Reading for Health. Erika Wright

the romance of cure in the way that Marianne is; rather, Elinor “[sits] down to her drawing-table . . . [and] busily employ[s] herself the whole day” (90). So far, Elinor engages in recommended behavior, and Austen appears to be adhering to Buchan’s guidance. But the narrator explains, “[Elinor’s] thoughts could not be chained elsewhere . . . these thoughts must be before her, must force her attention” (91). Instead of complying entirely with popular advice for managing grief—that is, thinking of “new ideas”—Elinor allows her mind to reminisce freely on memories and indulge in fantasies built on her love for Edward (91). Despite Buchan’s claims to the contrary, this type of attentiveness to one’s grief—the presentness of one’s thoughts—proves not only unavoidable, even by the best preventionists, but also beneficial. Upon the Steeles’ departure, just after Lucy tells Elinor of her engagement to Edward, Elinor finds herself “at liberty to think and be wretched” (114). Only in private can Elinor accept and acknowledge, and therefore manage, her wretchedness. Elinor’s failure to look for new ideas seems a rejection of preventative advice, but her actions invoke a sense of privacy and reflect an understanding of the relationship between the past and the present that prevention deems important.

      At the same time that Elinor attempts to protect herself from decline, she must keep Marianne from becoming the heroine of a cautionary tale. From jokes about the intensity of Marianne’s feelings to scoldings about accepting inappropriate gifts from Willoughby, Elinor holds firm to the spirit of prevention, lovingly coaxing Marianne into healthier conduct. In London, after witnessing Marianne’s persistent, futile, and improper attempts to correspond with Willoughby, Elinor invokes the specter of the precautionary “wretch” by writing to her mother, in order, the narrator says, “to awake[n] her fears for the health of Marianne” and get her “to procure those inquiries which had so long been delayed” (145). Such inquiries, Elinor hopes, will force Marianne to acknowledge that she has been participating in a romantic fantasy and therefore save her from becoming the tragic heroine in a love story of her own making. Elinor thus imagines the story that could be—indeed, the story that we know has already been written by Austen—to manage its outcome.

      Austen pits Elinor’s plot of prevention against Marianne’s plot of crisis and cure. For as the manuals suggest, the only way to render the narrative of prevention intelligible is by framing it in relation to—or even as a form of—cure. By the time Austen wrote Mansfield Park, she had ceased to rely on such framing and focused all the narrative’s energies on prevention. But in this early novel, we experience a clear or at least clearer demarcation between the curative model and the preventative one. When Marianne finally learns of Willoughby’s engagement to another woman, she becomes the self-described wretch that Beddoes portends and that Elinor fears. After Willoughby rebuffs Marianne at a London party and returns her letters, Marianne resists Elinor’s remonstrance to maintain her composure. She cries out, “I care not who knows I am wretched. . . . I must feel—I must be wretched” (160). Austen invokes the wretched child, the figure on whom preventative medicine relies and for whom it laments, but she revises the meaning of the child’s cries. Marianne embraces her wretchedness just as she nourished her grief, as if it were precisely what she was waiting for all along. Despite Elinor’s best attempts to prevent Marianne’s wretchedness (a state we already know she has experienced herself), Marianne claims she “must feel” and “must be” the wretch. In some respects, Elinor’s attempt to teach Mrs. Dashwood the methods of prevention is an attempt to regulate how Marianne conducts herself and, thus, what Marianne signifies in the novel.

      But while Elinor attempts to prevent Marianne’s wretchedness, and while her parallel plot marks the difference between prevention and cure, the stories of two other wretched women perform, both thematically and structurally, the work of prevention. All of Austen’s novels have, to varying degrees, embedded narratives that function as warnings—stories that “come before” (præ venīre) the main narrative. In Sense and Sensibility, the stories of Eliza Brandon and her daughter, Eliza Williams, precede Marianne’s and Elinor’s plots of wretchedness.¹³ The flannel-waistcoated Colonel Brandon, the novel’s other preventionist, introduces these stories, believing that the story of the younger Eliza will be useful to Marianne. He begins his narrative by referring to events that precede the novel’s beginning, as well as others that occurred earlier within the time frame of the novel but were never narrated. He tells Elinor about his love for Eliza Brandon, who he claims resembles “in some measure” Marianne (173). He speaks of her coerced marriage to his brother, the subsequent divorce, and her tragic decline into disrepute. He describes how he found her in a sponging house, a “melancholy and sickly figure” in the last stage of consumption.¹⁴ This story of lost love precedes the story more relevant to Marianne’s case: Willoughby’s affair with Eliza Williams and the pregnancy that resulted from it. Austen delays this information to give the reader the time and reason to appreciate Colonel Brandon’s attraction to Marianne and to anticipate Marianne’s eventual acceptance of him as a husband. But for the purpose of prevention, this part of the story is also important in that it rehearses the deadly consequences of improper conduct by one who was so “blooming” and “healthful”—it is a story that just did not have to be (175).

      The younger Eliza’s story echoes a portion of her mother’s, beginning, as the wretch’s narrative must, with domestic mismanagement and parental neglect. At three years old, Eliza came under the guardianship of Colonel Brandon, who, having “no family, no home,” placed Eliza at school, with a “very respectable woman” (176). Unfortunately, respectability was not quite the guard against wretchedness that the Colonel had hoped—if only he had paid attention to the first Eliza Brandon’s story. At sixteen, Eliza Williams visited Bath with a young friend and her “well-meaning, but not quick-sighted father” (176)—yet another ignorant parent. Under such care, the impressionable and orphaned young Eliza was easily ruined and left by Willoughby. When the Colonel tells Elinor this story, Eliza has been hidden away in the country with her bastard child.

      Although we can read both of the Eliza stories as cautionary tales of what Marianne might have become, Colonel Brandon does not exactly mean for Marianne to draw parallels between herself and the Elizas, despite the resemblance. Rather, he presents their stories to Elinor as examples of how well Marianne behaved, comparatively speaking. She has the potential for prevention after all. Brandon hopes that she will “turn with gratitude towards her own condition, when she compares it with that of [his] poor Eliza, when she considers the wretched and hopeless situation of this poor girl.” Marianne’s sufferings “proceed from no misconduct, and can bring no disgrace” (177). Although Austen condemns Marianne’s behavior more than the colonel does, she depicts Marianne’s wretchedness and misconduct as proceeding from domestic mismanagement and from a crucial failure of what Beddoes might refer to as her “health sense.” A “[c]onsciousness of health,” Beddoes explains, “will become just as much a source of pleasure as the consciousness of virtue.”¹⁵ The novel works toward helping Marianne reach this level of awareness and health—or, more specifically, it works toward helping the reader see how Marianne develops this sense.

      Colonel Brandon aids the reader by pointing out that although Marianne has been saved from the moral fate of the Elizas, she remains in danger of suffering the same physical consequence and thus has not quite achieved that balance between virtue and health. Part of the tragedy for Colonel Brandon is that the previously healthy girl he loves has become melancholy and sickly. Eliza’s social decline, we are led to believe, initiates a physical one. One must have the sense to know that improper attachments are both physically and morally unhealthy. The Elizas are Austen’s version of the cautionary wretch, but they do not entirely work in the way we might think they should, for even after hearing their sad tales from Elinor, Marianne continues to neglect her health. Her “violent” cold comes on the heels of two long walks in the “longest and wettest” part of the grass, after which she “[sat] around in her wet shoes and stockings” (259). Her cold turns into an almost fatal fever, which begins to resemble the physical decline we imagine having preceded Eliza Brandon’s consumption. The Eliza stories reach back into the past as a means of predicting the future and of developing not so much Marianne’s but the reader’s narrative foresight.

      Before either Marianne or Elinor can find happiness in marriage, Marianne must emerge from her