What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (10 page)

‘Your complexion is so improved!—and you have gained so much countenance!—and your figure—nay, Fanny, do not turn away about it—it is but an uncle. If you cannot bear an uncle's admiration, what is to become of you? You must really begin to harden yourself to the idea of being worth looking at. You must try not to mind growing up into a pretty woman.'

‘Oh! don't talk so, don't talk so,' cried Fanny, distressed by more feelings than he was aware of. (II. iii)

 

Edmund blunders, not knowing of Fanny's love for him, and doubly so in talking of her being ‘worth looking at'. He alerts her both to the possibility of her being attractive, and to the fact that he does not look at her with a lover's eyes. This perceptive yet unseeing registering of another person's physical attractions can even distinguish a woman looking at a man, though this is much rarer.
Emma
is unique in allowing its heroine to appreciate the masculine ‘figure' in a comparably candid manner, when she looks at Mr Knightley at the dance at the Crown. ‘His tall, firm, upright figure, among the bulky forms and stooping shoulders of the elderly men, was such as Emma felt must draw every body's eyes; and, excepting her own partner, there was not one among the whole row of young men who could be compared with him' (II. ii). It is as close as Emma can go to recognising something beyond friendship.

In the scene where Mr Knightley and Emma finally acknowledge their true feelings for each other, looks take over. Looking in Austen is perhaps never more charged with meaning than when Mr Knightley declares himself to Emma and expects her response to what is implicitly a proposal. ‘He stopped in his earnestness to look the question, and the expression of his eyes overpowered her' (III. xiii). It is an extraordinary grammatical usage: to ‘look the question'. As if only looking can express meaning. Something similar happens when Captain Wentworth places his letter before Anne Elliot in the room at the White Hart, and she sees and cannot misinterpret his ‘eyes of glowing entreaty' (
Persuasion
, II. xi). A substitute for speech, the letter concludes with an acknowledgement that speech will hardly be necessary to communicate her response. ‘A word, a look will be enough,' it says. Soon they meet again, in the company of others. ‘He joined them; but, as if irresolute whether to join or to pass on, said nothing, only looked. Anne could command herself enough to receive that look, and not repulsively. The cheeks which had been pale now glowed, and the movements which had hesitated were decided. He walked by her side.' Wentworth is right. After all the elusiveness of people's looks in Jane Austen's fiction – after all the uncertain, anxious, puzzled, mistaken looking that has gone on – here finally, satisfyingly . . . a look
is
enough.

FIVE

Who Dies in the Course of Her Novels?

A sudden seizure of a different nature from any thing foreboded by her general state, had carried her off after a short struggle. The great Mrs. Churchill was no more.

Emma
, III. ix

If we except the little pre-history of the Dashwood family in the first chapter of
Sense and Sensibility
, and the odd case of Lord Ravenshaw’s grandmother (of which more later), there are only two deaths that occur within Jane Austen’s novels, and one of these is of a character whom we never meet. The two people who die are Dr Grant in
Mansfield Park
and Mrs Churchill in
Emma
. Neither is lamented; both deaths are indeed calculated to make us consider how we might fail to grieve at others’ mortality. In the case of Mrs Churchill, the consideration is comic. She is the most powerful absentee character in all Austen’s fiction. We never see or hear her; she exerts influence over her adopted son, Frank Churchill, mostly by feigning various illnesses, but always off stage. Then suddenly she dies from an unspecified ‘seizure’, though we are told that it is something different from anything of which she has long been complaining (III. ix). Even the
malade imaginaire
is susceptible to the reaper. She is dead, but she is vindicated. The inhabitants of Highbury, none of whom have ever met her, respond with peculiarly disingenuous feeling: ‘Every body had a degree of gravity and sorrow.’

Dr Grant’s death in
Mansfield Park
is more frankly unregretted. In the rounding-up that happens in the novel’s closing phases, Dr and Mrs Grant, who first brought the amoral, chaos-causing Crawfords to Mansfield, have returned to London, where Dr Grant has found ecclesiastical advancement in Westminster. His self-satisfaction is not to last. Soon he ‘brought on apoplexy and death, by three great institutionary dinners in one week’ (III. xvii). It is thoroughly poetic justice: the gastronome clergyman kills himself with gluttony at the height of his contentment. We expect deaths like this in a different kind of novel – in Fielding, say, where the irascible Captain Blifil, who has married the wealthy Squire Allworthy’s sister, also dies of ‘an apoplexy . . . just at the very instant when his heart was exulting in meditations on the happiness which would accrue to him by Mr. Allworthy’s death’.
¹
Dr Grant’s demise is comically smuggled in from a different, moralistic and satirical, kind of narrative. And it is not just poetic justice. His death also serves the other characters’ wishes and the author’s narrative purposes. For it means that the two half-sisters, Mrs Grant and Mary Crawford, can live together in pretty perfect harmony. The novel says nothing of any sadness or sense of loss that we might hope Mrs Grant to have felt. At the beginning of the paragraph in which Dr Grant dies, we are told that Mrs Grant has ‘a temper to love and be loved’, so we may take the omission to confirm what we surely already suspect: that she never loved her husband.

Dr Grant was not yet fifty, but the flesh is frail. By dying he is rather surprisingly fulfilling the casual prediction made by the formerly feckless heir to the estate, Tom Bertram. When Dr Grant first arrives to take the living that was previously promised to Edmund Bertram, Tom convinces himself that the man who has purchased the position will, ‘in all probability, die very soon’ (I. iii). The prediction exhibits Tom’s callous wishful thinking: the living has been snatched from Edmund’s hands to cover his own gambling debts. Yet it is evidently a plausible guess. When Dr Grant appears ‘a hearty man of forty-five’ Tom is not to be dissuaded, and proves an accurate prognosticator. The apparently healthy prelate does indeed make way for Edmund Bertram to take up the station – and to receive the income – for which he has been groomed. Dr Grant’s demise from gorging suits everyone. The novel’s penultimate paragraph tells us that, to complete Edmund and Fanny’s happiness, ‘the acquisition of Mansfield living by the death of Dr Grant’ has occurred just at the moment when the young couple wanted a larger income and a home nearer ‘the paternal abode’ (III. xvii). His end could hardly have been better timed.

It is telling that the two characters who die are more conveniently dead than alive. Austen wants you to notice how deaths can suit the living. Mary Crawford and Mrs Grant must both be wearing full mourning as they begin a new life together, but we take it that, even in their black clothes, they are delighted to be rid of an irksome impediment to their sisterly friendship. At the end of
Emma
Frank Churchill consorts with his now acknowledged fiancée, Jane Fairfax, clad in sombre mourning garb. Mrs Churchill’s death has made their marriage possible, but requires an interim. ‘There must be three months, at least, of deep mourning’ (III. xvi). Frank Churchill meets Emma again after the announcement of his engagement, smiling and laughing on this ‘most happy day’, but suited, we should realise, all in black. We are not told this, but Austen’s first readers would have ‘seen’ this garb, and registered the clash of official sorrow and private happiness. The deaths of close kin usually required a period of full (often called ‘deep’) mourning – in which clothes were predominantly black – followed by an equal period of ‘second’ or ‘slight’ mourning.
²
Often the household servants would also be required to wear mourning.
³
For a woman, full mourning might involve not only a black dress but also the rejection of shimmering silk for duller bombazine. ‘Short mourning for distant relations was comparable with second mourning and was expressed rather by lack of any colour than by wearing black.’
⁴
Second mourning could involve the wearing of grey clothing. Other signs distinguished second mourning: for women, black edging on dresses or black ribbons; for men, black bands on hats and cuffs, or black buckles. Conventions were not certain, however: there are many examples from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of men and women anxiously asking each other about the regulations currently governing mourning.

Periods of mourning were also disputable, though by the mid-nineteenth century it was de rigueur for a widow to wear full mourning for a year.
⁵
In Fanny Burney’s 1778 novel
Evelina
, the young heroine is disapproving of the fact that her grandmother is out of mourning only three months after the death of her husband: she has been living in France and thinks that no one in England will know how short a time she has been a widow.
⁶
In
Lady Susan
, the amoral protagonist has been ‘only four months a widow’, so as she flirts and fascinates, she is presumably doing so, shockingly, in mourning garb (Letter 2). Austen’s own life was full of deaths and wearing black must have become a habit. She remarks in one letter in July 1813 that she will not need to put on mourning for the recently deceased Thomas Leigh, her mother’s cousin, as she is still wearing it for her sister-in-law Eliza, who had died just over two months earlier (
Letters
, 86). She can just carry on in black. The donning of mourning was a regular demand. It was not only worn for family members. In 1810, for instance, twelve weeks of national mourning was decreed to mark the death of George III’s daughter Princess Amelia.
⁷
In June 1811 Austen described how her niece Anna and family friend Harriet Benn walked with her to Alton to buy mourning to be worn in the event of the King’s death, and that she bought a black ‘Bombasin’ for her mother (
Letters
, 75). The mourning clothes adopted by Austen’s characters would have been visible in the mind’s eye of an early reader who took these habits for granted. In
Persuasion
, Captain Benwick is ‘in mourning’ for Fanny Harville’s loss, which means not just that he is sad, but that he is actually wearing mourning, as the Harvilles are likely to be (I. xi). Anne learns the story of their shared tragedy, but then their clothes would have made her curious. If we do not see these clothes we lose something, for Captain Benwick must have either eschewed his mourning dress while paying his attentions to Louisa Musgrove, or courted her while wearing it. Either possibility gives peculiar force to Captain Harville’s later exclamation to Anne, ‘Poor Fanny! she would not have forgotten him so soon’ (II. xi). Mourning dress is, after all, donned in order to stop you escaping from the memory of the dead person.

No one dies during the course of
Persuasion
, but the novel is full of the deaths that have mattered to its characters. As Linda Bree rightly says, ‘most of the characters would have been wearing black, in some form, throughout the novel’.
⁸
The requirement to wear mourning alerts us to the possibility that people who thus advertise their loss are not always so very sad. On hearing the news of Mrs Churchill’s death in
Emma
, Mr Weston shakes his head solemnly while thinking – Austen cannot resist telling us – ‘that his mourning should be as handsome as possible’ (III. ix). His wife, meanwhile, sits ‘sighing and moralizing over her broad hems’. Thinking about the clothes is natural – sometimes more natural than actual mournfulness. In October 1808 Jane Austen told her sister, ‘My Mother is preparing mourning for Mrs E. K.—she has picked her old silk pelisse to peices [
sic
], & means to have it dyed black for a gown—a very interesting scheme’ (
Letters
, 57). Mrs E. K. might have been Elizabeth Knight, sister of Thomas Knight, who had adopted Edward Austen, henceforth Edward Knight, as his heir. The duties of mourning reached a long way – in
Persuasion
the Elliots wear black ribbons after the death of Mr Elliot’s wife, a woman they have never met – and made necessary such adaptations of clothing.