17 Feb Focus on chapter 1 You can also talk about anything from chapter 1-9 300 words Prompt on the bottom of the attached document

Persuasion, through Vol. 1, Ch. 9 (pgs. 5-75)

Discussion Prompt

For the most part, the plots of the novels of Jane Austen (1775-1817) follow the arc of Shakespearean comedy, whereby a grouping of young people sort out, through complications of circumstance and emotion, who will marry whom. Typically, these stories center on one woman in particular, with the stories of the rest of the cast of characters told in relationship to her: in the case of Pride and Prejudice, it is Elizabeth Bennet; in the case of Mansfield Park, it is Fanny Price, and so forth. Austen's novels are populated by characters drawn from the lower portion of the upper class of early 19C England: most of these characters are not aristocracy, but neither do they have to engage in manual labor. The men are often military officers, landholders, or clergy. The women do not work, but neither are they so high up in the class system of England that their marriages are arranged for political reasons. Thus, Austen's heroines have some choice about who they marry, and there are real and consequential differences among the men who court them. So, while some men are more desirable thanks to their greater wealth than others, because material well-being is rarely an issue, the novels can concentrate on the possibility of the protagonist finding a happy match in a companionate marriage that is based on mutual sympathy. Usually, everything works out for Austen's protagonists: they marry the right man, who often also happens to have significant, if not always extravagant, wealth.

Persuasion, Austen's last completed novel, varies this formula somewhat. Anne Eliot has, in a sense, lived through the standard Austenian plot, but her story did not end in marriage. Instead, Anne was persuaded by her esteemed and somewhat older friend, Lady Russell, to decline Frederick Wentworth's offer of marriage. Eight years later, Anne is still unmarried.

Anne and Frederick Wentworth were close friends and well-suited to each other in temperament. It had appeared that they were bound to marry each other, and, in fact, Wentworth proposed to Anne. However, Anne was persuaded by Lady Russell to decline the offer. Austen presents Lady Russell's reasoning:

Anne Elliot, with all her claims of birth, beauty, and mind, to throw herself away at nineteen; involve herself at nineteen in an engagement with a young man, who had nothing but himself to recommend him, and no hopes of attaining influence, but in the chances of a most uncertain profession, and no connexions to secure even his farther rise in that profession; would be, indeed, a throwing away, which she grieved to think of! Anne Elliot, so young; known to so few, to be snatched off by a stranger without alliance or fortune; or rather sunk by him into a state of most wearing, anxious, youth-killing dependence! It must not be, if by any fair interference of friendship, any representations from one who had almost a mother's love, and mother's rights, it would be prevented. (26-27)

The sticking point for Lady Russell was Wentworth's lack of wealth and uncertain prospects in the face of what Lady Russell saw as Anne's beauty, intelligence, and youth. In light of Lady Russell's doubts, Anne allows herself to be

persuaded to believe the engagement a wrong thing—indiscreet, improper, hardly capable of success, and not deserving it. But it was not a merely selfish caution, under which she acted, in putting an end to it. Had she not imagined herself consulting his good, even more than her own, she could hardly have given him up.—The belief of being prudent, and self-denying principally for his advantage, was her chief consolation, under the misery of a parting—a final parting; and every consolation was required, for she had to encounter all the additional pain of opinions, on his side, totally unconvinced and unbending, and of his feeling himself ill-used by so forced a relinquishment. –He had left the country [i.e.: area] in consequence. (27-28)

The prompt for this week has to do with point of view. Notice how, in the two passages I have quoted here, Austen is subtly conveying the distinct thoughts of two different characters, but doing so in her own narrative voice. We do not get speeches from Lady Russell and Anne, nor do we get something like an internal monologue from either. Rather, Austen's narrative voice seems to perch on the shoulder of a character and convey that character's thoughts in the third person. This technique is known as free indirect discourse. Here is a formal definition of it:

https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1020

For this week, discuss the way that Austen conveys her characters' thoughts and how that subjectivity shapes our perceptions of the story. You are welcome to choose any passage that seems relevant to you (although I'd rather you chose a passage other than the ones I have quoted here), but, if you're looking for ideas, you might consider the first chapter and the way that Anne is introduced as a character. This is Anne's story, and much of it is told with an ear to her thoughts, but we don't start the novel from her point of view, and we see her first from without, as it were.

As another possibility, you might consider the depiction of Captain Wentworth in Chapters VII-IX. Is Wentworth depicted objectively, or through Anne's eyes? How do we know, and, if you find he's being depicted wholly or in part through Anne's eyes, how does that seem to shape his portrayal?