Jane Austen, Lady Susan

Introduction

Opening Passage:

LADY SUSAN VERNON TO MR. VERNON

Langford, Dec.

MY DEAR BROTHER,—I can no longer refuse myself the pleasure of profiting by your kind invitation when we last parted of spending some weeks with you at Churchhill, and, therefore, if quite convenient to you and Mrs. Vernon to receive me at present, I shall hope within a few days to be introduced to a sister whom I have so long desired to be acquainted with. My kind friends here are most affectionately urgent with me to prolong my stay, but their hospitable and cheerful dispositions lead them too much into society for my present situation and state of mind; and I impatiently look forward to the hour when I shall be admitted into your delightful retirement....

Summary: From the first moment we meet her, when Lady Susan Vernon is telling her brother-in-law -- telling, not really asking -- that she will be staying with him, we find her lying. It turns out that the "hospitable and cheerful dispositions" of her current hosts, the Mainwarings, have led her into an adulterous affair with the man of the house, to the not-so-hospitable and not-so-cheerful response of the wife. Nor is that all. Lady Susan is extraordinarily beautiful -- "delicately fair, with fine grey eyes and dark eyelashes; and from her appearance one would not suppose her more than five and twenty, though she must in fact be ten years older" and with "an uncommon union of symmetry, brilliancy, and grace" (Letter 6) -- and she has been flirting with the beau of young Miss Mainwaring (Mr. Mainwaring's younger sister) simply to prevent him from marrying her, because Lady Susan has marked the man, Sir James Martin, to be her own daughter's future husband. This is not the sort of situation into which anyone falls without being an inveterate manipulator, and 'manipulation' is an understatement for Lady Susan. Catherine Vernon, her sister-in-law, calls her "Mistress of deceit" at one point, and it is an apt title. She lies in practically every paragraph of her letters, she lies in her behavior toward others, and she lies to herself.

It might be a slightly jarring comparison, but there are two characters in literature she most reminds me of: Satan in Paradise Lost and Saruman in The Lord of the Rings. Like both of these figures, communication for her has nothing in itself to do with truth; it is merely a tool for getting what she wants, for coming out on top. Words and behaviors are machines to do work rather than things that express character. Like both of these characters, her ability to seduce has extended so far that she has convinced herself of a view of the world in which she is always right, and too often misused. It's ironic that the only two times the phrase 'I repent' is used in the novella, it is used by Lady Susan -- and telling that, in a story that shows her having an adulterous affair within months (if not before) of the death of her own husband, leading on multiple men at once simply because she can, and subjecting her daughter to terrible emotional treatment, she only uses the phrase to express regret over having done something that let other people inconvenience her. The difference, of course, is that in different ways Satan and Saruman are fallen angels; Lady Susan is all too plausibly human.

One wonders at her backstory, which is tantalizingly unpainted. Her husband apparently had severe money problems before his death, but, while she occasionally makes comments about not being able to afford this or that, she herself notes that she is not in any immediate need for money, and given her ability to live off of others, and the ruthless planning with which she is planning to marry a wealthy husband, it would be surprising if she were. The fact that she is called 'Lady Susan' tells us something -- it's Lady Susan, not Lady Vernon, and the distinction is quite important, because it means she has her title by birth and not by marriage, and is thus almost certainly the daughter of at least an Earl. (There was an Austen-based work a few years back called Lady Vernon and Her Daughter, which by all accounts was well-written, but shows one of its absolutely crucial divergences in the title.) If Lady Susan approaching forty can repeatedly outcompete Pretty Young Things on the marriage market, she must have been one stunning young woman when she was in her teens and twenties. Thus one has the suggestion -- although never really more than this -- of a woman born to privilege and who, being beautiful from a young age, is perpetually over-indulged. But it is perhaps to the best that we don't know her backstory: she enters mistress of deceit, she exits mistress of deceit, and, honestly, she's all the more splendid a character from the fact that this is all-in-all of who she is.

One of the nice things about the work is that Austen, being Austen, is capable not just of telling us how charming Lady Susan is, but showing how charming she is. She is just so utterly shameless as to stagger the imagination. Just when you think you've got her number, she will do something that teaches you that you are an amateur compared to Lady Susan. But the utter brazenness of her is part of her charm: to be so malicious and yet so impregnably confidence in her own rightness, while at the same time being so competent in achieving what she wants (being the villainess, she has to be foiled, but it is more by bad luck than anything), makes her just comic enough to be almost admirable, but so impressive that she cannot be treated as a joke. All those hateful deeds, and you cannot hate her. She is magnetic, and even as a reader knowing the whole backstory you can see yourself how it is that she can succeed with the other characters.

Looking around, I see that the most common complaint about this book is its epistolary format. This is unfortunate; if there's any story that benefits from the epistolary format, it is this one. We don't just get insight into Lady Susan's mind; we get her own perspective, too, and can compare it to the perspectives of others. That makes her stand out even more vividly than she otherwise would. Further, the story benefits from being spooned out in small doses. In the end, I think the difficulty people have with the epistolary format shows how flattened modern storytelling has become.

Favorite Passage: Lady Susan, of course, writing to her correspondent Alicia Johnson, when Mrs. Johnson has noted that Mr. Johnson has used the gout as an excuse for making it impossible for Lady Susan to meet with Mrs. Johnson; it is also the source of one of the most memorable phrases in the book:

My dear Alicia,—There needed not this last fit of the gout to make me detest Mr. Johnson, but now the extent of my aversion is not to be estimated. To have you confined as nurse in his apartment! My dear Alicia, of what a mistake were you guilty in marrying a man of his age! just old enough to be formal, ungovernable, and to have the gout; too old to be agreeable, too young to die.

Recommendation: Jane Austen writing a novella about a villainess? Highly, highly, highly recommended.

Poem a Day 26

Consolation of Philosophy, Book II

You seek, O human folly, far and wide
that thing that gives to life a joy and bliss;
you fail, and it were needful that you miss,
for wisdom seeks such joy and bliss inside.
What stupor wreaths your mind that you will quest
for joy already had, and seek outside
for what can only inside be possessed?

Deuterocanon Friday: Epiphany

Acknowledge the Lord, for he is good,
and bless the King of the ages,
so that his tent may be rebuilt in you in joy.
May he cheer all those within you who are captives,
and love all those within you who are distressed,
to all generations forever.
A bright light will shine to all the ends of the earth;
many nations will come to you from far away,
the inhabitants of the remotest parts of the earth to your holy name,
bearing gifts in their hands for the King of heaven.
Generation after generation will give joyful praise in you;
the name of the chosen city will endure forever.

Tobit 13:10-11 (NRSV-C)

Juxtaposition

I had all sorts of visions of things getting done today, and then came down sick as a dog last night. Gang aft agley. There's no particular reason to think there any historical connection between the two following passages, but I thought the juxtaposition was quite interesting, nonetheless.

An affection so amiable was advancing each in the opinion of all who had hearts to value anything good. Henry Crawford was as much struck with it as any. He honoured the warm–hearted, blunt fondness of the young sailor, which led him to say, with his hands stretched towards Fanny’s head, “Do you know, I begin to like that queer fashion already, though when I first heard of such things being done in England, I could not believe it; and when Mrs. Brown, and the other women at the Commissioner’s at Gibraltar, appeared in the same trim, I thought they were mad; but Fanny can reconcile me to anything”; and saw, with lively admiration, the glow of Fanny’s cheek, the brightness of her eye, the deep interest, the absorbed attention, while her brother was describing any of the imminent hazards, or terrific scenes, which such a period at sea must supply.

It was a picture which Henry Crawford had moral taste enough to value. Fanny’s attractions increased—increased twofold; for the sensibility which beautified her complexion and illumined her countenance was an attraction in itself. He was no longer in doubt of the capabilities of her heart. She had feeling, genuine feeling. It would be something to be loved by such a girl, to excite the first ardours of her young unsophisticated mind! She interested him more than he had foreseen. A fortnight was not enough. His stay became indefinite.

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Chapter 24 (published 1814)

Considered as a principle of action, a cultivated moral taste, while it provides an effectual security against the grossness necessarily connected with many vices, cherishes a temper of mind friendly to all that is amiable, or generous, or elevated in our nature. When separated, however, as it sometimes is, from a strong sense of duty, it can scarcely fail to prove a fallacious guide; the influence of fashion, and of other casual associations, tending perpetually to lead it astray. This is more particularly remarkable in men to whom the gratifications of taste in general form the principal object of pursuit, and whose habits of life encourage them to look no higher for their rule of conduct than the way of the world.

Dugald Stewart, The Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man, p. 266 (published 1828)

Poem a Day 25

Psalm

Deliver, O Lord, from all wrongdoing,
save from those who do deeds of violence;
may my prayer be incense before you,
my upraised hands an evening sacrifice.
When my spirit is weak, you know my way.
In my path they have hidden a dark trap;
thus my spirit grows faint deep inside me,
the depths of my gut are appalled within.
Bow down your heavens, O Lord, and come down;
descend on the mountains that they might smoke!
The might of your great deeds shall be proclaimed,
and I will declare out loud your greatness;
justice you perform for the oppressed,
food you give to those who hunger and starve.
You cover the heavens with layered clouds,
make rain descend and grass grow on the hills:
on mountains there grow fruit trees and cedars!

The Philosophical Topic that Most Disorients Young People

Sometimes people give as the aim for liberal arts education things like "to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to re-orient themselves." I think these sorts of things are truly ridiculous things to aim for in the context of any kind of college education, as I've argued, but suppose I were to take this as my goal in a philosophy course? What would I have to teach? What is the topic that has come up in my courses so far that has most consistently and most clearly had these effects? Neoplatonism. Nothing, nothing at all that I have ever taught, generates as much controversy and distress as Neoplatonism.

If you just look very briefly and vaguely Neoplatonism, students just think it's weird. But start getting into details, when they start to realize that the weirdness is heavily argued, at great length, by arguments to which they often have no ready answer at all, and things change. I have had -- and I mean this quite literally -- students freak out, try to shout me down, or storm out. Fortunately those are not hugely common, but I have had all of them happen. There's no other topic that more consistently gets students arguing so intensely that it becomes difficult to keep them from all arguing at once. When people say that liberal arts, or philosophy, should challenge students' beliefs, they usually mean religious beliefs. I tell you true, if you really want to challenge the actual beliefs your students have, go over Plotinus's arguments for the One, or Boethius's argument in Book III of the Consolation of Philosophy that all human beings naturally seek the Good, which is God, which the One, and that true happiness consists in being God -- not being godlike, being God -- or even just go into detail into the Divided Line and how Neoplatonists argue for various things that Plato represents by means of it.

And surprising as it might be, I think it's less of a surprise if you think about it: it really is radically different than anything most people are taught, but if you actually get into it, it is very tightly argued. It's alien to almost all the obvious features on which modern man congratulates himself for being reasonable about -- and it attacks these very features as not merely unreasonable but irrational, with arguments that modern people usually have never even thought of, and so have no defenses against. They can wave their empiricism, or whatever, at it, and it will look at them sardonically and proceed to eat their arguments. And why wouldn't it, really? Most of them have been building their philosophical views of the world by patchwork and piecemeal over a couple of decades; it doesn't really matter whether Neoplatonism is true or false, they're not going to have anything that can compete with any of the major examples of a philosophical approach that spanned centuries of intense and systematic philosophical discussion, ate most of its competitors, and spread itself through vast numbers of cultures from Spain to Persia. It's a mighty dragon, Neoplatonism, mighty enough to mock their assumptions as ridiculous. And never having come across the full thing, they don't have many weapons against it. Of course, that's all a melodramatic way of putting it; but really getting into Neoplatonism is generally like taking students through the looking-glass into a world they've never imagined.

Yes, I am currently teaching Neoplatonism (Boethius and Plotinus on happiness) in one of my classes. Fortunately, no shout-downs or storm-outs with this class, but not a small amount of controversy, either -- very good and sometimes intense discussion.

If you teach philosophy, what topic do you find most disorients students? Or, if you've had a philosophy class, what topics did you (or your class) find most disorienting?

Explicit and Implicit Philosophical Dialogue

In Mansfield Park, Austen represents a philosophy of education in which the most important good is the development of constancy, the most important end is the proper use of liberty (with a special emphasis on leisure, or free time and space). The primary means is the inner conversation and reflection regarding modern life with its competing conceptions of law and virtue and the incoherence created thereby....

Austen's philosophy emerges within a polyphony of voices that creates two kinds of philosophical dialogue. First, she creates an explicit dialogue in which the narrator represents different perspectives, including that of an authoritative, ironic, and/or corrective voice, over against other perspectives voiced by characters at different points in the narrative. She also creates an implicit philosophical dialogue by juxtaposing throughout the narrative contrasting representations of education.

Joyce Kerr Tarpley, Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, CUA Press (Washington, DC: 2010) p. 60.