Jane Austen's Persuasion in the Southwest of England, page 2

For Anne, Lyme Regis is a place of refreshment and invigoration away from the limitations of Kellynch.  She enjoys the fresh sea air and friendly company she finds in Captain Wentworth’s Navy friend, Captain Harville, and his family.  While Lyme is a popular holiday town in the summer, both then and today, Anne appreciates that Lyme is not overrun with visitors during her stay: “The city itself could not offer much in the way of public amusement in that season.  Assembly rooms were closed, summer visitors were gone, and only the residents were left.”  The unquestionable thing to do, then, was “to walk directly down to the sea” (63).  Lyme is a place of greenery and quaint, cozy cottages—a pleasant contrast to, in Anne’s opinion, the suffocating atmosphere of Bath.  Barbara Britton Wenner explains that “Lyme, its Cobb, and its windswept hills allow Anne, as an outsider, to find her real self in this threshold scene….” (98).  Lyme brings out a glow in Anne:  “She was looking remarkably well; her very regular, very pretty features, having the bloom and freshness of youth restored by the fine wind which had been blowing on her complexion, and by the animation of eye which it had also produced” (70).   This liberating environment provides a nurturing and non-critical setting in which Anne and Wentworth can reunite.

When Anne goes to Bath she feels as though she is entering a different world.  Anne “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….And looked back, with fond regret, to the bustles of Uppercross and the seclusion of Kellynch” (89).  She prefers the relaxed feeling and the jovial company of Uppercross to the “white glare” of Bath (23).  While many find the uniform, honey-colored stone buildings elegant and pleasing to the eye, Anne finds them dull and monotonous.  The city is mostly made up of many streets, without much green space besides two contained parks, and the rainy weather that persists for much of Anne’s time in Bath suggests gloom and boredom.  This physical landscape contrasts starkly with Anne’s beloved countryside and is at least partly responsible for Anne’s feeling trapped in Bath. 

However, the social landscape troubles Anne more than anything else—for Bath is where propriety-conscious upper class people like her father meet to share social gossip, something of which Anne wants no part.  Anne associates the city with the monotony of card-playing and promenading around the Assembly Rooms with insincere aristocrats who are interested not in true friendship but in climbing the social ladder.  Her preference of Lyme over Bath reveals much about Anne’s personality: she would rather mingle with “clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation.”  Anne finds Bath superficial and tells Mr. Elliot, “I certainly am proud, too proud to enjoy a welcome which depends so entirely upon place” (100). 

As an upper middle class woman, Austen knew firsthand about the gossip and preoccupation with status that saturates social life.  Nowadays, most marriages in the western world result from two people falling in love.  In Anne’s day, however, marriage held a much higher social significance.  A respectable woman like Anne, born into a title was expected to marry a man within her class or higher.  To marry a lower class man would bring disgrace to the woman’s family.  Appearances were everything, and marrying a man whose youth and vigor have been (according to Sir Walter) “cut up most horribly” by sea weather would be equal to throwing away one’s reputation (14).  Sir Elliot looks down on men of the Navy because they receive undue distinction.  Yet compared to Sir Walter, Navy officers have all earned their wealth by hard work and despite their rougher appearance they prove to be more worthy than people who have simply been born into a title.  Wentworth, Harville, and Benwick are genuinely gracious and passionate men, and their good manners only highlight the ignobility of class-conscious men like Sir Walter and Mr. Elliot.  Persuasion, then, shows the life of a variety of social classes.  With Wentworth’s winning of Anne’s hand in marriage, meritocracy wins over aristocracy. 

Like the social landscape, the literal landscape is key to Persuasion.  As the novel moves from rural to urban, we see how the topographical landscape sustains social interaction. 

In a memorable passage, Anne takes a walk near Uppercross with the Musgroves and Captain Wentworth.  As the group breaks into couples and smaller groups, Anne overhears Louisa telling Wentworth that Anne had rejected a marriage proposal from Charles Musgrove (who married Mary instead).  Wentworth now knows an important piece of information about Anne: although Anne rejected him years ago, she has not accepted another man since.  In turn, Anne questions Wentworth’s feelings toward herself.  Thus the landscape of the countryside frequently helps along the action of the novel.  As Anne moves from Kellynch to the more open and free landscapes of Uppercross and Lyme, she experiences a kind of awakening, meeting people who share her values and becoming reacquainted with Wentworth in a neutral, non-judgmental environment.

Elizabeth Bowen writes that “the landscape, the changing season, are part of the texture of the story.  Here, as nowhere else in Jane Austen’s work, brims over the poetry of Nature—uplands, woods and sea.  We are tuned in to a mood, to a sensibility which rings beautifully true” (Southam168).  Landscape, then, functions as both a physical and metaphorical site.  Historian Denis Cosgrove explains, “Landscape…is an ideological concept.  It represents a way in which certain classes of people have signified themselves and their world through their imagined relationship with nature, and through which they have underlined and communicated their own social role and that of others with respect to external nature” (Wenner 4).  Thus, the landscape influences the behavior of the characters; yet Jane Austen’s heroines find ways of challenging the landscape and finding new meaning there.  As Barbara Britton Wenner writes, “the questioning of cultural assumptions, learning from liminal locations, and recognizing landscape as critical ‘agent’ are all strongly evident in all of Jane Austen’s fiction” (2).  Persuasion illustrates beautifully the ties between social and literal landscape and literature.

© Copyright Emily Kliever 2007