Personal Objectivity in Austen--Not About Emotional Self-Indulgence

My version: the narrator is

very objective.

Re-post

I recently read [2011] a "re-imagined" version of Persuasion in which Anne bemoans she dropped Captain Wentworth when she was younger out of weak-mindedness; she should have dared all and married him anyway!

This is completely and utterly out of keeping with Anne's personality, not to mention Austen's theme.

What Anne actually says at the end of the novel is that while Lady Russell's advice to Anne when she was nineteen was wrong, Anne was not wrong to follow it. Having taught numerous nineteen-year-olds, I can attest to this. Being persuadable regarding certain issues--Hey, drop that druggy boyfriend and go back to college to get a degree in nursing--is a WONDERFUL attribute for a 19-year-old young woman to have.

Not that Captain Wentworth was a druggy boyfriend type of dude--and Lady Russell never gave him the chance to prove otherwise--but he so easily could have been. And Anne never blames Lady Russell. She went to her for advice, but the decision was Anne's.

She doesn't beat herself up for making it. She regrets it but not because she turned to someone with more experience due to her lack of experience. 

Austen's focus here indicates that although Persuasion is a very different novel from P& P, her themes/attitudes remain consistent: her narrator rarely thinks highly of characters who just do whatever comes to them on the spur of the moment (sweet-natured Bingley is a rare exception, and Bingley is never destructive).

It isn't that Austen is opposed (as Bronte thought she was) to "sensibility," an emotional reaction based on strong feeling. But she isn't a big fan of "because I've had this emotional reaction, it is now more important than anything else, including other people's well-being, social stability, not to mention my own future and health."

What Austen emphasizes with her heroes and heroines is their thoughtfulness. Anne's decision to marry Wentworth at the end of Persuasion provokes some social/familial hostility, though less than it would have eight years earlier, but now she knows what she is getting into. She is prepared to bear the consequences. She is also much more able to weigh the real costs to her family against their imagined costs. And she is better able to assess the strengths and weaknesses of her mother figure, Lady Russell.

These are all things she couldn't have done at nineteen although the marriage would likely have weathered her (and Wentworth's) learning curve. But Austen (and Bronte too actually) saw greater nobility in a decision based on self-knowledge and self-revelation than a decision based on "but this is what I want at the moment" (what Sayers in Gaudy Night calls "snatching").

Returning to Pride & Prejudice, the characters who behave without thought (Mr. Collins, Wickham, Lydia, Mr. Bennet) are punished (sort of) in the end. "Sort of" because although Lydia has married a wastrel, she'll spend the rest of her life flirting with officers, so she won't be particularly miserable (Wickham might be, but I think even Wickham does better out of the marriage than he could have hoped for). Mr. Collins has a far better wife than he deserves and a GREAT employer (from his perspective). And although Mr. Bennet is a crappy disciplinarian and not the best husband in the world, he is a reasonably nice guy and will continue to have a reasonably nice life. 

The narrator of my Northanger Abbey, like

Austen's, is more objective than the young lovers.

However, Austen reserves her true approbation, her happy endings, her love for those characters who demonstrate not only goodness and mutual affection but also intelligent objectivity and honesty. 

I think, to a degree, this is one reason Austen remains so beloved. We all want the sentimental romance, but underneath, we also want it to be real. Jane Austen keeps it real.