A
little over two years ago, I wrote a series of posts, beginning with this one…
…in
which I made the claim that Anne Elliot sees the world through a glass darkly,
i.e., that she is vision impaired, and that her primary sensory engagement with
the world is through her acutely sensitive ears.
I
return now with an extension of the thesis of those earlier posts, as I take
note for the first time of JA’s subtle depiction of Anne’s HYPERsensitivity to
what Anne calls “noise” – i.e., it’s not just that Anne’s sense of hearing is
her primary mode of sensory perception—it’s that she pays a price for it---she
is easily overwhelmed by too much “noise”, as you will readily observe in the
following Persuasion passages:
Chapter
9: Her sensations on the discovery made her perfectly speechless. She could not
even thank him. She could only hang over little Charles, with most disordered
feelings. His kindness in stepping forward to her relief, the manner, the silence
in which it had passed, the little particulars of the circumstance, with the
conviction soon forced on her by the noise he was studiously making with the
child, that he meant to avoid hearing her thanks, and rather sought to testify
that her conversation was the last of his wants, produced such a confusion of
varying, but very painful agitation, as she could not recover from, till
enabled by the entrance of Mary and the Miss Musgroves to make over her little
patient to their cares, and leave the room. She could not stay.
The common
interpretation of the above scene is that Anne is overwhelmed with romantic feelings
by Wentworth’s gallant act in grabbing Charles off Anne’s back, as it suggests
to her that Wentworth still has feelings for her. And David Lodge, decades ago,
raised the stakes, and a number of eyebrows as well, by suggesting that Anne’s “perfectly
speechless” “disordered feelings” were evidence that Anne has just experienced
an orgasm, as a result of the sudden revival of long-repressed feelings for
Wentworth.
These
are perfectly plausible interpretations, but, as usual with Jane Austen, I
suggest that the author has also provided us with an alternative or
supplemental plausible interpretation, which is that Anne is physiologically
hypersensitive to sound, such that the “noise” of Wentworth playing with the
boy is itself agitating to Anne, and she can only recover sensory equilibrium when
she leaves the noisy room.
Even
stronger evidence of Anne’s vulnerability to aural sensory overload comes five
chapters later, when she first enters Bath, and then shortly thereafter enters
the Musgrove lodgings there:
Chapter
14: Everybody
has their taste in noises as well as in other matters; and sounds are quite
innoxious, or most distressing, by their sort rather than their quantity. When
Lady Russell not long afterwards, was entering Bath on a wet afternoon, and
driving through the long course of streets from the Old Bridge to Camden Place,
amidst the dash of other carriages, the heavy rumble of carts and drays, the
bawling of newspapermen, muffin-men and milkmen, and the ceaseless clink of
pattens, she made no complaint. No, these were noises which belonged to the
winter pleasures; her spirits rose under their influence; and like Mrs
Musgrove, she was feeling, though not saying, that after being long in the
country, nothing could be so good for her as a little quiet cheerfulness.
Anne did not share these feelings.
She persisted in a very determined, though very silent disinclination for Bath;
caught the first dim view of the extensive buildings, smoking in rain, without
any wish of seeing them better; felt their progress through the streets to be,
however disagreeable, yet too rapid; for who would be glad to see her when she
arrived? And looked back, with fond regret, to the bustles of Uppercross and the
seclusion of Kellynch.
….Lady
Russell and Anne paid their compliments to them once, when Anne could not but
feel that Uppercross was already quite alive again. Though neither Henrietta,
nor Louisa, nor Charles Hayter, nor Captain Wentworth were there, the room
presented as strong a contrast as could be wished to the last state she had
seen it in. Immediately
surrounding Mrs Musgrove were the little Harvilles, whom she was sedulously
guarding from the tyranny of the two children from the Cottage, expressly arrived
to amuse them. On one side was a table occupied by some chattering girls,
cutting up silk and gold paper; and on the other were tressels and trays,
bending under the weight of brawn and cold pies, where riotous boys were
holding high revel; the whole completed by a roaring Christmas fire, which
seemed determined to be heard, in spite of all the noise of the others. Charles
and Mary also came in, of course, during their visit, and 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.
Anne, judging from her own
temperament, would have deemed such a domestic hurricane a bad restorative of
the nerves, which Louisa's illness must have so greatly shaken. But Mrs
Musgrove, who got Anne near her on purpose to thank her most cordially, again
and again, for all her attentions to them, concluded a short recapitulation of
what she had suffered herself by observing, with a happy glance round the room,
that after all she had gone through, nothing was so likely to do her good as a
little quiet cheerfulness at home.”
One
can count in that passage a dozen varied descriptions of Anne’s extremely negative
reactions to the many sounds of Bath—both on the streets and in those lodgings—and
an explicit contrast is drawn between Lady Russell’s enjoyment of those same “noises”,
and Anne’s being driven nearly to distraction by them!
To hammer
home the point forcefully, Jane Austen gives us this one final example six
chapters later still:
Chapter
20: Either from the consciousness, however, that his friend had recovered, or
from other consciousness, he went no farther; and Anne who, in spite of the
agitated voice in which the latter part had been uttered, and in spite of all
the various noises of the room, the almost ceaseless slam of the door, and
ceaseless buzz of persons walking through, had distinguished every word, was
struck, gratified, confused, and beginning to breathe very quick, and feel an
hundred things in a moment. …
I
wrote in my 2013 posts about how at the dawn of the Romantic Era, there was a
special awareness that those with impaired vision developed compensatory
increased sensitivity in hearing---but I had not then read closely enough in Persuasion to notice that JA realized
better than anyone that this heightened aural sensitivity came with a price,
which was vulnerability to aural overload. As for that price, somewhere in my
2013 posts I also mentioned that Fanny Price was very similar to Anne in this
same way --- making me wonder whether there was not, in JA’s real life, someone
(perhaps herself?) who was this way?
To
delve into this more deeply, I checked in the usual online archives and
databases, to see if anyone else had made similar observations, and I found a
number of them, which did indeed illuminate things, as you will now see.
First,
here is an excellent excerpt from a May 2000 post by Dorothy Gannon in Janeites
that fits perfectly with my thesis:
“Last
Sunday an article appeared…on 'highly sensitive persons.' …These people are
overwhelmed by loud noise, crowds, disturbed by things like fluorescent lighting,
etc. It's a physiological trait, something to do with how the brain processes
stimulation, and affects something like 25% of the population, to varying
degrees. There was a quiz you could take to discover where you stand in the
spectrum. I suspect Austen herself was one of these people, though not to the
extent of, say, a Fanny Price. It's been
my personal experience that one can harden oneself, so to speak, against these
stimulants, through exposure. One can also simply pretend one is not bothered.
I suspect Austen, if she was an 'h.s.p.' may have done this as a matter of
discipline, not wanting to give in to a 'weakness.' Without the status of
artist, and as the youngest daughter, an impoverished spinster at everyone's
beck and call, such a temperament, if she had one, was not likely to be much
indulged.”
In
2014, Diana Birchall reported in Janeites about a blog re: researching sound in
Virginia Woolf:
“…the
blog is taking into consideration the music that influenced Woolf, but also the
cacophony of street sounds, or "music," in Mrs. Dalloway in particular. Of course there are many studies
of the music Jane Austen listened to, but I don't think anyone has studied
sound in her novels, and I think they should. I was thinking it would be
very different from the sound in Woolf's novels, who as a modernist living in
London was assailed (and she was sensitive to noise) by a cacophony indeed,
cars backfiring and so on. But then I remembered that, pre-industrial and
rural though Jane Austen's world was, she has some "sound" passages
herself.”
Diana
then quoted the same above passage re Lady Russell’s enjoyment of Bath’s
cacophony, but did not pick up on Anne’s contemporaneous distress.
Turning
to the academics, Lynn Festa in “The noise in Mansfield Park” in Persuasions #36 (2014) writes the following
excellent and thought provoking comments about Fanny Price’s and Jane Austen’s sensitivities
to “noise”:
“In
Mansfield Park, Austen asks--compels--us to listen to noise and to think about
what it might mean. Fanny may be stunned by the cacophony at Portsmouth, but
the narrator anatomizes the slamming of doors, the shudder of thin walls, the
stomping and hallooing, offering us as detailed a sense of the Prices' house as
any modern sociological study of the impact of noise pollution upon the poor. …But
what counts as noise? Defining noise is not as simple as it sounds. The word
"noise" in Austen's time could refer both to pleasant and unpleasant
sounds; in Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary, it means "any kind of
sound." And indeed, unless they are obtrusive, noises often pass
unremarked. Austen's letters record snatches of conversation, but they only occasionally
register the sonic backdrop or soundscape of her world: the noises of domestic
life--the clatter of pots, the flap of drying laundry, the creaking of floor boards,
the crackle of a fire--or the sounds of the countryside--the bleating of sheep,
the hammering of laborers, the rumble of a farm cart (not carrying a harp). And
of course we all know the famous story of the un-oiled hinge that served as a
primitive intruder alert system at Chawton. When Maria Bertram finds the
distance of the church from Sotherton to be a blessing because '"the
annoyance of the bells must be terrible'", we recognize her lack of piety,
but also glimpse how one might have experienced the sounds of village life. It
is difficult to capture the ephemeral nature of sound; we can more easily
describe what Austen ate than what exactly she heard. And even the most
meticulously reconstructed soundscape cannot tell us which sounds Austen
herself considered to be noise. For noises are personal: one person's music, as
any parent with a teenager knows, is another person's noise, which risks
leaving us with something like Justice Potter Stewart's definition of
pornography in an aural register: "I know it when I hear it."
However,
Festa did not reach the point of suggesting that Anne Elliot might be
hypersensitive to sound, because Festa misread the above-quoted Chapter 14
passage, and inferred that it is Lady Russell who is overwhelmed by the noise
of Uppercoss, when it is actually Anne who is so distressed by it:
“As
Austen herself observes in Persuasion,
"Every body has their taste in noises as well as in other matters; and
sounds are quite innoxious, or most distressing, by their sort rather than
their quantity". Although overwhelmed by the pandemonium in the Musgroves
home at Uppercross, with its chattering girls, riotous boys, and "roaring
Christmas fire, which seemed determined to be heard, in spite of all the noise
of the others," Lady Russell nevertheless greets the hubbub of
Bath--"the dash of other carriages, the heavy rumble of carts and drays,
the bawling of newsmen, muffin-men and milk-men, and the ceaseless clink of pattens"--with
delight. The designation of something as noise is a subjective call…”
It’s
easy to fall into that error, because, in Persuasion,
as in all of JA’s novels, we experience the fictional world through the
senses and mind of the heroine, and Anne is especially prone to rationalizing her
own experiences, especially those aspects of herself she tries not to notice,
and displacing her own reactions onto others. A perfect example is in Anne’s
reaction to the roaring Christmas scene at Uppercross: “Anne, judging from her own temperament,
would have deemed such a domestic hurricane a bad restorative of the nerves,
which Louisa's illness must have so greatly shaken.” Domestic hurricane indeed!
Penny
Gay in “The Romanticism of Persuasion” in Sydney
Studies (2008), actually overlooks that crucial sentence, and infers that
Anne actually enjoys all the noise at Uppercross, when the opposite is the case!
And I
highly recommend “Lost in a Book: Jane Austen's Persuasion" by Adela Pinch in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 97-117, (which
Festa apparently was unaware of, despite its strong overlap with her article) which
includes the following acute observations harking back to Hennedy’s 1973
article which first prompted my 2013 series of posts re Anne’s vision
impairment:
“Persuasion is striking for the ways in
which the presences of other people are apprehended as insistently sensory
phenomena. … What interests
me…is the way in which the novel foregrounds the sensory nature of perception.
In the disquisition on noises which 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…. In this novel, in which scenes of overhearing are so
important (the hedge-row scene, for example, and the climactic scene at the
White Hart), noise and sound have special prominence. Spoken language is often apprehended
as sheer sound. This passage is an urban pastoral in the tradition of Swift,
where instead of pastoral sounds the ear is met with the sounds of the town,
which are ranged in a list, from "the dash of other carriages" to
"the ceaseless clink of pattens." Both the listing and the conjunction
of sound with the word "ceaseless" (a conjunction which will occur again)
evoke an atmosphere of continuous, unhierarchized sound….. I'm interested in the way in which
Austen's representation of Anne's innerness takes the form of an inwardness
that oddly seems only penetrated from the outside with difficulty….”
Finally,
it is Peter Graham who, albeit in passing, comes closest among the academics to
picking up on Anne’s idiosyncratic reaction to “noise” in his 2004 Persuasions Online article “Born to
Diverge: An Evolutionary Perspective on Sibling Personality Development in
Austen's Novels”, when Graham describes the roaring Christmas scene
at Uppercross:
“It
is a “fine family piece” in fact, despite the overstimulating effect it might
have on a fastidious introvert.”
My
response is that Graham is correct, Anne is indeed a fastidious introvert, but
I also assert that Anne’s hypersensitivity to sound is much more than just that
---Jane Austen, that uncannily perceptive and sensitive observer of all things
human, meant us to discern that beneath the psychological, there was also a physiological
basis!
Perhaps
Festa was correct after all in her suggestion that JA herself was
hypersensitive to “noise”—if so, then, unlike Anne Elliot, with her endless
rationalizing, JA’s hypersensitivity was more blessing than curse, because JA
managed, by artistic will, to subjugate it, and to make it a servant to her
fiction-writing process!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment