Jane Austen’s Persuasion: Finding Companionate Marriage through Sickness and Health

Abstract

In Jane Austen’s last novel Persuasion (1817), embodiment and disability function metonymically to show the emotional suffering of its characters. Austen gives temporary impairments to the novel’s protagonists, Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth, and physical disabilities to minor characters who suffer actual and metaphorical falls, such as Louisa Musgrove and Mrs. Smith. In Persuasion, Austen evokes pain and suffering in both mental and physical ways, with men, like Wentworth, experiencing mental impairments and women, like Anne, Louisa, and Mrs. Smith, experiencing physical impairments. Austen uses impairments, illness, and disability as prostheses to highlight the importance of a marriage of respect, affection, and rationality.