Persuasion (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Jane Austen Read Free Book Online

is given her own “woman’s estate” at last as a reward for discovering this.
    Our last glimpse of the Elliots returns us once again to the power hierarchy—which turns on dominating and being dominated rather than the equality and mutual feeling of friendship and romantic love based on it. As the novel draws to a close, Anne’s sister Elizabeth is saved from much suffering over the situation by her “internal persuasions,” a stream of consciousness that “satisfies” her twin urges to “propriety and vanity” (p. 207). But it is Mrs. Smith who is last glimpsed in the novel, emphasizing the earned value of the individual, independent of the classification system of social worth. Since she is what came to be known as “shabby-genteel,” come down in income through no fault of her own, but still ladylike and moral, the character of Mrs. Smith combines both old and new values, and so has the last word.
    Persuasion is on its surface yet another “voyage of discovery,” the story of a woman fully arriving as an adult through marriage. By the novel’s conclusion Anne Elliot has acquired competence in the psychology of love and mastery of its fit into the moral and social worlds. She learns how to read men through the comparison of paired suitors, as in Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, who represent categories of personal worth within a newly defined classification of difference, a “modern” sense of what one should be and what one should not. Captain Wentworth, fully endorsed by the heroine and narrator at the end, is the modern man, with his belief in his own authority, his optimistic crediting of his own future worth (a species of investment in himself), and his demonstration of the power of the individual to overcome the constraints of traditional classifications. But this scheme argues not so much for meritocracy as for what Marilyn Butler calls a “natural aristocracy.” Class attributes are shown to be important in love, as part of the definition of “character,” which also means personality, morality, and right living. Clearly Jane Austen is on the side of “the duties and dignity of the resident landholder,” which Sir Walter has corrupted; she does not unequivocally endorse a society in which the middle-class or the upward striver wrenches authority from the historically privileged class.
    Jane Austen, then, is both critical of the class system and wants to maintain it; that is, she wants to buttress it with better, more humanistic foundations. As in the novel Pamela, by the eighteenth-century author Samuel Richardson, a marriageable girl must not focus on trying to be a lady, but it is a truth universally acknowledged that there must be ladies. An Austen novel proposes a new system of signs opposed to the old conventions, reworking yet supporting fundamental social and religious categories. Persuasion in particular invites us to map Anne’s and Austen’s reading of her world onto our own and evaluate for ourselves the “cheerful confidence in futurity” that marked the early promise of Anne’s love affair. Speaking of the conventional social obstacles, the traditional privileges of class and gender that stood in the way of what she called “the play of spirit” in Jane Austen’s life, Virginia Woolf remarked most insightfully about Austen, “She believes in them as well as laughs at them.”
    In this context, what does the title mean? Lady Russell gives both good and bad advice in her early act of persuasion: good in that it is based on tenderness and authority, bad in that it is constrained by pride rather than true feeling. But this seems to beg the question: If feeling so often trumps reason, how then does one know what is “true” (presumably as opposed to ego istic) feeling? How does this help us to conciliate modernity with tradition, the authority of individual desire with the authority of systems, to classify the classifiers? It is the modern question—as Captain