Left Hanging: Silence, Suspension, and Desire in Jane Austen's Persuasion

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.