The Look, the Body, and the Heroine: A Feminist-Narratological Reading of "Persuasion"Author(s): Robyn R. WarholReviewed work(s):Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 5-19Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345602 .Accessed: 24/04/2012 05:46

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The Look, the Body, and the Heroine:

A Feminist-Narratological Reading of Persuasion

ROBYN R. WARHOL

Persuasion is a novel constructed around what was, for its time, a radically unusual narrative premise: the love affair that should have culminated in a marriage to end a conventional romance novel has gone bad, and the heroine of the piece must begin again, eight and a half years later, on her quest for narra- tive closure. It is a story of lost love regained, of oppositions reconciled. Feminist readers in the 1990s may wish, like Anne Elliot, to reclaim an old at- tachment. Is it time for feminist critics to stop worrying and learn to love Jane Austen again?

According to Julia Prewitt Brown, feminist readers of Austen are often among the novelist's detractors. Brown has recently taken to task such influential fem- inist critics as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Nina Auerbach, Mary Poovey, and Claudia Johnson for having misprized Austen's politics by taking too liter- ally (and too ahistorically) Austen's insistence upon marrying off her heroines. Brown's "polemical reading" suggests that "a feminist literary criticism that is worthy of the name" (313) would take a socio-political approach different from the one that has so far dominated Anglo-American feminism. Brown finds "the true philosophical basis of feminism in Mary Wollstonecraft," not in J. S. Mill; she privileges a community- or global-based ideal over individualism, and implies that anyone reading from this more genuine feminist angle will come to appreciate Austen properly. Positioning herself as taking a broader view than Austen's "feminist detractors," Brown concludes that "we can only be grateful that Jane Austen's place in history is not dependent on the narrow ap- proach of feminists writing today" (313).

What could be more narrow, though, than an approach that identifies one "true" philosophical basis for feminism, or, for that matter, than a call for re- vising reading strategies that limits the available possibilities to variations among ways of looking at heroines as if they were historical figures subject to the socio-political constraints of their author's era? The kinds of feminist-his- toricist criticism that delimit Brown's horizons tend to treat characters as if they were "real people," whose marital fate depends upon their situation in history. But what happens when a feminist resists the powerful temptation to think of Jane Austen's heroines as persons, and scrutinizes them as functions of texts, instead? Feminist narratology (the study of narrative structures and strategies in the context of cultural constructions of gender) provides a method

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for reclaiming Jane Austen as a feminist novelist by distinguishing her "story" (in which the independent heroine must, as some critics have it, "dwindle into a wife") from her "discourse." A close look at the narrative discourse of Persuasion yields an alternate view of Austen's literary feminism, discernible in her text's representation of a heroine's access to knowledge (through the act of looking) and to pleasure (through textual consciousness of the body). While some non-feminist critical analysis of Austen's narrative techniques has laid a foundation for talking about the forms Austen employs in her fiction-espe- cially free indirect discourse-feminist narratology can provide a context for politicizing that analysis, for considering the gendered implications of the way Austen puts a novel together.

As an alternative to a story-centered analysis of Persuasion, I propose to take a gender-conscious look at Austen's management of focalization, that is, her use of Anne Elliot as the central consciousness through which the story gets trans- mitted. As Louise Flavin observes, "In no other Austen novel is so much of what happens filtered through a central consciousness" (23); Flavin describes the re- sulting effect as a "complexity of polyvocality ... achieved by having a narra- tor report what a character hears another character say that another charac- ter has said" (21). Of course, the characters-Anne included-are textual con- structs, not literally "consciousnesses": as Michael Orange puts it, "it might be better to say that the narration filters knowledge of aspects of one part of it- self, which it represents as 'Captain Wentworth,' by means almost exclusively of another, labelled 'Anne Elliot.' There is no Captain Wentworth beyond Anne Elliot's point of view until very late in the novel,' and no Anne Elliot outside this narration" (66). Still, studies of focalization in this novel typically con- clude that the layering of voices in free indirect discourse has the effect of giv- ing "the illusion of depth to character," to use John Dussinger's phrase (99). Yet while everyone grants that "Anne Elliot" seems "deep," no one stops to consider what it means for this focal character to be female.

I.

At the simplest level, it means that the novel's heroine must be almost obsessed with the act of looking, an activity which-as I will explain below-was not associated with female characters in the novels of Austen's predecessors. This heroine has to look, for the conditions of narration depend entirely on her ob- serving everything that ought to be told. Anne's visual perceptions are crucial to the narrative movement, particularly since hers is a world bound by propri- eties dictating that so many things "should not be said" (P 238), or indeed-as Janis Stous has pointed out-a world where verbal language is so limited in its capacity to convey significant feelings. Looking and interpreting others' looks

As Mary Lascelles noted (204-5) and Orange reminds us (66), the narrative does afford two brief glimpses into Wentworth's perspective on Anne. Whereas Lascelles regarded these moments as lapses, the narratologist might see them as reminders of how relatively consistent the focalization is in this text, as compared to Sense and Sensibility or Emma, for instance.

ROBYN WARHOL I AUSTEN'S FEMINIST GAZE

come to function for Anne as an alternative language, a means of communication without recourse to words.

Because looking is a physical action, a function of those organs called eyes, representations of the act of looking continually draw attention in this text to the heroine's own body: its placement on the scene she is observing, its visceral reaction to what she sees, and its appearance as mirrored in the remarks of others upon Anne's "looks." The female body, therefore, comes into the narra- tive foreground not just as the vehicle of looking in the novel, but also as the object of the gaze of other characters. Anne Elliot has no moment of looking at herself, no gaze into a mirror or contemplation of any part of her body she might see-she only becomes visible in the text through the comments others make about how she looks. The heroine takes shape, then, in the objectifying view of other characters, especially male characters. When she feels herself to be under someone's scrutiny, Anne reacts with "sensations," sometimes pleasur- able, sometimes disagreeable. This focus upon looks and looking results in Persuasion's being the most physical, the most literally "sensational" of Austen's novels, in that the heroine's experiences-and the textual transmis- sion of them through her perspective-are thoroughly grounded in the senses.2

The female body comes explicitly into the foreground in the famous scene of argument between Anne Elliot and Captain Harville over the differences be- tween the sexes. The point under debate is whether men's or women's love lasts longest, "when existence or when hope is gone"; Harville argues for men's greater constancy, on the grounds of "a true analogy between our bodily frames and our mental;...as our bodies are the strongest so are our feelings" (236). Anne counters that if men's feelings are strongest, "the same spirit of analogy will authorise me to assert that ours are the most tender." "Tenderness," in this physical connection, implies soreness, sensitivity, susceptibility to pain, and Anne's position as focal character- as much as her experience as heroine-puts her in a peculiar position of authority to speak of such physical vulnerability. By making Anne's the central consciousness, and by placing her body always upon the narrative scene no matter how "painful" or "agitating" to Anne the circumstances, the novelist subjects her heroine's body to a kind of textual vio- lence. Early in the novel and throughout her period of uncertainty about Wentworth's marital intentions, Anne is markedly uncomfortable in her body, uncomfortable with the female body in general (particularly in the "large, fat" person of Mrs. Musgrove). But by gradually bringing together Anne's capacity for looking (and its attendant power to gain knowledge within the public realm) with the heroine's growing appreciation for the life of the body (and its intensely private set of significances), the text blurs the strictly binary divi- sions between external appearance and intrinsic value, between seeing and being seen, and between the public and private realms which have operated in pa- triarchy (in Jane Austen's time as in ours) to keep women oppressed. The femi- nism of Austen's last novel resides not so much in the heroine's marrying the

2I am using "sensational" in the sense recently introduced into critical discourse by D. A. Miller and Anne Cvetkovich, among others. While their usage of the term applies to the late- Victorian genre of sensation novels, the term's focus on the link between text and body makes its appropriation irresistible here.

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man of her choice, as in the text's dismantling those oppositions which it repre- sents as making life in the female body so painful. Before looking more closely at the female body in Persuasion, though, I want to return to the question of "looking" itself, especially in its function here as a narrative device. To date, narratology has not made as much use as it might of the notion of "the gaze" as it has developed in film studies. But as the gaze in film and the focalization of verbal texts are similar in their function, they might also resemble each other in their potential for carrying connotations of gender. Feminist film theorists (notably Laura Mulvey and Mary Ann Doane) have argued from a psychoana- lytic perspective that the position of spectatorship in Hollywood movies is always gendered male; some commentators, such as John Berger, extend this ob- servation into culture at large: "Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at" (47). Whether or not this is invari- ably true of the gaze in popular culture has become debatable, leading some feminists to posit a female viewing position that is not, as Mulvey's and Doane's work suggests, a kind of cross-dressing or adoption of a male subject po- sition, but something distinct. As Suzanne Moore explains, "If a female gaze ex- ists it does not simply replicate a monolithic and masculinized stare, but in- stead involves a whole variety of looks and glances-an interplay of possibili- ties" (Gamman and Marshment 59). Moore, very careful to avoid implying that gendered positions are "fixed outside social conditions," offers a liberation from what some see as an essentializing tendency in the more properly psychoana- lytic theory of the gaze. Feminist narratology might begin from Moore's posi- tion, arguing that in a given text the focalization represents a feminine perspec- tive. In fiction there is no structural reason why the position of spectatorship must necessarily be male. What Persuasion does is to distinguish among kinds of looking, juxtaposing the feminine focalization that relies on the heroine's viewpoint with the objectifying gaze-often associated here with male char- acters-which others in the text direct at the heroine's body.

II.

In verbal narration, as in film, the "gaze" and the "look" are distinct from each other, though often related: the first occurs in the realm of the "extradiegetic," outside the world of the story, while the second can be located inside, as some- thing exchanged among characters "intradiegetically."3 The extradiegetic gaze frames the reader's view of what is happening in the fictional world, whereas the intradiegetic look is one among the thousands of events that are represented as occurring there. When a novel is as carefully focalized through one character as Persuasion, the gaze imitates that of the focal character; in this novel, then, the extradiegetic gaze and Anne's intradiegetic look are often identical. Far from placing Anne in a male subject position, this arrangement (working together with certain ethical structures within the story itself, which I will outline below) functions to gender looking as a feminine activity.

3 See Gerald Prince's Dictionary of Narratology for definitions of these terms; I use them in the sense established by G6rard Genette.

ROBYN WARHOL I AUSTEN'S FEMINIST GAZE

The result is to overturn the tradition of the gaze that Claudia Johnson has so persuasively traced through eighteenth-century novels of sensibility.

In a discussion of Austen's relation to the politics of sensibility, Johnson asserts that "sentimental moral theory of the eighteenth century is essentially spectatorial, exploring the moralizing effects of seeing ourselves beheld in the gaze of others" (169). Commenting on Marianne Dashwood's physical decline in Sense and Sensibility as part of the tradition of heroines who fade out or die in sentimental novels, Johnson explains that such novels emphasize the emotions inspired in men (such as Colonel Brandon and Willoughby) by the spectacle of the heroine's suffering body. "What is emphasized in this literature," accord- ing to Johnson, "is the feeling of the onlooker, not the feeling of the sufferer," and she argues convincingly that this pattern is reproduced in Austen's first published novel.

As Johnson sees it, the tradition "locks women within an objective status, as things wept over" by men of sensibility. "Women, for their part, rarely look," Johnson claims. "Usually they are too insane-like Sterne's mad Maria or Burney's 'idiot' woman-to return a lucid gaze; too ashamed-like Goldsmith's Olivia-to meet a looker's eyes; or too delirious-like Marianne Dashwood- to care" (169). Given that Marianne fits the pattern of the fading heroine, a look at Anne Elliot will reveal that she represents a significant break with this model of heroinism. Anne, unlike Marianne (and unlike Marianne's foil, her sister Elinor) begins the novel in a physically "faded and thin" state, for "her bloom had vanished early" (P 37). In the course of the story, however, she reverses the experience of the fading heroine by regaining her "looks" (in the eyes, at least, of those characters who notice and comment upon them); what's more, Anne is represented as a heroine whose gaze is not just lucid but empower- ing, and whose subjective experience of her own bodily feelings removes her en- tirely from the ranks of the objectified heroines of sensibility.

In Persuasion, looking at others is the most reliable means available to char- acters for comprehending one another's value and meanings, but not everybody can do it well. Looking at physical detail in order to read interior significance is constructed in this novel as a distinctly feminine thing to do. As the focal character, Anne looks often, and with accuracy, at others: what she deduces from people's "looks" is usually borne out by the plot. By contrast, the men in the novel who are preoccupied with looks and looking-Sir Walter Elliot and his heir, Mr. William Walter Elliot-look to objectify, to fix the objects of their gaze with a value strictly commensurate with appearances. The text con- trasts these two Walter Elliots with other men- particularly Wentworth and Admiral Croft-who do not, without prompting, even see the body when they look at another person, men whose masculine worthiness is continually endorsed by the story. If the Walter Elliots' look objectifies the body and the naval men's look ignores it, the heroine's look comprehends both interior and exterior experience, both the body she sees and the significances she reads in its expres- sions. Anne's capacity to look, sp crucial to the narrative structure, is part of the text's construction of femininity.

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Sir Walter Elliot, with his mirror-lined dressing room and his unambiguous vanity ("the beginning and the end of [his] character," 36), is of course the fig- ure most obsessed with physical appearances. His persistent comments on peo- ple's looks become predictable, even parodic ("How is Mary looking?" is, for in- stance, the first question he asks about an absent daughter, 155); but they are ut- terly unselfconscious. They serve a wider purpose than caricature, however, in that they are a window in the text opening onto physical characteristics that don't typically make their way into Austen's descriptions. Thanks to Sir Walter's remarks (rendered either in dialogue or in free indirect discourse), we know that Mary's nose was red the last time he saw her, that Mrs. Clay has an awkward wrist, a projecting tooth, and freckles; that Lady Russell is develop- ing crow's feet around her eyes; and that Mr. Elliot is "very much under-hung" (that is, his lower jaw juts forward). Caught in Sir Walter's gaze, Austen's characters take on a more vivid physicality than her narrators ordinarily give them.

The narrator (who may or may not be using free indirect discourse to echo Anne's opinion of her father) calls Sir Walter's obsession with looks into ques- tion in terms of gender: "Few women could think more of their personal appear- ance than he did" (36). In other words, Sir Walter's concern for looks and look- ing breaks the stereotype dictating that women are vainer than men; but the narrator's remark implies also that the character's relation to looking has fem- inine connotations. Sir Walter occupies a stereotypically feminine viewing po- sition, too, in the evaulative way that he looks at men to judge their relative (sexual) attractiveness. He likes Colonel Wallis for being "not an ill-looking man" (153), approves Mr. Elliot as being "better to look at than most men" (154), and finally reconciles himself to having Wentworth as a son-in-law after he "saw him repeatedly by daylight and eyed him well" (250). Of course, Sir Walter looks at women, too; his complaint that on the streets of Bath one handsome woman "would be followed by thirty, or five-and-thirty frights" (155) reveals, though, that he looks always to objectify, always to evaluate the body's surface.

Admiral Croft-Sir Walter's foil in so many respects, in terms of class as well as gender-bears an opposite relation to looking. The contrast between them, significant because the self-made man succeeds in handling the responsi- bilities the landed nobleman had abrogated, becomes obvious when the Admiral confesses to Anne that he has removed most of the "looking glasses" from the master dressing-room at Kellynch (142-43). The Admiral has no inter- est in looking at himself, nor is he troubled by the ravages of sea life that Sir Walter perceives in all naval men's complexions. A less obvious contrast, though, is the difference between the ways the two men look at others. Whereas Sir Walter's gaze lights on the body-on skin, on bone structure, on teeth-Admiral Croft does not distinguish physical features. He mentions, quite unselfconsciously, that he can see no difference between Louisa and Henrietta Musgrove: not only does he not look for evaluative purposes, he does not perceive bodies at all. In the one scene where the Admiral is represented as looking concertedly at anything, Anne comes upon him peering into a shop win-

ROBYN WARHOL I AUSTEN'S FEMINIST GAZE

dow at an unrealistically executed painting of a boat. The scene comes on the heels of a passage explaining that Anne "saw [the Crofts] wherever she went" in Bath and that "she always watched them" for the signs of their happy union (179). This time she "might have passed [the Admiral] unseen," as his gaze is wholly absorbed in, as he puts it, "staring at a picture." He is interested in the inaccurate representation of an object; his absorption in that spectacle is quickly juxtaposed with his utter lack of interest in people's looks. He draws Anne's attention to various naval acquaintances who pass, but never to remark on their appearances. "If you look across the street, you will see Admiral Brand coming down and his brother. Shabby fellows, both of them! I am glad they are not on this side of the way .... They played me a pitiful trick once-" (180). Their shabbiness, in other words, is a factor of their behavior, not their dress. As the male partner in the novel's one solidly "attached and happy" (88) mar- riage, Admiral Croft embodies a masculine propensity for not looking at the body or its ornaments.

This textual pattern may account for Wentworth's failing to recognize Anne's physical attractiveness until the moment at Lyme when he sees Mr. Elliot's admiring glance at her. Having judged Anne's looks to be unpleasantly "altered" upon first seeing her again, Wentworth-true to the text's standard for masculine form-evidently never looks at her again until that moment. When Elliot, as yet unacquainted with his cousin Anne, passes her on the steps to the beach,

Anne's face caught his eye, and he looked at her with a degree of earnest admiration, which she could not be insensible of.... It was evident that the gentleman (completely a gentleman in manner) admired her exceedingly. Captain Wentworth looked round at her instantly in a way which shewed his noticing of it. He gave her a momentary glance,-a glance of brightness, which seemed to say, 'That man is struck with you,-and even I, at this moment, see something like Anne Elliot again.' (125)

Though the narrator's gratuitous insistence upon Elliot's degree of gentlemanli- ness hints that the frank gaze he casts upon Anne might not be appropriate to his class status, it is not until much later that Anne will conclude from his treatment of Mrs. Smith and of Anne's father and sister that Elliot is "a disin- genuous, artificial, worldly man, who has never had any better principle to guide him than selfishness" (214). Anne never makes the connection explicit, but the words she applies to her would-be suitor are an apt summary of her own father's characteristics. The man who makes it his business to look evalua- tively at others' bodies is-in Persuasion-not a man to be respected. Wentworth-who proves himself eminently respectable in the pursuit of his career, in his willingness to honor any implicit promise he has made to marry Louisa Musgrove, and in his having been the one among Captain Benwick's friends who had the fortitude to tell him about his fiancee's death (to cite just a few examples of his qualifications to be the hero, the masculine ideal of the book) cannot make an object of Anne by looking at her body directly. The text

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places Wentworth in the tricky position of having to be distinguished from the men who look solely to objectify and evaluate, at the same time having to learn to notice and to admire the heroine's body. To come to his proper end, the hero must take his first cue from the look of a less masculine man.

III.

But to associate looking in Persuasion only with such objectionable characters as Sir Walter and Mr. Elliot would be too hastily to relegate it to the negative side of a moral equation where behaviors are simply admirable or not for all characters. The heroine's earnest absorption in looking (and reading looks) sug- gests the value of looking from a feminine perspective that does not stop with the evaluation of appearances but goes beyond the surface to read the body's significances. In this novel the feminine look neither ignores the body nor objec- tifies it but sees surface and significance as integrally related. Anne notes "the look, with which 'Thank God!' was uttered by Captain Wentworth" when Louisa is declared out of danger (132); she sees that Mr. Elliot "looked com- pletely astonished" to recognize her from their encounter at Lyme, and that "he was quite as good-looking as he had appeared" there (156); she notices, on first seeing Wentworth in Bath, that "he looked quite red" (185); "looked very well," and "had even a momentary look of his own arch significance" (186); at Bath "she saw that [Wentworth] saw Elizabeth, that Elizabeth saw him.... she had the pain of seeing her sister turn away" (186). The evening at the con- cert is an orgy of looking for Anne, as she tries repeatedly both to see Wentworth and to catch his eye. When Mrs. Smith teases her about how little she noticed at the concert, Anne says "'I ought to have looked about me more'... conscious while she spoke, that there had in fact been no want of looking about, that the object only had been deficient" (201). Her "object" is always Wentworth, but she looks at him for purposes beyond objectification: she looks to communicate and to understand.

The novel attributes the power of feminine looking to other women charac- ters than Anne, though other women are often too preoccupied to exercise it. The heroine's one blunder of perception occurs in a scene where she is too absorbed in watching another woman's gaze to understand what is happening:

She looked instinctively at Lady Russell; but not from any mad idea of her recognizing [Wentworth] so soon as she did herself. No, it was not to be supposed that Lady Russell would perceive him till they were nearly opposite. She looked at her however, from time to time, anxiously; and when the moment approached which must point him out, though not daring to look again (for her own countenance she knew was unfit to be seen), she was yet perfectly conscious of Lady Russell's eyes being turned exactly in the direction for him, of her being in short intently observing him. (188)

Anne is chagrined to realize, when Lady Russell explains she was looking at window-curtains, that her own obsessive looking at Lady Russell's look has

ROBYN WARHOL I AUSTEN'S FEMINIST GAZE

caused her to lose "the right moment for seeing whether [Wentworth] saw them" (189). The scene is an instance of feminine looking run amok: Anne's au- thority as focal character falters as she is torn between, on the one hand, her anxiety that Lady Russell might see her discomposure and, on the other, her anxiousness for her friend to see the persisting attractiveness of Wentworth's body, to recognize "that eight or nine years should have passed over him, and in foreign climes and in active service too, without robbing him of one personal grace!" (188). In her preoccupation with her own and Lady Russell's gazes, Anne misses a chance to read Wentworth's.

That lost opportunity is significant, because looking in order to interpret others' looks functions as a feminine language in Persuasion, an alternative to the explicit verbal discourse that might sometimes simplify communication but would often abrogate propriety. From the feminine perspective the text con- structs, bodies are not merely objects but are signs to be read. Anne reads the looks of other characters continually, deducing their motives and reactions from their expressions, as when she looks at Wentworth's face after her sister Mary has audibly remarked upon his evident satisfaction at having been invited to Camden Place: "Anne caught his eye, saw his cheeks glow, and his mouth form itself into a momentary expression of contempt, and turned away, that she might neither see nor hear more to vex her" (231). Mary should not have spo- ken; Anne cannot verbally rebuke her; Wentworth's contempt can be registered only visually, but Anne understands the scene. For her, the look is a means of communication more proper than words, perhaps more effective.

That communication by looks is a feminine provenance in the novel becomes clear in the revised ending, the only passage in Persuasion where gendered dif- ferences rise to the surface of the dialogue. As Anne and Captain Harville con- duct their argument about the relative claims of men's and women's attach- ments, Anne continually watches Wentworth, seated nearby at a writing desk. She catches "one quick, conscious look" (235) from him; she is aware of his writ- ing during her dialogue with Harville but is surprised that Wentworth leaves the room with "not a word, nor a look. He had passed out of the room without a look!" (239). The look comes in the next instant, when he returns to hand her his letter, "with eyes of glowing entreaty fixed on her for a moment" (239). Anne has long ago interpreted his looks at her to mean his attachment is renewed, his jealousy stirred by her reputed connection to Mr. Elliot: the language of Wentworth's letter does not communicate any new information to her but only confirms what she has already observed.

Wentworth, by contrast, does not have Anne's access to the language of look- ing: he has to make his declarations to her in an explicit, verbal form, and his letter admits he would not "have waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine" (240). The feminine look, then, has the power to penetrate male desire; the masculine character must resort to words to find out what he needs to know about the woman's de- sire. This revision contrasts starkly with the moment in the cancelled chapter when Anne and Frederick come to their understanding through a mutually ex- pressive look: "[He] looked with an expression which had something more than

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penetration in it-something softer. Her countenance did not discourage. It was a silent but a very powerful dialogue; on his side supplication, on hers accep- tance" (259). The balanced syntax of that last sentence assigns equal powers of visual communication to him and to her; the revised version shifts the balance of the power of reading looks to the feminine side. Even the sexual dynamic be- tween them is altered in the revision: in the original version, the man looks with "more than penetration"; in the revision, it is the woman whose look has penetrated him. Whereas the cancelled chapter's reference to a "silent but very powerful dialogue" emphasizes the communicative nature of looks throughout the text, the revision more firmly assigns a feminine gender to the power of in- terpreting the body's signs.4

Looking, then, connotes a certain kind of power in Persuasion, but the limits of that power become clear when characters who look are more strongly marked by their class status than their gender. In the few instances where persons out- side the elite class are represented in the novel, they are significantly depicted as looking at their social superiors, but as being themselves invisible within the text. The "workmen and boatmen" who observe Louisa's accident at Lyme have a voice that surfaces briefly in the free indirect discourse, but they have no individualized bodies or faces: "many were collected near them, to be useful if wanted, at any rate, to enjoy the sight of a dead young lady, nay, two dead young ladies, for it proved twice as fine as the first report. To some of the best- looking of these good people Henrietta was consigned" (131). Someone among the central characters looks long enough at the workmen to judge the "best- looking," but the lower-class characters are not even visually differentiated enough to be counted: "some" of them come to Henrietta's aid. The working- class figures can look but cannot be seen: within this novel's scheme of represen- tation they have no bodies, and therefore no access to the kind of power Anne comes to hold.

This valence of class persists when the worker who looks across class lines is female, even when her look is a penetrating one. In Bath, Nurse Rooke (a con- veyor of important gossip among secondary characters) crosses Anne's path com- ing out of Mrs. Smith's lodgings. Mrs. Smith asks Anne if she had observed the woman who had opened the door on the previous day, and Anne replies, "No. Was not it Mrs. Speed, as usual, or the maid? I observed no one in particular" (204). The housekeeper, the maid, the nurse are interchangeable for Anne: being outside her class, they have no distinguishing physical features. As with the boatmen, however, the working person in this instance is capable of looking "up": "It was my friend, Mrs. Rooke-Nurse Rooke, who, by the by, had a great curiosity to see you, and was delighted to be in the way to let you in" (204). These moments of looking (or not looking) across class lines bring forward fur- ther details about the limits of the feminine language of looks in Persuasion: workers, like elite women, have license to look, but, unlike the women, they do

John McGowan has argued that "passion is ... the most difficult thing to know in Austen's novels. It remains hidden deep within the self, inaccessible to sight, and resistant to verbal or social expression" (6). While this holds true for Emma, the subject of McGowan's analysis, Persuasion suggests a move on Austen's part toward assigning more power to the heroine who can see and read the hero's passion.

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not become themselves the object of an intra- or extradiegetic gaze within the text. Of course, nineteenth-century femininity is constructed exclusively along class lines (in the sense, for instance, that middle-class women's bodies were supposed to suffer a physical delicacy from which factory workers and servants were assumed somehow to be immune); therefore, if looking and receiving looks is a feminine activity, it would be presented as inaccessible to any person not of the middle class, regardless of that person's gender. Significantly, this instance of class distinction implies that being objectified within a text-having a body that becomes visible through the narration-is a sign of empowerment in Austen's novel. The privileged women who have bodies have far more access to power in Persuasion's world than the working-class characters whose bodies never take shape in the narrative discourse. This pattern reverses the film- studies-based assumption that being the object of the gaze is a sign of oppres- sion. In Persuasion, characters whose subjectivity matters are also figures whose bodies become objects of the gaze.

The life of the body in Persuasion is perceptible only from a subject position within the elite class, then, and in this text the body only exists inside that class. Even though Anne, as the focal character, cannot distinguish the bodies of characters outside her own class, she is living a very vividly physical exis- tence; her participation in the feminine language of looks places her repeat- edly in the position of intense consciousness of others' bodies and of her own. Introduced into the novel as the "faded" heroine whose own body has lost its conventional charms, Anne at first bears an uncomfortable relation to the phys- icality that marks her in the text's economy as both feminine and middle-class. Ultimately, though, Anne's enjoyment of visceral experience returns, along with her bloom, to make Persuasion end as a celebration of life in the female body.

IV.

As Judith Van Sickle Johnson has documented in detail, the heroine's emotional experience is the central subject of Persuasion; Anne's physical desire-frus- trated and finally gratified-is the motor that drives the narrative's move- ment to its happy-ending closure in her sexual union with Wentworth. Johnson asserts that "although the rekindling of romantic sensibilities causes Anne a good deal of discomfort and agitation, she is nonetheless comfortable with dis- comfort; she delights in the sharp, physical sensations of her own passionate nature" (44). I think this rendition somewhat romanticizes the text's account of the heroine's physical experience. Although I can see how a reader might de- light in what Johnson calls "this new excitement of physical contact, this arousing consciousness of growing intimacy, that lends Persuasion its 'peculiar beauty"' (44), I do not think the text attributes this pleasure to the heroine un- til her marriage plot has passed its climax and reached its closure. Anne's emo- tional experience is intense but often painful; her situation as focal character means she is subject to a full range of sensations which she is obliged-as the novel's central consciousness-to register. The result is an almost violent narra-

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tive impulse against the heroine's body, inevitable within the novel's struc- ture.

As I have mentioned above, Anne argues for the "tenderness" of women's emo- tions in her debate with Harville, and the language associated with Anne's feelings throughout the novel suggests that "tenderness" should be understood here in its most literal, physical sense. "Pain," "sensation," and "agitation"- words for conditions of bodily distress-form the lexicon of emotion in the nar- rator's commentary on Anne's encounters with Wentworth. The narrative rendi- tions of their early scenes together especially stress this vocabufary: when Wentworth removes her troublesome nephew's hands from around her neck, Anne's "sensations on the discovery made her perfectly speechless"...[the ges- ture] "produced such a confusion of varying, but very painful agitation, as she could not recover from" before leaving the room (103). Wentworth's first ap- pearance brings "agitation" and "deep mortification" to Anne's body, so drasti- cally altered (according to his remark so thoughtlessly reported to Anne by her sister) after eight years (85). Listening unseen to Wentworth's conversation with Louisa, Anne hears "a great deal of very painful import... which must give her extreme agitation" (111); wondering at Wentworth's having placed her in a carriage to save her from further fatigue, she suffers "emotions so com- pounded of pleasure and pain, that she knew not which prevailed" (113). Even as she grows convinced that Wentworth still loves her, Anne's physical reac- tion is mixed: "It was agitation, pain, pleasure, a something between delight and misery" (185). Whatever it was, the narrator never calls it "enjoyment."

The cancelled chapter ends with an implication that the heroine's physical discomfort is inevitable even in the happiest circumstances. After reaching her understanding with Wentworth, Anne "was almost bewildered-almost too happy in looking back. It was necessary to sit up half the night, and lie awake the remainder, to comprehend with composure her present state, and pay for the overplus of bliss by headache and fatigue" (264). The revised ending re- moves that extremity of pain, but subjects Anne to "fresh agitation" and "full sensation" upon her receiving Wentworth's letter (240). Love quite literally hurts in Persuasion, and if the female body is the vehicle and object of the em- powering language of looking, it is also the site of much discomfort.

To be sure, Anne's physical discomforts usually result from what she must- as focal character sec or overhear by being present in situations that do not di- rectly involve her. The most striking instance would be her overhearing Wentworth's and Louisa's conversation during their walk in the country: if Anne, the central consciousness, did not witness this upsetting scene, it would have to be absent from the narration. Similar painful instances of Anne's requi- site presence in scenes she might prefer to avoid include her weeping as she plays the piano to accompany the others' dancing, her discomposure during the moments at Camden Place when her family treats Wentworth disparagingly, and her observations of Wentworth's grief over Louisa's accident. Critics have pointed to the lack of privacy in Austen's world as representing the lived expe- rience of early nineteenth-century middle-class women, which of course it does. Speaking strictly historically, one could surmise that a woman of Anne Elliot's

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class and marital status would have had very little opportunity for solitude, or for choosing whether or not to be present at social and family events. From a narratological point of view, however, the lack of privacy of Austen's heroines is more significantly a direct result of the novelist's choice of narrative per- spective. If all information is to be conveyed to the reader through the filter of Anne's perceptions, then the heroine must perforce be present at every signifi- cant scene. For Anne, whose observations lead so often and so directly to "painful agitation," her placement as the focal character means her body is subject to a continual emotional battering, the inevitable outcome of her narra- tive function. Throughout much of Persuasion, the heroine's body must necessar- ily be a body in pain.

That pain is gradually allayed, however, as the more positive sensations of the revised last chapters indicate. Though in many respects Anne Elliot's char- acter seems fully formed at the beginning of the novel (setting her apart from Austen's other heroines, with the possible exceptions of Elinor Dashwood and Fanny Price), her relation to the body changes and improves. Other characters continually note the alteration in Anne's appearance as she recovers her lost bloom; her body as visual object changes more than her values and perceptions, the locations of change in heroines like Emma Woodhouse, Elizabeth Bennet, and Catherine Morland. But Anne does experience a subjective change in her re- lation to the bodies of other women, particularly the maternal body of Mrs. Musgrove. In early scenes, Mrs. Musgrove is presented explicitly in terms of her excessive fleshiness, and the narrative reflects both Anne's consciousness of Mrs. Musgrove's bulk and her distaste for it. In the early scene where Wentworth commiserates with Mrs. Musgrove over the loss of her son, "a thick-headed, un- feeling, unprofitable Dick Musgrove, who had never done any thing to entitle himself to more than the abbreviation of his name, living or dead" (77), Anne is highly conscious of the fact that her own body is in close proximity with Wentworth's:

divided only by Mrs. Musgrove. It was no insignificant barrier indeed. Mrs. Musgrove was of a comfortable substantial size, infinitely more fitted by nature to express good cheer and good humour, than tenderness and sentiment, and while the agitations of Anne's slender form, and pensive face, may be considered as very completely screened, Captain Wentworth should be allowed some credit for the self-command with which he attended to her large fat sighings over the destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for. (92)

This matrophobic moment-where Mrs. Musgrove's fat body and motherly grief are so satirically juxtaposed with "the agitations of Anne's slender form"-has traditionally been read as an instance of Austen's own "regulated hatred," but I would attribute the perception, like the majority of narrative observations in the novel, to Anne herself. As the focal character, as the filter for all the vi- sual information in the novel, Anne is surely the one to whom it would occur that Frederick ought to be given "credit" for seeming to sympathize. The pas-

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sage attributes its revulsion from Mrs. Musgrove's "large bulky figure" (92) partly to the simple fact that its flesh forms a barrier here between Anne's body and the male body she desires, which is, on a symbolic level, a fitting em- blem for the pseudo-maternal interference of Lady Russell in Anne's original engagment to him. But the passage also suggests that "tenderness" is the exclu- sive right of the slender, virginal, relatively youthful female body, inappro- priate to the body of the sexually experienced mother.

Anne's matrophobic reaction to Mrs. Musgrove, so vivid in this passage, dis- appears later in the text. After Louisa's injury, Mrs. Musgrove is lightly sati- rized for her preoccupation with young people's danger of being bumped on the head, but the tenderness of her concern for her daughter is treated with perfect seriousness. The shift in narrative attitude toward the emotional mother's body suggests a development in Anne's own increasing comfort with female bod- ily experience, and indicates that maternity, tenderness, and physicality can come together in Anne's own experience of marriage in the end.

Jane Gallop has recently suggested that the impulse in Western culture to- ward violence against the mother is a result of the ideological separation of the mental from the physical, that is, the consequence of splitting off the "realm of culture, history, politics from the realm of love and the body." Her argument draws upon the post-structuralist assumption that all the binary di- visions of patriarchy-public/private, male/female, thought/emotion-must lead to aggression against the less empowered term in each pairing. The narra- tive perspective of Persuasion both demonstrates that aggression-in its ten- dency to subject the heroine's body to pain-and opens it up for inspection. Anne Elliot's access to power through the feminine language of looking lets her blur the oppositions of the textual world in which she is placed, by making mind and body functions of the same act-looking and reading looks-and by succeed- ing through that act in bringing together the interior and exterior significance of the people who come under her gaze. In her ultimate reconciliation with the life of the body, Anne triumphs over the text's violence against her, and sets a pattern for the feminist heroine who no longer needs to fade and die, nor to pro- vide a spectacle of sensibility. The text's sensations are the heroine's own; in the end, her gaze is represented as entirely integrated with the life of her body.

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Dussinger, John. "The Language of 'Real Feeling': Internal Speech in the Jane Austen Novel." The Idea of the Novel in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Robert W. Uphaus. East

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