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Persuading Rachel: Woolf and Austen's “little voyage of discovery”

from QUEER PASTS

Kathryn Simpson
Affiliation:
Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK
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Summary

Jane de Gay has argued that “Woolf 's preoccupation with the literary past had a profound impact on the content of her novels, on her philosophies of fiction and on certain aspects of her fictional method,” including “revisiting and revising plots which had made an impression on her as a reader” (1). As Woolf 's essay “Jane Austen” (1925) indicates, Austen's last completed novel, Persuasion (1818) engaged Woolf 's interest, so much so that in her own first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), one woman (Clarissa Dalloway) makes a gift of a copy of Persuasion to another (Rachel Vinrace). However, Rachel is disparaging of Jane Austen and complains that Austen is “so like a tight plait” (VO 49), suggesting that, as Rachel perceives them, Austen's novels are too ordered and predictable in terms of form and content, that the romance plots are too neatly concluded and, perhaps, that Austen's heroines always ultimately conform to social expectations. Critics such as Christine Froula and Susan Stanford Friedman argue that Clarissa's gift of an inscribed copy of Persuasion, as well as the discussion about “Jane” that goes on between Clarissa and Richard Dalloway, attempt to persuade Rachel to enter dominant heterosexual culture via “the plots of the female literary tradition” that contribute to the cultural promise of “marriage and maternity as the destiny that will fulfill her [a woman's] life” (Froula 148, 136). However, Clarissa's gift, her explanation of her own motivation for marriage, and the complicated nature of persuasion itself, opens up other ways of exploring The Voyage Out in the light of this earlier novel.

Persuasion is the novel that diverges most from the predictable pattern of Austen's other plots and there are elements of Austen's “tight plait” of a plot in Persuasion that seemingly for Woolf were ripe for a little unraveling. In “Jane Austen” Woolf speculates that, had she lived for longer, Austen may have written novels that “trespass” beyond the literary boundaries within which her work is typically located, giving rise to novels in which a greater “complexity of human nature” would have been apparent (143, 145). Detecting “a new element in Persuasion” and a sense of “transition” to a new stage of writing (144, 143), Woolf considers that Austen's next six novels would have been more “suggestive” in conveying not only what characters said but what remains “unsaid” (145).

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Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2017

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