A Jane Austen Education(50)

Austen herself cared far too much about friendship to make the mistake of idealizing it. She knew all about what Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, referred to as “the different sorts of friendship in the world,” and she had written about them from the time she was a girl. In her teenage years, the fashion had been for what they called romantic friendships—histrionically passionate attachments designed to show off your susceptibility to fine emotion. Love and Freindship, the most famous of her adolescent satires (“as fast as she could write and quicker than she could spell,” as Virginia Woolf remarked about them), was designed to deflate that exact cliché:After having been deprived during the course of 3 weeks of a real freind, . . . imagine my transports at beholding one, most truly worthy of the Name. . . . She was all sensibility and Feeling. We flew into each other’s arms and after having exchanged vows of mutual Freindship for the rest of our Lives, instantly unfolded to each other the most inward secrets of our Hearts.





One can only imagine the fun that Austen would have made of Facebook or MySpace or Twitter, with their comparable illusion of instantaneous intimacy. Isabella Thorpe tried to pull the same kind of thing with Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, but in her later books, Austen moved on to more adult forms of insincerity. Social climbers, she knew, can exercise their limbs on friendship as well as marriage, and the world of Persuasion was crawling with them. The town of Bath was a full immersion in the tepid waters of social ambition. Mrs. Clay, the oily widow, had hooked herself onto Elizabeth Elliot to see how far the ride would take her, her ultimate purpose being to inveigle Sir Walter into making her his second wife—at which point, we could be sure, the new Lady Elliot would no longer bother being deferential to her “friend.” “Frenemy,” we sometimes call this sort of person now, the kind who’s nice just long enough to get whatever they think they can out of you.

The novel’s most avid lickspittle, however, turned out to be none other than Sir Walter himself. This made perfect sense once I thought about it. Anyone that invested in distinctions of social rank had to be as obsequious to those above him as he was contemptuous of those below. Just as bullies are cowards in disguise, snobs are secret grovelers—another reason Austen so adored the aristocracy. The object of Sir Walter’s particular veneration was a cousin, the Viscountess Dalrymple, and her daughter, Miss Carteret, a pair of mediocrities who turned out to have nothing going for them but their pedigree:Anne had never seen her father and sister before in contact with nobility, and she must acknowledge herself disappointed. She had hoped better things from their high ideas of their own situation in life, and was reduced to form a wish which she had never foreseen,—a wish that they had more pride; for “our cousins Lady Dalrymple and Miss Carteret,” “our cousins, the Dalrymples,” sounded in her ears all day long.





But the friendship of a Sir Walter or a Mrs. Clay was not likely to take in anyone less susceptible to flattery than their intended targets. Far more dangerous, Austen wanted us to know—and far more insidious—were the friends who actually did mean well but couldn’t tell the difference between what was good for you and what was only good for them. Such a friend was Lady Russell, and the saddest thing about Anne’s relationship with her, her surrogate mother and only intimate, was just how much the heroine actually valued her, how little she could afford to let herself see the older woman’s limitations. Anne thought, early on, “of the extraordinary blessing of having one such truly sympathising friend as Lady Russell,” but only after the perfectly blasé reception she received at the Musgroves’ (that lesson “in the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle”). Even her sister Mary had treated the whole trauma of surrendering the family estate, which Anne had been suffering through for weeks, as a matter of utter indifference. Anyone was going to look good compared to that.

Yet it was that same Lady Russell who had pressured the heroine into making the worst mistake of her life, rejecting Captain Wentworth. Of course, she did it for what she thought were all the right reasons. Still, late in the novel, when she was presented with the same kind of situation again, she gave, unbelievably, the same advice—even though she knew perfectly well how terribly alone Anne was and how miserable she had been for all those years. But even Anne, by then, could see the truth. Lady Russell, whether she recognized it or not, was trying to protect her own dignity, not her friend’s. She was the person she was trying to save from being connected with someone as lowly as a naval officer.

This was a woman, after all, who thought that kissing up to the Viscountess Dalrymple sounded like a really good idea. Indeed, once the heroine took a hard look at her friend, she figured out that there wasn’t a whole lot of difference, in their ideas about class and manners and what really mattered in a person, between Lady Russell and her own father. And so, once Anne had made up her mind about how she was going to live her life—uninfluenced, this time, by any of her “friends”— “there was nothing less for Lady Russell to do,” if she wanted to stay on good terms with the heroine, “than to admit that she had been pretty completely wrong, and to take up a new set of opinions.” In plain language, Anne told Lady Russell to go soak her head. The heroine had walked away from her father and sisters, and she was strong enough now to do the same to anyone else who stood in the way of her happiness.