Marianne's preserver

I was at a prayer-book service at an Anglican church on the weekend. That is to say, a service that used the older service found in the Book of Common Prayer. As a Catholic, I sit in the back and act respectfully—because I have a lot of respect for the Book of Common Prayer—but don't receive communion because I am not in commmunion.

Anyway, while listening I noticed something that had never really registered before, that the prayer book refers to God the Father as our preserver. And I immediately thought of this:

Marianne's preserver, as Margaret, with more elegance than precision, stiled Willoughby ...

Is this echo intended? I have no way of knowing for sure but it is there. Austen and her audience would all have been very aware of the prayer book language and the echo would have been felt if not registered.

And that religious aspect of Marianne's worldview is the real source of her problem: Marianne's romantic ideas about love are more akin to idolatry than they are to the way actual human relationships work (a perspective that is hardly unique to her). Towards the end of Book 2, we saw that when Marianne learns the truth about Willoughby's character her reaction was more like that of a disillusioned believer than of a hurt lover:

She felt the loss of Willoughby's character yet more heavily than she had felt the loss of his heart ...

 Here at the beginning of Book 3, she continues in a like manner.

Consider what happens when Elinor tells Marianne about Edward's engagement and Marianne sees, for the first time, that Elinor has suffered as much as she has:

Marianne was quite subdued.

"Oh! Elinor," she cried, "you have made me hate myself for ever. How barbarous have I been to you! -- you, who have been my only comfort, who have borne with me in all my misery, who have seemed to be only suffering for me! -- Is this my gratitude! Is this the only return I can make you? Because your merit cries out upon myself, I have been trying to do it away."

 The tenderest caresses followed this confession. In such a frame of mind as she was now in, Elinor had no difficulty in obtaining from her whatever promise she required ...

This might seem like a change for the good, but note the bit I have added emphasis to. Even now, it's all about Marianne. All of her responses relate to her feelings and not to any other human being's understanding.

And the foreboding we feel here is vindicated by what happens next chapter when we learn more about how Marianne reacts to her discovery of Elinor's sufferings paralleling her own.

She felt all the force of that comparison; but not as her sister had hoped, to urge her to exertion now; she felt it with all the pain of continual self-reproach, regretted most bitterly that she had never exerted herself before; but it brought only the torture of penitence, without the hope of amendment. Her mind was so much weakened that she still fancied present exertion impossible, and therefore it only dispirited her more.  

And this is so right. It is  deeply prophetic of what romantic nonsense has done to our culture. Think of any crisis or disaster. There is always at least one person in the room for whom the real crisis is their feelings about it.

And let's look at that paragraph again. The rest of the story we are reading is all foreshadowed here:"only the torture of penitence", "without the hope", "so much weakened". There is Ophelia who will not commit suicide but will be so weak and distracted that she will die.

Two further thoughts. First, people who think God is absent Austen are just as blind as the ones who think her sexually repressed. Second, there is a tremendous philosophical sophistication here.