All the single men: Persuasion
strategy, moral & immoral
Greetings Austenites—
It is I, your resident “Jane Austen hotness specialist,” back with the sixth and final standalone-novel installment of Austen Math.
Today I am evaluating the single men and heroines of Austen’s final full-length novel, Persuasion. If you’re new here, you can (but needn’t feel compelled to) start here:
A few other notes in the wake of the Northanger Abbey edition before we jump in:
I finished reading The Mysteries of Udolpho, and while nowhere near to my taste as any of Austen’s novels, I do think Radcliffe pretty hard done by canonically vs., say, Wordsworth—vs. first-rate names working in the same register. Austen’s advantage is one of tone rather than quality, my preference inextricably tied to that for irony itself. As
writes:Somehow Austen manages to have it both ways (the passages in which Catherine comes to her senses and rejects the manicheism of the Gothic novel are counterbalanced by all of the praise of Gothic novels from Henry and others, including Austen herself—and the word where all of this comes together for me is the adjective "charming" used to describe Mrs. Radcliffe's productions, a word both damning and condescending and yet also potentially if mildly complimentary in a genuine way)
The delight and scourge of charm strikes again!
It is rare for a novel to successfully ping this have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too register—and I’ll end my intro here with a recommendation for a forthcoming contemporary one that likewise manages it: The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers, an expansion of her brilliant story from a couple years ago. The Hudson Valley best beware: it’s out in October and preorderable here. Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy.
Austen Math 101
Jane Austen, arguably the greatest novelist of all time, was the author of six marriage-plot comedies of manners published between 1811 and 1817: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. There is rampant dispute as to how to read them. “The people who read Austen for the romance and the people who read Austen for the sociology are both reading her correctly,” Louis Menand argues, “because Austen understands courtship as an attempt to achieve the maximum point of intersection between love and money.”
Menand’s vaguely mathematical binary is directionally accurate but insufficiently sophisticated. Austen is absolutely a marital maximizationist, but her calculations have far greater dimensional depth. As such, neither the die-hard romantics nor sociologists are reading her correctly; they are equally mistaken. Over- or under-weighting any single dimension of Austenian courtship maximization amounts to a fundamental misunderstanding of what she most cunningly gets:
Austen understood status—ahem, station; that its shoring up is hardly superficial. The intrigue of the marriage plot springs not just from uncertain affection—“will they fuck”—but the balance of such possibilities with a complex and often competing set of considerations. Status questions, basically, though to the standard socioeconomic strains I would add, particularly in Austen’s case, that of moral status. Alas, fuckability is a kind of status, too.
The Austen Math model more or less directly follows my original offhand vision, ranking all of Austen’s single men across four weighted dimensions—fortune, morals, manners, and fuckability—to develop secondary insights, calculate their individual total status, and analyze their relative marital desirability. The heroines, in turn, are judged by their dimensional weighting (and to what extent it shifts over time) versus the Austenian baseline. In other words: they are judged on the soundness of their judgment. The better a heroine is at Austen Math herself, the more virtuous she is deemed.
And what of love per se? Even the most sophisticated mathematical models are simplified phenomenological representations. Indeed, this is the purpose of models. I’d argue love is largely represented indirectly by a proprietary mix of the various dimensions—but I do not claim to capture all of Austen’s complexity, let alone any universal truths.
Methodology*
I. Dimensional raw scoring of single men
Each single man is evaluated on each of the four primary status dimensions of FORTUNE, MORALS, MANNERS, and FUCKABILITY using a whole-number score of 1 to 6, one being low and six high, based on textual analysis by yours truly.
My definitions are as follows, with help from Merriam-Webster (MW):
By FORTUNE (n), I mean “riches; wealth,” in line with MW 1.2, “a man of fortune.”
By MORALS (n), I mean both “ethics” and “modes of conduct,” per MW 2.2a-b, in the context of Christian Regency norms without blind deference to them.
By MANNERS (n), I mean personal bearing, air, deportment, style, etc., running the gamut of MW 1a-e, again filtered through a critical Regency lens.
By FUCKABILITY (n), admittedly not in MW, I mean sexual desirability, predominantly but not exclusively based on physical attractiveness, also including demonstrable charm, wit, and je ne sais quoi.
The six-point scale both allows for sufficient differentiation across Austen’s six novels and forces non-neutrality.
II. Austenian primary status weighting (baseline)
The four primary dimensions predict total status via uneven weight distribution, in alignment with the hierarchy of Austen’s values as I have long understood them:
MORALS - 40%
FORTUNE - 30%
MANNERS - 20%
FUCKABILITY - 10%
for a total of 100%.
The formula to calculate total estimated Austenian status is a basic SUMPRODUCT: D1*W1 + D2*W2 + D3*W3 + D4*W4, where D=dimensional raw score and W=Austenian weight.
III. Secondary dimension calculations
Each pair of congruous primary dimensions yields insights into a secondary dimension. At the intersection
of FORTUNE and MORALS is WORTH,
of MORALS and MANNERS is CHARACTER,
of MANNERS and FUCKABILITY is AFFECT,
and of FUCKABILITY and FORTUNE is ELIGIBILITY.
Secondary dimension calculations may be performed either via weighted or unweighted averages of their raw inputs to harness insights inclusive or exclusive of Austenian status bias, respectively.
Note the secondary dimensions get closer to viscerally lovable personal attributes—character, affect—but would be harder to directly quantify themselves (e.g.: worth is more subjective than fortune).
IV. Heroine dimensional weight variance
Each heroine is evaluated on the difference between her hierarchy of the four primary status dimensions (again per my textual analysis) and Austen’s. Like in the Austenian baseline, the heroine’s top-priority dimension is weighted 0.4, with -0.1 for each subsequent priority.
The formula for dimensional weight variance is: |W1-H1|+|W2-H2|+|W3-H3|+|W4-H4|, where W=Austenian baseline weight and H=heroine weight. I use this absolute-value “spread” calc over true squared variance for its simplicity, clarity, and sufficiency given the small size of the data set. The score will fall between 0 and 0.8 in increments of 0.2, and can be roughly interpreted as follows with regards to the heroine’s judgment:
0 - Unimpeachable
0.2 - Sound
0.4 - So-so
0.6 - Precarious
0.8 - Misguided
I.e., the lower the score, the better her judgment. In some cases, heroines’ dimensional values change over the course of the novel, in which cases I calculate both starting and ending hierarchy for comparison to estimate their development.
*Feel free—nay, encouraged—to quibble with any of this. We are here first and foremost to have fun, and banter is damn close to my definition of it.
Credentials
While admittedly an amateur Austen scholar, I am the daughter of a doting professional one—and a professional novelist and management consultant myself (see: Portrait, patents). My undergraduate degree is in English and my graduate an MBA: a thoroughly Austenian compromise. Her voice has been inseparable from that of my own conscience since I was ten years old.
Part 6: Persuasion
“More than seven years were gone since” Miss Anne Eliot’s brief, blissful engagement to Captain Frederick Wentworth. He’d been poor; she, the young daughter of a baronet, on paper out of his league. Perhaps she might have held up against the vain coldness of her father, Sir Walter Eliot, towards the match—but not when the sensible Mrs. Russell agreed with him. Anne’s elder sister, Elizabeth, has been similarly disappointed for different reasons. Their cousin and Sir Walter’s heir, Mr. William Elliot, spurned the family to marry a woman of great fortune but inferior birth. Now? Mr. Elliot’s wife has died, and Captain Wentworth as a fortune from war—while Sir Walter and Elizabeth’s negligent economy is forcing the family to rent their estate, Kellynch Hall, to strangers. Well, not quite strangers. The wife of Sir Walter’s new tenant, Admiral Croft, happens to be Captain Wentworth’s sister.
While Sir Walter and Elizabeth decamp to Bath, Anne goes to help her brother-in-law and hypochondriac younger sister, Charles and Mary Musgrove, in nearby Uppercross. The broader Musgrove clan, and in particular Charles’s two grown sisters, Miss Henrietta—partial but not yet engaged to her cousin, Mr. Charles Hayter—and Miss Louisa, make for lively company made livelier still by the return to Kellynch of Captain Wentworth himself. Will old flames revive, or be overpowered by new ones? A trip to Lyme to meet Captain Wentworth’s seafaring friends, including the melancholy Captain Benwick, may prove fateful—especially given the handsome stranger who catches Anne’s eye there. Well, not quite stranger . . .
The single men
Captain Frederick Wentworth; Mr. William Elliot; Mr. Charles Hayter; Captain James Benwick
Fortune
Captain Wentworth’s newly-minted fortune of “five-and-twenty thousand pounds” annualizes to over a thousand a year already, with plenty of potential to make more. Charles Musgrove, for one, “was sure Captain Wentworth was as likely a man to distinguish himself as any officer in the navy.” I’m inclined to agree with him: 4/6.
His younger friend Captain Benwick has likewise made some money at war—perhaps a bit less than Wentworth, but certainly enough to marry on. Let’s say 3/6.
Between Mr. Eliot’s late wife’s fortune and his future claim to Kellynch Hall, he is an extremely rich man likely to become still richer, not to mention a baronet. 6/6.
Charles Hayter is Charles Musgrove’s cousin; the first-born son of an inferior family branch, and a country curate assisting the local clergyman. His future prospects aren’t disastrous, but with so little at present can only score 2/6.
Morals
We get limited insight into the moral compass of either Mr. Hayter or Captain Benwick—I might ding the latter for abandoning the memory of Miss Harville to Louisa so soon, but they’re both, as far as we can tell, decent guys. 4/6 for Benwick, and, in the benefit of still greater ignorance, 5/6 for Hayter.
Of the other two, however, there is much to say:
Mr. Elliot might be the most outright evil man in Austen’s oeuvre, his selfishness manifest not in seductive passion but cold strategy. “I'm sure some of you might say strategy is immoral” (Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts)—and in this case you’d be right! Mr. Elliot treats his fellow creatures instrumentally, as vessels to be extracted for his own benefit maximization, disposable thereafter. From his first wife, he extracts her fortune; of the Smiths, he accepts kindness then turns his back; to his family, he is at turns highly solicitous and eager to be “rid” of them under the shifting plane of his own needs and objectives. His immense skill in all of this does seem to augment his liability—persuasion “is only one step removed from coercion” (Katie Kitamura, Audition). 1/6 for the master manipulator.
But isn’t Captain Wentworth strategic, too? Did he not go to sea to make his fortune? He did indeed. But much like the statistical preeminence of morality in Austen Math, this is likewise the foremost dimension of Wentworth’s maximization strategy. He has risen in his profession not just as a brilliant leader, but a humane one, evident from his dealings with “poor Dick” Musgrove. He is steadfast to his friends and family, who justifiably hold him in the highest regard. To Anne: he is considerate even when woundedly keeping his distance, and the author of such a moving letter I cannot resist reprinting it in full:
I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone I think and plan.—Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes?—I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice, when they would be lost on others.—Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating in
F. W.
For you alone I think and plan—what is this but moral strategy? 6/6 for the fervent, undeviating F. W.!
Manners
For all their inner divergence, Captain Wentworth and Mr. Elliot’s manners are explicitly on par—“so exactly what they ought to be,” Austen writes of the latter, “so polished, so easy, so particularly agreeable, that [Anne] could compare them in excellence to only one person’s manners. They were not the same, but they were, perhaps, equally good.” The comparably excellent manners are, of course, those of Captain Wentworth himself. 6/6 for both the rivals.
Captain Benwick is well mannered, but more on the reserved side, with “a melancholy air, just as he ought to have” in Lyme, given the recent death of his fiancée. Mary Musgrove thinks him “a very odd young man,” but Anne’s good opinion means more, if tempered by his abrupt embrace of Louisa. 4/6.
Despite his provincial upbringing in a poorer family, Austen describes Charles Hayter as “a scholar and a gentleman . . . very superior in cultivation and manners to all the rest.” Mary’s snobbery cannot prevent his getting 4/6 as well.
Fuckability
Wentworth is introduced as “a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit and brilliancy”—a description that holds up seven years later, when Henrietta and Louisa Musgrove are immediately smitten. “No;” Anne thinks, “the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look, in no respect lessening his personal advantages. She had seen the same Frederick Wentworth.” Lucky her! 6/6.
Benwick is both younger and littler than Wentworth, with a “pleasing face” to go with his melancholy air. His bookishness adds to his allure in these parts, though—enough to get 5/6.
Charles Hayter has at least as much to recommend him. Austen calls him “a very amiable, pleasing young man.” He’s pleasing enough that his refusal to compete with Wentworth for Henrietta’s attentions sends her running back to him. Again, 5/6.
Mr. Elliot “seemed about thirty, and though not handsome, had an agreeable person.” Much in the Henry Crawford vein, Mr. Elliot outperforms his looks in his ultra-smoothness, his ease. Wentworth’s feelings for Anne are retriggered and set ablaze in mimetic jealousy of him. And as such: Elliot must score 5/6, too.
Secondary dimensions & insights
Again some familiar shapes. Wentworth is another single-fault hero; Elliot follows the Henry Crawford-Captain Tilney kidney bean of unpunished sinners. If anything it is the less-developed characters, Benwick and Hayter, who stand out in their unusual slightly-above-averageness—making them highly suitable matches for the goodnatured but unexceptional Miss Musgroves.
Weighted Austenian Total Status Model
Wentworth alone rises above the pack!
The others all clump around the very same score that proved sticky in Mansfield Park—3.9. I’ll have more to say about this in the cumulative Austen Math report, but for now I’ll limit my comments to not being particularly surprised: Persuasion also sits closest to Mansfield Park tonally.
The heroine
Miss Anne Elliot
In some ways Austen’s last and eldest heroine is her most similar to the 1790s standard issue model—that is, concurrent feminine perfection. Anne is not only “a heroine who is right” through and through, with 0 - Unimpeachable Austenian judgment—she is also conventionally beautiful, with “very regular, very pretty features” enhanced further by elegant manners and noble lineage. (Emma Woodhouse may be richer, but she is not the daughter of a baronet!)
Even Anne’s great, youthful regret—breaking with Wentworth before he’d made his fortune—cannot properly be called an error. After their engagement is restored and all is well, she explains:
“I have been thinking over the past, and trying impartially to judge of the right and wrong, I mean with regard to myself; and I must believe that I was right, much as I suffered from it, that I was perfectly right in being guided by the friend whom you will love better than you do now. To me, she was in the place of a parent. Do not mistake me, however. I am not saying that she did not err in her advice. It was, perhaps, one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides; and for myself, I certainly never should, in any circumstance of tolerable similarity, give such advice. But I mean, that I was right in submitting to her, and that if I had done otherwise, I should have suffered more in continuing the engagement than I did even in giving it up, because I should have suffered in my conscience. I have now, as far as such a sentiment is allowable in human nature, nothing to reproach myself with; and if I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman’s portion.”
This is not a modern self-reflection; if anything, it’s a reactionary one. Anne is above reproach—less reminiscent of Elizabeth Bennet than Emily St. Aubert of Udolpho. As with Emily’s Valancourt, any blame for delay sits squarely on Wentworth’s shoulders. Upon learning he would have been re-accepted earlier, Wentworth himself laments:
“This is a recollection which ought to make me forgive everyone one sooner than myself. Six years of separation and suffering might have been spared. It is a sort of pain, too, which is new to me. I have been used to the gratification of believing myself to earn every blessing that I enjoyed. I have valued myself honourable toils and just rewards. Like other great men under reverses,” he added, with a smile. “I must endeavor to subdue my mind to my fortune. I must learn to brook being happier than I deserve.”
And thus somehow, even with a perfect heroine, Austen still manages to break the Manichean mold.
Other misc. notes from this read:
In shades of “hits different from the ‘the wrong side of five and thirty,’” very funny to think of twenty-seven years old as the washed-up autumn of youth.
Charles Musgrove, his father Charles, his son Charles, his cousin Charles Hayter—there are so many Charleses! There are more Charleses in this novel than among my friends’ children.
Seeing Austen’s unmarried, childless status in a new light remembering she knew that “A lady, without a family, was the very best preserver of furniture in the world.”
While Persuasion doesn’t have the same level of snap as Pride and Prejudice or Emma, the above is one of many crisp, wry lines. Another favorite comes from Mary (and as such, with a grain of salt): “If there is any thing disagreeable going on, men are always sure to get out of it.” I dare say that’s true of me, too.
NEXT UP: The GRAND FINALE. Lots of charts! Maybe a framework or two—
Until then, I remain
Your not-so-humble purveyor of Austenian fun—
ANJ
my favorite austen!
Well well. Lots of highly fuckable men in Persuasion!