Abstract
Understood in its historical moment, Austen’s fiction can be seen as a reflection on two key aspects of British national identity in a period of historical transformation: England’s strong maritime presence in the Atlantic world and a cultural imaginary based in landed estates. While the interpretation of Mansfield Park has rightly drawn attention to the significance of plantation estates for her fiction, this novel does not exhaust Austen’s Atlanticism. This chapter argues that Austen’s Persuasion articulates a picture of mobility associated with naval life (meritocracy, mapping, ethical individualism), rather than with the culture of the plantation or the landed estate. As a kind of psychological corollary to the British navy’s meritocratic culture, Austen valorizes the fluidity of mind that survives the exigencies of fortune and even profits from them. Seeing Nelson rather than Napoleon, Trafalgar rather than Waterloo, as her ethical model, Austen’s novel is a lesson in engaging with otherness—that is to say, in engaging Atlantically with the world.
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Notes
- 1.
Austen thus began Persuasion the same day (August 8, 1815) as the London papers reported that Napoleon had departed for St. Helena the preceding day, August 7. Emma is published by John Murray in December 1815, but the title page reads “1816.”
- 2.
By “retrospective,” I mean to imply a land-based conservative approach to national identity that relies on custom for its authority, eschewing the more mercantile worldview that threatens it.
- 3.
Sanditon, in Jane Austen’s Manuscript Works, ed. Linda Bree, Peter Sabor, and Janet Todd (Peterboro, Canada: Broadview Press, 2012), 337.
- 4.
Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
- 5.
Jocelyn Harris, A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s Persuasion (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 74.
- 6.
The plot complexities, which begin with Emma’s solitude after her governess Miss Taylor becomes Mr. Weston’s second wife, are greatly sped up after his son by his first wife writes that he will visit, does not visit, suddenly visits, and becomes the unacknowledged abettor of Emma’s self-delusion.
- 7.
See Jeremy Black, A New History of England (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2000); and Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
- 8.
Piers Brendon, the Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 607.
- 9.
Qtd. in Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 2005), 107.
- 10.
Bailyn, 25.
- 11.
Qtd. in Bailyn, 45.
- 12.
Joyce Chaplin begins her chapter by noting the lateness of the concept in “The Atlantic Ocean and Its Contemporary Meanings, 1492–1808,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Reinterpreting History), ed. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). However, by the time The Atlantic Monthly (now The Atlantic) was founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857, the conception of the Atlantic as a body—much like the Mediterranean—had taken hold.
- 13.
Persuasion, edited by Linda Bree (Peterboro, Canada: Broadview Press, 1998), 189. Further citations will be made parenthetically in the text.
- 14.
Harris argues that Austen modeled Admiral Croft on the much younger Francis Austen; while Frank supplied Croft’s amiability, Croft’s success at Trafalgar and high rank provided a way to honor Frank (77).
- 15.
Even as rear admiral, the most junior of the admiral ranks (admiral, vice-admiral, and rear-admiral), Wentworth’s brother-in-law has gained such significant social status that Sir Walter decides he would not be intolerable as a tenant: “‘I have let my house to Admiral Croft,’ would sound extremely well” (64).
- 16.
While Admiral Croft was “of a gentleman’s family” (61), this in itself is not enough to garner Sir Walter’s esteem, nor does it indicate wealth; the two Austen brothers who entered the navy were also eventually made admirals and were likewise of the gentry, but the family’s choice of a naval career for them suggests the lack of funding required by a university or army career.
- 17.
See Brian Southam, Jane Austen and the Navy (London: Hambledon and London, 2000).
- 18.
Ibid., 275. Southam also explains the significance of Admiral Croft’s other postings, nearly all related to blockades of French goods and monitoring French fleets.
- 19.
Sir Walter’s obsessive chase of reflective surfaces in which to view his face as others might see him reveals his insistence on a static temporality in which the visage that is his self-presentation to the world, but out of which he can only see whether another reflects his self-worth or disturbs it, cannot change. Change is what he deplores since it cannot augur good. Ironically, the seemingly premature aging of his middle daughter, Anne, is an aging that confronts him with a visible alteration of temporality, one that has condensed all of the normal aging Sir Walter should be experiencing into a visage (it is Anne’s face, not his own, that has changed) or surface reflection of what he is determined to hold at bay. Sir Walter’s belief that he will not age, will not lose power or attraction, is cemented in the static nature of land rights, hereditary privilege and rank, and the other carefully guarded social accoutrements of those who determined their prestige and liberties from their relation to land possession, are heavily indebted to mental schema of classification and mapping, but his denial of temporal reference belongs to the aristocratic regime to which he aspires, rather than to the landed civility of a Darcy or Knightley.
- 20.
William Boelhower, “I’ll teach you how to flow”: On Figuring Out Atlantic Studies,” Atlantic Studies 1.1 (2004): 28–48.
- 21.
Ibid., 45.
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Fay, E. (2017). Atlantic Thinking in Jane Austen’s Novels. In: von Morzé, L. (eds) Cities and the Circulation of Culture in the Atlantic World. The New Urban Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52606-9_7
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