"Describing What Never Happened": Jane Austen and the History of Missed Opportunities

Abstract

"Describing What Never Happened":Jane Austen and the History of Missed Oportunities William Galperin I. Jane Austen's fictions are seemingly rife with missed opportunities. From her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811), to her last completed novel, Persuasion (1817), the missed opportunity casts a shadow over Austen's world that her narratives never quite succeed in either dispelling or, even in Persuasion, fully redressing. Sense and Sensibility is forever haunted by the specter of John Willoughby, whose own reflections at the novel's close—in particular the "pang" he experiences at the thought of Marianne Dashwood's marriage to Colonel Brandon—are less a retributive instrument than a darkling echo of earlier prospects that the novel has concertedly nurtured.1 It is no accident surely that, in a typical gesture of damage control, the recent cinematic adaptation of Sense and Sensibility has no place for the most cinematic moment in the entire book: Willoughby's tenth-hour, and largely self-exculpatory, visit in the midst of Marianne's near-fatal illness. The movie, it is true, ends with a version of Willoughby in pang as he surveys Marianne's and Brandon's domestic tranquility from afar. But this grandiose and contrived image of him contravenes the novel's concluding observations (and directives), which are marked less by melodramatic longing than by a duller ache where the everyday is simply fraught and set against an horizon of plenitude from which life and its pleasures are a falling away: But that he was for ever inconsolable, that he fled from society, or contracted an habitual gloom of temper, or died of a broken heart, must not be depended on—for he did neither. He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.2 [End Page 355] The countercurrent against which happiness must struggle for Willoughby, and the marital and gender division it projects, hardly requires unpacking. But what is less immediately clear is how the impedance to joy, both here and elsewhere in Austen, is as much a function of things as they are as an index of something missed or bypassed that does not belong entirely to the realm of fantasy. In addition to noting that Marianne remains Willoughby's "secret standard of perfection in woman," and a placeholder for the very plenitude that Willoughby had himself figured (and had figured as recently as his dramatic reentry to the narrative), the narrator projects a different sequence of events from those that have transpired. For "in the voluntary forgiveness" of his benefactor following his marriage to what the novel calls "a woman of character," Willoughby is given "reason for believing that had he behaved with honour towards Marianne, he might at once have been happy and rich." This is not of course how things have worked out, either for Willoughby or for Marianne, who is gloomily described as being "taken from" her family on the occasion of her marriage.3 Still, the force of any lesson derivable from these developments is mitigated not just by the imperatives of comedy, which see to it that Willoughby is left, more or less unpunished, in the company of his animals and diversions, but even more by what in the context of the novel is very nearly a historical imperative. In this respect, loss is not strictly speaking absence but a residue or trace of something sufficiently palpable in its lingering materiality that it literally blots both the comedic close and the sententia attached to it. Persuasion, by contrast, appears pitched in a different direction insofar as the interrupted union of Anne Elliot and Capt. Frederick Wentworth is identified at the novel's outset as the problem or missed opportunity that the narrative must somehow redress. But even as Persuasion is given over in nearly exclusive measure to restoring what was lost in the prehistory of the narrative, when Anne initially rejected Wentworth's proposal of marriage, it is far from clear that what Anne has missed, much less...