Agency
A
main concern in many of Austen’s novels and those of her contemporaries is the
agency of the main character. Does she take control of her world and what
happens to her or does she let things happen around her? This choice of agency often
resulted in a reflection on the woman’s character. If she took control she was
deemed “bad” but if she was agentless she got to be considered “good.” By “good”
and “bad” I reference standards of propriety and decorum of the early 19th
century and also what others say about their character in the novel. Many of
the protagonists in these works have placid characters and they let events
unravel around them. First, there is Anne Elliot in Persuasion. Her opinions and her wants get pushed aside when she is
young and she suffers the consequences. However, luckily her love, Captain
Wentworth, returns and she quietly stands by and waits until he does something.
Captain Wentworth takes control and Anne’s happy ending is secured for her.
Throughout the novel she is highly esteemed and respected. Then there is
Adeline from Romance of the Forest. She
is the epitome of non-agency. She is swept from place to place and her future
is determined without her say so. She is under the control of lustful and
deceitful men. She is always touted to be honest, pure and prudent. I will
refer to these women as the “good” women. Their characters are always highly
esteemed but they lack any kind of agency. Fortunately, for them something
always works out just right, without their meddling, to end up making them
perfectly happy. Then there are what I will call the “bad” women or women with
agency. I refer to Lady Susan and Adeline Mowbray (Adeline M.). These women
take control of their lives and they are severely punished for it. Lady Susan
is a woman who is in control of her destiny but she has a terrible reputation.
Adeline M. makes one bad choice by deciding to live with a man unmarried and
she is punished for the rest of her life and ultimately dies because of her one
moment of agency. I find this a strange issue in these novels. Women who were
asserting their own agency by being writers wrote these novels, but their
characters are punished if they exhibit agency and rewarded when they do not.
Women in this era had no rights. As Mary Poovey points out, “Women were legally
‘cyphers,’ prohibited from political and economic activity except through the
agency of a legal ‘subject,’ man” (x). Nowadays, we think of a “cypher” as a
code but according to the OED at
that time a “cypher” meant “A person who fills a place, but is of no importance
or worth, a nonentity, a ‘mere nothing.’” Women were supposed to be nothings. But
these women writers are not “nothings” but they cannot show this in their
writing. According to Claudia Johnson if these women writers gloried in their
agency they would be, “Cherishing one’s independence [and] could sound like the
stubborn will to defy time-honored authorities and established forms” (xxii).
So, perhaps they still had to honor the traditions by keeping the women in
their novel agentless and pure otherwise if the character exercised agency she would
have a miserable ending.
I
want to start first by talking of the “good” women. As I stated above I will
focus on Anne Elliot and Adeline but first a little background on what
constituted a “good” women to people in the early 19th century.
This
portrait of Mrs. Henry Baring and her children is a good visual example.
Sir Thomas Lawrence who was a very famous portrait painter of the time painted
it. I think this image typifies some of the qualities of the “good” woman.
First, she is a Mrs., which means she is married. Second, she is clearly in her
role as a mother because she has her children there. She looks fresh, pure and
she is dressed in white. She is the ideal of motherhood. Yet, she is not doing
anything in the painting. She shits by as her children play and comb her hair.
She is an example of being a “cypher.”
The second piece
of evidence for what constitutes a “good” woman is a review of a set of poems
written by Eliza Daye. The reviewer loves her poems because they have an
“air of piety, benevolence, and sound morality.” In her poems she talks of “the
sweet blush of modesty.” This is another good example of what is accepted out
of women. They may write things but it still must be full of modesty.
All this talk of
modesty leads me back to agency. The “good” women all fit into these ideas of
what is right and proper, yet both of them are characters with no agency. In
her post “The
Navy and Social Standing” Gabrielle laments that Anne and Wentworth “hide
behind the propriety that made them both unhappy.” I agree with her and I think
that Anne spends most of the novel hiding behind what is proper instead of
speaking up. Lady Russell shut her down when she was younger and then as an
adult she keeps quiet out of decorum. Luckily, as I point out in my post “A
Polished Ending” Wentworth steps forward and makes the move. All the power
is in Wentworth’s hands. Anne even admits this after he has declared his love
for her. He asks her if she would have accepted him if he had asked again when
she had a little money and she said yes. But note this was left up to Wentworth
to ask again; Anne could not go seek him out. She maintains her propriety but
she is miserable for years because she does not have any control over her life.
Then
there is Adeline. She is the ultimate woman without agency. Not only can she
not make the choices she wants she is physically moved around against her will.
First, she spends her young life in a convent. Then, she is kidnapped and held
against her will. Then she lives with the La Mottes but soon is kidnapped
multiple times by the Marquis. She cannot even escape on her own. She depends
on others to help her. She is at the mercy of all of these evil people until
Theodore comes along to rescue her. Hers is a story of a woman who does nothing
for herself and everything just falls into place. The narrator declares that
some “almost deserve the name of virtue. Of this species was that of Adeline”
(87). So, even though she does nothing she is considered one of rare virtue. I
am intrigued by this connection of non-agency and virtue. They are so frequently
tied together in these novels and it seems as if these authors are promoting
this.
I
think to get a full picture of this connection we have to look at two women who
do exercise agency and what that does for their virtue. The first and less
extreme example is Lady Susan. I agree with Gabrielle’s
post and our class discussion that Lady Susan is the only one with any real
agency in this story. She goes where she wants when she wants and she takes on
lovers left and right. However, the ending does not fall into place for her.
She ends up with her second choice, Sir James Martin. Earlier in the novel when
he arrives unexpectedly she says, “She could have poisoned him!” But in the end
this is the man she marries. Lady Susan does not get her happy ending even
though she did more than Anne or Adeline ever did to secure her own happiness.
Not only does she not get her happy ending but also her character is frequently
called into question. Even Austen at the end says Sir James drew “a harder lot
than mere folly merited; I leave him, therefore, to all the pity that anybody
can give him.” I do not think that Lady Susan is what one would call amiable or
good but she is not as terrible as everyone makes her out to be. I think she
earned her bad reputation by being a woman with agency.
A
better example of a “bad” woman being punished for her agency is Adeline M. G’s
post entitled “Adeline’s
Agency” perfectly sums up my thoughts on Adeline. She gets her moment to
exercise her agency and she does it but then she is punished for the rest of
her life. She is considered a fallen woman and sometimes people even assume she
is a prostitute.
For some background this is a
painting called, “The Fallen
Woman” by Richard Redgrave. It shows a woman and her illegitimate child being
cast out by her family. This was a very serious offense to society at that
time. This is very similar to Adeline M.’s situation. She lives with Glenmurray
of her own free will but then her family and society shut her out. On top of
that, she is treated like a prostitute! I found this interesting poem by Oscar Wilde
called “The Harlot’s House.” It is a poem about walking by a harlot’s house at
night. He refers to the prostitutes as “like a live thing.” They are not even
human in his eyes. Neither is Adeline M. Different men pursue her and they look
at her lustfully and say very rude things to her just because she exercised her
agency once and she lived with a man unmarried. She is punished her whole life
because she exerted her agency once. She has a character as pure as Adeline
from Romance of the Forest but
because she made an improper choice once by exerting her agency and she is
punished for the rest of her life.
The
message seems pretty clear: if a woman has no agency she is rewarded, if she
tries to get what she wants she is punished. I find this an interesting lesson
to be coming from Austen since I always liked to view her as a woman with
agency because she was a writer. However, I think there is more to this message
than meets the eye. There was a lot of concern with how novels would affect the
minds of women and so I think that Austen and her contemporaries were writing
within those constraints. They knew that they could exercise some agency over
their own lives by being a writer but within that they were still constrained
by society. They could not write the story of a completely independent woman
having a happy ending. If they did attempt to glorify their own agency in their
novels it would, “sound like the stubborn will to defy time-honored authorities
and established forms” (xxii). These women writers had much more agency than
the common woman, but they still were very restricted in what they could do. The
woman who took control of her life had to be cast as “bad” and the woman who
let things happen to her was characterized as “good.”
Works
Cited
“Art. XXXVIII. Poems on various Subjects. By Eliza Daye. 8vo. 258
pages. Price 7s. Johnson. 1798.” Rev. of Poems
on Various Subjects, by Eliza Daye. The
Analytical Review. Feb. 1799: 201. Web. 26 April 2012.
Johnsons, Claudia. Introduction. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. By Johnson. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1988. xiii-xxv. Print.
Lawrence, Sir Thomas. Mrs.
Henry Baring with Two of her five children. 1821. Sir Thomas Lawrence. By Michael Levey. Italy: Michael Levey. 243.
Print.
Poovey, Mary. Preface. The
Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. By Poovey. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1984. ix-xix. Print.
Richard Redgrave, RA. Ed.
Susan P. Casteras and Ronald Parkinson. New Haven and London: Yale U P. 1988.
No. 106.
Wilde, Oscar. “The Harlot’s House.” The Victorian Web. Project Gutenberg. Web. 26 April 2012.
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