Persuasion: Show me the Money

Jane Austen’s books, a friend once said are all about money.

And status, I might add.
Of the two, money clearly comes first.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Persuasion, Austen’s last novel.
Though its ostensible subject is the heroine’s endless regret for having broken off her engagement the book concludes — and she herself says — that she could hardly have done otherwise.

The guy was broke.

A nobody and broke.

A nobody because he was broke.

His unsuitability as a suitor rested on those two facts.

If she knew nothing else, Jane Austen knew this:
women must be provided for, or provide for themselves.
Therefore, they must have money.
Somehow they must pay the bills.

At the base of all Jane Austen’s novels is this steely core of practicality.

Because marriage for a woman was a job, virtually the only job, and without such employment she would be destined for a life of poverty, genteel or otherwise, the man’s finances were of the first importance.

And so Frederick Wentworth’s ‘prospects’ were the heroine’s rightful concern. His respectability, that is, his rank in society, was the other great concern for her family. But respectability comes, we discover in the book, with the money. Poor, Anne’s elder sister, the snooty Elizabeth, would hardly look at Wentworth; rich, he received nods and invitations.

So bound up with money, respectability, and having the right affiliations is the possibility of Wentworth’s and Anne’s marriage that had any of these been lacking the deal would have been permanently called off.

In the end money and a uniform make Wentworth suitable.

Yet he gained his riches in a fashion that would have been deemed criminal had he done it out of uniform. For Wentworth is in the Navy and the Navy legitimizes piracy just as money legitimizes Wentworth.

I saw this same phenomenon in another context. In Guatemala on the steps of a church I photographed Mayan Indians wearing army uniforms, the same army uniforms the same men would wear in the coming genocide against those same Indians. Once the uniform was donned, monstrosities could be carried out — even against oneself, one’s own family.

Wentworth did not hang for his piracies; he was enriched by them and made socially acceptable. The British Navy, the vehicle for his advancement, was the way up for many in a ironbound England obsessed with every little distinction of class and status. The Navy had, of course, recently ‘saved’ England from invasion. So added to Wentworth’s money and newfound respectability is a certain glamor. He is a war hero, something both Jane Austen and her heroine admire.

On the other hand, aristocratic pretensions, fusses over precedence, Austen laughs at.

But not money, never money, nor its concomitant good: respectability.

These are issues she takes very seriously.

Although she has looser notions of gentility than her more snobbish characters, she is by no means a believer in mixing things up. Marrying completely outside one’s class is verboten. If Wentworth has low status, at least he is not a peasant. And, of course, he is a man. While a woman’s only hope to escape her class is to marry up; a man like Wentworth can work his way there.

These two great social dividers, class and gender, are the underground rivers that wend their way through all Austen’s books. For despite their tremendous charm, their narrative brio, and their felicities of style, her books are deadpan serious when it comes to quintessential social realities.

Which she examines from the perspective of a woman, that is to say from a woman’s need to be married. Had she examined them from the perspective of a man, she might have situated her story in the workplace where the struggle to rise in the world takes on a different character. She might have talked about office politics or covert financial maneuverings and schemes — one’s allies and enemies in the masculine battlefield for advancement.

But she knew little about that in any real, firsthand way.

She did know that it was often a life and death matter for a woman to secure her future through marriage. Unlike her more rebellious Romantic sisters, the Brontes, she did not chafe under this system. She accepted the terms of the game, however unfair, and the need to work within them. By and large she seems to have believed in the values and conventions of her time, their rightness in the scheme of things.

Yet, for all her paeans to propriety, she knew that respectability and money had become almost interchangeable in an increasingly materialistic 19th century England; without the latter you cannot have the former and both are critical for a woman’s safety in a world over which she has little control. Poverty, always the gremlin in the closet, is the evil thing ready to pounce upon the unwary and destroy them. If the surface of her novels tends to be bright, the darkness in the background is never entirely out of view.

And so this clever, supremely witty woman whose writing seems to many to embody feminine frivolities emerges upon examination to be the most hard-headed pragmatist of them all.