persuading perfection

As I was reading Persuasion, I couldn’t help but be constantly reminded of the foolishness of Louisa Musgrove and the similarity between her and characters like Lydia Bennet and Marianne Dashwood.  I know she’s not our protagonist, but her falling off the Cobb steps was just too ridiculous; she’s not at all someone we think could even deserve the attention of a proper gentleman like Captain Wentworth.  The ironic thing is that when we first meet her, she is a reasonably good girl: she had “all the usual stock of accomplishments, and… like thousands of other young ladies, living to be fashionable happy, and merry.”  She’s also described as being “rather pretty,” with “spirits extremely good,” her manners “unembarrassed and pleasant” (Ch. 5).   True, Lydia Bennet may not have been described in this fashion, nor Marianne really, but why, then, is it that all these seemingly perfect qualities of a girl don’t make her the perfect wife? These perfect qualities of a young girl don’t seem to translate well as the perfect qualities of a married lady.  I think what I’m trying to ask is if Austen is implying that no level of perfect education can equate the perfectness of education a young lady can achieve through a marriage.  I know we’ve talked about this before, as education and marriage seems to be a recurring theme within all of Austen’s novels we’ve read. I guess Louisa’s flaws lie in her gaiety and joie de vivre, and I’m assuming this translates into immaturity and childishness? Must we always assume from Austen’s novels that there must be something wrong with a girl with perfect traits? I remember a class discussion on Samuel Richardson’s influence on Austen’s writing, and I think Clarissa may have been the inspiration for many of Austen’s female characters, including Louisa Musgrove.  If Clarissa was written to be the perfect heroine, with all the perfect traits and full embodiment of virtue and morals, I think Austen, in her witty, cynical way, twisted this to establish characters that seem perfect at first glance but are heavily flawed underneath.