Using point of view to create drama: Persuasion chapter 24
This is part of a newsletter series documenting the pandemic of 2020 and offering a close reading of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. You can access the full series by clicking on the “novel study” category above the post or the “Austen” tag beneath the post. Access the complete story spreadsheet for the novel [here].
It is week thirty-seven of 2020. I’m not going to lie – it’s been a hard one here in San Francisco. The climate crisis has now combined with the coronavirus crisis to trap us in our homes because the air outside is too unhealthy to breathe. For many people in communities up and down the West coast, even their homes are not safe from encroaching wildfires.
And then there was the day-of-no-sun on Wednesday. I’ve been getting up an hour earlier than everyone else in the house on weekday mornings in order to work on my tiny baby novel (I know!), and I am careful not to check headlines or air quality or coronavirus numbers or anything else that could send me into doomscrolling mode and waste my precious minutes. I glanced outside and noted the orangeish sky and sighed, knowing we’d be in for a bad air day.
An hour later when I went back upstairs to start waking my kids up for online school, I noticed that it was actually darker than it had been when I got up. I stepped outside to look for the sun, which we usually see rising over the houses across the street from us. On really bad air days, I’ve learned, it will be a gorgeous and terrifying orange color. I scanned the sky and saw nothing but a perplexing dark orange fog. Other neighbors were in the street talking nervously and pointing to the sky and to the streetlights, which were still on.
This photo was taken in my backyard, just before noon. As the hours wore on, the sky just kept getting darker until late afternoon, when the dark orange fog-smoke gave way to lighter orange fog-smoke and the street and backyard came alive with chattering birds.
I’m taking the time to describe this so that I will remember it accurately for myself, and in the hopes that it will galvanize you to take some action to address the climate crisis. This is the way it has shown up for me, but it is coming for us all if it hasn’t reached you yet. US readers, please vote in November! Check your registration and make a voting plan here.
And now let’s get to that discussion of point of view I promised last week. Chapter 24, the grand finale, is below for your enjoyment. In that chapter, the narrator comes to the fore, disposing of characters into all of their proper places.
Here I want to focus on chapter 23, which is centered around Anne’s point of view. This chapter is famous for Anne’s declaration that “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story,” but it’s also a dazzling show of the dramatics that can be achieved with only a few characters in a barely described room. Austen makes the most of the gaps in knowledge and feeling between the characters in the room.
Austen sets our awareness of the dramatics to come by showing us Anne inadvertently eavesdropping on a conversation between Mrs Musgrove and Mrs Croft. Anne herself is embarrassed to hear “many undesirable particulars” – details that she believes should be private – and her feelings are with Mrs Croft, who must respond tactfully to these disclosures, and with Captains Harville and Wentworth, whom she hopes are “too much self-occupied to hear.”
But when Mrs Croft protests against long or uncertain engagements, Anne feels “a nervous thrill.” Captain Wentworth, it turns out, has been listening too, and the two exchange “one quick, conscious look.” Anne – and readers – are left to guess what it might mean.
Next, Anne has a conversation with Captain Harville on the topic of love and loyalty, which our narrator is careful to hint may also be audible to Captain Wentworth. Austen then, through the mechanism of the letter he leaves for Anne, shifts us momentarily into Wentworth’s point of view, and we discover that he has, in fact, been listening to Anne’s conversation with Harville.
After the letter, notice that we drop a shade deeper into Anne’ point of view – getting what feels like unmediated access to her thoughts: “But the chair would never do. Worse than all! To lose the possibility of speaking two words to Captain Wentworth in the course of her quiet, solitary progress up the town . . . could not be borne.” In the subsequent encounter between Charles, Anne, and Wentworth, Austen exploits another gap in knowledge for drama – Charles unknowingly providing exactly the excuse for private conversation that the other two are wishing for.
And what does Austen do now, at this culminating moment of her entire plot? She zooms far, far out and shows her two characters from far above: “as they slowly paced the gradual ascent, heedless of every group around them, seeing neither sauntering politicians, bustling housekeepers, 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.”
The early stages of their conversation are given to us in a compressed summary, which allows the narrator to control our interpretation of it, as in this description of Wentworth’s evolution: “he had learnt to distinguish between the steadiness of principle and the obstinacy of self-will, between the darings of heedlessness and the resolution of a collected mind.”
Only in the final stages of the chapter are we rewarded with access to direct dialogue between these two lovers we have been rooting for over many weeks and chapters. The chapter ends with Wentworth’s satisfying admission that he has been wrong: “I did not understand you. I shut my eyes, and would not understand you, or do you justice. This is a recollection which ought to make me forgive every one sooner than myself. Six years of separation and suffering might have been spared. It is a sort of pain, too, which is new to me. I have been used to the gratification of believing myself to earn every blessing that I enjoyed. I have valued myself on honourable toils and just rewards. Like other great men under reverses . . . I must endeavour to subdue my mind to my fortune. I must learn to brook being happier than I deserve.”
And with that, dear readers, our time with Austen has come to an end. These weekly newsletters are also coming to a temporary end. My work schedule has been shifting around so I can oversee my kids’ online learning. I’m working more on weekends, when I have fewer interruptions, and less on weekdays, and the time for this newsletter has gotten squeezed out. I do hope to be back in your inbox in 2021, but as I discussed back in week 11, this is not a time for planning. Hoping, yes; planning and promising, no.
I’m going to give Austen one more moment as our Thing of Joy this week, for that’s what this Persuasion reread has been for me, and I hope for you too. Did you catch this wonderful passage from chapter 23?
“At last Anne was at home again, and happier than any one in that house could have conceived. All the surprise and suspense, and every other painful part of the morning dissipated by this conversation, she re-entered the house so happy as to be obliged to find an alloy in some momentary apprehensions of its being impossible to last. An interval of meditation, serious and grateful, was the best corrective of everything dangerous in such high-wrought felicity; and she went to her room, and grew steadfast and fearless in the thankfulness of her enjoyment.”
May we all find some happiness in the coming months and, when we do, hold it tight – steadfast, fearless, and grateful.
Stay well, y’all, and keep fighting the good fights,
Kristen
Who can be in doubt of what followed? When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other’s ultimate comfort. This may be bad morality to conclude with, but I believe it to be truth; and if such parties succeed, how should a Captain Wentworth and an Anne Elliot, with the advantage of maturity of mind, consciousness of right, and one independent fortune between them, fail of bearing down every opposition? They might in fact, have borne down a great deal more than they met with, for there was little to distress them beyond the want of graciousness and warmth. Sir Walter made no objection, and Elizabeth did nothing worse than look cold and unconcerned. Captain Wentworth, with five-and-twenty thousand pounds, and as high in his profession as merit and activity could place him, was no longer nobody. He was now esteemed quite worthy to address the daughter of a foolish, spendthrift baronet, who had not had principle or sense enough to maintain himself in the situation in which Providence had placed him, and who could give his daughter at present but a small part of the share of ten thousand pounds which must be hers hereafter.
Sir Walter, indeed, though he had no affection for Anne, and no vanity flattered, to make him really happy on the occasion, was very far from thinking it a bad match for her. On the contrary, when he saw more of Captain Wentworth, saw him repeatedly by daylight, and eyed him well, he was very much struck by his personal claims, and felt that his superiority of appearance might be not unfairly balanced against her superiority of rank; and all this, assisted by his well-sounding name, enabled Sir Walter at last to prepare his pen, with a very good grace, for the insertion of the marriage in the volume of honour.
The only one among them, whose opposition of feeling could excite any serious anxiety was Lady Russell. Anne knew that Lady Russell must be suffering some pain in understanding and relinquishing Mr Elliot, and be making some struggles to become truly acquainted with, and do justice to Captain Wentworth. This however was what Lady Russell had now to do. She must learn to feel that she had been mistaken with regard to both; that she had been unfairly influenced by appearances in each; that because Captain Wentworth’s manners had not suited her own ideas, she had been too quick in suspecting them to indicate a character of dangerous impetuosity; and that because Mr Elliot’s manners had precisely pleased her in their propriety and correctness, their general politeness and suavity, she had been too quick in receiving them as the certain result of the most correct opinions and well-regulated mind. There was nothing less for Lady Russell to do, than to admit that she had been pretty completely wrong, and to take up a new set of opinions and of hopes.
There is a quickness of perception in some, a nicety in the discernment of character, a natural penetration, in short, which no experience in others can equal, and Lady Russell had been less gifted in this part of understanding than her young friend. But she was a very good woman, and if her second object was to be sensible and well-judging, her first was to see Anne happy. She loved Anne better than she loved her own abilities; and when the awkwardness of the beginning was over, found little hardship in attaching herself as a mother to the man who was securing the happiness of her other child.
Of all the family, Mary was probably the one most immediately gratified by the circumstance. It was creditable to have a sister married, and she might flatter herself with having been greatly instrumental to the connexion, by keeping Anne with her in the autumn; and as her own sister must be better than her husband’s sisters, it was very agreeable that Captain Wentworth should be a richer man than either Captain Benwick or Charles Hayter. She had something to suffer, perhaps, when they came into contact again, in seeing Anne restored to the rights of seniority, and the mistress of a very pretty landaulette; but she had a future to look forward to, of powerful consolation. Anne had no Uppercross Hall before her, no landed estate, no headship of a family; and if they could but keep Captain Wentworth from being made a baronet, she would not change situations with Anne.
It would be well for the eldest sister if she were equally satisfied with her situation, for a change is not very probable there. She had soon the mortification of seeing Mr Elliot withdraw, and no one of proper condition has since presented himself to raise even the unfounded hopes which sunk with him.
The news of his cousin Anne’s engagement burst on Mr Elliot most unexpectedly. It deranged his best plan of domestic happiness, his best hope of keeping Sir Walter single by the watchfulness which a son-in-law’s rights would have given. But, though discomfited and disappointed, he could still do something for his own interest and his own enjoyment. He soon quitted Bath; and on Mrs Clay’s quitting it soon afterwards, and being next heard of as established under his protection in London, it was evident how double a game he had been playing, and how determined he was to save himself from being cut out by one artful woman, at least.
Mrs Clay’s affections had overpowered her interest, and she had sacrificed, for the young man’s sake, the possibility of scheming longer for Sir Walter. She has abilities, however, as well as affections; and it is now a doubtful point whether his cunning, or hers, may finally carry the day; whether, after preventing her from being the wife of Sir Walter, he may not be wheedled and caressed at last into making her the wife of Sir William.
It cannot be doubted that Sir Walter and Elizabeth were shocked and mortified by the loss of their companion, and the discovery of their deception in her. They had their great cousins, to be sure, to resort to for comfort; but they must long feel that to flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.
Anne, satisfied at a very early period of Lady Russell’s meaning to love Captain Wentworth as she ought, had no other alloy to the happiness of her prospects than what arose from the consciousness of having no relations to bestow on him which a man of sense could value. There she felt her own inferiority very keenly. The disproportion in their fortune was nothing; it did not give her a moment’s regret; but to have no family to receive and estimate him properly, nothing of respectability, of harmony, of good will to offer in return for all the worth and all the prompt welcome which met her in his brothers and sisters, was a source of as lively pain as her mind could well be sensible of under circumstances of otherwise strong felicity. She had but two friends in the world to add to his list, Lady Russell and Mrs Smith. To those, however, he was very well disposed to attach himself. Lady Russell, in spite of all her former transgressions, he could now value from his heart. While he was not obliged to say that he believed her to have been right in originally dividing them, he was ready to say almost everything else in her favour, and as for Mrs Smith, she had claims of various kinds to recommend her quickly and permanently.
Her recent good offices by Anne had been enough in themselves, and their marriage, instead of depriving her of one friend, secured her two. She was their earliest visitor in their settled life; and Captain Wentworth, by putting her in the way of recovering her husband’s property in the West Indies, by writing for her, acting for her, and seeing her through all the petty difficulties of the case with the activity and exertion of a fearless man and a determined friend, fully requited the services which she had rendered, or ever meant to render, to his wife.
Mrs Smith’s enjoyments were not spoiled by this improvement of income, with some improvement of health, and the acquisition of such friends to be often with, for her cheerfulness and mental alacrity did not fail her; and while these prime supplies of good remained, she might have bid defiance even to greater accessions of worldly prosperity. She might have been absolutely rich and perfectly healthy, and yet be happy. Her spring of felicity was in the glow of her spirits, as her friend Anne’s was in the warmth of her heart. Anne was tenderness itself, and she had the full worth of it in Captain Wentworth’s affection. 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 in its domestic virtues than in its national importance.
THE END
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