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Thursday, April 02, 2009
Of a Postcolonial Persuasion
[I was really pleased to find some confluence between the comments on Rohan’s great post about postcolonial criticism and some things I was already thinking about while reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion. I was heading in what I thought was a slightly different direction, so I decided to approach the book somewhat separately, but there were inevitable and valuable correlations, which I hope are evident here.]
It’s curious to read Persuasion in the light of the (in)famous Said reading of Mansfield Park in his Culture and Imperialism. Said pointed out the Bertram family’s Antigua plantation was a sort of enabling fiction, sustaining the family’s fortunes and thus making the action of the novel possible in a very real way. Said focused in particular on a casual exchange between Fanny Price and Sir Thomas about the plantation, drawing some fairly broad conclusions. A number of critics (and likely a number of readers) have taken issue with Said’s rough handling of Austen and with the implication that Austen was just one more lackey of the slave trade and British imperial oppression more generally.
Persuasion, it seems to me, would have been a better choice for postcolonial critique: even the most inveterately romantic of readers would accept that foregrounding the novel’s coziness to Empire would produce a valid reading. Austen effusively and earnestly sings the praises of the British navy in two prominent places, and the fortunes of a number of characters have been made by the imperial project (though not explicitly at the expense of enslaved peoples). Some may still object to Said’s act of “implication” and not-so-veiled judgment, but I seriously doubt anyone’s going to say that the issues of violent imperial expansion and Great-Power competition are of dubious importance to the novel.
Yet I think that Said’s choice was the correct one, although I realize that it is often this question of choice that seems to be most grating to those who resist Poco’s Empire: the idea that poco critics are picking books because they are intent on picking on them, and that the forgoing of other, more obviously valid choices is done primarily for political, polemical, or promotional reasons. Although this strategy (or the perception that it is used) has tended to discredit postcolonial criticism in some quarters or otherwise to give rise to the belief (sometimes founded in experience) that poco renders books through its blades and gears like just so much meat (per Rohan’s critique). But I think it is generally the selection process, and not the grinding, that its critics find so distasteful: not the sausage, but the choice of whom to call a pig. It is the initial selection that makes the result feel, as Rohan says, like a “gotcha!”
Certainly, Said’s choice of Mansfield Park (or of Austen more generally) does have tremendous strategic value. Lionel Trilling’s essay on the book anointed it, more or less, as the most intellectually fulfilled (or most morally vexed) of Austen’s novels and also limned a darker side to Austen: “She is the first to be aware of the Terror which rules our moral situation… She herself is an agent of the Terror.” So engagement with Mansfield Park is certainly a way of striking to Austen’s moral/intellectual core, of mounting an effort to draw her into decisive battle. (It might be pointed out that, as Mansfield Park is probably the least beloved of Austen’s novels, its relative unpopularity might dampen the ire of Said’s critics, but I think the idea of implying that Jane Austen was some kind of complaisant monster is outrageous enough to most people, regardless of the book.)
But Persuasion is also, perhaps, unsuited for the type of “space clearing gestures” (to use Aaron’s term) that Said and postcolonialism needed to execute at the time in order to stake out a sufficiently large amount of intellectual working-room. Unlike the other novels, Persuasion is almost void of those firmly plotted junctures which knock the characters onto paths perpendicular to their prior direction. In fact, the idea of continuity or constancy runs through the book like a circulatory system, vivifying every scene and cell. The two protagonists do not, as most of Austen’s lovers do, need to reorient their trajectories in order to meet happily; there are not the kinds of transformations, humblings, or self-surmountings which characterize the love-plots of all her other books, and the moral lessons that those books so strongly implied are, if not disavowed, at least a little abrogated. Pride and sensibility are not disciplined; prejudice and sense are not forced to moderate themselves.
Rather than transformation, the book is about its title: persuasion is a watchword for the author and her protagonists. It explains their actions comprehensively: they have been persuaded to do as they did, by social pressures, by familial pressures, by friends or confidants. But in all instances, one cannot say that either ever does something they are entirely opposed to; even Anne’s initial rejection of Wentworth is recovered at the end of the novel when she tells him, “I was perfectly right in being guided… I was right in submitting to her [Lady Russell].” The minor characters (Benwick, the Musgrove sisters) may be transformed by events, but Anne and Wentworth are at most nudged closer together, but remain walking in the same direction the whole book through.
Yet this utter constancy is accomplished not in spite of the power of persuasion, but because of its prevalence and strength; Anne’s susceptibility to persuasion is also a completely effective defense against the forces which threaten a transformation (her cousin). We can contrast this dynamic with the usual Austenian trope of the headstrong heroine, unwilling to accede to any force of mere persuasion, an obdurance necessitating the right angles of transformative events or revelations which has its apotheosis in Elizabeth Bennett. Fanny Price is almost more like Anne than she is like Elizabeth, but she is far more resistant to certain concessions (like participating in the Inchbald play) than Anne would ever be, and her timid obstinacy is the critical element that allows her to act abruptly on occasion and to act in abrupt occasions, as when the Bertram family is shaken up in such a way that marriage to Edmund becomes possible. The obstacles Austen drops into the plot force everything to go perpendicular; Fanny is able to turn with it.
It seems to me that the type of novel, then, that Persuasion is, is not very well structured for the type of ambitious critique Said wanted to accomplish when he set about analyzing Mansfield Park. How do you score the contrapuntal voice for a straight line?
Yet this does not mean that Persuasion would resist postcolonial criticism, or that the average reader’s greater comfort with it being so glossed would be wrong; I think Persuasion actually has a great deal more to say about the different types of power active in the Empire and in the navy than Mansfield Park, but not because those concerns are front and center here and ostensibly tangential there.
The structure or shape of the book, I think, is of more consequence than the subject, and a comparison of Mansfield Park and Persuasion may demonstrate the different kinds of postcolonial criticism one can engage in. The Saidian form is (perhaps too) well-suited for a novel of transformations and right angles, seeming to choose them just to one-up their own voilàs; it is a dramatic criticism, and its postures are abrupt in their turns. But there is an equally valid form of postcolonial criticism which does not require right angles or precipitous revelations.
Or, at least, I think there could be.
Comments
Andrew, I like the drift of your thought.
I think one terminological clarification might help out discussion: perhaps it would be helpful to introduce a distinction between the idea of a trademarked “postcolonial reading,” and a reading that, without ideological predetermination, focuses on the colonial themes in a text.
A “postcolonial reading” of a novel like Mansfield Park or Persuasion is presumed to make certain strong claims: 1) that the theme of colonialism is structurally important to a canonical novel; 2) that the novel cannot be properly read without reference to the colonial element—colonialism is central even if it seems thematically marginal; and 3) the novelist is in some way “complicit” in the crimes of history occasionally invoked by her text. Often also, 4) contemporary readers and critics have a *moral* imperative to correct the blindness (or indifference) of past critics to the slave trade and the injustices of colonialism.
The problem for me is that people (including people in the poco sub-field) presume that a “postcolonial reading” has to follow the same arc in every case. In “Mansfield Park,” I think (1) might be true, but not so much (2), (3), or (4). I don’t really hold it against Said that he made those claims in his essay on the novel; it was, as you say, an important space-clearing gesture. But the payoff for replicating the same reading with dozens of other 19th and 20th century British and American texts is much less.
In fact, a reader focusing on colonial themes might read colonial reference points in a literary text doing work along different trajectories. Some readers might be less inclined to force strong claims down the reader’s throat, and make subtler assertions based on colonial reference points. Others might even agree with aspects of the recent neo-conservative defense of British Empire (i.e., Niall Ferguson), especially when the reference points are technology (i.e., railroads) or education, rather than, say, the slave trade, or the ghastly, genocidal European Scramble for Africa.
In “Persuasion,” for instance, I vaguely recall numerous references to the Navy, but few to direct colonialism. If my memory is correct, one could say, more precisely, that naval warfare and geopolitics are thematized by the novel, and colonialism only indirectly. Rather than simply replicate the “postcolonial” (TM) reading of the novel, or another like it, an interesting reading of the novel might situate the naval theme with a thick historical account of the many different ways in which the new maritime culture was impacting the dominant social order in Regency England.
In short, if doing a postcolonial reading requires us to always perform some version of the same rhetorical gestures, it really is a deeply reductive methodology—and I wouldn’t want to be “postcolonial.” But if it’s more of a starting point for a varied set of intellectual and historical interests, without a predetermined ideological slant, I’ll provisionally remain on board.
This is an interesting post, Andrew. I admit to not knowing Mansfield Park well but Persuasion is my 2nd favourite Austen novel. I think I would agree with Amardeep that colonialism is not ‘thematized’ in it, even through the emphasis on the navy; the crucial thematic value of the navy is as an example of a more meritocratic system of social mobility than the (fading) aristocracy. But at the same time, part of the obliquely referenced backstory is just how someone like Captain Wentworth makes his money (taking French ships)--which is part of a larger conflict over naval dominance, which of course is part of the history of Britain’s imperial adventure. So there is something there to build a postcolonial reading on (though it would still seem to me peripheral to what the novel is trying to talk to us about, or at least I think so, though a compelling reading would persuade [!] me otherwise). That there are connections to colonialism is not that interesting if you acknowledge (as Jonathan and others emphasized in comments to my previous post) that in one way or another of course everyone and everything had some kind of connection to such a large historical phenomenon.
Amardeep, I find your careful (and admirably temperate) contributions to these discussions very helpful and I was prompted as a result to go review your contribution to the Theory’s Empire event, which I had looked at once before some time ago when thinking about Erin O’Connor’s essay. I wish I had remembered it sooner; it’s excellent, and actually much more helpful in orienting and directing my tentative steps in this complicated terrain than the Tiffin et al glossary. For instance, Tiffin etc. had pointed me to the Viswanathan book (one thing I’m interested in is the status or implications of studying English literature in Egypt, as the protagonist of In the Eye of the Sun does)--but clearly I should also look at Priya Joshi’s book.
These are really great comments; I wish I had done as good a job separating things out and working through what I see as the colonial presence of the novel.
I agree that colonialism is less present in Persuasion, but what I was trying to get at was that the question of what type of power is most effective was better dramatized in this novel, and that in the context of the navy (and in the particular context of a navy now wondering what to do after the Napoleonic wars), this question becomes immensely relevant to what would come after—increased use of the navy for colonial expansion. And I think the background of the two wars against America, where British (naval) power was not able to be deployed as effectively as it was in the Napoleonic wars, is also part of any consideration of what makes for an effective use of power, or whether there are circumstances which make something like persuasion ("soft power") more effective than transformation.
I would say that P is a novel that will rebound disastrously upon any reader attempting the replicated arc type of postcolonial reading that Amardeep describes. I agree that it’s far more amenable to the thick description of how maritime culture modifies, impacts, or perhaps even simply walks away from, the residual order. The reason I think this is that the novel seems to me to be already well ahead of & on top of the sorts of tropes the weakest kind of postcolonial criticism prides itself upon discovering. The novel weaves these tropes into its patterns so it’s hard to maintain that they aren’t consciously meant. The thread of thinking about the growing irrelevance of Sir Walter Elliot’s objection to Navy men, with their weatherbeaten complexions and faces the colour of mahogany, is a case in point: whiteness is thought about sceptically in the novel.