Indirectness in Jane Austen's Persuasion

“No sooner had such an end been reached, than Anne, who had been a most attentive listener to the whole, left the room, to seek the comfort of cool air for her flushed cheeks; and as she walked along a favourite grove, said, with a gentle sigh, ‘a few months more, and he, perhaps, may be walking here.” – Jane Austen, Persuasion (p. 25)

 “The plot owes much of its tension, in fact, to the ongoing threat that feelings which can be read only haphazardly, through momentary glimpses, or indirectly, through their bodily manifestations, can always be misread.” – Alan Richardson, “Of Heartache and Head Injury: Reading Minds in Persuasion” (p. 152)

     Jane Austen and her characters do a lot of hinting in Persuasion. Austen foreshadows the dramatic event of Louisa Musgrove’s head injury with a similar incident in Chapter 7, when one of the children suffers a bad fall: “they suspected great injury, but knew not where” (51). For the boy, the damage turns out to be physical only; his mental capacities appear undiminished, and he recovers with Anne’s aid. The effects of Miss Musgrove’s fall are thus set in contrast: “Louisa’s limbs had escaped. There was no injury but to the head.” The earlier event lays the way for a more serious one later on.

     Beyond the devices of plot, Austen employs a distinct prose style that utilizes indirectness to create hints which contribute to both a sense of pervasive uncertainty and a degree of suspense, as Alan Richardson maintains in his article “Of Heartache and Head Injury.” Austen frequently writes a form of indirect dialogue, in which passages are contained within quotation marks and yet read like third-person narration. For example, in Chapter 15, a collective quote describes the buzz of conversation that occurs among members of the household in Bath after a knock sounds at the door. By altering her structure to accommodate a sort of blend of narration and dialogue, Austen avoids directness and instead fosters a sense of disconnected suspense. Because the words remain unattributed, they convey more realistically the atmosphere of the moment and create a more distinct impression.

     Austen also makes use of italics to hint at underlying emotions. When Anne is pondering which of the Miss Musgroves may capture Captain Wentworth’s fancy, Austen writes: “she knew not now, whether the more gentle or the more lively character were more likely to attract him” (69). Such emphasis implies that one character will indeed win out over the other. This functions less to illuminate anything about the merits of the Miss Musgroves, than to set up the more concrete seduction of Captain Wentworth and foreshadow his further emotional distance from Anne.

     Anne herself is shown to make several hints, even through the third-person narration that inhabits, at some level, her conscious mind. When describing Mr. Elliot, Austen’s narrator says, “His manners were so exactly what they ought to be, so polished, so easy, so particularly agreeable, that she could compare them in excellence to only one person’s manners” (134). In a later moment with Mr. Elliot, Austen writes: “He gave her to understand that he had looked at her with some earnestness. She knew it well; and she remembered another person’s look also” (139). These allusions to Captain Wentworth serve to emphasize Anne’s tentative manner of thinking. Even through the extension of consciousness embodied in the narrative’s free indirect discourse; Anne represses her feelings for him so scrupulously that at times she cannot even mention Captain Wentworth by name.

     Richardson argues that Anne’s moments of unconsciousness function in the novel as a means to reveal her truer inner thoughts and impressions. He adds, “Her periods of dislocation mark the collision of conscious awareness with unconscious thoughts and feelings and the intense physiological sensations that accompany them” (149). She frequently pauses to recover from a surge of feeling that leaves her physically depleted. Austen makes her heroine’s nature clear: “Anne hoped she had outlived the age of blushing; but the age of emotion she certainly had not” (46). When she loses herself in emotion, she lets go of the repressed thoughts that churn inside of her, and these thoughts come to the surface by various narrative means. Austen’s use of hints and indirectness stands out as a method of revealing what lies hidden in her character’s heart of hearts. One must wonder, of course, whether the thoughts that sneak out in moments of emotion are really our true thoughts—whether our conscious or unconscious mind is the true representation of ourselves. By blending them in her prose, Austen implies that the distinction is more than a little blurred.