beehammer

Oh, Persuasion!

It’s not one of my favorites, I have to admit. I think I first read it in college, on my own, and I wasn't as pleased with it as I might have been. I saw someone raving about it somewhere, though, and gave it another shot recently. It's still not my favorite, but I appreciate it a lot more. I’m pretty sure the emotional distance--one I don't get with Pride and Prejudice--is because Anne is really the only... remotely sympathetic or interesting person we spend much time with at all? It’s like if Pride & Prejudice just had Lizzie--no Charlotte, no Jane, no Bingley, no Miss Darcy.

But I do really, really appreciate what Austen is doing with it.

Like Pride and Prejudice just absolutely whales on the fucking abysmal circumstances of a woman with no real economic expectations, even if she’s otherwise perfect. “Aren’t Jane and Lizzie awesome? Don’t you just love them? Well guess what’s gonna happen to the whole family once dad dies if nobody marries this assclown cousin! :)” “Look at how many lives Wickham has ruined, guess what’s gonna happen to him! Fucking nothing! :)” “Sure would be a shame if Bingley and Jane, a genuine love match, didn’t happen because she has relatives who live in Cheapside. :)”

But with Persuasion, like Austen is coming for, like, the entire institution of marriage or something. The advice Anne gets when she refuses Wentworth is actually, really very solid advice. I mean, her father threatens to cut her off if she marries Wentworth, and he’s the sort of asshole who absolutely would be like “Anne who? Doesn’t ring a bell?” until (maybe) Wentworth made it big. Conceivably Lady Russell could shame him into cards on Christmas and Easter, but given how he treats Anne as-is, yeah, he’d probably disown her if she married against his wishes. And that’s a thing he can do, even though everyone agrees he’s the last person who should be in charge of his own life, never mind his adult daughters’ lives or an entire estate full of people!

When Wentworth talks about his career, yes, he’s dedicated and smart and hard-working, but he’s also been extremely lucky. He could just as easily have died, as Dick Musgrove did, or been seriously injured, as Harville was, in which case Anne could very well have ended up like Mrs. Smith, eking out a living knitting tchotchkes for the rich and sympathetic, or a professional companion like Mrs. Clay.

Which, the Harvilles seem to be doing okay for themselves. They’re happy. But Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Clay have both been reduced to fairly miserable, precarious existences through no fault of their own. Like, Mrs. Clay’s ticket out is hooking up with a broke-rich jackass who reduces her to tears without even realizing why she’s crying. She’s Anne without the pride or the fortitude.

Mrs. Smith swallows a warning to Anne about how awful William Elliott is because, well, at least this way Anne gets to stay in her own house, and he probably can’t be so much worse than Sir Walter and Elizabeth are being now, and maybe Mrs. Smith won’t wind up begging on the streets. And maybe Anne can actually reform the bastard, who knows! Mrs. Smith loves Anne and knows what the right move would be, but she can’t make it because it wouldn’t change anything except Anne’s level of happiness with the presumed situation. Her circumstances have made it impossible for her to see a scenario where Anne can say no if William Elliott proposes--Anne’s out of options, and Mrs. Smith understands too well what that really means.

Lady Russell wasn’t being a dick when she was like, “Baby, no. You love him, he seems fine, but this is a bad idea.”

And Wentworth is an okay guy, I guess, but hooooooly shit, the complete and utter grudge he carries around, still, like ten years later, over her completely reasonable decision to not defy her father and ignore the woman who’s basically her mother now? I mean, fucking yikes, buddy. Given how many men he’s served with who’ve left broke widows and penniless orphans behind when they died at sea, he has to know by the time he rolls back into Anne’s life that it wasn’t an unreasonable call for her to have made, but he’s still bitter about it. And like, that’s Anne’s happy ending!

Everywhere Anne turns, there’s a family whose life has been completely and utterly jacked up by an unfortunate marriage. Not even necessarily a terrible marriage, just like... they exacerbate each other's faults. Or both of them have the same deficiencies in some key area, and neither one is going to look into shoring that up or hiring somebody or improving themselves.

Like Charles Musgrove, who seems to be a decent dude and would have made Anne an okay husband, but he bought into the whole “women are basically interchangeable, rite?” lie and proposed to Mary after Anne said no. His parents are basically like “wevs, if it makes the kids happy,” and so nobody sat him down and went, “Yeah, so this is the one who was raised by Sir Walter at his worst and the neighbor-lady on alternate Sundays. You sure about this, boo?” Fast forward a few years, and he and Mary are making each other and his parents miserable with their game of domestic chicken, where no one will raise the damn kids, or address their problems, or take a lick of domestic responsibility.

Henrietta’s engagement of, essentially, convenience to a cousin with a decent expectation of a career is endangered because Wentworth, uh, showed up? Like, that’s what their happiness rests on: Henrietta having no better prospects, not even for five seconds.

Benwick doesn’t even make it to the altar before his life is derailed by his fiancee’s death. Harville’s opinions on his fickleness notwithstanding, you get the sense that Benwick’s grasping desperately at straws in his grief, and whoever he winds up with isn’t going to make him happy and vice versa.

Hell, it even catches up to Wentworth, who finds out too late to hit the brakes that all the attention he’s been paying Louisa out of boredom has created the expectation that they’re engaged. I mean, props where props are due, he assumes the responsibility until Benwick relieves him of it, but what the hell kind of life would he and post-TBI Louisa have been able to give each other? She’s out there starting at slammed doors, and Mrs. Croft has like... two? separate speeches about the shit Navy wives have to put up with to see their husbands again.

Even Lady Russell, arguably the best off and freest character in the book, is out there threading the needle between staying close enough to her late bestie's family to see that her kids are okay and not getting so close that scandal might attach to her and Sir Walter not marrying.

It's a system where only the supremely lucky wind up genuinely happy in their situations and everybody else suffers to one degree or another, not because that's just how life goes, but because there's not an easily-available avenue in contemporary British life for addressing or repairing those mistakes.

Anne's this intensely passive character whose internal life revolves around trying not to respond to her own emotions because she learned early and hard that the only one getting upset or hurt by slights or unfairness or outright cruelty directed toward her was, well, her. And why? Because there's literally no other avenue for her to take. She can get a change of scenery in exchange for playing live-in nursemaid, or lady's companion, or third wheel, but eventually she does have to go home. She's too sensible to jump into an inadvisable marriage just to get the fuck out of that situation, but she lets you see very clearly why women in her position did and all the additional things piled up on the scale besides "I like him and think he's hot and he's reasonably sure he can feed us both."

So it's not one of my favorite books, as a novel. It's not the most enjoyable read--it's frustrating, and it makes you rail against all the shit everybody's up against. But I respect that that's what it's doing. And it does it well. I imagine given all the Annes who've read it over the years have been happy with her and Wentworth's reunion, and all the non-Annes who've read it have hopefully gone, "Shit, Anne really should have had more options, this whole situation sucked, maybe it's not fair to mock women for being cat-ladies or spinsters or picking their career over lackluster domestic options."