by Jane Austen(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Paperback, 249 Pages, Fiction
“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.”
From the Cover: Anne Elliot seems to have given up on present happiness and has resigned herself to living off her memories. More than seven years earlier she complied with duty: persuaded to view the match as imprudent and improper, she broke off her engagement to a naval captain with no fortune, ancestry, or prospects. However, when peacetime arrives and brings the Navy home, and Anne encounters Captain Wentworth once more, she starts to believe in second chances. Persuasion celebrates romantic constancy in an era of turbulent change. Written as the Napoleonic Wars were ending, the novel examines how a woman can at once remain faithful to her past and still move forward into the future.
My Review: Like Jane Eyre, I read Jane Austen’s Persuasion under what could be called (at worst) duress. That is to say I read it for my Romantic British Literature class. (Interestingly enough, it was for the same teacher.) While it was not nearly as dull as Jane Eyre, Persuasion failed to capture my attention for whatever reason. I definitely do not fall into the camp of the “Janeite” as they are only half-ironically called.
What I found to be most intriguing about this novel is just how closely it resembled a Shakespearean comedy. Many of the elements that one can find in Twelfth Night, or As You Like It, or A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Much Ado About Nothing are evident in Persuasion: overheard conversations, lovers who have fallen out of love, a returning war hero, a plucky female lead, a waning aristocrat, a meddling upper-class lady, the deceitful relative who wants the family land and title, hiding in hedgerows, even the “disguising” of the female lead, though this last may be a bit of stretch as unlike, say, Viola or Rosalind, Anne is not physically disguised, but rather she has “fallen out of bloom” so much so that when Captain Wentworth returns from the Napoleonic Wars he hardly recognizes her, and it is only at the end that she is fully revealed to be the beauty she was before the novel started.
Without spoiling too much—though how you could not see the end coming, I’ll never know—just like a Shakespearean comedy/romance, Persuasion ends with reconciliation and a wedding. It is all so very much like one of the Bard’s plays that I cannot believe that Austen did model Persuasion like this on purpose. This has all the hallmarks of being a very deliberate setting up of events and people that for this all to be coincidence would be unbelievable.
After I recognized this Shakespearean influence, it softened me some towards Austen’s novel and made me read it with a more charitable eye than I did Jane Eyre (for which I have been raked over the coals repeatedly). Framing the story in the way that Austen did elevates an otherwise drearily boring love story to something with a little more wit and wisdom. (There’s also a lot of flower imagery surrounding Anne that I’d be willing to bet means something, but I’m just not sure what to do with all of it yet.)
Yet, it is all still not enough to throw me into the Camp of the Janeites and take up orders to become an acolyte. During our discussion of Persuasion my professor read a quote from an eminent Austen scholar (I can’t remember the name for the life of me and am too lazy to look it up right now) which went something to the effect of: “Jane Austen was the conscience of her time.”
I take umbrage with that idea for one chief reason: I feel that a so-called “conscience of [a] time” needs to say something of meaning and/or import about the society in which they live. Upton Sinclair would be a “conscience of [his] time.” H.G. Wells would be a “conscience of [his] time.” Theodore Dreiser would most definitely be a “conscience of [his] time” as would Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and a dozen others. Jane Austen is most definitely not a “conscience of her time.” Why? Because, to put it in so many words, Austen does not challenge the status quo of her time in this novel, or for that matter any of her other novels.
The characters in Persuasion are all from the upper class and all have upper class concerns: i.e. rank, title, money, land, and “proper” marriage. I can think of only one character from the lower or working class in Persuasion and although she is at least favorably portrayed, her part is brief and an expository one at best. No where in the novel does Austen play the trickster and challenge the notion that the ruling class does not have any obligation to the lower classes, nor does she show the daily trials and travails of the lower and working classes. There is no indictment of the norms of society or call to moral obligation. The characters in Persuasion (as well, one could argue, Jane Austen) continue blissfully along in their little bubble of privilege without worrying how the “other half lives.”
This is not the literary action of a “conscience of [a] time.”
I have probably committed heresy in the Church of the Janeite by questioning the infallibility of Jane Austen, but I just can’t drink the Kool Aid that so many others have. Persuasion while a novel that succeeds on many levels, fails in one major aspect: Jane Austen does not, at least in Persuasion, live up to her given title as “the conscience of her time.”
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