What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (32 page)

Pace
Mr Darcy, books for Austen are not just the solemn matter of improvement. They are the means by which people live out their desires or their follies. Marianne Dashwood is not entirely wrong to believe that reading takes you to a person’s heart. In
Mansfield Park
, the first reason given for Fanny loving Edmund is that ‘he recommended the books which charmed her leisure hours’ (I. ii). Nothing, we sense, can be more intimate. In Whit Stillman’s clever 1990 film
Metropolitan
, loosely based on Austen’s novel, the hero wins the Austen-adoring heroine only when he himself learns to appreciate
Mansfield Park
. Which is as it should be.

SIXTEEN

Are Ill People Really to Blame for Their Illnesses?

‘I do not think I ever was so ill in my life as I have been all this morning: very unfit to be left alone, I am sure. Suppose I were to be seized of a sudden in some dreadful way, and not able to ring the bell!’

Persuasion
, I. v

You might think people really were to blame for their own illnesses, if you were as easily tricked by Frank Churchill as Emma is. The day after their first meeting, Emma asks him about visiting Miss Bates’s house, where, he says, he found himself kept much longer than he had intended by ‘the talking aunt’. What about his acquaintance from Weymouth, Miss Fairfax (whose name he has not mentioned)? How was she looking?

‘Ill, very ill—that is, if a young lady can ever be allowed to look ill. But the expression is hardly admissible, Mrs. Weston, is it? Ladies can never look ill. And, seriously, Miss Fairfax is naturally so pale, as almost always to give the appearance of ill health.—A most deplorable want of complexion.’ (II. vi)

He speaks as if illness were Jane Fairfax’s natural condition. Her reserve, even insipidity, he implies, makes her look unhealthy. Emma might begin ‘a warm defence of Miss Fairfax’s complexion’ but his judgement is surely half-pleasing to her. She is herself, after all, the character who claims ‘I am always well, you know’ in response to an anxious enquiry from Mrs Weston (III. xii). When Frank Churchill goes on to declare that ‘nothing could make amends for the want of the fine glow of health’, he seems to be preferring one woman rather explicitly to the other. ‘Ill’ is his word for Jane Fairfax’s very character.

It is all a blind. He loves Jane Fairfax. So hastily and passionately has he rushed her into a secret engagement that we must also infer strong sexual attraction. That pale complexion must allure him. Yet he is clever enough to know how she appears to others and to know that Emma will be ready to believe that her rival for elegance actually looks ‘ill’ – her own robust health being, in her own mind, the sign of her superiority. In claiming that she is always well, Emma is saying something peculiar for her age. A diligent reader of Jane Austen’s letters would be hard put to find one which did not mention illnesses among family and friends. More than muslin or money, illness is her consistent concern and surpasses even the weather as a natural topic of epistolary conversation. Occasionally Austen describes her own indispositions, but mostly she reports the ailments of family members and close friends. In an age when diagnoses were unconvincing and treatments rarely productive, a slight illness might always seem like a harbinger of something worse. Take this, from a letter of June 1808: ‘There has been a cold & sore throat prevailing very much in this House lately, the Children have almost all been ill with it, & we were afraid Lizzy was going to be very ill one day; she had specks & a great deal of fever.—It went off however, & they are all pretty well now’ (
Letters
, 53). The relief of this is something that we can hardly feel any more. It gives us some idea of how our usually comfortable distinction between trivial and serious ailments was much less secure.

There was good reason to worry over each new indisposition, but therefore also more to be gained from hypochondria. There are suggestions in Austen’s correspondence of reined-in exasperation at others’ supposed afflictions: a jaundiced reader might think that her mother and her brother Henry, both often ill and both notably long-lived, were possible valetudinarians. ‘Dearest Henry! What a turn he has for being ill!’ she exclaimed in a letter to her sister in 1813, as she reported yet another of his ailments (
Letters
, 96). In November 1815 she wrote from London to Cassandra describing Henry’s slow recovery from another bout of illness, ‘but still they will not let him be well’ (
Letters
, 128). She seems divided between exasperation (‘He is so well, that I cannot think why he is not perfectly well’) and concern (‘The fever is not yet quite removed’). Occasionally she lets loose about some notable hypochondriac, as in a letter of September 1813, where she describes Edward Bridges’ wife as ‘a poor Honey—the sort of woman who gives me the idea of being determined never to be well—& who likes her spasms & nervousness & the consequence they give her, better than anything else’ (
Letters
, 90). For the most part, however, Austen fusses over symptoms without mockery. ‘Henry is not quite well.—His stomach is rather deranged. You must keep him in Rhubarb & give him plenty of Port & Water’ (
Letters
, 88). Sometimes it seems that Mr Woodhouse’s pseudo-medical twitterings were all too easy for her to generate.

A cold or an attack of bile might be nothing – or it might be something. It is a shock for the modern reader when he or she begins to realise from the dates of letters that Austen’s comments on her own health, as inconsequential as the bulletins that she has been issuing on friends and family for twenty years, tell us of the onset of a fatal illness. The shock is the greater as most of her reports talk of her improving health. ‘We are all in good health &
I
have certainly gained strength through the Winter & am not far from being well; & I think I understand my own case now so much better than I did, as to be able by care to keep off any serious return of illness’ (
Letters
, 149). Less than six months later she was dead.

Illness shapes the plots of several of her novels. Illness takes Catherine Morland to Bath, whence Mr Allen has been sent for his gout. Mrs Allen is naturally delighted. ‘A neighbour of ours, Dr. Skinner, was here for his health last winter, and came away quite stout’ (I. viii). ‘That circumstance must give great encouragement,’ replies Mr Tilney, with his special brand of unnoticed irony. It is usefully unclear what the reader is to think of going to Bath for your health. Mrs Allen is foolish, but her husband is not. That exemplary couple Admiral and Mrs Croft also come to Bath to minister to illness. According to Mary Musgrove, the Crofts are in the town because ‘they think the admiral gouty’ (
Persuasion
, II. vi). The report comes originally from Charles Musgrove, so might be thought to be reliable. Yet there is always the suspicion that the therapeutic powers of the Bath waters are illusory. The waters are, after all, sampled by Mr Woodhouse and recommended by Mrs Elton. Jane Austen’s brother Edward was one of those who came to Bath for his ill health, drinking the waters and bathing and attaching himself to a Bath physician, Dr Fellowes (
Letters
, 20 & 22). The novelist knew well the fashionable valetudinarian culture of Bath, though we do not know how absurd she found it . . .

The difficulty of distinguishing between the merest hypochondria and the first signs of a fatal ailment produces a comic coup with the death of Mrs Churchill in
Emma
. For much of the novel illness, so-called, has appeared to control Frank Churchill’s movements. He is about to enjoy the ball that he has begun to organise in Highbury when a letter arrives. ‘Mrs. Churchill was unwell—far too unwell to do without him’ (II. xii). He must leave immediately for Yorkshire. Later he writes to Mrs Weston from Mrs Churchill’s home to say that she is ‘recovering’, but that ‘he dared not yet, even in his own imagination, fix a time for coming to Randalls again’ (II. xiii). Frank Churchill is eventually liberated to return by Mrs Churchill’s ill health. She and her husband decide to travel to London, as Mr Weston reports: ‘she has not been well the whole winter, and thinks Enscombe too cold for her—so they are all to move southward without loss of time’ (II. xviii). Mr Weston has ‘not much faith in Mrs. Churchill’s illness’, he tells Mrs Elton, before half-recollecting that hypochondria is made possible by the reality of death around the corner. ‘“I hope,” said he presently, “I have not been severe upon poor Mrs. Churchill. If she is ill I should be sorry to do her injustice.”’ His self-correction is like a reminder of the paradox at work in all the novels: most people are merely imagining themselves ill;  however, anybody might die at any time. The former is possible because of the latter. On Frank Churchill’s next visit to Highbury we get intimations that Mrs Churchill’s condition is no longer a mere
malade imaginaire
. ‘That she was really ill was certain; he had declared himself convinced of it’ (III. i). Now she has decided that she cannot stand the noise of London and is moving to Richmond. ‘Mrs. Churchill had been recommended to the medical skill of an eminent person there, and had otherwise a fancy for the place.’ We are still in the balance between illness and ‘fancy’, but one or the other is manoeuvring her adopted son closer and closer to Highbury.

Fancy bested by reality might seem to be the pattern of
Sense and Sensibility
. After Willoughby’s abrupt departure, Marianne performs the business of suffering, complete with insomnia, headaches and inability to speak (I. xvi). After she is rejected by him in London, however, her affliction becomes real. Austen ensures that her almost fatal illness has its origins in her own self-indulgent folly (‘imprudence’ is Austen’s unhesitating word): Marianne pleases herself with a twilight walk in the grounds of the Palmers’ country house, where the grass is ‘the longest and wettest’, and then sits around in wet shoes and stockings (III. vi). Disappointment in love may have weakened her, but she sets her own sickness in train. Once she is ill Elinor forces ‘proper medicines’ on her (III. vii), but what might these be? The apothecary is sent for, ‘pronouncing her disorder to have a putrid tendency’ and ‘allowing the word “infection” to pass his lips’. On his second visit he admits ‘His medicines had failed’, but he is full of confidence in some further treatment or other. This confidence is his business. Mrs Jennings, meanwhile, assumes that the illness will be fatal. Sir John Middleton tells Willoughby in the lobby of the Drury Lane Theatre that Marianne is ‘dying’ (III. viii). Mrs Dashwood arrives in ‘terror’, convinced that Marianne is ‘no more’ (III. ix). Much later Marianne’s own self-diagnosis seems to confirm this. ‘My illness, I well knew, had been entirely brought on by myself, by such negligence of my own health, as I felt even at the time to be wrong. Had I died,—it would have been self-destruction’ (III. x).

In recent decades, critics and readers have been willing to find Marianne a victim rather than a culprit. Perhaps the most influential has been Tony Tanner, whose introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of
Sense and Sensibility
scintillatingly invokes Freud and Foucault to argue that socialisation makes Marianne ill. She suffers from ‘neurosis brought on by repression’. Illness is the price she pays for bending her nature to society: ‘sickness is precisely the cost of her entry into the sedate stabilities of civilised life envisaged at the end’.
¹
The problem with this argument is that it is Marianne’s proud sensibility, rather than her eventual socialisation, that makes her susceptible. Marianne’s sickness begins with being ‘hysterical’. Even after her recovery, her susceptibility remains, producing her ‘hysterics’ when a servant announces that ‘Mr. Ferrars is married’ (III. xi). ‘Hysterics’ might not have the pejorative force that it now has, but the other Austen characters with whom it is associated are models of self-indulgence. In
Persuasion
Mary Musgrove has to be kept from ‘hysterics’ when her son breaks his collarbone (I. vii). Finding excuses to go out in the evening, she brandishes her ‘hysterical’ symptoms as an excuse for not looking after her son: ‘I am not at all equal to it. You saw how hysterical I was yesterday.’ When Louisa Musgrove has her accident, Mary suffers from ‘hysterical agitations’ (I. xii) and continues to be ‘hysterical’ the next day (II. i).

Austen’s characters live with the expectation of illness.

Marianne’s fellow hysterics are a dubious crew. ‘My mother was in hysterics,’ Jane Bennet tells Elizabeth on the confirmation of Lydia’s elopement (II. v). Mrs Bennet subsequently embarks on an enumeration of her symptoms: ‘such tremblings, such flutterings, all over me, such spasms in my side, and pains in my head, and such beatings at heart, that I can get no rest by night or by day’ (III. v). In
Sense and Sensibility
Marianne seems to share her susceptibility with the appalling Fanny Dashwood, who falls into what Mrs Jennings calls ‘violent hysterics’ when she hears of Edward’s engagement to Lucy Steele (III. i). Mrs Jennings returns from one of her daily visits to her daughter Charlotte, who has recently given birth to her first child, and brings the report, which she has had from the doctor, Mr Donavan, attending her daughter. He has been called to see Mrs John Dashwood, and readily gossips with Mrs Jennings about his other patient’s condition. Mr Donavan, opportunist attendant of family disappointment, has, says Mrs Jennings, returned to the Dashwood residence in Harley Street so that ‘he may be within call’ when Mrs Ferrars is told the news – ‘for your sister was sure
she
would be in hysterics too’. A wonderful little comic subplot: what does the doctor say to his medical friends? ‘What! Is Fanny ill?’ asks Elinor (III. i). One hardly knows the answer.