Love and Friendship

We don’t really have to wait for the novelization promised in the end credits for Lady Susan Vernon to be “thoroughly vindicated.” It’s in the film. 

Whit Stillman’s reading of Jane Austen’s novella anatomizes the constrictions the male-cantered social structure places on women and the manipulations and wiles women need to survive them. However dishonest, cunning, manipulative, cynical and both amoral and immoral she may be, Lady Susan does what she has to do to survive in an antipathetic social order. Her survival and her daughter’s marriage validate her schemes.

The narrative arc moves from the widow Lady Susan’s banishment from the Manwaring estate, where she has been seducing the master, to her daughter’s wedding. There Lady Susan is titularly married to a wealthy fool but is carrying Manwaring’s child. The plot is Lady Susan’s triumph despite a series of exposures and failed plans.   

There is a clear discrepancy between the genders’ power and worth in this battle of the sexes. Only Susan and Manwaring have any sexual spark; everyone else reads vapid. More importantly, Manwaring apart all the men are hapless tools, fools and gulls. The intelligence, sensitivity, awareness and the capacity to plan and to act rest solely in the women. 

Yet the men have all the power, all the authority. The women can effect their desires only by manipulating the foolish men. As a penniless widow with a young daughter Lady Susan can be forgiven her manipulations of the silly men who don’t deserve their authority and power. As Lady Susan observes, in this social order "Facts are such horrid things."

Susan’s sister-in-law Catherine is a positive contrast. She has Susan’s insight into male vanity and helplessness along with her ability to manipulate her husband. But she is direct and forthright about it. She deploys her cunning to protect her gullible brother and to preserve her family’s honour. Unlike Susan, though, Catherine can afford to be thus open because she is secure.

The three other women reflect their gender’s powerlessness. The American Alicia Johnson must sneak forbidden meetings with her close friend Susan under her husband’s threat of exile back to the dread Connecticut. Manwaring’s abandoned wife, despite her wealth and her protection by said Mr Johnson, is reduced to mad wailing by her humiliation. Susan reduces her supposed friend Mrs Cross to unpaid attendant until necessity finds her a job — until which she is at her “friend’s” mercy for sustenance. Susan’s assertiveness gains validation from these examples of women’s helplessness in a patriarchal society. 

The tension between a placid formal social surface and the tensions of gender warfare plays out in Manwaring’s name. As spelled, the name suggests the external face of manliness, the man that is worn whether for shelter, warmth or protection in a society biased against women. But the name is pronounced Mannering, as if the manners and social conventions are part of the patriarchal ordering that ensures the men’s advantage over women, however foolish and redundant the men — and needy and worthy the women. As the title suggests, both love and friendship are the arenas in which the social conventions oppress women — and where the outlaw widow must scheme to survive. Hence her "I had a feeling that the great word 'respectable' would some day divide us."

The young and handsome Reginald, for all his character and virtue, proves Susan’s most gullible prey. He is the film’s most articulate man, in contrast to the verbally silliest, Owen, whom Susan initially plots to marry her daughter then weds herself to cover for her pregnancy by Manwaring. 
    The other men speak in the short bursts of period foppery — except for Manwaring, who speaks not a word. As the sexual and motive force in the film, his wordless power contrasts to his partner Susan’s chatter and trickery and the other men’s vacuity. Manwaring’s expression is strictly in his stone face and steely eye. That he is Susan’s object and objective reminds us of the imbalance of power between the sexes. It is for his cold protection and hot embrace that Lady Susan so chillingly conducts herself. Not entirely to her discredit, when we gauge her need and the helplessness of the recessive women.