The Virtues behind Virtues
What makes Persuasion's heroine, Anne Elliot, so attractive?
Happy Friday, fellow R&W journeymen and women. And an extra high-five for making it through Election 2024. ;-)
This week on the podcast, Rhea and I began our deep reading of Persuasion by Jane Austen. As Rhea mused in the podcast, after reading some terrific and trippy contemporary works (I’m looking at you, Lincoln in the Bardo), reading Jane Austen feels so much like coming home.
I agree.
One way I think Austen does this is by creating characters with quite tangible virtues and vices without degrading them into charicatures of whatever virtue or vice they display. They remain alive and open for us to love, loathe, pity, and examine our own virtues by, in the same way the best and most beautiful children’s stories do.
Persuasion’s heroine, Anne Elliot, is the perfect springboard for an examination of virtues, namely those virtues of patience and duty.
At the outset of the novel, Anne is considered as “only Anne” by her father and her sisters. This is code for: neglected, misused, taken lightly; all these she suffers in spades at the hands of her most intimate kin. Then we learn she has been quietly suffering for years with the ill-effects of a lost love. To make matters worse, her former lover appears again and finds his way to her inner circle, still bitter over her rejection of him (not because she didn’t love him, but because she was persuaded to do so by a mother-like figure). Anne endures all these injustices and pains with great patience and unwavering duty.
How does she do this with such winsomeness and grace? And in a way that we readers admire her and find her still fully human?
I don’t know. My guess, however, is it has—in part—to do with with Austen’s magic for creating characters full; not only of the outward virtues, but of the hidden, heart virtues that give life to those virtues on display.
In her book, On Reading Well: Finding the Good life by Reading Great Books, Karen Swallow Prior begins her chapter highlighting Persuasion with a wonderful root word study of the word patience. “The essence of patience,” she writes, “is the willingness to endure suffering.”
That “suffering” is the meaning of the root word for patience, is made clear by the fact that we also use the word patient to refer to someone under medical care. The patient is someone “suffering” from an ailment—not merely waiting. Patient shares the same root as the word passion, which also means “suffering.” Someone who has a passion—a passion for music, a passion for soccer, a passion for a person—suffers on behalf of that love. We we speak in the church about “the passion of Christ,” it literally refers to the suffering of Christ on the cross on our behalf. The overlap between the words suffering and patience can be seen in another meaning of both words: “permit.” When Jesus said, “Suffer little children…to come unto me” (as Matthew 19:14 is rendered in the King James), he meant “permit” them to come…. The expression “the patience of Job,” describing the great test of faith Job underwent in the Bible, refers to Job’s suffering, not merely his endurance.”
Maybe it’s because I’m allergic to being patient, but in general I find the advice to “be patient” unhelpful. Telling a person to be patient during a time of trial is akin to telling a five-year old to not desire the decorated sugar cookie sitting on the counter. She may not eat the thing, but it won’t be because she doesn’t want it, rather because of some adult is keeping her from indulgence. The outward result looks the same as if she didn’t desire the cookie in the first place: she abstains. But her inner Cookie Monster is fully alive and ready to gobble the cookie once the adult leaves the room.
In order for patience to become something more than an outward action of willpower, as we see in the character of Anne, it must be planted in proper conditions and tended to as a gardener does his orchard. The Apostle Paul understood this in his letter to the Galatians when he named patience as one of the “fruit of the Spirit.” (Galations 5:22). Good fruit is the result of a tree properly planted and well-tended. Patience, I would argue, is the result of a person—in body, mind, and spirit—properly positioned in relationship to God.
In the Epilog of his book, Waiting: Finding Hope When God Seems Silent, Ben Patterson writes on why he didn’t include the words patience or perseverence as touchstones to waiting:
Does it strike you odd that a book on waiting has scarcely mentioned the word patience? Or perseverance? Aren’t those the virtues that we are to exercise when we are forced to wait? They are, but they are secondary to what is really needed to wait with grace. More basic than patience or perseverance are humility and hope. These two are the attitudes, the visions of life, that make patience possible. Patience is the rare and lovely flower that grows only in the soil of humility and hope.
Humility makes patience possible because it shows us our proper place in the universe. God is God, we are his creatures; he is the King, we are his subjects; his is master, we are his servants. We have no demands to make, no rights to assert….
Hope makes patience possible because it gives us the confidence that our wait is not in vain. Hope believes that this God of love, power and wisdom is on our side…. No matter how things look to us, God is the complete master of the situation.
Without a deep understanding and acceptance of your proper creaturely place in the universe, patience will always be a practice in “suck it up.” I can tell you from experience, this is an exhausting way to live. Also, at some point it will fail you. I promise.
However, to declare with Job in the moment of his devastation: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will leave this life. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord,” is to accept that what you have lost was never yours to begin with. Moreover, particularly with that final sentence, it is to throw yourself into the arms of the Almighty and, out of a hope-filled trust, worship him still.
Anne’s patience is the kind grown out of humility and hope. How do we know this? First, because unlike “suck it up patience,” Anne’s patience doesn’t fail her no matter how trying the situation. Second, Anne is continually de-centering herself from her life. That is, she is able to see from the other’s point-of-view and then act or think toward the good of that other, rather than her own good first. This can only be done from a position of humility fueled by hope in something—or rather, Someone—greater than yourself.
As humility and hope enliven Anne’s patience, so devotion enlivens her duty.
When I think of devotion, I think of Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazerus, written about by several of the Gospel authors. It was Mary who sat at Jesus’s feet with the other (all male) disciples, when—according to her dutiful sister, Martha—she should have been helping prepare the meal. It was Mary who took a jar of pure and expensive nard oil and used the entire bottle to annoint Jesus’ feet and then wipe them clean with her hair. (John 12:1-7)
Outwardly, these acts were incongruous to the expectations for women of her culture and time. Martha was right: Mary’s proper duty was to help Martha, not sit at the feet of the Rabbi; that was a position reserved for men. With annointing Jesus’ feet: It was the servant’s role to attend to the guest’s feet, not the host’s. Not only this, she used the entire jar of purfume that likely cost a year or more of wages. And she wiped his feet with her own hair, when Jewish women at the time rarely unbound and uncovered their hair in public.
Out of her devotion to Jesus, Mary acted in ways that shocked outside observers.
So it is with Anne Elliot of Persuasion.
The difference, however, is that Anne’s “outside observers” are us, the readers of Persuasion. No one inside the story (so far, anyway) takes any notice of Anne to be shocked by her devoted acting on their behalf. They see Anne’s devotion only as her “duty” to meet their every need.
But we readers can see her devotion by all her “ingongruous acts.” We see it in her caring for her nephews, her deference toward her selfish sister, her patience with Wentworth’s snubs, as well as Louisa and Henrietta’s frivolities. When, on the podcast, Rhea keeps wondering why Anne doesn’t speak up for herself more often and “tell off her sisters,” I wonder if it isn’t Anne’s devotion Rhea is recognizing, her “incongruous ways” that seem shocking compared to the way we would expect someone in her position to behave.
At this point, I am half-way through Persuasion. It remains to be seen if I will continue to find Anne’s virtuous attributes winsome and admirable, or if she will begin to feel pious and unreachable. I’m trusting the former. I’m not sure Jane Austen was capable of creating heroines of the latter.
For what ultimately drives the virtues of our heroine, Anne, is the same thing which drove her maker, Jane: love.
Thanks for reading and journeying with us here at the Reader & the Writer! I hope your weekend is warm and beautiful, and feels like “coming home.”
Much love
Shari