What exactly is a “clumsy wrist”? What’s wrong with freckles? How was Jane Austen so familiar with hypochondriacs and why are teeth so important in her novels? Learn the answers to these questions and more in this episode of My Cousin Jane.
Hey everybody, welcome back to My Cousin Jane. Today we’re going to be taking a look at the deleted scenes and bonus features aspects of Chapter 5 of Persuasion.
Hypochondriacs
Jumping right in, one of the things that happens in this chapter is that Anne goes to stay with her sister Mary. Mary’s defining characteristic in the novel is that she is a rather surly hypochondriac.
We have a couple of different hypochondriacs in Jane Austen novels. We have Mrs. Bennet, who in Pride and Prejudice always, as Elizabeth says, fancies herself nervous. She is the type of hypochondriac that anytime she’s upset or worried, she thinks she’s sick. Mary is the type of hypochondriac that whenever anything isn’t going her way, she imagines up a physical complaint to try to change the situation, to bring things back to her advantage.
What’s interesting about the prevalence of hypochondriacs in Austen’s works is that Jane Austen’s mother was famously a hypochondriac. We know that Jane had a good relationship with her mom, and that she had a lot of admirable traits. One of the things that we know about her is that she was a hypochondriac. Jane was very familiar with this condition.
We don’t know if she was a hypochondriac like Mrs. Bennet or like Mary Musgrove, but she was definitely a hypochondriac. That’s an interesting parallel.
Mrs. Clay’s Personal Misfortunes
Today I want to focus more on Mrs. Clay, because some of the things that happened with Mrs. Clay, and the descriptions of Mrs. Clay in the novel, shed some interesting light into the Regency era, the early 1800s.
First of all, let’s listen to Sir Walter’s early opinion of Mrs. Clay, relayed almost through a narrative structure, but how Sir Walter thinks of her.
Mrs Clay had freckles, and a projecting tooth, and a clumsy wrist, which he was continually making severe remarks upon, in her absence Persuasion, Chapter 5
Let’s listen to Elizabeth. Anne suspects that Mrs. Clay is trying to worm her way into the family, and ingratiate herself to Sir Walter, and she’s a little worried about this, mostly for Elizabeth’s sake. She goes to her sister Elizabeth, talks to her about this, and says, “Hey, Mrs. Clay, you know, she’s kind of a concern here.” This is what Elizabeth has to say about it.
And as to my father, I really should not have thought that he, who has kept himself single so long for our sakes, need be suspected now. If Mrs Clay were a very beautiful woman, I grant you, it might be wrong to have her so much with me; not that anything in the world, I am sure, would induce my father to make a degrading match, but he might be rendered unhappy. But poor Mrs Clay who, with all her merits, can never have been reckoned tolerably pretty, I really think poor Mrs Clay may be staying here in perfect safety. One would imagine you had never heard my father speak of her personal misfortunes, though I know you must fifty times. That tooth of hers and those freckles. Freckles do not disgust me so very much as they do him. I have known a face not materially disfigured by a few, but he abominates them. You must have heard him notice Mrs Clay’s freckles.”
“There is hardly any personal defect,” replied Anne, “which an agreeable manner might not gradually reconcile one to.”
“I think very differently,” answered Elizabeth, shortly; “an agreeable manner may set off handsome features, but can never alter plain ones. Persuasion, Chapter 5
Pretty severe on Mrs. Clay. As we see in the novel, it turns out Anne is right: her agreeable manner does in fact eventually win them over. This shows the superficial weight that Elizabeth and Sir Walter place on physical appearance.
What’s interesting are the types of physical characteristics that they consider to be defects. Part of this is their own personal pride, and part of it is the attitude during the Regency era, and even well into the Victorian age, about what constituted physical beauty.
Freckles
The first thing that they talk about are Mrs. Clay’s freckles. During that time period, because freckles become more prominent with exposure to the sun, freckles were considered a mark of lower class. Because if you were in the aristocracy, why on earth would you go outside more than you have to, especially without a parasol? If you’re going out that often, you’re probably having to go to the market, you’re probably having to work in the field, something like that.
Having freckles or sunburn or even a tan during the 1800s was considered less than the ideal beauty. It’s interesting, in contrast to our day.
Because of that, there were lots of skin creams that purported to take care of all of these issues. Freckles, sunburn, pimples, and even suntan were purported to be able to be treated by certain creams. Sir Walter actually recommends one of these creams later on to Mrs. Clay.
Projecting Teeth
One of the other physical characteristics that they point out is a projecting tooth. We don’t know exactly what this means. It’s probably a tooth that’s not perfectly in alignment.
What’s interesting about this is during the 1800s, or rather even a little earlier, in the late 1700s, this is where dentistry starts to come into its heyday, cosmetic dentistry as being an important class distinction.
You can see this because teeth are mentioned in almost all of Jane Austen’s novels. They’re mentioned in Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and they become an important plot point in Emma, with Harriet having to go see a dentist, and that’s when she runs into Robert Martin on her way to the dentist in London.
There was an article in Modern Philology, which is a periodical that studies language and the history of language. In 2006, Mark Blackwell talks about Jane Austen’s use of teeth, and how when she accentuates someone’s teeth as being less than ideal, this is her way of pointing out class distinction. Harriet is described as having a tooth amiss, and here Mrs. Clay is described as having a projecting tooth.
In Jane Austen’s letters, you can see the use of dentistry, as they, in the upper middle class and the aristocracy, would, when they’d go to town, when they would go to shops, part of that metropolitan lifestyle was also, “We’re going to swing by the dentist and have him fix up this particular problem.”
I don’t know exactly to what extent cosmetic dentistry was a class distinction. It’s interesting because, in the United States, obviously cosmetic dentistry has become almost a staple of middle class and upper middle class life. It’s interesting how we’ll now accept tans and freckles as being marks of physical beauty, but we still have this class distinction in our minds about teeth.
It’s interesting how certain styles come and go. That’s actually something that is also talked about in this book, with the old style versus the new style with the Musgrove sisters, and how they felt that they were more stylish and more genteel than their parents. That’s an attitude that Jane Austen also had, was that subsequent generations tend to be more stylish and had better manners than prior generations.
Clumsy Wrists and Rickets
The final physical attribute that Mrs. Clay is ascribed to her misfortunes is a clumsy wrist. There’s a lot of speculation about what this means. Some people think that this means that she simply wasn’t good at playing the harp. What I think it more likely is, was a side effect of rickets.
Rickets is a disease that’s caused mostly by lack of sunlight, sometimes by a vitamin D deficiency, but usually by a lack of sunlight. While it’s probably been around for a while, it wasn’t really studied in England until the late 1600s, and the doctors at the time thought it had just emerged. What’s interesting is that they considered the origins of this disease to be in Dorset and Somerset, which as we know is where Persuasion takes place, in Somersetshire.
This disease became so prevalent that by the mid-1800s, some surveys said that one in three children had symptoms of rickets, or other surveys actually said every child that they surveyed had some mark of having rickets to some degree or another. Most of these surveys were done in larger cities, and this is where rickets tended to be more common. There is a lot of speculation about why that is. Many people think it was simply because of the pollution and smog in those cities, especially in the Victorian era.
One of the signs of rickets is a swelling of the wrist. This could possibly be the cause of the “clumsy wrist” that Mrs. Clay had, because it wasn’t a petite, thin wrist of the Regency age lady, but instead the swollen wrist of a lower class person who suffered malnutrition and had to live under the smog of the big city, and was unable to get enough sunshine, and so had developed rickets as a child.
Another interesting thing about rickets is that John Snow, and you may have heard of John Snow if you’ve studied anything about medicine, is considered the father of epidemiology and the study of disease and how diseases spread. He is pretty famous for using statistical analysis and surveys to trace a cholera epidemic in London to its source at a polluted pump, and there’s actually a monument to him in London.
One of the things that’s interesting is that subsequent to this, he published a paper saying that he thought the rickets epidemic was tied to bakers in the bigger cities using alum in their rising agents for baked bread, and that people in the more rural areas weren’t using this adulterated bread, which is why rickets wasn’t as prevalent there. What’s interesting about this is it was actually not backed up by any statistics or surveys. He was just guessing, which is in big contrast to his cholera work.
Rickets was pretty prevalent and a big problem, and nobody really knew for sure what caused it all the way up until World War I, and then people realized it was mostly caused by lack of exposure to sunlight and malnutrition, but primarily, for most people, it was due to lack of sunlight.
Whether it was rickets or being bad at the harp or perhaps both, poor Mrs. Clay, with her clumsy wrist, her projecting tooth, and her freckles, is marked out as having many personal misfortunes.
What’s interesting in the novel is that when they talk about her personal misfortunes, they don’t mention the fact that her socioeconomic background is unfortunate, or her family life with her husband, which we don’t know a lot about. We just know that it was an unprosperous marriage. We’re not told anything about that. All that we know about her personal misfortunes from Sir Walter’s point of view are the physical characteristics, which is another interesting commentary on Sir Walter’s personality.
Conclusion
That wraps up this episode of My Cousin Jane. As always, if you enjoy the show and would like to help support us, please consider clicking the little donate button or subscribing to our newsletter. Either way, thanks so much for listening.
