoping of experience, the
compressing inward of distant objects, may belong to such a time. Similar and far more explicit interplay of
near and far, past and present, up and down, going and coming, expanding and
contracting takes place in Tolstoy’s study of the mind of a dying person, “The
Death of Ivan Illyich.” Of Jane Austen’s life we know very little; she
was very private, and her works were published anonymously, “by a lady.” Very possibly, Austen’s gender and social
class played a role in the decision to publish anonymously, as has been
argued. But we should not rule out the
possibility this was something Austen herself may have actively chosen. Not all women writers published
anonymously. Perhaps Austen wanted
privacy. We know that she withdrew from
an introduction to Mme de Stael, and it used to be thought that she did so
because she objected to Mme de Stael’s reputation. But in his excellent biography, Park Honan gives evidence that it
is very likely that Austen withdrew from other literary introductions as well:
she was probably in Bath when Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth were there but
withdrew from these introductions. To
speculation as to why Austen never married, the most convincing answer, since
we know that she had more than one proposal, is that she chose not to in order
to devote herself to her art. All of
Austen’s drive for public attention was located in the ambition to see her
works in print. She evidently had no
desire for personal attention. But her
interest in how people read her work is proven by the fact that she carefully
saved the most offhand comments upon the novels from friends and acquaintances. Austen needed privacy to write, because privacy
provides the condition for solitude.
She probably had to lay claim to privacy for this reason in the way a
male writer would not have had to. A
man would have been given the time to write, because he would have been given
the time to work. In this sense,
Austen’s privacy was her career. The
further she withdrew from the public, the closer she came to fame. The more personal and restricted her life,
the wider its sphere. In other words,
the paradox I have pointed to earlier in Austen’s conception of private and
public, nearness and distance is at work in her own life. Austen’s privacy is intimately bound up with
her public ambition – the two must be seen together. I should like to close with a few speculations
concerning the larger implications of what I have said as they relate to the
current state of Austen criticism. Private and public are historical categories,
whereas nearness and distance are metaphysical and ultimately
perhaps theological ones. For example,
it has often been remarked that archaic societies do not experience the
distinction between “public” and “private,” but nearness and distance
are categories of thought that can be recognized in their art and ritual. These categories predate the separation of
the private and public domains; ideas of nearness and distance, for example,
are very strong in the New Testament, particularly in the Gospels. It is my sense that the source of these
paradoxes in Austen is Biblical, as it is in Tolstoy’s story mentioned
earlier. That Austen was a seriously
religious person is suggested by various kinds of evidence – her sister’s
commentary and the prayer she wrote are two examples. I am not suggesting any sort of Church-going, institutional
Christianity. We are familiar with her
unrelenting satire of English church in almost every novel, and of her
well-known sympathetic comment about the more primitive Christians known as
Evangelicals. Austen’s Christianity,
which may have had more in common with that of the late Tolstoy than with that
of (for example) Dickens, has received almost no attention. There is only one book on the subject. Gene Koppel’s excellent book, and that book
received very little attention because its interests fly in the face of the
overriding neo-positivist orientation of current criticism. What I have suggested here – in arguing a
homologous relation between historical categories and metaphysical ones – is
that the historical and the metaphysical, as dimensions of human existence,
need not exclude one another, and may in fact be studied together. WORK CITED All quotations from Persuasion are from R. W. Chapman (ed.), 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1933). |
