Tài liệu Persuasion

PERSUASION JANE AUSTEN E D I T E D BY P A T R I C I A M E Y E R A NORTON CRITICAL SPACKS EDITION PERSUASION The text of this Norton Critical Edition is that of the first edition (dated 1818 but probably issued in late 1817), which was published posthumously. The editor has spelled out amper­ sands and made superscript letters lowercase. The novel, which is fully annotated, is followed by the two canceled chapters that comprise Persuasion's original ending. "Backgrounds and Contexts" collects contemporary assess­ ments of Jane Austen as well as materials relating to the social issues of the day. Included is an excerpt from William Hayley's 1785 "Essay on Old Maids"; Austen's letters to Fanny Knight, which reveal her skepticism about marriage as the key to happi­ ness; Henry Austen's memorial tribute to his famous sister; as­ sessments by nineteenth-century critics Julia Kavanagh and Goldwin Smith, who saw Austen as an unassuming, sheltered, "feminine," rural writer; and the perspective of Austen's biogra­ pher, Géraldine Edith Mitten. "Modern Critical Views" reflects a dramatic shift in the way that scholars view both Austen and Persuasion. Increasingly, the focus is on Austen's moral purposefulness and political acumen and on Persuasions historical, social, and political implications. A variety of perspectives are provided by A. Walton Litz, Marilyn Butler, Tony Tanner, Robert Hopkins, Ann W. Astell, Claudia L. Johnson, and Cheryl Ann Weissman. A Selected Bibliography is included. Each Norton Critical Edition includes an authoritative text, contextual and source materials, and a wide range of interpretations— from contemporary perspectives to the most current critical theory—as well as a bibliography and, in many cases, a chronology of the author's life and work. ABOUT THE SERIES: C O V E R I L L U S T R A T I O N : Thomas Hearne, "View of Bath from Spring Garden," Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. A U T H O R ' S P O R T R A I T : Watercolor sketch of Jane Austen by Cassandra Austen. Reproduced by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London. I S B N - 1 0 : 0-393-96018-8 90000 > W.W.NORTON NEW YORK LONDON \_ 780393"960181 The Editor PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS is Edgar F . Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of eleven books including An Argument of Images: The Poetry of Alexander Pope, The Female Imagination, The Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth in the Adult Imagination, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Nov­ els, and Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind. Professor Spacks is a contributing editor of The Norton Anthol­ ogy of World Masterpieces. PERSUASION AUTHORITATIVE TEXT BACKGROUNDS AND CONTEXTS CRITICISM W. W. N O R T O N & C O M P A N Y , INC. Also Publishes T H E NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay et al. T H E NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE edited by Nina Baym et al. T H E NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE edited by Jack Zipes et al. T H E NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION edited by R.V. Cassill and Joyce Carol Oates T H E NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF E N G L I S H LITERATURE edited by M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt et al. T H E NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF LITERATURE BY W O M E N edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar T H E NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY POETRY edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair T H E NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF POETRY edited by Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy T H E NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF SHORT FICTION edited by R.V. Cassill and Richard Bausch T H E NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF THEORY AND CRITICISM edited by Vincent B. Leitch et al. T H E NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF WORLD LITERATURE edited by Sarah Lawall et al. T H E NORTON FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST FOLIO OF SHAKESPEARE prepared by Charlton Hinman T H E NORTON INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE edited by Alison Booth, J. Paul Hunter, and Kelly J. Mays T H E NORTON INTRODUCTION TO THE SHORT NOVEL edited by Jerome Beaty T H E NORTON READER edited by Linda H. Peterson and John C. Brereton T H E NORTON SAMPLER edited by Thomas Cooley T H E NORTON SHAKESPEARE, B A S E D ON THE OXFORD EDITION edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al. For a complete list of Norton Critical Editions, visit www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nce_home.htm A NORTON CRITICAL EDITION Jane Àusten PERSUASION AUTHORITATIVE TEXT BACKGROUNDS AND CONTEXTS CRITICISM Edited by PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA W. W. Norton & Company New York London Copyright © 1 9 9 5 by W . W . Norton & C o m p a n y All rights reserved Printed in the United States o f America First Edition T h e text o f this book is c o m p o s e d in Electra with the display set in Bernhard Modern Composition by Vail Composition Manufacturing by Maple-Vail Book design by Antonina Krass Library o f Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Austen, Jane, 1 7 7 5 - 1 8 1 7 . Persuasion : an authoritative text, backgrounds, and contexts, reviews and essays in criticism / Jane Austen ; edited by Patricia M e y e r Spacks. p. c m . — ( A Norton critical ed.) Includes bibliographical references. 1. E n g l a n d — S o c i a l life and customs — 1 9 t h century—Fiction. 2. M a n - w o m a n relationships—England—Fiction. 1775-1817. Persuasion. 3. Austen, Jane, I. Spacks, Patricia Ann Meyer. PR4034.P4 II. Title. 1994 823'.7-dc20 94-4510 ISBN 0-393-96018-8 W . W . Norton & C o m p a n y , I n c . , 5 0 0 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 1 0 1 1 0 W . W . Norton & C o m p a n y L t d . , Castle House, 7 5 / 7 6 Wells Street, London W I T 3 Q T 567890 Contents Preface ix The Text of Persuasion 1 [The Original Ending of Persuasion] 168 Backgrounds and Contexts [William Hayley] • [On Old Maids] 181 Jane Austen • Letters about Persuasion 187 To Fanny Knight (March 1 3 , [ 1 8 1 7 ] ) 187 To Fanny Knight (March 2 3 , [ 1 8 1 7 ] ) 189 Henry Austen • Biographical Notice of the Author 191 [Richard Whateley] • [A New Style of Novel] 196 Anonymous • [Austen's Characters] 206 Julia Kavanagh • [The Language of Feeling] 208 Goldwin Smith • From Life of Jane Austen 211 Géraldine Edith Mitton • From Jane Austen and Her Times 212 Modern Critical Views A. Walton Litz • New Landscapes 217 Marilyn Butler • [On Persuasion] 224 Tony Tanner • In Between: Persuasion 231 Robert Hopkins • Moral Luck and Judgment in Jane Austen's Persuasion 265 Ann W. Astell • Anne Elliot's Education: The Learning of Romance in Persuasion 275 Claudia L. Johnson • Persuasion: The "Unfeudal Tone of the Present Day" 286 Cheryl Ann Weissman • Doubleness and Refrain in Jane Austen's Persuasion 307 Jane Austen: A Chronology 313 Selected Bibliography 315 vii Preface Jane Austen wrote Persuasion, her last complete novel, while suffering from the illness (Addison's disease) that would kill her. She began work on it in 1815, finishing her alterations of the final chapters on July 18, 1816, precisely a year before she died. Her brother Frank published it, along with Northanger Abbey and his own biographical notice of his sister, at the end of 1817. Certain critics (including some whose work is excerpted in the Back­ grounds and Contexts and Criticism sections of this volume) have found in the novel a melancholy strain, attributable, in their view, to the author's illness. Early commentators on Persuasion—and some fairly recent ones—glimpsed in the book the sadness of mortality, comment­ ing on its elegiac tone and on a new kind of seriousness in its imagining. Those with a literary-historical bent have noted the incursion of atti­ tudes and assumptions that we associate with romanticism: the novelist who once mocked Marianne's enthusiasm for dead leaves (Sense and Sensibility) now allows her heroine, without overt criticism, to take pleasure in evidence of the "declining year." Social critics have found splendid material for investigation in the novel's new emphasis on the life and values of the Royal Navy, discovering that Austen not only drew on knowledge gained from two admiral-brothers but appeared to criti­ cize the aristocracy and welcome the accession to social power of a new class. Persuasion, in short, contains something for everybody, a fertile field for varied sorts of critical investigation. The documents collected in the Backgrounds and Contexts and Criti­ cism sections of this volume suggest a range of possibilities and adum­ brate changing attitudes and trends in critical discourse. T h e excerpt from William Hayley's Essay on Old Maids (1785), for instance, implic­ itly sketches the social context in which Austen chose to investigate the emotional situation of a twenty-seven-year-old unmarried woman. For Austen, at least in her role as fiction maker, as for Hayley, marriage constituted the happy ending of a woman's youth. Within this concep­ tual framework, however, Austen found it possible to imagine a woman neither preoccupied with marriage nor initially convinced that no female fulfillment can exist outside it. Her letters to Fanny Knight remind us of Jane Austen's comic skepticism about marriage as consti­ tuting inevitable female bliss; Persuasion helps elucidate that skepticism. ix X PREFACE In his memorial notice her brother describes Jane Austen as a woman of notable piety and familial devotion. That woman's last completed novel reminds us how rich an emotional life may underlie exemplary female conduct. One of Austen's communications to Fanny Knight describes Anne Elliot, the heroine of Persuasion, as "almost too good for me." Henry Austen's characterization of his sister makes goodness sound like a simple matter. Persuasion tells us otherwise. Goodness can include resistance as well as persuadability—and it by no means pre­ cludes private judgment. If such commentators on the social scene as Hayley and such observ­ ers of character as Henry Austen call attention to components of con­ ventional female compliance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commentary on Per­ suasion tends to stress other stereotypically feminine elements of the novel, notably its alleged emphasis on feeling and its concern for the everyday. Such commentary supports a view of Austen that has long survived; as an unmarried woman living in a village, she knew and cared little about problems and experience beyond her immediate setting. Limited in imaginative range, according to this view, Austen evinced sharp observation, acumen about a fairly restricted realm of emotions, and a gift for sharp, often comic, characterization. Twentieth-century criticism, however, heavily represented in the present volume, considers the Austen of Persuasion a serious moralist and a significant commenta­ tor on social, even political, issues. My decision to emphasize recent criticism of Persuasion reflects my conviction that the current critical shift has enormous importance for our comprehension of Austen's achievement. New ways of approaching the novels make it possible for the first time to think complexly about Austen in the context of her contemporaries—not only her literary peers, but all the other men and women living through the Napoleonic Wars on the Continent and their political repercussions in England. Persuasion speaks of more than life in a village, or even in Bath. It sharply ironizes Austen's well-known profession to her brother about "the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour." Devoted readers have always denied the claim that Austen works to "little effect"; the notion of her two inches of ivory is equally questionable. "Pictures of perfection . . . make me sick and wicked," Austen observed, in the letter containing her claim that Anne Elliot was "almost too good" for her. Good though she is, the heroine of Persuasion never runs the danger of "perfection." She plays music so that others may dance, cares for a sick child so that her sister and brother-in-law can go out to dinner, changes residence in response to the real or fancied needs of her relatives. Behaving like the very model of a well-bred spinster, she nonetheless vibrates with passion and preserves a will of her own. PREFACE XI The early commentators who praised Austen's characterization and noted the high degree of feeling in Persuasion had it right. Thus Julia Kavanagh, in 1862, observes that the portrayal of Anne constitutes "the first genuine picture of that silent torture of an unloved woman." Just so: Austen makes her readers experience vicariously the full intensity of such torture. But those interested in the social and political implications of Austen's fiction get it right too. T h e special brilliance of Persuasion depends partly on its combined focus on the private experience of a sharply imag­ ined individual and the social actualities that necessarily inform individ­ ual experience. As in her other fiction, Austen here provides a penetrating study of self-love in its varied manifestations. T h e Elliot family supplies numerous examples, from the comic to the simply appalling. Anne's sister Mary, her state of health varying according to the degree of attention others pay her, has found an appropriate mate in Charles, concerned mainly with his hunting, his dogs, and his guns. Elizabeth, the other Elliot sister, resembles her father in vanity and in self-referential snobbery. Sir Walter, for whom his own appearance and rank constitute the primary standard of value against which he judges others (usually to their disadvantage), cares not at all for the welfare of his daughter Anne, whom he considers plain and unlikely to marry well. He and Elizabeth decide, as an economy measure, to bring Anne no gift from their visit to London. T h e tiny episode epitomizes their utter self-absorption, which signifies a widespread and dangerous social malady. Less dramatic but more sinister in his self-preoccupation is William Elliot, who calculates his every move in relation to selfish interest. Anne condemns him for lack of "openness" well before she learns of his more openly destructive behavior. He acts like a man of the world—if one defines the world as a place where everyone is out for him- or herself and where success entails winning place, power, and wealth at the expense of others. Persuasion raises the question of whether any alterna­ tive conception of the world can prove viable. It does not treat this question as a simple one. As Alexander Pope had recognized ("Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul; / Reason's comparing balance rules the whole"), self-interest energizes everyone and provides a fundamental engine of social progress. Anne, to whom her family denies the right of openly expressed self-concern, experiences the omnipresence of individually focused perspectives as she moves from one small social environment to another, to find that the concerns of one household mean nothing at all to residents of another only a few miles away. Driving down a Bath street with Lady Russell, Anne sees only the presence of the man she loves on the sidewalk. What will Lady Russell say about him? she wonders. Lady Russell, of course preoccu­ pied with her own affairs, comments instead on the window curtains Xll PREFACE she has been contemplating. Anne appropriately recognizes the irony of conflicting personal assignments of significance, but the recognition does not protect her—even her—from seeing in the light of her own feelings, thoughts, and obsessions. Yet Persuasion suggests the possibility of surmounting narrow selfconcern, not only through the self-sacrificing "goodness" that Anne at first appears to embody but through a kind of "openness" antithetical to William Elliot's calculation and promising new social horizons. Pope went on from his observation of self-love as energizing principle to the Utopian hope that self-love and social might ultimately merge. Austen adumbrates less Utopian versions of that merging in the members of the navy she depicts, Admiral and Mrs. Croft, Captain Wentworth, and Anne herself, who becomes Mrs. Wentworth. The Crofts and Captain Wentworth exhibit healthy self-concern. Admiral Croft does not feel shy about drawing his own conclusions as to the character of Sir Walter Elliot; Mrs. Croft speaks her judgments and attitudes forthrightly. Cap­ tain Wentworth, in worldly terms successful, has indeed gained his wealth at others' expense, triumphing in naval combat, capturing ships, winning promotion presumably over other people's heads. T o some extent, then, the world operates as William Elliot assumes, by clamber­ ing competition. Yet these people who have won status and money have not had to sacrifice personal feeling. The Crofts exemplify cooperative and satisfying marriage. Wentworth, despite his hurt feelings over Anne's earlier rejection and his determination to marry anyone but her, finally faces the truth of his emotions and risks rejection once more for the sake of his newly discovered, long-enduring devotion. If we take Anne and her lover as exemplary, it is not quite accurate to generalize, as Anne does, that women love longest when all hope is gone. Men can love just as long—they just have more trouble acknowledging the fact about themselves. One need not conclude that the navy will replace the aristocracy as center of social power. But the navy epitomizes a better moral as well as social order, specifically in the way its representatives embody a produc­ tive union between self-directed and outward-directed interest. Anne, marrying Wentworth, can abandon self-sacrifice for self-fulfillment— which is not to say that she at all abandons her concern for others. The novel's final sentences direct the reader's attention both to the life of personal feeling and to the navy's symbolic connection with private as well as public virtue. "Anne was tenderness itself, and she had the full worth of it in Captain Wentworth's affection. . . . 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. " T h e language of finance ("the full worth of it," "pay the tax") applied to emotions calls attention to the processes of exchange involved in virtually every human transaction. PREFACE xiii Ideally one achieves balance between what is given and what received; one does not, like William Elliot, aspire only to take. Being a sailor, or a sailor's wife, allows for intricate balances, between loving and being loved, between pride and fear, but also between personal absorption and public responsibility. T h e private satisfaction Wentworth receives corresponds to the national service he gives; Anne pays for her pride in his public role by fear for the possibility of her private deprivation. At any moment such precarious balances can tip, but the novel concludes with the imagining of their preservation and of their moral resonance. Such preservation, such resonance signify for national life as well as for a couple's marriage. The text of Persuasion here printed is that of the first edition, dated 1818 but probably issued in late 1817. T h e printing of the two canceled chapters follows the edition of R. W . Chapman. Ampersands that appeared in the original texts have been spelled out, and superscript letters have been lowered. The Text of PERSUASION Persuasion Chapter I Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt. As he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century—and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed— this was the page at which the favourite volume always opened: 1 2 3 E L L I O T O F KELLYNCH-HALL. Walter Elliot, born March 1, 1760, married, July 15, 1784, Elizabeth, daughter of James Stevenson, Esq. of South Park, in the county of Gloucester; by which lady (who died 1800) he has issue Elizabeth, born June 1, 1785; Anne, born August 9, 1787; a stillborn son, Nov. 5, 1789; Mary, born Nov. 20, 1791. Precisely such had the paragraph originally stood from the printer's hands; but Sir Walter had improved it by adding, for the information of himself and his family, these words, after the date of Mary's birth— "married, Dec. 16, 1810, Charles, son and heir of Charles Musgrove, Esq. of Uppercross, in the county of Somerset,"—and by inserting most accurately the day of the month on which he had lost his wife. Then followed the history and rise of the ancient and respectable family, in the usual terms: how it had been first settled in Cheshire; how mentioned in Dugdale— serving the office of High Sheriff, representing a borough in three successive parliaments, exertions of loyalty, and dignity of baronet, in the first year of Charles II., with all the Marys and 4 1. 2. 3. 4. Presumably!. Debrett's Baronetage of England (1808). Titles (of nobility). New peerages. Sir William Dugdale, The Ancient Usage in Bearing of Such Ensigns of Honour as Are Commonly Caïïd Arms, with a Catalogue of the Present Nobility of England . . . Scotland . . . and Ireland (mi). 3 4 CHAPTER I Elizabeths they had married; forming altogether two handsome duodec­ imo pages, and concluding with the arms and motto: "Principal seat, Kellynch hall, in the county of Somerset," and Sir Walter's hand-writ­ ing again in this finale: "Heir presumptive, William Walter Elliot, Esq., great grandson of the second Sir Walter." Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character; vanity of person and of situation. He had been remarkably handsome in his youth; and, at fifty-four, was still a very fine man. Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did; nor could the valet of any new made lord be more delighted with the place he held in society. He considered the blessing of beauty as inferior only to the bless­ ing of a baronetcy; and the Sir Walter Elliot, who united these gifts, was the constant object of his warmest respect and devotion. His good looks and his rank had one fair claim on his attachment; since to them he must have owed a wife of very superior character to any thing deserved by his own. Lady Elliot had been an excellent woman, sensible and amiable; whose judgment and conduct, if they might be pardoned the youthful infatuation which made her Lady Elliot, had never required indulgence afterwards.—She had humoured, or softened, or concealed his failings, and promoted his real respectabil­ ity for seventeen years; and though not the very happiest being in the world herself, had found enough in her duties, her friends, and her children, to attach her to life, and make it no matter of indifference to her when she was called on to quit them.—Three girls, the two eldest sixteen and fourteen, was an awful legacy for a mother to bequeath; an awful charge rather, to confide to the authority and guidance of a con­ ceited, silly father. She had, however, one very intimate friend, a sensi­ ble, deserving woman, who had been brought, by strong attachment to herself, to settle close by her, in the village of Kellynch; and on her kindness and advice, Lady Elliot mainly relied for the best help and maintenance of the good principles and instruction which she had been anxiously giving her daughters. This friend, and Sir Walter, did not marry, whatever might have been anticipated on that head by their acquaintance.—Thirteen years had passed away since Lady Elliot's death, and they were still near neighbours and intimate friends; and one remained a widower, the other a widow. That Lady Russell, of steady age and character, and extremely well provided for, should have no thought of a second marriage, needs no apology to the public, which is rather apt to be unreasonably discon­ tented when a woman does marry again, than when she does not; but Sir Walter's continuing in singleness requires explanation.—Be it known then, that Sir Walter, like a good father, (having met with one or two private disappointments in very unreasonable applications) prided