Content area
Full text
It is surprising that students of rhetorical history have not inquired into the relationship of Jane Austen's Persuasion to eighteenth-century rhetorical theory. Austen's work has, of course, received its share of critical attention from rhetoricians, most prominently from Wayne Booth in his classic The Rhetoric of Fiction. Booth's intentions were, however, to identify how a rhetorical perspective could illuminate Austen's art; neither he nor anyone else has investigated the relationship suggested by the title of her last novel to eighteenth-century accounts of the persuasive process. Might our understanding of the theory be deepened by close study of Austen's reflections on persuasion And would a sustained reading of Persuasion in light of eighteenth-century theory illuminate the novel? This essay had its origins in these questions.
Since literary critics have not agreed on Persuasion's central theme, there is room for a reading by a rhetorician. What Michael Williams identified in 1986 as the "orthodox" interpretation takes the novel's principal concern as the dramatization of the decline of the aristocracy and rise of the bourgebisie--the decaying aristocracy represented in the person of the uprooted, bankrupt Sir Walter Elliot, the bourgeoisie in the energetic, dedicated naval officers, most notably Captain Wentworth (157). This view, first presented by Joseph Duffy over forty years ago, was effectively challenged by R. W. Chapman shortly after it appeared and subsequently by others (Butler; Morgan; Williams), but it persists in readings by Malcolm Bradbury, David Monaghan, Alistair M. Duckworth, and Tony Tanner, for instance. Perhaps its perseverance can be explained by its consistency with Ian Watt's influential Rise of the Novel. Watt's thesis, that an emerging bourgeois reading public found in novels a Puritan ethic and respect for individualism that mirrored its own values, would lend a retrospective credibility to a reading of Persuasion that saw the novel as dramatizing the rise of the middle class.
Recently, however, Nancy Armstrong has challenged Watt. Armstrong argues that the eighteenth-century novel gives expression less to the values of an emergent bourgeoisie than to the female voice and the values of the domestic household to counter the male dominance in the public realm. According to Armstrong, the novel as a genre translated "the complex and competing ways of representing human identity into a single binary opposition represented...