"Unbecoming Conjunctions": Mourning the Loss of Landscape and Love in Persuasion

"Unbecoming Conjunctions": Mourning the Loss of Landscape and Love in Persuasion Jill Heydt-Stevenson I am sorry for the Beaches' loss of their little girl, especially as it is the one so much like me. ... Mrs. Hall of Sherboum was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, oweing to a fright.—I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband. ... Mr Waller is dead, I see;—I cannot greive about it, nor perhaps can his Widow very much. ... The death of Mrs. W. K. we had seen;— I had no idea that anybody liked her, & therefore felt nothing for any Survivor....1 These are Austen's reactions to deaths in her own neighbourhood; they do not differ much in sensibility from the infamous comments in Persuasion about Mrs Musgrove's "large fat sighings over the destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for"—that is, the dead sailor, Dick Musgrove.2 Such comments have outraged and exasperated readers, 1 "To Cassandra," 9 January 1796, p. 4; "To Cassandra," 27 October 1798, p. 24; "To Cassandra," 20 June 1808, p. 196; "To Cassandra," 8 February 1807, p. 49; all from Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others, collected and edited by R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1932). 2 Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. R.W. Chapman, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 68. References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 8, Number 1, October 1995 52 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION who have called her "cruel," and her sensibility "tasteless."3 But when is loss tasteful and becoming? Austen acknowledges what we might feel uncomfortable acknowledging—mat the ability to sympathize with the mourner depends in some part on the "tastefulness" of the one who grieves: Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions , which reason will patronize in vain,—which taste cannot tolerate,—which ridicule will seize, (p. 68) In the novel at large, and in her responses to the deaths of her neighbours, Austen explores the process of mourning, revealing "unbecoming conjunctions " in order to expose the paradoxical nature of grief—sometimes it is moving, sometimes comical, sometimes ridiculous—and to ask what a more timid individual might consider to be the unaskable: is what is lost worth mourning for?4 And as she asks this question, she focuses not on the acceptance of loss or restoration of the object but on the instability and subjectivity that loss engenders, on the relativity of grief and how that affects the aesthetics of taste, and on the ultimate inability to restore completely what has been lost. What makes her exploration of this topic particularly rich and multivalent , as well as historical, is the fact that in this novel Austen interweaves the examination of loss with an inquiry into picturesque aesthetics while employing those aesthetics to examine loss itself. Because critics have slighted or minimized both the power of the picturesque and the connection between this movement and Austen, however, no one has yet investigated in any depth her explorations of picturesque landscape and loss. In my opinion Austen was not a mere debunker of the "cult" of the picturesque.5 In contrast, I believe that she understood and incorporated 3 "This is gratuitously harsh, shockingly cruel and malicious," John Halperin, The Life of Jane Austen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 305. Roger Sales offers an interesting reading of the letters that places them within the historical context of the Regency, but he also focuses on their "abusive" quality. Jane Austen and Representations ofRegency England (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 34. 4 Austen's reaction to death is complicated; her reaction to her own father's death, for example, reveals profound sorrow and contains no mischievous irony. 5 See Margaret Llewlyn, Jane Austen: A Character Study (London: William Kimber, 1977); W.A. Craik, Jane Austen in Her Time (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1969); Mary Lascelles, Jane Austen and Her Art...