A Companion to Jane Austen by Johnson Claudia L.; Tuite Clara; & Clara Tuite

Author:Johnson, Claudia L.; Tuite, Clara; & Clara Tuite
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2011-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

II

Austen’s fiction therefore reflects a profoundly ambivalent view of the military, which only began to change after the victories of the Peninsular War and the emergence of Wellington as a national hero. As a bastion of Britain’s imperial and commercial power, the Royal Navy was regarded more positively, but not without some qualification. Admiral Crawford in Mansfield Park, who keeps a mistress and whose circle is the target of Mary Crawford’s questionable joke about “Rears and Vices,” indicates that the senior service could be as worldly as its counterparts in the army. As Brian Southam (2005) has shown, Mansfield Park is a study in the workings of patronage in the navy, of which Austen had direct knowledge in the form of the careers of her brothers. The promotion of Fanny Price’s brother William is dependent upon the political influence of Sir Thomas Bertram and strings pulled by Admiral Crawford at the behest of his nephew Henry, who wants to ingratiate himself with Fanny. Henry Crawford, like Willoughby, Darcy, and Frank Churchill, is one of those gentlemen whose wealth and familial status mean that military service is optional. He experiences some envy of the fact that Fanny’s brother has tested himself, both mentally and physically, in the heat of battle: “he wished he had been a William Price, distinguishing himself and working his way to fortune and consequence with so much self-respect and happy ardour,” to which Austen adds crisply “The wish was rather eager than lasting” (MP: 236). Crawford’s “war envy” is a sign of how the ideological security of the gentleman was beginning to be threatened by changes in the reputation of the military profession as a result of the French wars. The navy, as exemplified by the career of Horatio Nelson, demonstrated that active service in defense of one’s country could confer a value and status on the individual surpassing that of rank, defining in the process too a different kind of masculinity, forged by what Crawford discerns in William as “the glory of heroism, of usefulness, of exertion, of endurance” (MP: 236).

Austen develops this theme more fully in Persuasion, published posthumously in 1818 but set during the peace of 1814 before the renewal of hostilities that culminated in the Battle of Waterloo. In the character of Captain Wentworth, a younger son without a fortune who rises by means of talent and good luck to the rank of captain and £25,000, Austen represents the officer class of the navy as an alternative to the degenerate landed gentry, exemplified by Sir Walter Elliot. Wentworth has the charm of other military characters in Austen’s fiction – he is as adept in the concert or dining room as he is on the quarterdeck – but his ease in polite society is contextualized in terms of the more authentic sociability which he practices with his fellow officers, based on mutual respect, informality, steadfastness, and honesty. Anne Elliot encounters this naval brotherhood when she visits the Harvilles at Lyme: Austen’s description of naval

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