In followup to my recent post about Anne Elliot’s
hypersensitivity to noise… http://tinyurl.com/oc6aq29 …I received a very interesting reply from
Lynn Festa (whose recent Persuasions article
I had cited therein), after I brought my post to her attention.
First, Lynn alerted me to Strange Fits of Passion, Adela
Pinch's 1998 book which expanded upon Pinch’s 1993 article that I had cited.
Here’s Pinch’s interesting expansion, at p. 149 of her book:
“What
interests me…is the way in which [Persuasion]
foregrounds the sensory nature of this knowledge [of society-wide events]. In
the disquisition on noises that Austen interjects right after her picture of
the noisy family-piece at Uppercross, she highlights the sensory, and the
pleasurable or unpleasurable, aspects of noise: ‘Every body has their taste in
noises…’ In this novel, in which overhearing is such an important way of
knowing (in the hedgerow scene, for example, and in the climactic scene at the
White Hart), noise and sound have special prominence. Spoken language is often
apprehended as sheer sound. ….Anne is
often so occupied with her own rumination and recollection that impressions
from the outside seem to have a hard time finding their way in. This is not to
say that Anne seems self absorbed; rather, the way Austen frequently represents
Anne’s consciousness is as absorption. While many readers have stressed Anne’s
acute perceptions of the outside world. I’m interested in the way in which
Austen’s representations of Anne’s innerness takes the form of an inwardness that oddly seems only
penetrated from the outside with difficulty…’Anne found herself’…has a way of
suggesting that what precedes these moments of contact is a state somewhat like
unconsciousness: it is an absorption within… she appears as someone who does
not want to know anything but what she already knows… at the White Hart hotel,
Anne, absorbed in her thoughts, becomes ‘gradually sensible’ that Captain
Harville is addressing her. Sensations from the outside are often surprises,
like physical shocks, as when she is ‘electrified’ by Mrs. Croft’s suddenly
saying something of interest…[Anne’s and Wentworth’s] renewed courtship takes place
through moments of physical contact…which are both erotic and strangely
intrusive, described as impingements from the outside world. It seems fitting
that their whole re-courtship is framed by the fact that Wentworth’s family—and
Wentworth himself-have taken over Anne’s house.
This
combination of eroticism, claustrophobia, and sensation can be found above all
in the scene in Chapter 9 in which Wentworth removes the child from Anne’s
back…the agitation it produces…seems to come not only from Anne’s confusion
about Wentworth’s motives…but also from the sheer physicality of this moment of
contact…stresses how removed Anne’s experience of Wentworth is from an everyday
knowledge of another’s presence…the presence of her lover is apprehended as
invasive, much as the presence of others is…”
END QUOTE FROM PINCH BOOK
As an
aside, I find almost uncanny the strong resonance of Pinch’s final observation
about Wentworth’s intervention to remove the boy from Anne’s back as
“invasive”, in light of my other recent post, about Mr. Elton’s drunken
advances on Emma during their Christmas Eve carriage ride with Mr. Elton, as a
metaphor for Napoleon’s invasion of Russia that was defeated by the Russian
winter. It makes perfect sense, as I consider that resonance, that JA would
have continued to play with that metaphor of sexual invasion in Persuasion, with its Napoleonic
timeline, written right after Emma.
But
back to Anne Elliot’s hypersensitivity to noise---Lynn Festa also alerted me to
the following relevant discussion in Deidre Lynch’s 1998 book The Economy of Character:
“In Persuasion, rooms filled with people are
experienced by Anne Elliot as stages for unintelligible sound: the fashionable
world’s ‘nothing-saying’ is apprehended less often as an aggregate of distinct
voices, more frequently as a ‘ceaseless buzz’ or a hum…Austen shows how these
noise machines give their female operators and auditors the space for private
life…an imperviousness to the outside world’s demands and noises…”
What
I find both fascinating and stimulating, is that
Pinch and Lynch (nice coincidental rhyme there!) both take a psychological
approach to explaining Anne's remoteness from, and defensiveness toward, other
people. That is in contrast to my having been struck so strongly by the sheer,
almost inevitable, "physiologicality" of Anne’s experience. And so, as Festa has prompted me to now consider
Anne from both perspectives, I
believe Austen, master psychologist that she was--a Regency Era Oliver Sacks,
if you will---intended a very sophisticated combination of the two perspectives
on Anne’s experience of the world. I.e.,
Anne is JA’s brilliant depiction—entirely by inobtrusive showing rather than
didactic telling--- of a woman lost inside herself, both by the way her sensory
organs operate, but also psychologically. And it makes perfect sense that these
two forms of inner absorption would constitute an unfortunate closed loop, with
the physiological and the psychological deficits amplifying each other---and it’s
impossible to tell which came first. That's why Anne's SO interior--she
is not fighting to overcome her sensory deficits, she has long since retreated deeply
inside them, and never quite emerges from them, even after she “blooms” in the
second half of the novel.
Finally, Lynn Festa questioned my claim that it is only Anne
who did not like the noise at the Uppercross Christmas. She suggested instead that
Lady Russell also didn’t like all that
noise. Festa based that assertion (which I now recall has been made by other
Austen scholars as well) on Lady Russell’s making the following emphatic
assertion immediately after the description of all the noises in that family
scene:
"I shall remember, in future,' said Lady Russell.. 'not
to call at Uppercross in the Christmas holidays.' "
I had overlooked that speech, which, at first, does seem to negate my claim that it was
only Anne who hated the noise at Uppercross Christmas. In that same vein, when
I looked again at the preceding passage, there was what seemed to be an example of Lady Russell’s frustration at the high
noise level:
“Mr Musgrove made a
point of paying his respects to Lady Russell, and sat down close to her for ten
minutes, talking with a very raised voice, but from the clamour of the children
on his knees, generally in vain. It was a fine family-piece.”
That “fine” seems
sarcastic, as in Laurel & Hardy’s famous “another fine mess” – i.e., it was apparently not very “fine” for Lady
Russell not to be able to hear a
compliment being paid to her.
But, upon closer analysis, those two passages actually support my claim that it is Anne, and
only Anne, who hates noise. It’s an amazing tour
de force on JA’s part.
First, note that Anne’s disliking the noise in that Christmas
scene at Uppercross is entirely consistent with Anne disliking noise at several
other points in the novel. However, in contrast, Lady Russell does not have a consistent aversion to noise.
In fact, she actually (as Festa acknowledges) enjoys the street noise in Bath.
Thus, it would be curious and inconsistent for Lady Russell to have such
opposite reactions to the same sort of stimuli.
But second and much more important, Lady Russell does not state the reason why she doesn't
want to call at Uppercross at a future Christmas, she simply states her
resolution not to do so! It is Anne who blithely assumes (clearly, I suggest, because
of her own sensory overload issues) that Lady Russell also feels overwhelmed by the noise there. And Anne actually makes
the same blithe assumption regarding Louisa Musgrove’s sensitivity to sound.
But, I suggest, it's an unjustified assumption by Anne in both cases.
And here’s the kicker, the gorgeous irony that JA hid in
plain sight in that same Christmas noise scene. Read again the following, and
ask yourself a simple question—how does Anne, who is the observer, have any
idea as to what Mr. Musgrove was saying to Lady Russell:
“Mr Musgrove made a
point of paying his respects to Lady Russell, and sat down close to her for ten
minutes, talking with a very raised voice, but from the clamour of the children
on his knees, generally in vain. It was a fine family-piece.”
If it’s so damned noisy in the room, and if Mr. Musgrove is
speaking “with a very raised voice” “in vain” to Lady Russell sitting right
next to him, then it means that Anne the listener, who is sitting at a further
distance, has merely guessed that Mr.
Musgrove was paying Lady Russell “his respects”!
And that leads us to ask, what if his “very raised voice” has
another explanation? What if it was not a reaction to the noisy room, but instead
was a clue that Mr. Musgrove was speaking to Lady Russell in anger? After all, in the real world, it’s not only people trying
to be heard over a din who speak “with a very raised voice”, it’s also angry
people!
And, following that alternative line of inference to its
logical conclusion, if Mr. Musgrove did speak to Lady Russell in anger, and if
it was because they were engaged in an argument, which did not get resolved
amicably, then that would be a
powerful alternative explanation for Lady Russell’s resolution not to return to
Uppercross—for Christmas, or at any other time, for that matter!
But, you should then be asking me, what in the world were
they arguing about? And that’s what
finally brings us to the kicker, i.e., the textual wink which quietly confirms
that Jane Austen intended us to go through this entire chain of analysis, and
to end by asking this question re Lady Russell and Mr. Musgrove.
So now, I ask you who know Persuasion well--is there any other plausible reason you can think
of, for Lady Russell and Mr. Musgrove to have words, such that she would
resolve not to visit her old friends and neighbors at Uppercross at a future
Christmas? What could tick Lady Russell
off that much?
I suspect that there is more than one plausible explanation,
but here’s the one that occurred to me straight off. We know that Lady
Russell’s hot button issue, the one that gets her dander up, is her extreme
sensitivity to any slighting of the dignity of the Elliots. She’s a snob about
a title, and that’s why, eight years earlier, she presumed to persuade Anne not
to marry the commoner Wentworth. Snobbery is Lady Russell’s defining trait in
the novel.
And we are not yet at the end of the novel, when Lady
Russell to some extent repents her meddling. And so she is still just like Sir
Walter, just like Elizabeth, and (even, although less obviously) just like Anne,
in her snobbery. And now I ask you, what
do we already know about the Musgroves’s attentiveness—or lack thereof-- to the
“high status” of the House of Elliot? I bet you also now recollect that we
heard the following elaborate meditation by Anne on that very subject, way back
in Chapter 6, when Anne first visits Uppercross after her father and sister
move to Bath:
“Anne
had not wanted this visit to Uppercross, to learn that a 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. She had never been
staying there before, without being struck by it, or without wishing that other
Elliots could have her advantage in seeing how unknown, or unconsidered there,
were the affairs which at Kellynch Hall were treated as of such general
publicity and pervading interest; yet, with all this experience, she believed
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; for certainly,
coming as she did, with a heart full of the subject which had been completely
occupying both houses in Kellynch for many weeks, she had expected rather more
curiosity and sympathy than she found in the separate but very similar remark
of Mr and Mrs Musgrove: "So, Miss Anne, Sir Walter and your sister are
gone; and what part of Bath do you think they will settle in?" and this,
without much waiting for an answer; or in the young ladies' addition of,
"I hope we shall be in Bath in the winter; but remember, papa, if we do
go, we must be in a good situation: none of your Queen Squares for us!" or
in the anxious supplement from Mary, of--"Upon my word, I shall be pretty
well off, when you are all gone away to be happy at Bath!"
She
could only resolve to avoid such self-delusion in future, and think with
heightened gratitude of the extraordinary blessing of having one such truly
sympathising friend as Lady Russell.”
So,
we may conjecture that the plain-spoken, down-to-earth Mr. Musgrove has ruffled
Lady Russell’s feathers by his lack of interest in Sir Walter’s social
engagements with the Dalrymples, and the like—she has responded in a huff, and
he has in turn let her know that he could care less about Sir Walter and the
Dalrymples! Or something along those lines.
I
could just end there with a Q.E.D., but before I finish, I want to go
still one step further, and suggest that this assumption by the heroine of Persuasion is exactly the same kind of heroine’s
epistemological error that is enacted explicitly and repeatedly in all of JA’s
novels, but above all, in Emma. It’s
yet another instance when an Austen heroine assumes she knows the thoughts and
meanings of other people, but she is wrong---or, at least, she does not have
enough information to be sure of her blithe assumption.
As
those familiar with my theory of the shadow stories of all six Austen novels,
the heroine in each novel, who is of course the overwhelmingly focal
consciousness, projects onto others her own experience.
Anne
is the heroine least likely to be viewed in this skeptical light, which, to me,
is a sign of JA’s evolution as a writer—after making Emma’s cluelessness the
central theme of her eponymous novel, JA took on the challenge of making Anne’s
cluelessness much harder to detect, and yet have it be as serious and pervasive
as Emma’s! It makes JA’s early death that
much more tragic, as we can see that she never stopped experimenting as a
writer, she always kept pushing the edge of the envelope, in her endless game
of theme and variation, literarily speaking.
Regards, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
‘
P.S.:
Apropos the connection between Anne Elliot’s hypersensitivity to noise and the
real life Jane Austen, I also want to mention that I found the following very
interesting passage in JA’s letter to CEA dated 9/15/1813:
“Now
for Bath. Poor F. Cage has suffered a good deal from her accident. The noise of
the White Hart was terrible to her. They will keep her quiet, I dare say. She
is not so much delighted with the place as the rest of the party; probably, as
she says herself, from having been less well, but she thinks she should like it
better in the season. The streets are very empty now, and the shops not so gay
as she expected. They are at No. 1 Henrietta Street, the corner of Laura Place,
and have no acquaintance at present but the Bramstons.
Le
Faye cites Chapman’s picking up on the obvious parallel between poor F. Cage
and Louisa Musgrove, but I noticed that JA on more than one occasion in her
letters refers in a negative way to places she finds herself staying as “noisy”—food
for speculation…..
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