Academic Excerpt

Below is an excerpt from an essay I wrote in college. In this class, we studied literary & critical theory, and for our final project, we picked a body of work and then delved into the criticism surrounding it. I chose my favorite Jane Austen novel, Persuasion. After reading as many different schools of thought about the book that I could find, I pulled out significant feminist critiques and synthesized them together into a single cohesive work discussing the criticism of ​Persuasion.


Persuasion and its Feminist Critiques

Persuasion has long been considered unique amongst Jane Austen’s novels, and at its heart lives Anne Elliot, a different type of heroine. While most of Austen’s heroines are outgoing, witty, and beautiful, Anne is reserved, quietly observant, and her beauty has faded. From the 1970s onward, feminist critics have argued about their ideas and theories concerning this novel, each coming from a distinctive angle. These critics tend to use the same four scenes from the book to further their arguments, with each viewing the scenes through her or his own lens. The end result is that in the critical debate surrounding Persuasion, these passages have been used to further feminist theories regarding Captain Wentworth, the hero of the novel, Anne Elliot, and Persuasion itself, though each of the originating feminist viewpoints are markedly different.
Before moving on to a discussion of each obligingly flexible scene in the novel, this essay will first outline the basic premises of each of the primary feminist viewpoints examined here. Thomas P. Wolfe’s 1971 article “Achievement of Persuasion” argues that the distinctiveness of the novel arises from Austen’s “mode of dramatizing the consciousness of the heroine” (687). That is, most of the story is told through Anne’s eyes, in her voice, creating a feminine novel rather than a more traditional masculine novel with a female protagonist. In “Rhetoric and Gender in Jane Austen’s Persuasion,” written in 1995, Arthur E. Walzer sees the central conflict of the novel as one of gender rather than class. Robyn R. Warhol’s “The Look, the Body, and the Heroine: A Feminist-Narratological Reading of Persuasion” from 1992 introduces narratology into the feminist debate and finds Anne, as a creation of the text, to transform the act of looking into a feminine one (8). Monica F. Cohen examines domesticity, the Navy, and their growing overlap in “Persuading the Navy Home: Austen and Married Women’s Professional Property,” published in 1996. She argues that as the navy was domesticated in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, domesticity was professionalized, and this in turn meant that women became professionals (347).