Abstract

Anne Elliot, the protagonist of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, spends much of the novel being ignored: “Anne, with an elegance of mind and sweetness of character, which must have placed her high with any people of real understanding, was nobody with either father or sister: her word had no weight…she was only Anne” (Austen 7). The novel is a critique of nineteenth-century British society which satirizes social class, marriage, and expectations regarding female behavior. In the narrator’s hands, Anne’s questions, private reactions, and ordinary words like “could,” take on added significance and power. Small changes in diction or shifts in subject become the engines that gradually alter both Anne’s opinions and the novel’s readers’. The use of rhetorical devices in the novel, Persuasion, encourages readers to reflect on their identity in comparison to conventional expectations, just as the novel displays Anne Elliot's move from being ignored to finding her true identity and place in society. This project is unique because it contributes to an understanding of the importance of words in the novel. It is through the narrator’s representations of her quiet asides, silent internal debates, and subtle re-directions that Anne Elliot, whose word at the beginning of the novel “had no weight,” by the novel’s end is finally able to speak and to choose a husband equal to her character though not to her status.