56
PARTISAN REVIEW
knowingly to this connection in joking about Wentworth 's involvement
in Louisa 's accident: "A new sort of way this, for a young fellow to be
making love, by breaking his mistress's head!"
The pattern in the novel connecting sex and childbirth with injury is
not perfect. But the counter-example, the fat and fertile Mrs. Musgrove,
is not exactly positive . There is something disturbingly animal-like in such
fecundity, suggested by the ease with which she loses, forgets, then belat–
edly mourns her son Dick. The ambivalent treatment of motherhood
throughout recalls a number of allusions in Austen's letters, such as this
mention of her niece's second childbed: "Poor Animal , she will be worn
out before she is thirty - 1 am very sorry for her. "
The two most intelligent and independent women among Anne's
acquaintance, Mrs. Croft and Lady Russell, are both childless, and Lady
Russell dislikes the Musgrove "domestic hurricane ." So does Anne, yet
she takes pleasure in caring for her sister's children, especially in making
them behave better with her than with their mother. '''I cannot help
wishing Mrs. Charles had a little of your method with those children,'"
says Mrs. Musgrove ; Anne has apparently been playing out her maternal
feelings in the safety of her role as aunt.
It is in this context that another of the novel 's strangest and most
significant scenes occurs. Like the later episode on the Cobb, this one in–
volves a fall. Young Charles Musgrove has fallen and injured himself;
Anne is kneeling beside the couch tending
to
him in Wentworth's pres–
ence when Charles's little brother, two-year-old Walter, begins torment–
ing her by climbing on her back. Then suddenly she is "released from
him":
someone was taking him from her, though he had bent down her
head so much that his little sturdy hands were unf,lstcned from around
her neck, and he was resolutely borne away before she knew that
Captain Wentworth had done it.
Her sensations on the discovery made her perfectly speechless.
His kindness in stepping forward to her relief - the manner - the si–
lence in which it had passed. . produced such a confusion of vary–
ing, but very painful agitation, as she could not recover from.
Like Louisa's fall, this is a moment of action when wordless gestures
resemble the silent language of dreams. The situation itself is evocative: a
young woman is caring for a child when a man intervenes as though to
take up the role of husband and father. But there is something peculiar
about the action. Walter has climbed on Anne's back and has "bent
down her head so much that his little sturdy hands were unfastened from
