To return to my summer course, I also taught Austen’s Persuasion. In part, I wanted to teach one of the Austen novels that seems to be assigned less often. I also thought my students would find the social criticism in it more readily apparent than it sometimes can be in Emma or even Pride and Prejudice. That criticism was, indeed, accessible to them–many wrote about their sense that Austen valued the navy over the aristocracy. In general, I think characters like Sir Walter Elliot are one of Austen’s delightful sources of humor. However, our emphasis on Austen’s adulation of the navy began to feel almost dull (perhaps because we didn’t more closely consider the war that would follow the narrative or the faintly absurd pop star status naval officers acquire for the Musgrove daughters).
The ambiguity that did surface over the course of our discussions was what Austen seems to make of Anne’s past. Some passages, in which Anne criticizes Lady Russell’s advice against her engagement to Wentworth before he attains a fortune, made students confident that Anne regrets her earlier decision. Yet in another moment, Anne insists that she did not act wrongly, nor does she “blame” Lady Russell. That she marries a wealthier Wentworth in the end suggests her decision was not so troubling, after all. These moments leave me wondering whether Anne arrives at any firm conclusions about her past, or whether the novel invites one particular reading of the events.
I find this ambiguity engaging. Anne refuses to criticize with any command her own past or the attachment to the past that Lady Russell represents, as the close friend of Anne’s dead mother. This is striking given Anne’s ultimate association with change and the future: she happily marries a self-made man, who realizes she still loves him in the midst of her playful diatribe on the social conditions of women’s lives. Instead of an estate, they procure a carriage and soon, likely, a war ship. But still, the past is important to her. Austen mocks Sir Walter through his obsession with his ancestry and his vast collection of mirrors. But she grants Anne a profound nostalgia for her mother. The buried past (figuratively meaning Anne’s rejection of Wentworth and literally meaning Lady Elliot) holds more weight for Anne than do its living embodiments (Sir Walter and the continually open Baronetage).
I think I like this because it offers Anne something, besides a self-important family, to struggle with. She regains her beauty, receives both the sincere admiration of the prodigal heir and the more idyllic love of her former fiance, and even marries into money. That she may not be able to provide a consistent narrative of the past and that her aristocratic heritage still holds meaning for her, make her more sympathetic. For ultimately, they soften Austen’s apparent insistence on the beauty and rightness of the navy and the future.
