Jane Austen's Persuasion

294 Pages·2004·1.06 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations
Jane Austen’s
PERSUASION
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Persuasion
© 2004 Infobase Publishing
Introduction © 2004 by Harold Bloom
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Persuasion / edited and with introduction by Harold Bloom.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-7585-0
1. Austen, Jane, 1775–1817. Persuasion. I. Bloom, Harold.
II. Series.
PR4034.P43P47 2003
823'.7—dc21
2003009471
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Anne Elliot, Whose Word Had No Weight 11
Stuart M. Tave
Persuasion: forms of estrangement 35
A. Walton Litz
Anne Elliot’s Dowry: Reflections on the Ending of Persuasion 49
Gene W. Ruoff
The Radical Pessimism of Persuasion 61
Julia Prewitt Brown
The Nature of Character in Persuasion 81
Susan Morgan
In Between: Persuasion 107
Tony Tanner
Persuasion: the “Unfeudal Tone of the Present Day” 143
Claudia L. Johnson
Persuasion: The Pathology of Everyday Life 167
John Wiltshire
Lost in a Book: Jane Austen’s Persuasion 205
Adela Pinch
vi Contents
Satire, sensibility and innovation in Jane Austen:
Persuasion and the minor works 227
Claude Rawson
Chronology 257
Contributors 259
Bibliography 261
Acknowledgments 265
Index 267
Editor’s Note
My Introduction relates Jane Austen’s portrait of Anne Elliot to
Shakespeare’s vision of Rosalind in As You Like It.
Anne Elliot receives what I regard as her classical critique from Stuart
M. Tave, who regards her depth of feeling as controlled by a matching depth
of integrity.
A. Walton Litz rightly emphasizes that Persuasion ends openly and
ambiguously, compared to Austen’s other major novels, while Gene W. Ruoff
finds in the novel’s conclusion something like a Wordsworthian myth of
memory.
The prophetic sense of the decline of marriage as a societal covenant in
the nineteenth century is ascribed by Julia Prewitt Brown to Persuasion,after
which Susan Morgan sees perception as the true guide to character in this
novel.
In a brilliant reading, the late Tony Tanner identifies Anne Elliot as a
threshold figure, poised in between two houses, her father’s and her
prospective husband’s.
To Claudia L. Johnson, Persuasion has subtle affinities with William
Blake’s dissent from “mind-forged manacles,” while John Wiltshire finds in
this novel what the great poet Elizabeth Bishop termed “the art of losing.”
Adela Pinch strikingly increases our awareness of how Anne Elliot’s
experiences resemble the role of a reader in regard to books, after which
Claude Rawson culminates this volume with the interplay of satire and
augmented perceptiveness in Persuasion.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
“Persuasion” is a word derived from the Latin for “advising” or “urging,” for
recommending that it is good to perform or not perform a particular action.
The word goes back to a root meaning “sweet” or “pleasant,” so that the
good of performance or non-performance has a tang of taste rather than of
moral judgment about it. Jane Austen chose it as the title for her last
completed novel. As a title, it recalls Sense and Sensibilityor Pride and Prejudice
rather than Emmaor Mansfield Park. We are given not the name of a person
or house and estate, but of an abstraction, a single one in this case. The title’s
primary reference is to the persuasion of its heroine, Anne Elliot, at the age
of nineteen, by her godmother, Lady Russell, not to marry Captain Frederick
Wentworth, a young naval officer. This was, as it turns out, very bad advice,
and, after eight years, it is mended by Anne and Captain Wentworth. As with
all of Austen’s ironic comedies, matters end happily for the heroine. And yet
each time I finish a rereading of this perfect novel, I feel very sad.
This does not appear to be my personal vagary; when I ask my friends
and students about their experience of the book, they frequently mention a
sadness which they also associate with Persuasion, more even than with
Mansfield Park. Anne Elliot, a quietly eloquent being, is a self-reliant
character, in no way forlorn, and her sense of self never falters. It is not her
sadness we feel as we conclude the book: it is the novel’s somberness that
impresses us. The sadness enriches what I would call the novel’s canonical
persuasiveness, its way of showing us its extraordinary aesthetic distinction.
From The Western Canon.© 1994 by Harold Bloom.
1