The Look, the Body, and the Heroine: A Feminist-Narratological Reading of "Persuasion"

Persuasion is novel constructed around what was, for its time, radically unusual narrative premise: love affair that should have culminated in marriage to end conventional romance novel has gone bad, and heroine of piece must begin again, eight and half years later, on her quest for narrative closure. It is story of lost love regained, of oppositions reconciled. Feminist readers in 1990s may wish, like Anne Elliot, to reclaim an old attachment. Is it time for critics to stop worrying and learn to love Jane Austen again? According to Julia Prewitt Brown, readers of Austen are often among novelist's detractors. Brown has recently taken to task such influential critics as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Nina Auerbach, Mary Poovey, and Claudia Johnson for having misprized Austen's politics by taking too literally (and too ahistorically) Austen's insistence upon marrying off her heroines. Brown's polemical suggests that a literary criticism that is worthy of name (313) would take socio-political approach different from one that has so far dominated Anglo-American feminism. Brown finds the philosophical basis of feminism in Mary Wollstonecraft, not in J. S. Mill; she privileges communityor global-based ideal over individualism, and implies that anyone reading from this more genuine angle will come to appreciate Austen properly. Positioning herself as taking 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 narrow approach 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 call for revising reading strategies that limits available possibilities to variations among ways of looking at heroines as if they were historical figures subject to socio-political constraints of their author's era? The kinds of feminist-historicist 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 resists 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 context of cultural constructions of gender) provides method