Leave Us the Counterpoint

A new chapter of Duty!

Demelza and Ross enact another secret plan--with a little help from Ross's late father.

Excerpt from Chapter III, “Jordan River,” from Busman’s Honeymoon

Excerpt from Chapter IV, “Household Gods,” from Busman’s Honeymoon

Excerpt from Chapter IV, “Household Gods,” from Busman’s Honeymoon

Harriet had her love life exposed in an extremely public, shameful way. Naturally, she wants to hide from love and avoid being hurt again. Oxford seems to offer her a place where she can live a peaceful, solitary intellectual life unbothered by emotions, safe from all the dangers of the world. Yet she finds that danger can come even to Oxford.

She wants to be an independent woman, yet she also doesn't want to be hurt. These goals cancel each other out. She could marry a man who would protect her from life's dangers--but she'd lose her self-respect.

Peter shows her over and over that he's not going to protect her from life's dangers. Being with him makes life more dangerous. Being with him opens her up to more pain. He's not going to keep her safe. What he is going to do is stand beside her and help her to face the dangers. She can be an individual and be in love--but she has to be willing to be hurt.

Wimsey had his whole "love at first sight" thing, but he also got to spend an entire book investigating a mystery surrounding Harriet. While she was stuck in prison, he got to talk to people who had known her in her former life, got to meet her friends and learn about her background and discover all sorts of details about who she is as a person.

Harriet never got to do that for Peter. She just knew him as an aristocrat, as a detective, and as someone who wanted to marry her. She interacted with people who knew him as one of those three things, and she got to know him in the context of a relationship where she never got to see much beyond the surface.

In Oxford, Harriet gets to dig into Peter's past. He stops asking her to marry him, which finally gives her the chance to ask questions about him. She meets people who knew him before he knew her, who know him in lots of different roles. She gets to see what he's like as an uncle, how he deals with disciplining an irresponsible son of the family. She learns about his work with the Foreign Office. She meets an old college friend who knew him as the silly aristocrat you show off to your friends. She meets someone who knew him as a commanding officer. She even gets to watch him sleep--which is explicitly, with multiple allusions, compared to death--then rummages through his pockets gathering evidence that gives clues about his personality.

She learns what made him fall in love with her. She learns that other people can fall in love with him. All this is evidence that lets her piece together a picture of the history that led him to this moment, and helps her figure out how she feels about him.

Harriet's spent an entire book wondering how one could possibly reconcile a life of the mind and a life of the heart, because it seems like your only options are to give yourself over to passionate emotions that destroy your mind, or to retreat into an emotionless intellectual life that withers the heart.

Both seem dangerous because on the one hand, she suspected that the lonely intellectual life could drive someone insane, but what drove someone insane in this case was focusing on emotions to the exclusion of all rational thought. She can't choose either, but can't see a way to have both.

Then in the final moment before Peter's final marriage proposal, they go to a concert. Not just a concert, but a duet. Two musicians working in counterpoint--playing individual tunes that weave perfectly into one complete song.

To the appreciative Peter, music is

ravishing heart and mind together.

And here's the solution. The perfect analogy. In music, the heart and mind aren't opposites, but partners. Emotion turns the orderly and intellectual into something beautiful. Order elevates emotion into something sublime. You don't have to cut out all passion or give it free rein--you can control it. You don't have to suppress the mind to experience passion--knowledge can enhance the passion.

As a romantic analogy, it goes even further, because music can be played by two people in different ways. They can be individuals whose melodies entwine into counterpoint. One person's melody can be supported by the other's harmony. Neither one is necessarily better or worse--it's a matter of taste. Which do you prefer? Which can you best play, best appreciate?

Harriet didn't have to reject marriage because of some bad examples of marriage, just as she doesn't have to reject all music because bad songs exist. What matters is this particular person, this particular song. Can she and Peter work together to make something she finds beautiful?

Ciarán Hinds as Captain Frederick Wentworth (Persuasion, 1995)

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