Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations The Adventures of The Handmaid’s Tale The Red Badge of Huckleberry Finn Heart of Darkness Courage All Quiet on the I Know Why the The Rime of the Western Front Caged Bird Sings Ancient Mariner Animal Farm The Iliad Romeo & Juliet As You Like It The Interpretation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Beloved Dreams Khayyám Beowulf Invisible Man The Scarlet Letter Billy Budd, Benito Jane Eyre A Scholarly Look at Cereno, Bartleby the The Joy Luck Club The Diary of Anne Scrivener, and Other Julius Caesar Frank Tales The Jungle A Separate Peace The Bluest Eye King Lear Silas Marner Brave New World Long Day’s Journey Slaughterhouse-Five Cat on a Hot Tin Into Night Song of Myself Roof Lord of the Flies Song of Solomon The Catcher in the The Lord of the Rings The Sonnets of Rye Macbeth William Shakespeare Catch-22 The Merchant of Sophie’s Choice Cat’s Cradle Venice The Sound and the The Color Purple The Metamorphosis Fury Crime and A Midsummer Night’s The Stranger Punishment Dream A Streetcar Named The Crucible Moby-Dick Desire Daisy Miller, The My Ántonia Sula Turn of the Screw, Native Son The Sun Also Rises and Other Tales Night A Tale of Two Cities Darkness at Noon 1984 The Tale of Genji David Copperfield The Odyssey The Tales of Poe Death of a Salesman Oedipus Rex The Tempest The Divine Comedy The Old Man and the Tess of the Don Quixote Sea D’Urbervilles Dracula On the Road Their Eyes Were Dubliners One Flew Over the Watching God Emma Cuckoo’s Nest Things Fall Apart Fahrenheit 451 One Hundred Years of To Kill a Mockingbird A Farewell to Arms Solitude Ulysses Frankenstein Othello Waiting for Godot The General Prologue Paradise Lost Walden to the Canterbury The Pardoner’s Tale The Waste Land Tales A Passage to India White Noise The Glass Menagerie Persuasion Wuthering Heights The Grapes of Wrath Portnoy’s Complaint Great Expectations A Portrait of the Artist The Great Gatsby as a Young Man Gulliver’s Travels Pride and Prejudice Hamlet Ragtime 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 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 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 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Jesse Zuba Cover designed by Terry Mallon Cover: © Hulton-Archive/Getty Images, Inc. Printed in the United States of America IBT EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 This book is printed on acid-free paper. 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