For Next Week: Persuasion (no video!)

 

Answer THREE of the following over Persuasion for next week (Wednesday or Thursday):  

Q1: In Persuasion, we see Jane Austen at the end of her career (though she probably didn’t know this), and very much in a new century—the eighteen teens.  This was just before the publication of Frankenstein but well after the Romantic movement (the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as Gothic literature).  How do we see Persuasion influenced by the Romantic movement in British literature?  What new touches in the work signal a ‘Romantic’ sensibility unusual in Austen’s writing?  Consider not only what the narrator focuses on/describes, but what the characters say, read, and expound to others. 

Q2: In a very amusing and fantastic passage on page 27, the narrator describes the Musgrove’s house which is being invaded by a harp and a piano-forte (an old style piano).  The old-fashioned demeanor of the house is offended, as she writes, “Oh! Could the originals of the portraits against the wainscot, could the gentlemen in brown velvet and the ladies in blue satin have seen what was going on, have been conscious of such an overthrow of all order and neatness!  The portraits themselves seemed to be staring in astonishment.”  As this passage suggests, much of the goings-on of Persuasion would shock and astonish the old order.  Where do we see Jane Austen pitting the new world against the old?  What innovations and ideas seem quite at odds with the more traditional, class-based ways of running the world?

Q3: Discuss the education of women in this novel so far, considering characters such as Anne Eliot, Mary Eliot, the Musgrove sisters, and Mrs. Croft in particular.  What does it mean to be ‘educated’ as we move into the 19th century?  Are any of these women ‘ideals’ for Austen?  Or anti-ideals?  Does Anne share some of Catherine’s lack of moral insight and judgment?  Or she a wiser, more sophisticated woman like Austen herself?

Q4: How does Persuasion develop Austen’s theme of mothers and fathers?  We get an usual set of parents in this book, from Sir Walter Eliot, Lady Russell (a surrogate mother), and the two generations of Musgroves.  How does Austen reflect on the duties and sensibilities of parents, and their relationships with their children?  Note that this is the only book thus far that actually has young children in it!  Why do you think Austen focuses so much on the younger generation in this book? 

Q5: In Austen’s original ending of Persuasion, Anne and Wentworth have a long discussion together where they come to terms and he expresses his love. In the revised version, he simply writes her a letter. Why do you think she went backwards into epistolary writing to bring her novel to it’s romantic climax? Do we lose something by not seeing them together? Or is the letter more appropriate to the characters?

Q6: According to the director of the 1995 film, Persuasion is the “first modern love story”.  Did you feel this when reading the book?  What makes this more of a love story than Northanger Abbey (which was published in the same year, 1817)? Was Austen getting more romantic—or idealistically—in middle age? Why might this have been, according to the book itself? Where do we see more hope in this book than in Northanger Abbey or Lady Susan?