M ARSHALL B ROWN Austen’s Immobility Die Kunst ist - im Verhältnis zum Leben - immer ein Trotzdem; das Formschaffen ist die tiefste Bestätigung des Daseins der Dissonanz, die zu denken ist. 1 In today’s academic world mobility is primarily a term of sociologists. They have used it copiously to refer to migration and the flow of migrant groups. Labor and dispossession are the principal referents. But in common parlance mobility has many additional associations. As other essays in this collection illustrate, mobility can imply liberation as well as constraint; it can pertain to individuals as well as to groups; it can concern internal change constituted by maturity and development as well as transport and external setting. While the diverse versions of mobility obviously share certain broad characteristics in that they all refer to changes of position or state, they can appear incompatible in terms of affect and scale. What do migrant laborers have to do with limber actors or genre-bending authors? Building and Bildung may not seem a natural pair, especially not to the cement workers. My aim in this essay, on the example of Jane Austen, is to suggest nevertheless that the various forms and degrees of mobility are more alike than they initially sound. Freedom and compulsion, transport (in all its senses) and binding, growth and decay cannot be neatly separated. While Austen does not herself activate all imaginable resonances of mobility, her novels are a good test case to illustrate the complexities and mutual involvement of different spheres and types of mobility. Movement and change affect us all, and they are never simple. Austen serves the inquiry because her social goal is stability, not mobility. The ideal is permanence: marital bliss, social order, domestication and domesticity. Any alteration threatens disruption; estates may be improved but only within carefully regulated limits of taste. Class boundaries are universally recognized and firmly in place. Life goes on in organic fashion; there is commerce but no manufacturing, nor even so much as a bakery to transform raw materials in a public setting. Travel is coded so that, for instance, men are far freer to move than women, 2 1 Georg Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1971), 62. though any impulsive movement bodes 2 Abundantly informative, Roger Sales, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency in England (London: Routledge, 1994), 155-162, distinguishes women’s immobility from men’s much greater freedom. Yet when it comes to travel (large-scale mobility), money and the control of money are major factors, for instance governing whether and when Fanny M ARSHALL B ROWN 268 ill; even exercise is prescribed and regulated. It can appear as if anything readily classified as mobility, that is, any actual change of condition, puts the social fabric at risk. To that extent, Austen does seem to group all forms of mobility under a single aspect. Indeed, the larger the movement, the more threatening it appears, and the less account Austen’s narrations take of it, remaining attached to the women who stay at home or are chaperoned to established resorts. At first sight, then, mobility is only a problem, merely a deficient mode of fixity, without an opening onto possibility. Yet Austen’s world is, of course, far from as moribund as this description makes it sound. Even though there certainly are characters who remain chained to the center, staid, listless, or morbid, still no one would pretend that gravity is Austen’s mode. Her aim is to enable life, not to stifle it. Immobility becomes the regulator of motion, not its antagonist. For that reason, her novels are a privileged vehicle for examining and parsing divergent vectors of mobility. It is true that there are no migrant groups in Austen’s world, not even the Irish, despite some reference to people moving to Ireland. Her closest approach comes in the brief encounter with gypsies in Emma. But those gypsies are surely internal vagrants and not international migrants. To be sure, there may be peripheral awareness of migrations, as when Fanny Price in Mansfield Park reports asking her father about the slave trade, a topic about which Austen had recently read a book. 3 But, Fanny reports, her inquiry led only to “such dead silence! ” 4 Price gets to go horse-riding. Even though none of Austen’s characters belong to the lower classes, the expense of travel often weighs on them. For better or worse, Austen’s world is too settled to speak directly to issues of population flows. Not for her the invading Romans and the traveling students of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Hamlet, nor the patterns of in and out migration portrayed in Defoe’s account of the Kreuznaer/ Crusoe family. Nothing so global colors Austen’s world. Her colorlessness has been fruitfully scrutinized by postcolonial critics as a conscious or unconscious colorblindness, the repression of the larger historical 3 William Galperin discusses Austen’s reading of Charles W. Pasley’s Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire as well as Claudius Buchanan’s Christian Researches in Asia in The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003), 163-66. A letter to her brother Frank of July 5, 1813, reports her consulting the map of Sweden, evidently fantasizing about foreign lands, since a subsequent letter of Sept. 25, 1813, expresses her disillusionment at the conditions Frank reported in the interval: Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995), 214-15, 229. 4 Austen’s novels will be cited by giving chapter; page, using the abbreviations in the list of Works cited; so, here MP 21; 199. The original editions, followed by Chapman, begin the numbering afresh with each volume. Most modern reprints number them consecutively, and I have adopted the consecutive numbering, since it can be readily reconstructed from editions that number them by volume. Austen’s Immobility 269 forces impacting her society. 5 Yet people have always moved. Today’s news might give the impression of a new crisis from across the sea in Europe and across the river in the United States. But Völkerwanderung has always been the norm and stability the often longed-for exception. Even the arch-structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss regarded his analyses as demonstrations of “innumerable mixings of races and cultures occurring throughout the ages.” But whatever the authorial dimensions of the repression, Austen’s characters’ “dead silence! ” appears to rest on an ineluctable lack of interest. Not even Wentworth in Persuasion is asked what he was doing in all his years abroad. 6 “Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire.” Those are the opening words of Austen’s last completed novel, Persuasion (1; 3). Person is identified with place, place with house, house with family. “Hall” characterizes the And mobility of a lesser sort permeates even Austen’s world. Austen’s characters do move. She herself didn’t ever move far, and neither do her narratives. But her letters are full of comings and goings - essential to her lively spirit and far too many to be easily readable by anyone not actually living among her acquaintances. Issues of individual mobility are central to her fiction as well: geographical mobility, social mobility, economic mobility. Two consequences follow from acknowledging the mobility in Austen’s seemingly static world. The first is that the tensions surrounding mobility can be felt on a far smaller scale than that of the nation. For Austen, moving to the next village can be as disruptive as traveling across the seas: “a removal from one set of people to another, though at a distance of only three miles, will often include a total change of conversation, opinion, and idea” (P 6; 42). Between Kellynch and Uppercross lies what might punningly be called a customs barrier, for duties back then were far more local than they are now. Even if Austen’s ideal is a completely stable domesticity, it must take note of flux. And I mean “if.” That ideal is not a foregone conclusion. For my second thesis is that the domestic ideal is cultural, not natural, and is anxious, not comforting. Civilization’s discontents are as endemic to Austen’s world as to Freud’s or to ours. These are the issues I propose to scrutinize, with the ultimate goal of opening the question, what light problems of individual movement shed on those of social flows. 5 The marquee postcolonial critique of Austen is Edward Said’s essay, “Jane Austen and Empire,” Culture and Empire (New York: Vintage, 1994), 80-96. He raises important issues, but not in the right way. “The Bertrams could not have been possible without the slave trade, sugar, and the colonial planter class” (94) is a tautology if referring to a particular case, but false as a generalization: Austen’s works contain numerous wealthy landowners such as George Knightley with no colonial connections. For an articulate critique of Said (one of many), see Susan Fraiman, “Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture and Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): 805- 21. 6 Claude Lévi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (London: Cape, 1973), 437. M ARSHALL B ROWN 270 building as a seat, hence as a long-term abode. People below the nobility are no longer named for their village or town as they were in the Middle Ages, but the important houses in Austen’s world are all named and bear the imprint of their owners. People without a residence are looked down upon; they are children, servants, or paupers. Quite commonly, the residence replaces the person, as with the domicile of the haughty Mrs. Churchill in Emma: “Enscombe however was gracious, gracious in fact, if not in word” (E 30; 257). The house can even take on its owner’s gender: “Enscombe, I believe, certainly must not be judged by general rules: she is so very unreasonable; and every thing gives way to her” (E 14; 123, Austen’s italics). Every man’s house is his castle; homesteads are little kingdoms, and the families are its subjects. So much is clearly the case with Enscombe, for “Mrs. Churchill rules at Enscombe” (E 14; 121). But though Enscombe seems a distant kingdom which the novel’s characters may never reach, the sense of dominion appears in all of Austen’s true domiciles. In Fanny Price’s family at Portsmouth, where no one rules, there is disorder, instability, and loss of identity. In Bath, where everyone is a lodger, there is opportunity and risk, at great expense. These are not homes. Your place is where you belong; it is your society, your character. Sir Walter is a metonym for Kellynch, Kellynch for Somersetshire, and, we must presume, Somersetshire for England. The epitome of domesticity is the epitome of the nation, as evoked in the often quoted prospect from George Knightley’s estate onto Robert Martin’s Abbey Mill Farm, with its display of “English verdure, English culture, English comfort” (E 42; 360). The analogy between home and country is a strong one, so strong that George Knightley seems to exile himself when he agrees to move down the road to take up residence with his wife Emma. The name Woodhouse is eloquent, and telling for the entire ideology of domesticity: she yearns for the house that would be a native home. The domestic ideal was, of course, widespread. It permeates Wordsworth’s poetry, among others; I single him out because of the threat of disruption that haunts all his poetry. “Vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods” populate the area above Tintern Abbey; they could be political refugees, but they seem primordial when juxtaposed to “some hermit’s cave.” And “pastoral farms, green to the very door” rest uneasily, not just in Austen’s bounded world of improvement, but even in Wordsworth’s more open universe, where the “little lines / Of sportive wood run wild” 7 7 William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth. Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford UP, 1974). smack of adolescent excess and where “thoughts of more deep seclusion” forebode death. Domesticity needs a fence to keep out the green and a threshold from the wind and the rain. It shuns too much exposure; even the hermit in his cave keeps a protective fire burning in the forest of the night. And yet, however wide- Austen’s Immobility 271 spread the ideal of a bounded existence, it was certainly never universal; notably, the hospitality that characterized Walter Scott and so many of the inhabitants of his novels reflects a different world-view that bridges divides and welcomes migration. The ideal of settlement that pervades Austen’s fiction was anything but inevitable. The question to be posed, then, is whether domesticity appears as a natural ideal, as an ethical choice, or as a social pathology. In settling your terrain, in improving your lot, are you honoring the human condition or dishonoring your neighbors and associates? How much regulation and of what sort establishes a custom and a community, and when does it lead to estrangement? What does it take to keep a home or even a castle from degrading into a fortress? Sir Walter Elliot might here represent the nadir of domesticity. Right on that first page of Persuasion comes the information that his favorite reading is his family history in the Baronetage. Skipping back over “the endless creations of the last century” he comes to his own ancient patent. The living and the dead consort here in a tribute to self-absorbed sterility. “The Sir Walter Elliot who united [beauty with rank] was the constant object of his [own] warmest respect and admiration” (P 1; 3-4). The result of narcissistic domesticity is obstinate celibacy; his deceased wife’s “strong attachment” links him with Lady Russell (P 1; 5), but he resists bringing her into his home as his wife. Sir Walter is married to his house and can imagine no other partner, hence no equal human companionship. His life’s great tragedy, enforced by his wasteful habits, is the necessity of letting out his estate. His consolation is that the tenant is a worthy admiral. “An admiral speaks his own consequence, and, at the same time, can never make a baronet look small” (P 3; 24). Behind this stated preference lies an unstated presupposition. As the novel’s final lines make clear, admirals belong to the larger world and are subject to removal. He can’t make a baronet look small not just because of his rank, but also because his occupation means that he can never permanently settle. He does not threaten Sir Walter’s enclosure. Sir Walter, to be sure, is the beginning of the story, not its end. Better homes and gardens are in view. Austen’s novels all end with marriages looking forward to new settlement. Bad or absent fathers are replaced with good husbands, enabling continuity that overcomes the passing of generations. Yet while deaths are muted in Austen’s novels, they are often present in the background. So, in Emma, Emma has lost her mother too long ago to remember her; Jane Fairfax is an orphan; Frank Churchill was brought up by a foolish stepmother; Harriet Smith’s parents are unknown. Trauma is ubiquitous even if unstressed: in Persuasion the Baronetage gives the day when Sir Walter’s son was stillborn—but not the day of his wife’s death, which he pens in, but then never thinks of her again. (There are quite a few other early deaths M ARSHALL B ROWN 272 in the background of Persuasion: William Elliott, Lady Russell, and Anne’s crippled and impoverished school friend Mrs. Smith are all widowed, and Benwick has lost his fiancée Fanny Harville.) Instead, his thoughts are given to the future; he also pens in the day of his youngest daughter’s wedding, and then thinks constantly of succession and inheritance. Chains broken and repaired are the substance of Austen’s novels, and a happy and stable marriage is their goal. The conclusion of Persuasion calls Anne Elliot’s happy lot a “settled life” (P 24; 251), and five of the six novels use the word perfection to characterize the final outcome. “To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen, is to do pretty well” is, for instance, the narrator’s judgment at the end of Northanger Abbey (NA 31; 252), and only Pride and Prejudice lacks the word “perfect” - not surprisingly, given the totally dysfunctional character of the Bennet family and the anger of Darcy’s aunt. The yearning for settlement may initially be compromised by the deficiencies of the older generation, but it appears requited by the virtues of the young. Yet even for them settlement is never perfect. To be sure, Anne Elliot finally gets her captain, and with him enough money to compensate for the family wealth her father has squandered, but she gets neither land nor security: there is “no Uppercross-hall before her, no landed estate, no headship of a family,” and she must live with the “tax of quick alarm” and perhaps even “the dread of future war” (P 24; 250, 252). All Austen’s heroines survive unsettled periods and sometimes agonizing uncertainties before the double rewards of domestic and financial settlement. It’s no wonder that the happy ends so precariously realized come to seem perfection incarnate. But as Andrew Miller’s study of Victorian perfectionism has shown, the white glare of perfection is not easy to live with. 8 8 Andrew Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008), 123-41. This chapter, on Austen, is titled “Perfectly Helpless.” As joyous as Austen’s endings sound, the narrator’s say-so does not make them perfect. For like much else in Austen’s narratives, the narrator’s judgments in the conclusions are shaded by benevolent tact. How perfect can perfection be? The word “perfect,” in Austen’s usage, is often ironic and even more often euphemistic; it reflects desire more than decree, as when Jane Bennet, struggling to think positively about her eloped sister Lydia, assures Elizabeth that she is “perfectly well” (PP 47; 286). And, really, moments of perfection are as much as can ever be imagined. “Verweile doch, du bist so schön”: Faust’s dangerous wish might well be Austen’s too. But to make that association is also to recognize that she must also echo his “doch.” Contentment is a dam against the floods of time. Here is Franco Moretti’s comment on the happy end of the novels of realism: “Why, in other words, did Western civilization discard such a perfect narrative mechanism? And perhaps the answer lies precisely Austen’s Immobility 273 here: it was too perfect. It could only be convincing in so far as historical experience continued to make absolute cohesion and totalizing harmony not only a desirable ideal, but a conceivable one too.” 9 The ideal threatens to unravel at the end of Persuasion. Anne Elliot, Austen says, “gloried in being a sailor’s wife,” but the condition also brings anxiety for her husband’s “profession which [though], if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance” brings with it the “tax of quick alarm” and perhaps even “the dread of future war” as “all that could dim her sunshine” (P 24; 252). For in fact military tours of duty were long and dangerous. Here the longed-for parallelism of home and country takes its toll: peaceable virtue at home accompanies perilous valor abroad. To this novel, at least, the dictum of Lukács applies that I quoted as my epigraph. Form confirms dissonance. But doesn’t it always? You can project an idyll, as Austen’s conclusions all do. But you can’t expand it to the whole country or to the continuing future. Time is always passing in Austen’s worlds, with each chapter succeeding to the moment of the preceding chapter, each one bringing a new encounter and a new risk. None of the novels offers a prospect into future family life, no next generation foretold, no happily ever after formula. The perfection that is achieved as a moment of stability, that is, does not foreclose future adventures. The joyous conclusion of a troubled courtship says “trotzdem” and puts only the most momentary stop to change. Life will have more chapters, and with it more worried fathers, more poor relations, more quarrelsome children, more financial anxieties. There are in fact few genuinely happy couples described inside Austen’s narratives, and perhaps only one marriage that takes place during the span of a novel brings happiness within the plot, that of Harriet Taylor and Mr. Weston. And even that marriage both portends trouble to Mr. Woodhouse and remains shadowed by the tensions around Weston’s son Frank Churchill. (There are of course some foolishly happy marriages, such as John and Fanny Ferrars or William Collins and Charlotte Lucas.) The plots stop at the end of the novels, but there is every reason to believe that life will go on. The early work of D.A. Miller represents one tendency in Austen criticism that regards closure as “expedient repression.” If one disregards the possible irony in Austen’s use of the word “perfection,” then the novels project domesticity as a conceivable ideal - but even then conceivable only as an ideal, not as a settled possession. 10 9 Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), 72, Moretti’s italics. That is perhaps too harsh a view of the 10 D.A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981), 267. This book speaks of “a fascinated delight with unsettled states of deferral and ambiguity” manifested in “a blinded dialectic, knowing itself only in the partial mode of denial” (66). More recently, Miller has awarded more credit to the author for “a dialectical reminder not just of that excluded self it [Style] M ARSHALL B ROWN 274 closures she really imagines, if one regards them as inevitably temporary. But the suppression of mobility would be an unwelcome repression. Indeed, as Nicholas Dames has written, “mobility is central to Austen.” 11 According to Patrick Brantlinger, writing about Austen’s genre, national expansion and domestic settlement were always in conflict. He reads the dream of Empire as an escape, and it could be, though, as the end of Persuasion shows, the pull goes in both directions, and home could equally well be an escape from imperial adventure. Here is what Brantlinger says: Imperialism influenced not only the tradition of the adventure tale but the tradition of “serious” domestic realism as well. Adventure and domesticity, romance and realism, are the seemingly opposite poles of a single system of discourse, the literary equivalents of imperial domination abroad and liberal reform at home. In the middle of the most serious domestic concerns, often in the most unlikely texts, the Empire may intrude as a shadowy realm of escape, renewal, banishment, or return for characters who for one reason or another need to enter or exit from scenes of domestic conflict. 12 Everything Brantlinger says there is true, except for the qualifiers “most unlikely” and “shadowy.” For in fact, as I have been suggesting all along, settlement and movement are inseparable twins. It might not be foreign adventure, but adventure there must always be. The ending that is too perfect puts a stop to movement and to life. 13 had to give up, but also of that included self it never had, ... what we might properly call its ego ideal.” Perfection is the name of that ideal which, on this account, the novel exposes to inspection: in Emma “the perfection of Style ... opens the secret of its impossible desire to possess the perfection of a Person who has, who is, everything.” D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), 67-8. Adventure and domesticity are incompati- 11 Nicholas Dames, Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 65. Dames’s rich chapter (20-75) covers much the same ground as the present essay, and some of our examples overlap. His focus, however, remains on memory rather than on movement, leaving the issues worth retracing in the present context. I am grateful to Kevis Goodman for pointing me to this study. 12 Patrick Brantlinger, The Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988), 12. 13 D.A. Miller’s Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981), which buys into the notion that Austen’s “ideology is one of settlement” (50), asserts that while time doesn’t stop at the ends of her novels, it “lapses into benign repetition” (44). In fact, though, no oracle could know what the future might have thought to hold for characters who exist only in the mind of an author who closes the curtains on her dramas. Only two of the novels end with a prospect, and in one, Pride and Prejudice, the rhetoric of repetition clearly screens many potential disruptions. Lydia and Wickham’s “manner of living ... was unsettled in the extreme. They were always moving from place to place in quest of a cheap situation.” Georgiana’s “mind received knowledge, which had never before fallen in her way” (PP 61; 387). Are these instances of repetition or of change? Lady Catherine’s “resentment gave way, either to her affection for him, or her curiosity to see how his wife conducted herself; and Austen’s Immobility 275 ble only in their ideal forms; what is unlikely is not situations in which they coexist but those in which they don’t. There is value in movement; Wentworth’s name suggests as much. Yet Wentworth’s perfect gallantry betrays his name by proving an enemy to liberty, for he shocks his brother-in-law Admiral Croft by denying women freedom of movement. This is from no want of gallantry towards them. It is rather from feeling how impossible it is, with all one’s efforts, and all one’s sacrifices, to make the accommodations on board such as women ought to have. There can be no want of gallantry, admiral, in rating the claims of women to every personal comfort high - and this is what I do. I hate to hear of women on board, or to see them on board; and no ship, under my command, shall ever convey a family of ladies any where, if I can help it (P 8; 68-9). Wentworth’s refusal to allow women this kind of mobility is mildly hysterical. If you rate women so high that your narrator has to italicize “high,” then you will refuse them the discomforts of travel - and its comforts as well. Wentworth has to learn better than that. The Empire is not a shadowy realm; it is a distant part of the globe. The Empire looks shadowy in Austen’s novels because it is hard to reach. But in evaluating the role of mobility in her works it is essential to remember the difficulties of travel. In Pride and Prejudice the wealthy Darcy tries to reassure Emma that 50 miles is “a very easy distance,” but the less wealthy Elizabeth thinks quite otherwise (PP 32; 178). And in Emma, though London is “only sixteen miles off” from Highbury, it is not only “beyond [Emma’s] daily reach,” but “much beyond” (E 1; 7). In the terms of this novel, at least, sixteen miles is a voyage. On a fast horse you could do it in a few hours, as Frank Churchill does, purportedly for a haircut, shocking all concerned. In a wheeled vehicle it would take half a day. According to the memoir of Austen’s life by her nephew J. E. Austen-Leigh, “The smaller landed proprietors [...] seldom went farther from home than their country town,” and in 1771, when the family changed residences, “the lane between Deane and Steventon [...] was a mere cart track, so cut up by deep ruts as to be impassible for a light carriage. Mrs. Austen [...] performed the short journey on a featherbed.” 14 she condescended to wait on them at Pemberley, in spite of that pollution which its woods had received” (PP 61; 388). “Or” is a delicate reminder of unsettled feelings, and one senses the risk that condescension in spite of pollution could readily revert to spite at the pollution. Such a road launches the unfinished Sanditon: “A Gentleman & Lady travelling from Tunbridge towards that part of the Sussex Coast which lies between Hastings & E. Bourne, being induced by Business to quit the high road, & attempt a very rough Lane, were overturned in toiling up it’s long 14 J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, in Austen, Persuasion, ed. D. W. Harding (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 177-78. M ARSHALL B ROWN 276 ascent half rock, half sand” (MW 1; 363-64). By one recent calculation, the cost of the cheapest public transportation was roughly equivalent to the cost of a taxicab today. 15 From the perspective of Austen’s novels, it is too restrictive to regard mobility only or chiefly in terms of the long-range movement of populations or of dispossessed groups, only in terms of those forced to move or those who seek advantage by entering new cultural regions. Her works are a reminder that movement is both natural to all humans and difficult for all. It is true that she nowhere portrays the mechanicals and servants who are the subjects of Patricia Fumerton’s recent book about internal migrations, entitled Unsettled. For that reason, you can come away from reading Austen with the impression that the real life has been left out. Anything even remotely approximating the condition of migrants as usually understood is repressed or ironized by Austen’s immobile ideal. The closest she comes to representing work actually being done is George Knightley reviewing his books and directing the manager of his estate: as Emma says in the concluding moment of volume 2, Knightley is away a lot (presumably on business, though she doesn’t actually say that), and “when he is at home, is either reading to himself or settling his accounts” (E 36; 312). Real work is presumably done at Abbey Mill Farm, but the farm appears only in the idealized perspective I have quoted, when “safely viewed” over a wall (E 42; 360). Improvement is aesthetic, not economic: relandscaping has provided Sotherton in Mansfield Park with nothing more genuine than a “ha-ha” for a boundary and a “wilderness” that was really a “planted wood of about two acres” (MP 9; 91), and Sixteen-mile cab rides each way are not daily fare for very many of us, let alone half-day jolting rides on uneven roads and in uncertain weather for the cost of cab fare. In the face of that uncomfortable reality, there is actually a surprising amount of travel in Austen’s novels. Emma’s Highbury is particularly confined and stagnant; Emma has not been to Knightley’s neighboring estate of Donwell in two years, and she has never made the seven-mile excursion to Box Hill. But that is extreme, and oppressive, and even Emma frets to get out and to get her depressed father to bestir himself. In other novels people come and go frequently to London, to Bath, to the coast, and further afield as well, at home and also abroad. The Empire is in fact not a shadowy realm for Sir Thomas Bertram. It is indeed far away, but within epistolary reach, and he returns faster and sooner than the young people caught up in their theatricals wish. He goes there on business, family business. It has to be a matter of importance to call him so far away, but setting sail is a normal demand or opportunity, into which he inducts his eldest son. And no one expresses any particular curiosity about his experiences when he returns. Like Ireland, the colonial realm is arduous and remote, but still part of the business of life. 15 Robert D. Hume, “Money in Jane Austen,” forthcoming in Review of English Studies. Austen’s Immobility 277 equally bogus is the interior remodeling for the theatricals, which Sir Thomas immediately undoes with a little more carpentry. (Christopher Jackson, the carpenter, may be the only named skilled laborer in Austen’s corpus, but even he is a household employee, not an independent craftsman.) Economic life is a fantasy or a delusion. Nor are the lower classes more fully represented: the disorderly Price household, while déclassé, is a far cry from Dickens’s Micawbers and Jellybys; the impoverished Bateses are not like any of Dickens’s genuine indigents; and the three brief paragraphs devoted to a crowd of begging gypsy children make no pretense to depicting the criminal underworld. These limitations of Austen’s world are, of course, well known. But they should not blind us to her sensitivities. The displacements her characters undertake or undergo are not of the same magnitude as those experienced by migrants in today’s world. But then the entire scale of her universe is different. The disruptions that beset the prosperous, often very wealthy denizens of Austen’s villages are decidedly tamer than those suffered by many before, during, and after her time. Mobility does not threaten livelihood to nearly the same extent. But it is different in degree, not in psychology. Families are disrupted, reputations compromised, situations threatened in Austen, as they are throughout many kinds of communities. Change in locality, in economic circumstances, in opportunity, in age, and, obviously, in domestic situation are the core of her novels. As Moretti argued, the entry into the world is the essence of the Bildungsroman, from Goethe and Austen forward; he recognizes openness to opportunity as an essential element but does not attend to the essential correlative, which is displacement. Whatever Austen’s last chapters bring, the itineraries are full of the anxieties of the unknown. The unsatisfactory poles of response are embodied in an exchange at the end of the Sotherton outing. Fanny expresses the passivity that has rendered her a victim of circumstance and misguided influence: “I shall soon be rested [...]; to sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure, is the most perfect refreshment.” And Mary Crawford expresses the agitated impulsiveness that renders her morally unfit for contentment: “I must move [...], resting fatigues me.” And the end of the chapter then soon brings a foreboding quiescence that links immobility with mortality: “Fanny said she was rested, and would have moved too, but this was not suffered [...] She watched them till they turned the corner, and listened till all sound of them had ceased” (MP 9; 96). The tensions surrounding mobility percolate through Sense and Sensibility, a novel full of comings and goings. Neither motion nor stasis fills the bill. The Miss Dashwoods had now been rather more than two months in town, and Marianne’s impatience to be gone increased every day. She sighed for the air, the liberty, the quiet of the country; and fancied that if any place could give her ease, Barton must do it. Elinor was hardly less anxious than herself for their removal, and only so much less bent on its being effected immediately, as that she was con- M ARSHALL B ROWN 278 scious of the difficulties of so long a journey, which Marianne could not be brought to acknowledge (SS 39; 279). The ideal is open-air calm, stability with liberty. Traveling is difficult and expensive, fixation is disheartening. As ever, the good-natured Mrs. Jennings expresses things more animatedly than propriety really allows, but she speaks for all the characters in her reaction to the sisters’ departure: “Lord! we shall sit and gape at one another as dull as two cats” (SS 39; 280). But the characters hardly go outdoors, and the atmosphere is oppressive almost everywhere. Those who make moves are selfish opportunists, on the make, libertines. The poles governing this world are thus paralysis and inconstancy, with inconstancy the more viciously immoral of the two. The double-bind exists throughout Austen’s fictions. It is resolved here only by “an extraordinary fate” in the final chapter (SS 50; 378), an unrepeatable series of miracles that replace the poles with their attenuated forms of stable sense and mobile sensibility. But to reach a happy conclusion these title forms must be further attenuated until they become near doublets, with Elinor learning to feel with others (in the scene of Willoughby’s confession) and Marianne learning to think. Sensibility converts into sensitivity: “her conscience, her sensitive conscience,” Marianne’s mother says about her, in the novel’s only use of that adjective (SS 47; 350). Bildung would be the ideal form of mobility, but Brandon, at age thirty-six, has exhibited only immovable, almost inexplicable constancy, and Marianne, at nineteen, is already becoming a matron. “Though sisters,” the last sentence says, “they could live without disagreement among themselves” (SS 50; 380). The upshot in this happiest of conclusions is a “constant enjoyment” (SS 50; 378), obliterating differences and consolidating steady states in both the virtuous couples and the wicked ones. The best Austen can imagine is a cheerful immobility. One great achievement of Austen’s art lies in the coalescence of scales. The corporeal, the psychological, the social, and the ethical characteristically coincide, as do the local and the wide-ranging. Each element allegorizes the others. So, for instance, Mary Favret writes eloquently about the unsettling end of Persuasion that “the structures of feeling demanded by war [...] migrate into everyday life.” 16 16 Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010), 171. For that reason, even the smallest of movements in her works reflects on the basic conditions of human mobility. Too much motion results in Lydia Bennet’s flirtatious inconstancy; too little in Mr. Woodhouse’s lethargy. But in a changing world, there can be no sweet spot that is always paced correctly. Rather, Austen’s marriages reflect the ongoing adjustment needed to keep the polity in balance. As the gayest of the novels, Pride and Prejudice tends toward both the virtues and the risks of mobility. Elizabeth’s innate impatience is tested to the limit in the long chapter at Austen’s Immobility 279 Pemberley, which begins with her “spirits [...] in a high flutter,” continues by admiring “every remarkable spot and point of view” until “the eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House” (PP 43; 245), followed by a tour of the grounds in which she outpaces the Gardiners, whose “progress was slow” (PP 43; 254). But though quicker to notice, Elizabeth is less observant, for in the next chapter the watchful Gardiners perceive Darcy’s love for her. By nature an eager and “excellent walker,” as Miss Bingley scornfully observes (PP 8; 35), Elizabeth later proves a faster runner than Jane as well (PP 49; 301). The only person she can’t outwalk is Wickham: “she had walked fast to get rid of him,” but it doesn’t work (PP 52; 329). But the “flutter of spirits” (PP 52; 326) is clearly not the healthiest condition, and she needs the counterweight of Darcy’s deliberateness to keep her in check, just as (according to the Gardiners) he needs “a little more liveliness” to bring out his virtues (PP 52; 325). These themes, which persist throughout the novels in ever-changing balance, reflect the sensibility responsive to movement while resistant to agitation. On some accounts of Austen, movement is concentrated on inner development, the “passage into self-knowledge.” 17 But development requires both exposure and alertness, or, as Miranda Burgess has described it, transport in the sense of movement without an excess of emotional transport. 18 Settlement is undoubtedly the goal of Austen’s narratives. The fortunate in her world are those who persist and struggle through to a stable outcome. But stability characterizes only the one last chapter out of fifty or sixty. In Emma the outcome is particularly regressive, with an older husband brought under the roof of the aged father. It might seem excessive to speak of a death wish here, but noise is never happy in Austen’s world, and the blessed event is something that might well be called a quietus. The goal of desire is the end of desire; that is the insight that led Leo Bersani to take Mansfield Park as a key instance of the linkage of realism with the fear of desire. 19 17 Susan Morgan, In the Meantime: Character and Perception in Jane Austen’s Fiction (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980), 151. But even a 18 Miranda Burgess, “Transport: Mobility, Anxiety, and the Romantic Poetics of Feeling,” Studies in Romanticism, 49 (2010): 234-35. 19 Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 74-77, making the point that too much acting creates a world of imagination and disrupts reality: “the power of stillness is often equivalent to the power of description” (77). In a parallel discussion from a historicist rather than a theoretical and psychoanalytic perspective, Linda M. Austin, “Aesthetic Embarrassment: The Reversion to the Picturesque in Nineteenth-Century English Tourism,” ELH 74 (2007): 629-53, discusses 19th-century critiques of the superficial “tourist gaze.” According to a fine critical analysis of Mansfield Park by David Marshall, The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750-1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005), 72-90, the only true escape from inauthentic acting would come not from settlement but utter disappearance, as instanced by the status of the narrator who (almost) never says “I.” M ARSHALL B ROWN 280 gayer novel, Sense and Sensibility, ends with Marianne Dashwood “submitting to new attachments” and with a spate of double negatives that vividly evoke the compromises that settlement entails. Willoughby “found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity,” Margaret (the third sister) is “not very ineligible for being supposed to have a lover,” and Elinor and Marianne “could live without disagreement between themselves” (SS 50; 379-80). It is a killjoy, Bingley’s sister Mrs. Hurst, who says about the already too placid Jane, “I have an excessive regard for Jane Bennet [...], and I wish with all my heart she were well settled” (PP 8; 36). Excessive, indeed. Perfection, as here, is ever near allied to denial. Immobility is destiny or fate, bliss or curse, quiescence or denial and destruction. Either way, it is the end of the fable. But there have always been births and deaths, lovers and rivals, quarrelsome siblings and envious spinsters, glorious careers at risk and boring evenings at cards. Always have been and always will be. Austen’s narrative endings have fairy-tale underpinnings; their ethereal tone implies that reality must be less perfect. And in that world, the world of all chapters but the last, people are always on the move, whether walking a half-mile in the rain on a charity expedition, journeying to London for dissipation, Bath for encounter, or a provincial city for escape or opportunity, or voyaging abroad. Fielding’s Tom Jones and George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss both introduce the proverbial migrants, gypsies, as sentimental ideals. In Emma they make too brief an appearance to legitimate any evaluation; there is no sentimentality to the episode, merely an acknowledgment that such things exist, even in Highbury’s never-never-land. But that is, in fact, a fundamental insight of Austen’s fiction. Except for the briefest, idyllic states of exception, we are all migrants through life. The mobility we see in others, with the kind of exaggerated alarm that they arouse when the gypsy boys assail Harriet Smith, really is the situation of all of us. Migrants are not others; neither noble savages nor ignoble ones. They are ourselves. A notable recent study of mobility, Tim Cresswell’s On the Move, prompts a response in the light of Austen’s portrayals. Cresswell’s book is a rich and varied, historically aware and broadly interdisciplinary account of mobility on many scales from the dance-floor and the horse-barn to labor flows. It is resourcefully argued and rewarding to read. Cresswell divides the world into sedentarists and nomadists. As a characterization of cultural anthropology, his division is persuasive. Those who respond favorably to settlement are troubled by mobility; those who seek free movement resist disciplining in place. There is no doubt where his own sympathies lie: mobility, for him, “is a social and cultural resource,” and “the emergent nomadic metaphysics” is characteristic “of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.” 20 20 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006), 220. In- Austen’s Immobility 281 deed, he sees his books as “an account of the production of mobilities in modernity” (83). He avoids the trap of simple class reifications, and he acknowledges a left sedentarism that he associates with Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart. Nevertheless, his account remains too insistently axiological. Whichever side one’s metaphysics favor looks good or normal, and the other side bad or defective. No place is recognized for dialectic where the axiological and ontological poles must be balanced against one another. That is where Austen’s contribution lies. She does not deny axiology, but she plays axiology off against ontology, or, in simpler language, ideal value against real existence. The result is the dialectic missing from Cresswell’s basically descriptive accounts. Like Cresswell, she sees flux on many scales, from the dance floor and horse cart to the global. To grope one’s way toward settlement in a world in flux is one view of the task. How does one successfully decide to make a commitment that calls a halt to the flux? What kinds of commitments fail, what kinds succeed? At the same time, Austen recognizes how essential it is that one’s commitments not be life-destroying. Halting must never be equated with blockage. The ideal of perfection is inevitably fragile. In the post-lapsarian world fixedness is no more the answer than rootlessness. So, in a different but entirely pertinent context, Ottmar Ette has newly written about the illusion of returning to a paradise (such as Robert Martin's farm that shimmers beyond the ha-ha): “Migration back to the starting point always proves … to be migration to an Otherwhere, to a place that is no longer what it once was that can only be insofar as it is coming to be.“ 21 21 Ottmar Ette, Konvivenz, Literatur und Leben nach dem Paradies (Berlin: Kadmos, 2012), 55, my translation: “Die Migration zum Ausgangspunkt zurück erweist sich stets ... als Migration an einen Andernort, an einen Ort, der nicht mehr ist, was er einst war - der nur sein kann, weil er werden wird. “ Rigid elders and flighty adolescents, patriarchy and elopement, are equally unsatisfactory. So long as we can see Austen’s endings as provisional rather than definitive, we can find in her novels an accommodation of space with time, old with young, national stability with global opportunity, domestic contentment with progressive husbandry. Nomadism and identity politics both have their attractions and their value, for sure. But we need art’s “trotzdem”; we need models like Austen’s to keep any single value from getting out of hand. M ARSHALL B ROWN 282 Works Cited Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1960. E. ---. Jane Austen’s Letters. Ed. Deirdre Le Faye. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. ---. Mansfield Park. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1960. MP. ---. Minor Works. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1958. ---. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1948. NA, P. ---. Pride and Prejudice. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1959. PP. ---. Persuasion. Ed. D. W. Harding. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. ---. 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