Alas! with all her reasonings, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing.
Now, how were his sentiments to be read? Was this like wishing to avoid her? And the next moment she was hating herself for the folly which asked the questions.
In the later novels such as Emma or Persuasion, when the narrator shows the interior state, she does not summarize it with such conventional terms as embarrassment and vexation. By conveying her agitation in the style and sentence structure (a whole series of inelegant, short, stubby clauses), the narrator does not have to say that Anne Elliot is uncomfortable, and, as a consequence, we get the most dramatic and immediate use of free indirect discourse to achieve transparency. Here, the external event is minimized, rendered in almost phantasmagorical fashion-'the room seemed full-full of persons and voices'-as the text concentrates only on Anne's response. The dialogue is background noise that the narrative doesn't even bother to repeat. The narration no longer conveys order, control, and rationality, for the event, while ordinary, is painful and irrational-in fact, most of the passage consists in Anne's difficult struggle to impose rationality on it. Like much of Persuasion, this passage is Wordsworthian in its focus on memory, the pain of remembering, and how memory separates one individual from another. Austen's most solitary protagonist, Anne Elliot suffers alone. The intensely subjective passage quoted represents an interior sermon in which she cautions herself to expect nothing but changes, alienations, and removals, none of them for the better. A few lines later, Mary relates to Anne Wentworth's comment on their meeting again after all these years: ''Altered beyond his knowledge! Anne fully submitted, in silent, deep mortification.'
Her mortification is followed by the narrator's summarizing of Wentworth's attitude in indirect discourse:
Frederick Wentworth had used such words, or something like them ['You were so altered he should not have known you again'], but without an idea that they would be carried round to her. He had thought her wretchedly altered, and, in the first moment of appeal, had spoken as he felt. He had not forgiven Anne Elliot. She had used him ill; deserted and disappointed him; and worse, she had shewn a feebleness of character in doing so, which his own decided, confident temper could not endure. She had given him up to oblige others. It had been the effect of over-persuasion. It had been weakness and timidity. -289-
Wentworth's response is given in shorthand as petulance and misunderstanding. His and Anne's responses to the encounter are kept entirely separate. And the responses are gendered: the range of emotions she feels is conveyed, following the path of pain and reaction, but his feelings are summarized, condensed, reported as a state, not conveyed as a process. Their thoughts are both transparent, but they are rendered differently. Their alienation and emotional distance are embodied in the very shape of the narrative: hers painful and slow, his curt, conventional, and clichéd-she had used him ill. The passages discussed so far have all been part of courtship plots within domestic novels of courtship and marriage, and they have all dealt with the relations between the female and male protagonists. There are of course many scenes of large social gatherings, scenes of solitary heroines' meditations, and scenes of female characters interacting. Save for the solitary meditations, none of these other configurations results in the detailed examination of consciousness or reflects the relation between one consciousness and another. The configuration examined here is explicitly gendered because the reflections are not symmetrical; they usually concern the female interpretation of the male ('she longed to know what at that moment was passing in his mind'). Such scenes therefore accept the assumptions of heterosexual monogamy, that marriage between male and female is the goal of social intercourse, that the unmarried state is unstable and seeks the rest or stability of marriage. The gender difference in responses becomes more pronounced as the narration becomes more interiorized, implying that women differ from men more on the inside than on the outside, more in their emotional than in their physical lives.
Austen's most difficult novel is Mansfield Park, the only one admirers are regularly willing to admit that they have to work at liking. Its scenes of reunion illuminate Austen's narrative technique and presentation of consciousness. Also, because the moral and historical arguments about aristocracy, responsibility, and the state of England are so explicit in Mansfield Park, it is here easiest to see the connection between narrative form, how the protagonist's subject position is constructed, and theme-what that subjectivity signifies. Claiming that Pride and Prejudice was too 'light, bright and sparkling,' with Mansfield Park Austen apparently set out to compose a more serious and less comic novel, 'on a complete change of subject.' Unlike the witty and confident Elizabeth Bennet before her or Emma after her, Mansfield Park's heroine seems -290- humorless and often prudish. Fanny Price is a Cinderella figure, a poor relative subject alternately to abuse and neglect as she is brought up as a dependent among her rich relatives at Mansfield Park. Only her cousin Edmund fully appreciates Fanny's worth, and she has to endure the unwanted attentions of the lively Henry Crawford along with the jealousy aroused by Edmund's attraction to Henry's equally lively sister Mary. Such a plot produces a solitary and unusually silent protagonist with no confidants-only the narrator and the reader are privy to her interior struggles and resentments. As a consequence, both Fanny's consciousness and the narrator's presentation of it assume unusual prominence in the novel, and interpreters struggle to decide if we are asked to take Fanny as the authorial spokesperson; that is, should we believe that she is always right-a moral paragon like Elinor Dashwood in
By eight in the morning, Edmund was in the house. The girls heard his entrance from above, and Fanny went down. The idea of immediately seeing him, with the knowledge of what he must be suffering, brought back all her own first feelings. He so near her, and in misery. She was ready to sink, as he entered the parlour. He was alone, and met her instantly; and she found herself pressed to his heart with only these words, just articulate, 'My Fanny-my only sister-my only comfort now.' She could say nothing; nor for some minutes could he say more.
He turned away to recover himself, and when he spoke again, though his voice still faltered, his manner showed the wish of self-command, and the resolution of avoiding any farther allusion. 'Have you breakfasted? — When shall you be ready? — Does Susan go?' — were questions following each other rapidly. His great object was to be off as soon as possible. When Mansfield was considered, time was precious; and the state of his own mind made him find relief only in motion. It was settled that he should order the carriage to the door in half an hour; Fanny answered for their having breakfasted, and being quite ready in half an hour. He had already ate, and declined staying for their meal. He would walk round the ramparts, and join them in the carriage. He was gone again, glad to get away even from Fanny. -291-
He looked very ill; evidently suffering under violent emotions, which he was determined to suppress. She knew it must be so, but it was terrible to her.
This is a curiously mixed passage-of great emotional conflict and suffering, yet seen almost from afar. Very little dialogue is rendered directly, only Edmund's elliptical address to Fanny; the rest is reported indirectly. Fanny appears to say nothing of significance here at all, though as is usual in this novel, it is her response, her feelings that matter. By conveying so clearly the sense of containment of emotion, of that which is too painful to speak, Austen has captured the contradiction of intimacy and distance in the very form of the narrative. Edmund's feelings are physically transparent and yet distant: they can be assumed, conjectured at, even seen, but not told directly.
The whole scene is rendered from Fanny's perspective, though not really from within her, as is common earlier in the novel; here, we are looking through her or with her as she solicitously watches Edmund. With its isolated and vulnerable protagonist, the watcher who sees all of the others' flaws and failures, Mansfield Park more than any of Austen's previous novels thematizes the connection between subjectivity and selfishness, the consequences of toying with another's feelings, of thinking too much of oneself and too little of others, of the unwillingness to harmonize one's feelings and desires with others. In these last few chapters there is no longer any room for irony between a knowing narrator and Fanny's adolescent gushes on picturesque nature or the jealousy
