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ABSTRACT: This paper explores the significance of silence in Jane Austen's Persuasion (1917), focusing in particular on the way silence substantiates, rather than interrupts, the continuity of Anne Eliot and Frederick Wentworth's relationship. The convention has been to read Anne's silence as a deficiency moving teleologically toward the fulfillment of a communicative equality rooted in her marriage with Wentworth (Mooneyham 1997, Olmsted 2006, Tandon 2003, Wallace 1995). In this paper, however, I use a psychoanalytic framework to suspend the emancipatory language of verbal reciprocity, thus situating silence outside and against a discourse of giving voice to the voiceless. By analyzing the substantively recessive qualities of a buzz in the air, a dash on the page, and bodies suspended out of reach of one another, this paper looks at the ways Austen imagines silence as the "stuff" of desire, thus declining the simple equation of female desire with the desire to speak and be heard.
KEYWORDS: Austen, feminism, Lacan, psychoanalysis, silence, voice
In a contemporary political era often enamored with the project of giving voice to the voiceless, it is tempting for scholars to take up some of literature's most cherished silent and silenced protagonists with the intention either to suss out their hidden articulations or to determine what their silence says on behalf of the broader cultural voicelessness they represent. This paper is an attempt to bypass that temptation. In so doing it registers new questions about what silence, beyond the imperative of articulation and reception, can do to our understanding of characters who, after all, may be indifferent to us as listeners, no matter how attuned we are to hearing what they have to say.
Anne Elliot of Jane Austen's Persuasion (1817) is one such silent and silenced character: "she had never, since the age of fourteen, never since the loss of her dear mother, known the happiness of being listened to."1 This sentence is central to the way Anne has conventionally been taken up by critics. The sentence links Anne's status as silent spectator within her social world to the loss of something so essential that it renders her virtually an orphan in her own family. Despite this apparent link between Anne's silence and the death of her mother, however, the tendency...