📖🧠 Persuasion is a TBI story

Part 1: Jane Austen illuminates the communal impact of neurotrauma

I prompted Canva’s Text to Image feature to see what it thinks a Regency-era woman at Lyme, with a brain floating in the air, looks like. The results are absurdly delightful.

I’m a longtime Austen cinema fan who has barely read any Austen. Other than wanting to catch up on the canon and be less of an imposter, I wonder if I’ve been drawn to her in this past year because I relate to the plight of women from earlier eras who were obliged, by injury or social convention, to remain perpetually at home.

I loved this post by Plain Jane from the Austen Connection, which is sadly behind the paywall, where they highlight how the happily-ever-after endings of Austen’s heroines hides the fact that there are much bigger issues at play.

“Let’s face it,” the authors write, “Austen is parading us through a house of horrors involving marginalization, domination, negligence, banishment, oppression, and predators, and while our Main Characters make it through this maze to some kind of an ending, call it happy if you must, some of our favorite characters make it only barely, and some get left on the side of the road.” This perspective definitely influenced my reading of Persuasion here. I was much more able to see the darkness of the book from the get go because of it.

I picked up Persuasion a few months ago because I needed a break from the other Austen microverses I’m exploring—Northanger Abbey’s Catherine Morley is driving me distracted, and Mansfield Park makes me feel like I am suffocating. The first few chapters seemed familiar. I looked on Goodreads to see if I’d marked the book as “Reading,” and I had five years ago. I didn’t make it very far. Still, I can’t tell you how odd it is to have the realization slowly break that I’ve been somewhere before, even if that somewhere is a book. On the first attempt, my brain was much more injured, and apparently that information wasn’t important enough for my brain to lay down tracks to make it immediately available to my recollection.

But that memory lapse strikes me as especially fitting for this book because, among other things, it’s a story about Louisa Musgrove’s brain injury. In fact, her injury is an important hinge on which the whole story turns to bring about Anne’s and Captain Wentworth’s eventual reunion.

An Injury Story

The cues that Persuasion will be an injury story are apparent from the very beginning. The Elliots appear as a deeply wounded family. The loss of the lady of the house has left them financially and emotionally struggling. They are minor nobles on the brink of a respectability collapse.

None of them can quite connect properly with each other. Appearances, flattery, and delusion are valued over character and common sense, while Anne is left to deal with the years-long heartbreak of losing her true love to Lady Russell’s overinfluence. Anne has lost physical vitality under the effects of Kellynch’s ✨exhausting nonsense.✨

The dislocation ramps up when Sir Walter and Elizabeth quit their estate mired in debt and Anne becomes the confidant and nursemaid of her family at Uppercross. Mary’s hypochondria is a symbol of a dis-ease in the family system, always crying out to be seen and heard but not being particularly loved or attended to by anyone. Like most of the Eliots, she always thinks she’s the center, clueless about how she affects others.

Neglect and Care

When little nephew Charles is injured and left in the care of aunt Anne, who allows everyone else’s cares to occupy her (although she carves out moments of solitude to mentally review her own), the pain of that incident is minimized and shuffled aside for less important but more enjoyable social concerns. The people who should be nurturing their son are not. Obliviousness and overcare for niceties create critical neglect.

In Lyme Regis we meet the poor, injured folks who, in contrast to the Eliots, are living humbly and correctly. Captain Harville walks with a limp and Captain Benwick is grieving and depressed. These people are intimately connected by shared history and bonds of friendship. They support each other in their woes even if it causes enormous inconvenience. They nurse each other’s hurts. Here is care for and acceptance of disabilities.

Captain Wentworth is one of these people; he shows that he is willing to take care of Anne’s concerns when he relieves her of her clingy nephew and when he notices her fatigue and ushers her into his sister’s curricle on their long walk. In Lyme he seems to recognize Mr. Eliot almost instantly as a threat and suggests that it’s perhaps good that Anne did not talk to him.

While Anne has taken on a more sickly aspect under her heartbreak (and bombardment by her father’s image obsession), Frederick has grown wealthy. His own sense of his ability to succeed was borne out in his naval successes. Marrying Frederick young actually would have been the wiser and healthier choice for Anne. Her material and emotional needs would have been taken care of and in all likelihood she would not be miserable and living in precarity.

It seems to me that Austen clearly intends Anne to be a misplaced figure amongst the vain, as Anne seeks to transition from the world of hollow wealth to the world of true nobility and heart. Already Anne is more nurturing than the rest of her family are, and she seems on the cusp of stepping even more fully into her role of generational pattern breaker. It’s frustratingly sad to imagine how her life would have been if she had escaped the decay of her father’s house earlier.

Louisa’s Head Injury

The climax of physical harm comes, of course, when Louisa heedlessly jumps from the Cobb. She is instantly struck unconscious, and the entire party of family and friends flies into disarray. Anne keeps her head while Henrietta and Mary Musgrove lose theirs. Even the men need direction. Anne, of course, steps in. Frederick praises Anne’s capacities.

The hardhat is especially appropriate. And the floating brain in this one is so incredible.

Penned in the early 1800s, here is Louisa’s medical diagnosis: “The head had received a severe contusion, but he [the surgeon] had seen greater injuries recovered from: he was by no means hopeless; he spoke cheerfully.” I suppose forced cheerfulness protects the doctor as much as it does the loved ones from the full brutal force of emotions hitting in the wake of the accident. Perhaps in context of other more overtly severe wounds, it would seem that Louisa’s head injury will be recoverable, but the doctor couldn’t possibly predict what the trajectory of Louisa’s recovery would be. Every brain is unique and every injury has unique contours and complications. Surely even in the nineteenth century that must have been an empirical fact, even if that level of nuance was not accessible in the immediate aftermath.

In her description of Louisa’s predicament, Anne says, “Louisa’s limbs had escaped. There was no injury but to the head.” At first I was angry when I read this line. “But to the head,” combined with the doctor’s observations, feels like the minimizing that brain injury survivors are used to hearing. A broken limb certainly could have turned catastrophic in the early nineteenth century, with a dangerous surgery and the onset of gangrene, but a brain injury in any era can appear fine and be worse than anyone can imagine at the same time. Psychologically it’s easier to discount all scary scenarios, including what might amount to damage of an entire personality.

Jane Austen seems to understand that hopeful suppositions and groans of remorse, like Captain Wentworth’s, are some of the closest emotional regulation tools at hand when someone’s head hits the pavement. At this point, we readers are just as much in the dark as anybody in the story is as to how Louisa’s healing will unfold. Will she recover fully? we fret, alongside her friends and family.

The ensuing descriptions of the family’s and friends’ concern for Louisa’s “concussion” (Jane Austen’s word) are sympathetic, human, and reasonable. They understand the healing might be slow and are encouraged to see Louisa progressing under the constant nursing care of Mrs. Harville. Louisa has an instant rallying of community care—an enormous advantage. Because she never has to prove to anyone that she was hurt, something brain injury survivors often have to do, she can spend all her time being cared for instead of caring (ineffectually) for her injury herself.

A Community Injury

Austen illustrates particularly well how one person’s brain injury is an injury to an entire family and community. I read a gorgeous, revelatory paper about how psychoanalytic concepts can be used in neurorehab. I have never felt more seen by anything I have read in all my thousands of hours of studying brain injuries. I want to write about this paper by itself, but the concept that I want to bring in here is that one set of researchers argued “that brain damage does not occur inside people’s skulls, but in the space between people, often infiltrating and amplifying personal distance and disconnection. Thus, brain injury and its socio-emotional consequences can be understood as socially constructed and modulated by social context.”

Obviously damage happens to the brain itself, but there is also shared brain synchrony between relational beings. Our brainwaves fire in similar patterns when we are relating to one another socially, and the correlation is even stronger when the brains of the participants are closely related or romantically linked.¹ Brain injury constitutes an injury to “the meeting of the minds”—a beautiful way these researchers describe how brains interact with one another through subjective experience.

For the friends at Lyme, who witness the accident, I imagine the interpersonal injury occasioned by Louisa’s injury would have been acute. Just moments before, everyone is lighthearted, enjoying a brisk day by the sea. Then, the sudden trauma transports them into another reality entirely. It’s clear from the discombobulated response of nearly everyone involved that they are upset. Captain Wentworth appears to be just as distraught as Louisa’s blood relations are after she falls, suggesting genuine concern for her and lending more credibility to the idea that they are romantically linked. Furthermore, he takes it upon himself to deliver the news of the accident to Uppercross: a shock reverberates through that community as well.

It is fitting, then, that brain injury recovery is a group project. Patterns of travel, residences, and daily life change. The Harvilles volunteer their house as a hospital and rehabilitation center. People manually deliver messages about medical progress a long distance, with Henry Hayter and Captain Wentworth bringing notes to Kellynch and Uppercross; the elder Musgroves temporarily move to Lyme to be closer to Louisa.

Interlude, where we digest what has happened

Jane Austen gives us a slight narrative break from the emotional upset we just witnessed by whisking Anne away from Lyme. Instead of sending her straight to Bath, she places Anne in Uppercross for a bit of a pause to gather herself and reflect on what has transpired as she waits for Lady Russell, her conveyance to Bath and her link to the dysfunction of the past. This is Anne’s usual life, but she is not at all captivated by it. Her thoughts are with the good people of Lyme and her ruminations about the accident and Frederick. Although Anne articulates, maybe a little tentatively or shamefully, that she much prefers the life with her friends, she doesn’t fully apprehend yet that Louisa’s injury has placed her life on a new trajectory.

Watch for part 2.

Before you go, I’d like to hear from you:

The Regency woman considers her own cap, er, brain.

1. Brain Waves Synchronize when People Interact “When people converse or share an experience, their brain waves synchronize. Neurons in corresponding locations of the different brains fire at the same time, creating matching patterns, like dancers moving together. Auditory and visual areas respond to shape, sound and movement in similar ways, whereas higher-order brain areas seem to behave similarly during more challenging tasks such as making meaning out of something seen or heard. The experience of ‘being on the same wavelength’ as another person is real, and it is visible in the activity of the brain…. Couples exhibit higher degrees of brain synchrony than nonromantic pairs, as do close friends compared with more distant acquaintances.”