The laughing dancing ducking Miss Austen: Persuasion, eyesight and Admiral Croft

Intrigued by Arnie Perlstein's argument that Anne Eliot has poor eyesight in Persuasion, I looked back at the scene where Anne runs into Admiral Croft staring at the ship print in the shop window. This seemed an apt starting point for testing the theory: surely, if Anne can see details of a painting in a shop window, that would suggest her eyesight is acute.

Admiral Croft gazing into the shop window. I love this because of the cat.

In this scene,  we learn right before Anne runs into Admiral Croft staring at the print thatLady Russell takes her out for a daily carriage drive. On these drives, Anne "never failed to think of them [the Crofts], and never failed to see them." Austen writes that it:

"was a most attractive picture of happiness to her. She always watched them as long as she could, delighted to fancy she understood what they might talking of, as they walked along in happy independence, or equally delighted to see the Admiral's hearty shake of the hand when he encountered an old friend, and observe the eagerness of conversation when occasionally forming into a little knot of the navy, Mrs. Croft looking as intelligent and keen as any of the officers around her."

This paints an utterly charming "picture of happiness." I love the "little knot of the navy" phrase, as we think of naval people as great knotters of ropes. On first glance (no pun intended), it certainly seems as if Anne sees perfectly well. Yet I understand how this lovely vignette could be read two ways. It all hinges on the word "picture." Is Anne really literally seeing this scene or is it a "picture of happiness" (after all, "happiness" is an abstract concept) painted in her imagination?

The "picture of happiness" in the Crofts that Anne likes to imagine. Does she really see it?

The word fancy means to imagine in 19th century England, as it does today, but while we might use fancy and imagination interchangeably, in that period fancy held a connotation of weaving a fantasy. Wordsworth, for instance, distinguishes between fancies and imaginings in The Prelude, with fancies more far-fetched, perhaps involving wizards or fairies. When Anne "delighted to fancy" what the Crofts said to each other, this indicates that can't hear them and thus is weaving their conversations wholly from her own mind. What she sees from the carriage window--the possibly blurry scene of the Crofts walking--"equally delighted" her: is it, in reality, as fanciful?

I think its not by accident that Anne runs into Admiral Croft when she does--we know she has been hoping to meet with the Crofts and there is that mysterious (and in Austen always red flag type of throwaway phrase): "about a week or ten days after the Croft's arrival, it SUITED HER [ANNE] BEST TO LEAVE HER FRIEND, OR HER FRIEND'S CARRIAGE ... and return alone to Camden Place." We are not told why it "suited" Anne to do this, but we might surmise it would be to encounter the Crofts and learn more about Lousia's engagement--and lo and behold, right away she stumbles on Admiral Croft.

Anne sees Admiral Croft "staring at a picture." She obviously can see well enough, even if near-sighted, to discern this. The word "picture," occurring so soon after Anne's thought of "picture of happiness" about the Crofts, might lead us to believe that the apparently real picture of the Crofts that Anne sees from the carriage is just as much an imaginative (and distorted) picture as the picture of the boat. Croft calls the boat a "cockleshell"--which means a flimsy ship--ready to capsize. However, a cockleshell also stands for a cuckold, as in the nursery rhyme "Mary, Mary quite contrary." Some have interpreted the "cockleshells" in that rhyme to mean Mary Queen of Scots was cheated on by her husband. (See Wikipedia's entry on the nursery rhyme: some printed 18th century editions replaced "cockleshells" with "cuckolded.") Significantly, too, we don't witness Anne seeing the ship--we witness her HEARING Admiral Croft describe it.

The color version of the scene above. Note that Anne looks at Admiral Croft, not the ship print.

After this, Anne and Admiral Croft promenade together along the street. He takes her arm, saying "I do not feel comfortable if I do not have a woman there." Croft's running dialogue tells Anne what is going on, not Anne's own eyes, lending further credence to the impaired eyesight theory. The running dialogue from Admiral Croft, rather than Anne, describes and also interprets the scene. We should be suspicious. Croft tells us that "Brigden stares to see anyone with me but my wife," and notes Drew (hhm sounds like drew a picture): "Look, he sees us; he kisses his hand to you; he takes you for my wife." Then we get the repetition of the idea of Anne not being Mrs. Croft: "as she was not really Mrs. Croft..." she has to bide her time for Admiral Croft to spill his news.

Admira Croft and Anne walk arm-in-arm in Bath.

In the overt story, this is simply a lovely scene showing Anne--and the reader--kept in inadvertent suspense by a kindly man about news she is yearning to have. But it also adds up in the covert story to bad eyesight. Why otherwise would Admiral Croft have to say to Anne that Drew "kisses his hand to you?" In the overt story, he is simply making cheerful and pointless conversation. In the covert story, he knows she can't see well. And further, if Anne actually is only painting distorted mental pictures of the Crofts (like the distorted boat), of the two out together happily (because she can't see well at all and only sees a blur), what if she is seeing Adm. Croft on the arms of other women and yet weaving her own fantasy of domestic happiness? Maybe Adm. Croft is a womanizer--he starts off by saying he doesn't feel comfortable without "a woman" on his arm--and perhaps people are staring, not for the reasons Admiral Croft supplies, but because they want to take in his latest possible paramour?

Also, we have to rely on Admiral Croft's word that Mrs. Croft is not with him because of a blister on her foot: this is the kind of detail easily overlooked, but one we might want to fact check as the story emerges. As it happens, Mrs. Croft's blister never comes up again, and by the time we see her again, she is fine.

Working against the sight-impaired theory however, is the following scene, just a few pages later. Anne, her sister and Mrs. Clay have taken cover in Mollards, a shop, against a rainfall. We learn that

Anne, as she sat near the window, descried, most decidedly and distinctly, Captain Wentworth walking down the street.

If she is badly short-sighted, how can she see Wentworth "most decidedly and distinctly?" But, of course, she doesn't see him, she "descries" him, a word that means, according to dictionary.com, "to see (something unclear or distant) by looking carefully; discern; espy." A secondary meaning is "to discover, perceive, detect." The dictionary's suitably nautical example is "The lookout descried land." So to descry something can mean to see it hazily in the distance, but can also mean to perceive or detect. We are told that Anne "descried" Wentworth "most decidedly and distinctly." Is that literally possible on a rainy day, through shop a window, or does it suggest a more intuitive perception or  ability to discern him distinctly without needing to see him clearly? It would make sense to look more carefully into what descry connoted in the Regency and if Austen uses it elsewhere.

Not enough attention is placed on intertextual links between the novels or the way they might function as a metatext. If we look back at Mansfield Park, we see that admirals don't come off well. While it's possible that Mary Crawford exaggerates about the rears and vices of her uncle's naval friends, we know she is staying with her half-sister because her uncle has brought a mistress under his roof, rendering her former home no longer respectable and forcing her into her country exile. Could not our only admiral in this novel be cut from a similar cloth, and our characters blinded because each for their own reasons has an incentive to think well of him? 

Inkle and Yarico: Notes from a Conference

Islands, the theme of this year's College English Association conference, inspired papers on the relationship of utopias to islands. Islands often function as the space "out there," the original Atlantis or the imagined Avalon, places more perfect than our current locations. While in some ways the concreteness of the island theme-- as opposed to more abstract themes from prior years such as "imagination" or "borders"--could interfere with papers, it also led to many rich explorations.

An 18th century depiction of "islanders"

One speaker explored artistic representations of the story of Inkle and Yarico,  popularized by Richard Steele in "An Ekphrastic Interlude," in The Spectator 13 March 1711. It remained a famous tale throughout the 18th century. 

The Spectator version follows, based on a true story:

Thomas Inkle, shipwrecked in the Americas, was befriended by the  Indian maid, Yarico. The two became lovers, and Inkle promised to marry Yarico if she would help him escape to England. He said he would dress her in silk gowns and promised her all the good life civilization offered. She hailed a ship, the two boarded it, it arrived at Barbados and there Inkle immediately moved to sell Yarico into slavery. She revealed she was pregnant with his child, begging him for this reason not to sell her, but he used this information to raise her price and proceeded with the sale. After all, as Steele explains, he was a "prudent and frugal" young man.

Inkle and Yarico: she protected him. He sold her.

While Frank Felsenstein, the presenter, gave out a photocopy of the Steele version of the story, I lost it, so was pleased when I got home to find it in one of my collected volumes of The Spectator. In this essay, Steele frames "Inkle and Yarico" as the response of a lady, Arietta, to a male's derisive telling of Petronius's "The Widow of Ephesus," a tale of female inconstancy. In this story, a woman is mourning her dead husband in an underground tomb. Bodies of disgraced, "hanged" (crucified) criminals are nearby, and a guard watches over them so that their families can't steal the bodies and bury them. The guard brings the widow food, and soon the two are in love. Unfortunately, the guard spends so much time in the tomb with the lady that a family is able to steal back a body. Rather than lose her new lover to punishment for neglecting his job, the widow gives him the body of her dead husband to crucify in place of the missing corpse. This is held up as an example of female fickleness, annoying to Arietta, who, Steele dryly comments, like most women "out of a nicer Regard to their Honour, or what other Reason I cannot tell, are more sensibly touched by those Aspersions which are cast upon their Sex, than Men are by what is said of theirs."

Arietta counters the Petronius tale with the story of saga of Inkle and Yarico. Clearly, the point is made: the betrayal and sale of a living woman is far worse than using a dead body to help someone out of a jam.

Felsenstein used slides to show how artists represented the Inkle and Yarico story. It was, for example, turned into poems and included in a 1750s book of poetry, written more than once into a play, translated into other languages, put on an American coin and painted on vases and Wedgewood plaques. This ubiquitous tale was even used to illustrate the letter Y in an 1811 children's alphabet book, with Yarico shown partially dressed.

The abolition movement, nonexistent in 1711 but gaining steam as the century progressed, adopted Yarico, and for obvious reasons began to represent her as increasingly africanized rather than Native American. As with Uncle Tom's Cabin, her story was increasingly ridiculed in the 19th century after slavery was abolished. 

Felsenstein cited an article by WJT Mitchell on "Ekphrasis and the Other," which connects ekphrasis, the depiction of art in literature, to female otherness by arguing that we privilege speech over visual representation in the culture, and thus the ekphratic object is subject to the male gaze and must rely on others as its voice.While at first glance this does not seem to relate to Yarico, as clearly images of her carried a powerful narrative force in their own right and became a shorthand for abolition, Yarico becomes reduced to an object under Inkle's gaze. Inkle sees Yarico not as fully human but as a thing whose use value changes based on context and whose worth is framed by his own needs. Given that the story is situated within a proto-feminist debate about the sexes in Steele's telling, one wonders if the saga would have played out the same way if Inkle had been a woman and Yarico a man: would a white female Inkle have sold her deliverer into slavery? Interestingly too, the Steele story emphasizes the mesmerizing effect on Yarico of Inkle's long, beautiful locks of hair: Mitchell makes much of the gaze of the snake-haired Medusa, leading to the idea that Yarico was perhaps hypnotized by Inkle's sexual power, tragically mistaking it for love and compassion.

As an interesting parallel, another paper on the panel discussed the use of animals in Robinson Crusoe, arguing that Defoe reveals a complex and sympathetic relationship to animals in his novel, putting pressure on the abstract distinction between humans and animals. Crusoe initially relies on animals for companionship, and feels compassion and empathy towards them. However, these emotions battle with his desire to establish a hierarchy and exploit animals: in the end, as with Inkle, prudence and frugality win and Crusoe uses animals for his own benefit. Perhaps we need to reevaluate prudence and frugality as virtues?

Crusoe and his parrot

One must imagine that Jane Austen was familiar with the story of Inkle and Yarico, and that she had probably read the Steele account, with its pro-women framing. She was no stranger to the idea of women thrown under the bus--or carriage wheels--in the interest of prudence and frugality. Certainly Sense and Sensibility shows the gradual reduction of John Dashwood's sisters to objects willingly sacrificed, with the urging of his wife, to "prudence and frugality."

Finally, as eco-feminists point out, treatment of animals is related to treatment of women, and, as we know, women are often derisively characterized as animals, revealing the contempt in which both are held. Arguably, humane treatment of animals is related to humane treatment of women, and leaders who refer to women as cows and pigs are not behaving innocently. I certainly wouldn't dishonor animals by likening them to some of our revered heads of state.