What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (18 page)

In the persons of servants, the lower orders are ever-present in Austen’s fiction. The novelist expects the reader to ‘see’ them (often the male servants will be dressed in livery). As Elizabeth Bennet acknowledges with pain, family troubles take place in a domestic theatre with an audience of servants. ‘What praise is more valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant?’ asks the narrator of
Pride and Prejudice
, in effect echoing Elizabeth’s thought (III. i). There is nothing like the verdict of a servant, for the servants see everything, and we as readers should see them watching and listening.

NINE

Which Important Characters Never Speak in the Novels?

He had a pleasing face and a melancholy air, just as he ought to have, and drew back from conversation.

Persuasion
, I. xii

‘
Oratio imago animi
. – Language most shows a man: Speak, that I may see thee’, wrote the dramatist Ben Jonson, elaborating a Latin idiom.
¹
The great novelists of the nineteenth century, including Jane Austen, learned to make us discern a character through his or her speech. The rather few critics who have written on speech in Austen’s fiction have discovered how each of her speakers seems to have their own idiolect – a way of speaking that is individually distinctive.
²
In the art of creating idiolects the novelist is like the dramatist, but in the presentation of conversation the novelist has an extra resource: she can report dialogue without quoting it. In any particular scene a character might be speaking without his or her words actually being given to us. Austen, one of the greatest of all writers of dialogue, also developed a technique that is not usually noticed: the selective denial of quoted speech to particular characters.

Sometimes this denial is like a little joke that must have delighted the author exactly because it is difficult to spot. Such seems to be the case with Captain Benwick, the grieving poetry-lover in
Persuasion
. On her visit to Lyme with Captain Wentworth and the Musgroves, Anne Elliot spends much of her time deep in talk with this mournful naval officer, yet not a word that he speaks is ever quoted. We are given a good idea of their topics of literary conversation, we are invited to imagine him plangently reciting lines from the poems of Scott and Byron ‘which imaged a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness’, but we are never allowed actually to hear him speak (I. xi). Captain Benwick belongs to a special class of Austen’s characters: those who may play an important part in the story, may often be present on the page, may even be talking a good deal – but do not enter the novel’s recorded dialogue. The effect is extraordinary, and surely affects readers who are not necessarily conscious of Benwick’s speechlessness. The fact that we never hear him speak means that he never quite achieves singularity. We are left with the suspicion that he is performing by rote. The author’s buried joke is that all his outpouring amounts to no real expression of individual feeling or opinion.

And outpouring it seems to be. Anne Elliot and the Musgroves have already been told Captain Benwick’s sad history by Captain Wentworth before they meet him at Lyme. He is still distraught at the death of Fanny Harville, to whom he was engaged. When he is first encountered, he is described as a young man with ‘a pleasing face and a melancholy air’, who ‘drew back from conversation’ (I. xi). Yet his avoidance of conversation does not mean that he does not want to talk.
Au contraire
. On her first evening in Lyme, Anne gets Captain Benwick for company and finds that, though he is ‘shy’, he eventually has plenty to say– notably about his ‘taste in reading’ (I. xi). In fact, ‘he did not seem reserved’, and soon he is talking about poetry and repeating the appropriate chunks of Scott and Byron that he has got by heart. He has found out the lines that seem to dignify his own feelings. Anne spends most of the evening with him (not without motive: she is keen to avoid the conversation of Captain Wentworth). But, being full of quotations himself, he says nothing that the author thinks worth quoting.

The next day Captain Benwick seeks Anne out and he is soon talking again, disputing over books (I. xii). Captain Harville is grateful to her for ‘making that poor fellow talk so much’. He has been silently brooding over his books, it seems, while ‘shut up’ with the unbookish Harvilles. Now Anne has done the ‘good deed’ of a thoroughgoing therapist and given him the chance to talk. The sense is delicately given that Anne is becoming rather the victim of this silent man who has so quickly discovered the consolation of talk. As the party walks along the Cobb for a last time before leaving, ‘Anne found Captain Benwick again drawing near her.’ Of course he is going to talk and recite some more, but Austen is not going to tax the reader with what he says. Her heroine’s response is charitable rather than delighted: ‘she gladly gave him all her attention as long as attention was possible’. Not enough attention for any of his words to lodge.

When Charles Musgrove returns from Lyme and tells Anne about Captain Benwick, it is about him talking. ‘“Oh! He talks of you,” cried Charles, “in such terms . . . His head is full of some books that he is reading upon your recommendation, and he wants to talk to you about them . . . I overheard him telling Henrietta all about it”’ (II. ii). He keeps being talked about as talking, but his own words are kept from us. Charles vaguely remembers something he might have said about Anne – ‘Elegance, sweetness, beauty’ – but not any actual statement. He will never actually speak to us. The ‘poor fellow’ is sad, no doubt of it, but by declining, among all his effusions, to give us his own words, Austen animates our doubts about all his feelings. It is funny and it is narratively cunning, for Captain Benwick’s rapid tumble into an engagement with Louisa Musgrove will provoke Anne’s dispute with Captain Harville about the retentiveness of men’s and women’s feelings, prompting Captain Wentworth to his declaration. We should already know from the absence in the novel of Benwick’s own speech that there has been something self-pleasing in his discussion of the poetry of feeling. After his engagement to Louisa becomes official, Charles Musgrove describes him sitting next to his inamorata, ‘reading verses, or whispering to her, all day long’ (II. x). His conversation is more like a private flow of discourse. He has to be dragged into exchanges with other men. Charles Musgrove observes, ‘when one can but get him to talk, he has plenty to say’, but we will have to take his word for it.

There is sometimes something comical in Austen’s refusal to let a minor character be heard. Mr Musgrove in
Persuasion
is often present but never gets a word in – in contrast to the loquacious Mrs Musgrove. Benevolent and affluent, he is led by the inclinations of his wife and daughters. Comparably in
Pride and Prejudice
, Miss de Bourgh, Lady Catherine’s daughter, hardly has the right to be given any words of her own. During her stay in Kent, whenever Elizabeth meets Lady Catherine, Miss de Bourgh is always of the company, yet she is incapable of contributing anything to the dialogue. Lady Catherine’s daughter ‘spoke very little’, we are told, but in fact she speaks to us not at all: she is made entirely silent by the novel. Austen contrives a deliberate impression of her nothingness that is comic because the young woman is otherwise so privileged, and because her mother is so persuaded of her accomplishments. When Elizabeth joins her table for cards she finds it ‘superlatively stupid’, with talk about the game that is simply too tedious to relate (II. vi). When Elizabeth and Maria Lucas take their final leave before returning to Hertfordshire, she ‘exerted herself so far as to curtsey and hold out her hand to both’ (II. xv). She is, of course, the stooge to her endlessly talking, endlessly commanding mother, and we can feel as we read that she has been stunned into non-expression.

The other unspeaking young woman in the book is Georgiana Darcy. When she is first introduced by her brother, Elizabeth sees that she is ‘exceedingly shy’ and finds it difficult ‘to obtain even a word from her beyond a monosyllable’ (III. ii). When we next meet her she is attended by those baleful sisters Miss Bingley and Mrs Hurst, who are watching over her exchanges with Elizabeth, and she therefore has the more reason for restraint. Like Miss de Bourgh she has a paid companion, a genteel lady called Mrs Annesley, who is employed to do some of the talking for her. Elizabeth thinks that Miss Darcy looks ‘as if she wished for courage’ to join in the conversation, and sometimes she does ‘venture a short sentence, when there was least danger of its being heard’ (III. iii). The impression of her reticence is strongly conveyed by Austen’s decision never to quote her. When her brother appears, Miss Darcy ‘exerted herself much more to talk’, but who knows what she said? Miss Bingley mentions the militia, hoping to mortify Elizabeth with memories of Wickham, while unaware of Miss Darcy’s ‘meditated elopement’ with him. Elizabeth is a match for this thrust, covering for Miss Darcy’s embarrassment. ‘Georgiana also recovered in time, though not enough to be able to speak any more.’ Her wordlessness is her timidity, but something else too. The reminder that she was close to being deceived into elopement with Wickham is also a further explanation of her speechlessness. Her awkwardness, we are told, proceeds ‘from shyness and the fear of doing wrong’ and she is painfully aware that she has indeed come perilously close to ‘doing wrong’. Her near-seduction by Wickham has robbed her of the capacity to speak for herself.

Pride and Prejudice
has a high proportion of dialogue, so the non-contribution of these characters to the conversations that swirl around them should be noticeable to the other characters. In contrast, there are silent characters in Austen whose silence is a fact for the reader but not for the other characters. These are characters whose silence the novelist has elaborately arranged. A rival to Captain Benwick as a kind of authorial joke is Mr Perry, the local apothecary in
Emma
. Never has a character had so much of their speech reported by other characters without any of it ever being quoted by the author. Mr Woodhouse is endlessly citing his judgements, and his dialogue is punctuated with ‘Perry said . . . Perry tells me . . .’ There is nothing that Mr Woodhouse likes to tell any companion more than what Mr Perry has supposedly said – but in the novel Mr Perry actually says nothing. It is as if this absence from dialogue mimics ths successful quack’s wise practice, which must be to go along with whatever such a wealthy hypochondriac wants to believe. Who knows whether Mr Perry has said most of the things that Mr Woodhouse attributes to him? The novelist keeps him from speaking, imitating his own canny reticence. Mr Perry’s silence (despite all those reports of his sentiments) must have tickled his creator. It is what allows you to imagine his life – and even his thoughts – as the well-remunerated stooge of the Highbury gentry. They have come to rely on him, and to reward him financially for their reliance. He is their echo. When Harriet Smith becomes interested in riddles, Mr Woodhouse even consults ‘his good friend Perry’ in search of an example, though the apothecary ‘did not at present recollect any thing of the riddle kind’ (I. ix). Mr Woodhouse is slavish in his reliance, but it is not only he who reports what Mr Perry has said; everyone else in Highbury seems to repeat Mr Perry’s comments. Mr Perry is naturally the origin of much village gossip, being constantly on the move from one person’s house to the next. When Harriet Smith, for instance, gives Emma her account of Mr Elton’s mission to London to have Emma’s picture of her framed, the apothecary is her original source. Harriet has been told by Miss Nash, head-teacher at Mrs Goddard’s school, who has heard about it from Mr Perry. In Harriet’s account, Mr Perry is as loquacious as ever. He has met Mr Elton on the road and, realising that he was going to miss their whist club for the sake of this romantic errand, ‘had remonstrated with him about it, and told him how shabby it was in him . . . and tried very much to persuade him to put off his journey’ (I. viii).

Everybody hears Mr Perry talking except the reader. Even when he is actually present his speech is kept from us. In the one chapter told from Mr Knightley’s point of view (III. v), two parties, consisting of most of the novel’s main characters, meet and walk up to Hartfield to visit Mr Woodhouse. ‘As they were turning into the grounds, Mr. Perry passed by on horse-back. The gentlemen spoke of his horse.’ It is a crucial encounter, leading to Frank Churchill’s ‘blunder’ in mentioning the likelihood of Mr Perry ‘setting up his carriage’. Mr Perry is riding a horse, but is evidently making so much money from the hypochondriacs of Highbury that he can accede to his wife’s desire for a carriage. Frank Churchill is
au fait
with this development because of his secret communication with Jane Fairfax, and is therefore in difficulties when asked by Mrs Weston how he knows. Mr Perry, the local go-between, is as important as ever in this episode, yet we are not going to hear if he really has a voice of his own. Only once do get close to hearing him, when he comes to Hartfield after having called on Jane Fairfax, who is ailing because she has broken off her engagement with Frank Churchill. Mr Perry tells Emma that his new patient’s health ‘seemed for the moment completely deranged’, and that ‘Her spirits seemed overcome’ (III. ix). Even here Austen is determined to keep us from his actual speech, giving us his diagnosis in elaborately reported mode. On another occasion we seem to get a preserved specimen of his actual advice, when Emma is trying to answer her father’s anxiety about the health-damaging consequences of the forthcoming ball at the Crown. He need not worry because Mrs Weston will be in charge of arrangements, ‘Our own dear Mrs Weston, who is carefulness itself’ (II. xi). Grasping for evidence of her former governess’s care for people’s health, she asks her father to recall what Mr’ Perry said ‘so many years ago’ when she had measles. ‘If
Miss Taylor
undertakes to wrap Miss Emma up, you need not have any fears, sir’ (II. xi). This is not him speaking, but it purports to be a quotation remembered down the years – and, if it is such, what a blissfully idiotic sentiment it is! As if wrapping up were a cure for measles, that common killer of children in the nineteenth century, and as if Miss Taylor’s wrapping-up skills were uniquely infallible.