“They were actually on the
same sofa, for Mrs Musgrove had most readily made room for him; they were
divided only by Mrs Musgrove. It was no insignificant barrier, indeed. Mrs
Musgrove was of a comfortable, substantial size, infinitely more fitted by
nature to express good cheer and good humour, than tenderness and sentiment;
and while the agitations of Anne's slender form, and pensive face, may be
considered as very completely screened, Captain Wentworth should be allowed
some credit for the self-command with which he attended to her large fat
sighings over the destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for.
Personal size and mental
sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large bulky figure has as
good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the
world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason
will patronize in vain--which taste cannot tolerate--which ridicule will seize.”
Many take the position
that it must be Jane Austen-- a slender person all her life, by all accounts
--- who personally felt surprisingly judgmental feelings toward those less
svelte, and that this passage was the most overt expression of those feelings,
which we also find traces of in JA’s letters.
I tend to think that Jane
Austen the person did harbor unkindly
thoughts toward heavy people, but it has been several years since I realized
that, regardless of Jane Austen’s personal feelings, the phrase “large fat
sighings” was intended by Jane Austen to reflect Anne Elliot’s subjective
perceptions. In JA’s masterful psychological portraiture, they arise from Anne’s
strong, repressed anger over being blocked from Wentworth’s line of sight, and
vice versa, by Mrs. Musgrove’s formidable bulk seated in the middle of the sofa
between them.
And that second quoted paragraph
reflects the struggle in Anne’s mind, as first she finds Mrs. Musgrove’s histrionic
grieving ridiculous, but then her reason/conscience argues that heavy people
can also feel deep affliction--but then, Anne’s anger fuels her finding some irrational
justification for sticking to her initial harsh judgment—sometimes, she
decides, appearances do trump
substance, when ridiculous is just too ridiculous.
And, if we dig a little
deeper in Persuasion, we find out
that Anne does not make this harsh judgment out of the blue, it has been set up
by comments made to Anne by sister Mary three chapters earlier, in Chapter 5,
as Mary describes a dinner out with her inlaws:
"Nothing remarkable.
One always knows beforehand what the dinner will be, and who will be there; and
it is so very uncomfortable not having a carriage of one's own. Mr and Mrs
Musgrove took me, and we were so crowded! They are both so very large, and take
up so much room; and Mr Musgrove always sits forward. So, there was I, crowded
into the back seat with Henrietta and Louise; and I think it very likely that
my illness to-day may be owing to it."
Mary has no qualms about being
explicit about the cause of her discomfort. And if you think about it, it makes
perfect sense that both Anne and Mary should be judgmental, each in their own
way, of the appearance of other people less blessed than the Elliots with good
looks and a nice figure. After all, they both grew up in a household headed by
Sir Walter, the world’s leading authority (or so he thinks himself) on good
looks, and on the great, even decisive, importance of those good looks in
judging the value of a person, second only perhaps to that person’s social
status.
So we can also see that
Anne, for all she thinks herself superior to, and different from, Mary and her
father, and above their petty, small-minded, un-Christian complaints, resentments, and judgments, is a
whole lot more like them than she would ever want to admit.
I mention all of the
above, because of something I noticed for the first time in Sense & Sensibility, which, upon
examination, I realized, and will explain, below, is the covert forerunner of
Mrs. Musgrove’s fat sighings—between 1811 and 1816, Jane Austen grew bolder in
her depiction of uncharitable impulses in her virtuous heroines.
More than a few Janeites
have over the years noticed the similarity between the personalities of Mrs.
Jennings and Mrs. Musgrove—jolly, expansive mother-figures who dote on their
families and are not shy about expressing their
feelings in company, often to the chagrin of the restrained, discreet
young heroines through whose eyes we see those matrons.
But how many Janeites have
also noticed the strong physical
similarity between Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Musgrove? What I realized today is that Mary Musgrove’s
report of the carriage ride with her in-laws the Musgroves that made her ill,
and Anne Elliot’s frustration sitting on the sofa with Mrs. Musgrove and
Wentworth, are actually not only connected to each other, but are also both echoes
of a much earlier uncomfortable carriage ride described in Chapter 26 of
S&S, when the narrator recounts the beginning of the long trip from Barton
Cottage to London, with Elinor, Marianne, and Mrs. Jennings sharing some tight traveling
accommodations:
"ELINOR COULD NOT
FIND HERSELF in the carriage with Mrs. Jennings, and beginning a journey to
London under her protection, and as her guest, without wondering at her own
situation, so short had their acquaintance with that lady been, so wholly
unsuited were they in age and DISPOSITION, and so many had been her objections
against such a measure only a few days before!”
I’ve read that passage
many times over the past 20 years, but for some reason this time, for the first
time, I did a doubletake at the phrase “Elinor could not find herself”—was I
just imagining it, or was this the prototype for Anne Elliot sitting on the
sofa with Mrs. Musgrove? I.e., taken out
of context from the rest of that compound sentence, those first five words
almost sound like Elinor literally could not find or locate her own body, because
she was sitting next to, and to some extent under, the body of Mrs. Jennings,
squeezed into tight quarters in the carriage!
Of course, upon further
parsing of the entire sentence, the normative meaning becomes clear, i.e.,
“Elinor could not find, i.e., think of, herself in the carriage …without
wondering, etc.”. However, knowing Jane Austen’s love of having it both ways as
an author, I think it a compelling secondary interpretation that Mrs. Jennings,
sitting next to Elinor, is also partially sitting on Elinor!---in the same way that a heavy person sitting next to a
slim person on a modern airliner, where everyone is squeezed in like sardines
from the getgo, cannot help but infringe on the personal space of the
neighboring passenger.
Sound like a reach on my
part? Well, consider how this seemingly wacky alternative reading fits
remarkably well with other textual evidence in S&S. First and foremost, we
all know that Mrs. Jennings is not petite: “Mrs. Jennings, Lady Middleton's mother, was a
goodhumoured, merry, fat, elderly woman, who talked a great deal, seemed very
happy, and rather vulgar.”
Mrs. Jennings’s bulk is
part of what could almost be a caricature of the merry older widow. Could this
have anything to do with Elinor’s negative thoughts in the carriage? Turns out that JA very quietly set up the idea
of a physically uncomfortable carriage ride to London in the immediately
preceding Chapter 25, when we learn a crucial detail indicating that Mrs. Jennings
is going to be squeezing Elinor and Marianne into her carriage with her:
“It will only be sending
Betty by the coach, and I hope I can afford THAT. We three shall be able to go
very well in my chaise…”
So per Mrs. Jennings there
would not be room in the carriage for herself, Marianne, Elinor, AND Betty. But,
while Mrs. Jennings may very well believe that with Betty removed from the
carriage, there will be plenty of room for the Dashwood sisters and Mrs.
Jennings, I believe JA is giving us a very strong hint –via her ambiguous
sentence structure--that Elinor would strenuously but silently, disagree vehemently
on that point.
And note that JA, the
mistress of literary economy, only needs five words to convey all of this extra
meaning, and these five words, read against the grain as I suggest, are also
true to Elinor’s character—she is not her sister Marianne, and she is not Mary
Elliot either, in that she does not say what she really feels, everything is
guarded, coded, and careful—and so “Elinor could not find herself” is the
perfect expression of both her character and her feelings.
I Googled to see whether I
was the first scholar to ever address this question, and I find that my young
friend Ophelia Murphy (who was one of the two grad students who, along with
their supervising professor, Fiona Stafford, invited me to give my first public
talk about Jane Austen, at the Oxford Romantic Realignments Seminar, in June
2007), in her recent, erudite and thought provoking book, Jane Austen The Reader, quoted
that very passage in S&S Chapter 26, and then wrote about it from a
different angle:
“Part of the reason for
the disparate opinions of Elinor and her mother arises from their different understandings of the Dashwood sisters’
position in society. A winter excursion to London was in many respects an
important signifier of wealth during Austen’s lifetime. …This is the ‘condition
of life’ in which Mrs. Dashwood mentally places her daughters, a sharp contrast
to the ‘situation’ in which Elinor finds herself in Mrs. Jennings’s carriage,
where she and her sister literally take the place of the maid Betty. Unlike her
mother and younger sister, Elinor understands only too well her diminished
status in a society in which wealth is the paramount signifier of personal
importance. Her sensitivity to the ways in which she and her sister are likely
to be perceived and judged by others may be seen as the source of her unease.
Her response is to curtail her expectations….” END QUOTE FROM MURPHY BOOK
Here we see Jane Austen’s
genius in full flower, because I believe Olivia is 100% correct, and onto
something very important, in her explanation for how the carriage ride to
London is a metaphor for the living situation of Elinor and Marianne—surely
Jane Austen did indeed intend that interpretation. But…when you layer on the covert depiction of
Mrs. Jennings literally sitting on top of Elinor, such that Elinor cannot even
see or feel the rest of her own body as she sits, it dovetails perfectly with
Olivia’s metaphorical interpretation—the carriage ride is a kind of physical
oppression which Elinor mightily seeks to stoically endure, but, because she is
even more tightly wound than Anne Elliot, no “fat sighing” thought bubbles up
from her subconscious, it only comes
out muted, hidden beneath a benign meaning.
The metaphor Olivia sees is
extended by realizing that Elinor is a lightweight not only in body but also in finances and social status, and since
her father’s death she has increasingly spent her life being pushed around, oppressed,
and given no space, by those around her, even nice, kind people like Mrs.
Jennings.
So, in those five words, we
get a poetic encapsulation of Elinor’s life as she experiences it at that
moment—she could not FIND herself—and it also seems to me that Jane Austen was 150 years ahead of her
time in using this expression as well. It of course became a cliché of the
Sixties (the 1960s, that is) for young people to go off on adventures of
various kinds, outside-the-box (or perhaps, outside-the-carriage?) attempts to achieve some mysterious alchemy, whereby they
would suddenly have an epiphany and “find themselves”, i.e., find their true selves.
And when we look at Elinor
Dashwood at that crucial juncture of the action in S&S, as she sits under Mrs. Jennings and ruminates with
trepidation and doubt on what will happen in London, we may fairly say that she
is a young person experiencing an identity crisis, as all the things she loved
have been taken away from her, and she sees her sister having the same
experience, and Elinor sees little hope for the future at that instant.
This is truly the prose poetry
of Jane Austen at its most perfect---beneath the words of ordinary mundane
life, which seem to be merely practical, we find, just under the surface, and
putting on our double-take spectacles as readers, some very deep metaphysical
angst.
And speaking of poetry, in
this post I will only mention in passing the connections between this literal
carriage ride to London and the metaphorical, carnal “carriage ride” that some “Queen
Mab” (like, say, Mrs. Jennings, a very droll Queen Mab, given the grotesque
contrast between her and Shakespeare’s tiny Queen!) would try to take Marianne
(and perhaps Elinor too?) on, leading to a true “vortex of dissipation”, as the
young JA described London.
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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