The Art of Knowing Your Own Nothingness

The Art of Knowing Your Own Nothingness

Rae Greiner

ELH, Volume 77, Number 4, Winter 2010, pp. 893-914 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by Indiana University Libraries at 01/23/11 4:50PM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elh/summary/v077/77.4.greiner.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elh/summary/v077/77.4.greiner.html

893ELH 77 (2010) 893–914 © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

THe ArT of Knowing YoUr own noTHingness

bY rAe greiner

A little over ten years ago, James Chandler published England in 1819, in which he characterized romantic historicism “in terms of a massive altering of ‘the case.’”1 Citing André Jolles’s 1930 Einfache Formen (Simple Forms), he argued that “the case . . . is not merely an instantiation of a general scheme or normative system; nor is it just the form in which that instantiation occurs”; it is, rather, “the occurrence of an anomaly for such a system or scheme,” making vis-ible “the posing of a problem for the framework in respect to which the object or event is represented.”2 Cases are forms of mobility, and these days, the study of their travel is decidedly in vogue. Critical Inquiry recently devoted two issues to the case, the first (summer 2007) organized around efforts to historicize case-making procedures, and the second (Autumn 2007) around questions of personhood, ask-ing “what happens,” as series editor Lauren berlant put it, “when the substance of caseness is provided by the ‘person’—an idea of a per-son, a kind of person, a norm of personhood.”3 The subjects of these essays range from moral philosophy to lyric form, bad teeth to slow death, prompting us to wonder what’s behind the case form’s present attraction. berlant offers the possibility that because a case “verifies something in a system,” it acts as a measure of the system’s normative efforts.4 Cases in this instance are uninteresting or are made to be so that the system can absorb anomalies otherwise threatening to it. A different tack would elaborate the multiple registers the case form keeps simultaneously in play, from the grammatical and temporal to the deliberative and aesthetic. Here cases are not normative but exploratory and circumstantial, a conception Chandler had in mind when he described the romantic case in terms of a dynamic media-tion “between descriptive and normative orders.”5 The case’s appeal would thus lie in its rhetorical and heuristic applications, for the way it exemplifies the deliberative process: both by staging that process in action and by providing a localized instance of it.

The following pages broaden and complicate an assertion made but unelaborated by berlant, that “when executed conventionally, the case study is a claim about realism.”6 Jane Austen’s Persuasion—its title

894 Knowing Your Own Nothingness

underscoring the importance to that novel of rhetoric—is the literary case around which this essay centers. but i begin with Adam smith, since the cases central to that novel are rooted in a smithian account of sympathy. The techniques of an emergent literary realism circulate in the highly disciplined, abstracting gestures smith associates with the sympathetic imagination and that nineteenth-century realist novelists subsequently turned to their own ethical and representational uses. while Austen affords a particularly rich example of realism’s debt to the sympathy debates of the mid- to late-eighteenth century, this is ultimately an argument about nineteenth-century realist narrative practice more broadly, and the realists’ putting to use of a case-based representational strategy inherited from smith. if Persuasion’s cases are (or can be) remarkably elastic, generating provisional, imaginative solutions to the problems at hand, this has partly to do with Austen’s efforts at placing cases and their making at the core of her realism as well as her plot. it is a practice through which that century’s realism comes to define itself, as a sympathetic bringing together of moral feeling and judgment with representations of individual people in particular circumstances, accurately given, and with a verisimilitude of detail on which their ethical force relies. As James eli Adams ar-gues, later nineteenth-century writers (including ruskin and eliot) saw realism as “an instrument of moral education” that worked by “enlarg[ing] the reader’s understanding by nurturing sympathy, which is confirmed above all in the power to feel a common humanity at work in humble modes of life, petty aspirations, thwarted desire.”7 smith provides the realists with a strategy for treating cases as the vehicles of fellow-feeling, not by padding them thickly with moral content but by drawing attention to sympathy’s built-in narrative dimensions and to the fictions of feeling sympathy produces. As ian Duncan suggests, there are two reasons why fiction—“traditionally stigmatized as inauthentic for its divergence from truth or fact”—so successfully becomes, by the late-eighteenth century, “the mode of representation best fitted to render the ‘nothing’ that is the empirical domain of common life”: first, “because that ‘nothing’ had gone unremarked by the historical record,” and second, “because that domain is itself already fictive, an intersubjective representation sanctioned by custom.”8 The “nothing” of sympathetic fellow-feeling, i suggest, is at the heart of nineteenth-century realist form.

895Rae Greiner

i. ADAm smiTH: THe CAse for sYmPATHY

Adam smith was no ordinary literary critic. in his major writings, he only occasionally relates the plots or titles of literary works and has virtually nothing to say about novels, despite entertaining a yen for swift. Yet smith had an abiding interest in imaginative forms, and his belief that civic virtue consists in speculative, fictive modes of thought was crucial to his overall project even prior to the first publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which went through six english editions in his lifetime.9 As renata Jermołowicz writes, “smith adored literature” both Classical and modern, a fact gleaned in part from what we know of thirty lectures smith delivered in edinburgh between 1762 and 1763, in which he “departed from the stereotype of the lecturer who was merely a linguist and grammarian becoming also a literary critic, historian, stylist, writer, and orator.”10 in a similar vein, Duncan asserts that smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres “constitute the first significant university programme devoted to the analysis of english literary discourse.”11 According to Duncan, critics have offered differing accounts of smith’s role in facilitating the shift from a pedagogy grounded in traditional civic virtue to one center-ing on the literary values of polite discourse and sensibility, a shift alternately styled as one from rhetoric to literature. Duncan argues that what smith’s lectures do best is map out “the rhetorical function of literary discourse in a modern culture”; as such, they “represent one of the first analytical descriptions of literacy as a modern, secular technology of subject-formation” (“As,” 38).

for my purposes, Duncan’s most valuable claim is that smith’s Lectures are designed to formulate a reading subject along with the specific practices her reading would likely entail. smith “promoted a structural and systematic subject-fashioning oriented to the emergent domains of modernity,” Duncan writes; the lectures’ “distinctive in-novation lies in their advocacy of the constitution of a new kind of modern subject through the techniques of literacy—specifically, they constitute the modern subject as a reader” (“As,” 42). in The Theory of Moral Sentiments smith maintains that an important part of this reader’s training was in sympathy, which requires that a person imagine what it would be like to be someone else, situated where he is. it’s crucial that, for smith, this involves imagining not simply what you would do if you found yourself in similar circumstances, but what you would do if you were not you but someone else entirely—hence the high premium placed on imaginative effort. in this model, sympathy becomes a primary channel for readerly engagements taking place


within the terrain of fiction. The economy of sympathy turns out to be a materialist one, its sentimental changes of mind corresponding to contemporary notions of intersubjectivity. smith’s originality, as Duncan puts it, “lies in the recognition of a subject-formation that takes place through the techniques of literacy, and is dialogical in its operation: the activation of ‘sentiment’ occurs in a sympathetic transaction between the representation and the reader or audience, as opposed to its being found ‘in’ either the text or the reader’s psychology” (“As,” 47).

smith’s reliance on the case form has everything to do with its imagi-native capacities. Potential sympathizers are readers well-equipped with representational savvy, called upon to sharpen their narrativizing skills in a world organized between minds. The case form hones a reader’s intelligence for the heightened levels of abstraction that literacy, along with sympathy, requires. As Chandler suggests, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, “especially in fiction,” the case can func-tion as “a discourse, a genre, and a way of thinking.”12 That last claim will be particularly important for what follows. for in smith, sympathy is fundamentally a way of thinking about others. it usually results in feeling but is not equivalent to it. because our senses “never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person,” sympathy involves the mental elaboration of cases, not feeling what others feel.13 “it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception” of another’s “sensations,” smith writes; “[neither] can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. it is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy” (T, 9). oriented toward the “as if” of other ontological positions (rather than epistemological certainty), the sympathetic case situates other people into imaginative scenarios with explanatory potential. it posits the real not in the expe-rience of feeling per se but in an openly fictive, simulated sharing of feeling with others, smithian abstraction turning real feelings into the more productively traded impressions of mutual fellowship. smith’s theory of the moral sentiments thus provides a theory of fiction, as sympathy’s commerce in representations provides the motion through which our sense of fellow-feeling develops.

smith’s readers sometimes take the above passage to imply that sympathy depends on knowing the truth about the other’s case, facts whose verification can ignite our sympathy and whose failing to be known (or proving wrong) can squelch it. The editors of the glasgow edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments distinguish between smith and David Hume on the basis of such proof, understood in terms of

897Rae Greiner

merit. Hume’s agent sympathizes with the “pleasure or pain produced in a person affected by an action,” they say; Hume “thinks of the spectator as sharing by sympathy the pleasure of the benefit itself” (T, 13). for smith, since sympathy can respond to “any feeling,” the “first role in moral approbation concerns the motive of the agent” (T, 13). in smithian “double sympathy,” they claim, one sympathizes with the feelings of the principal person affected but also—and fore-most—with the “benevolent motive of the agent” (T, 13). sympathy is doubly enhanced when we know of the agent’s good intentions, while presumably drying up when his motives are or seem to be suspect.

but if this formulation emphasizes the notion that, to put it crudely, smith’s sympathizer judges first while Hume’s first feels, it misleadingly implies that sympathy’s judgments work best where other people, and their intentions, are confidently known. smith’s use of the case form suggests, on the contrary, that such knowledge is hard to come by, and further, that sympathy flourishes precisely because the minds and feelings of others can never be known except in an approximate way. “nature,” smith writes, “when she loaded us with our own sorrows, thought that they were enough, and therefore did not command us to take any further share in those of others, than what was necessary to prompt us to relieve them” (T, 47). As smith explains:

[w]hen we condole with our friends in their afflictions, how little do we feel, in comparison of what they feel? we sit down by them, we look at them, and while they relate to us the circumstances of their misfortune, we listen to them with gravity and attention. but while their narration is every moment interrupted by those natural bursts of passion which often seem almost to choak them in the midst of it; how far are the languid emotions of our hearts from keeping time to the transports of theirs? we may . . . inwardly reproach ourselves with our own want of sensibility, and perhaps, on that account, work ourselves up into an artificial sympathy, which, however, when it is raised, is always the slightest and most transitory imaginable; and generally, as soon as we have left the room, vanishes, and is gone for ever. (T, 47)

“Loaded” with our own feeling, we aren’t exactly eager to shoulder the weight of other people’s; the laments of even our closest friends do little to motivate our feeling anything other than an “artificial sympathy” that disappears in minutes (T, 47). while their “narration” contains choke-inducing “bursts of passion,” our feelings fizzle no mat-ter how hard we try to screw them up (T, 47). naturally disinclined to take on the feelings of others, we are rarely willing to “go along with” excessive feeling of any kind (T, 45). The sympathetic machinery


only really gets going when something less obvious occurs that it is up to us, imaginatively, to figure out. even with motives presumably as clear as can be, our friends are liable to deflect our sympathy rather than attract it.

on the other hand, we are “more apt to weep and shed tears for such as . . . seem to feel nothing for themselves, than for those who give way to all the weakness of sorrow: and in this particular case, the sympathetic grief of the spectator appears to go beyond the original passion in the person principally concerned” (T, 48, my emphasis). smith’s preference for a stoical repression of feeling is unmistakable but only partly explains the increased aptitude for a sympathy that responds to feelings not so much repressed as imagined. The “particu-lar case” of the man who “seems to feel nothing” for himself involves both his “seeming to feel” without “giv[ing] way” to expression and our related ability to feel or “appear to” feel by imagining his original passion. That is, because his feeling is undemonstrated and unverified, sympathy manifests an interest in his case in us. our own feelings can “go beyond” origins they have themselves created. This is clearest in smith’s famous claim that we can sympathize with the dead, who feel nothing but with whose imagined feelings we will readily sympathize. such cases exemplify the fact that smith’s theory describes a repre-sentational system in which not feeling but imagined, fictive feeling is the stuff of sympathetic transfer. As smith puts it, even when we feel with others an “analogous emotion” (T, 10) this is not the same as feeling what they feel; sympathy’s sentiments must be similar enough “as is sufficient for [their] harmony” but not their identity: “[though] they will never be unisons, they may be concords,” smith writes, “and this is all that is wanted or required” (T, 22).

Critics frequently underestimate the high level of abstraction in-volved in smithian sympathy, leading them to presume that sympathy functions according to a visual logic. The idea that “sympathy as an experience of the visible is a consistent thread in smith” girds the as-sumption that the theater is sympathy’s structural analogue.14 out of this assumption arise a persistent set of ethical problems unresolved by eighteenth-century moral philosophy and nineteenth-century novelists alike: How can you verify what the other is feeling? what happens when you cannot see, but are merely reading about, other people with whom you might sympathize? These might well be pernicious ethical bugbears, but they are not smith’s. As we have seen, smith’s cases provide speculative accounts of mental actions independent of authen-ticity claims and founded instead on something like fiction, invented

899Rae Greiner

narratives detailing the possible or likely events that have led to an emotional response. each case is deliberated according to the principle of “propriety,” smith’s term for measuring a feeling’s fitness to the oc-casion in which it occurs (T, 12). smith is quite unambiguous about this point: sympathy “arises not so much from the view of the passion, but from the situation that excites it”; bodily passion—indeed, close proximity or contact of any kind—is likelier to discourage sympathy than promote it (T, 12). further, even our imagined representations of other people’s feelings must conform to a carefully managed sense of propriety. The whole thing is precarious, a balancing act with one agent amping up his feeling while the other chokes it down, both at-tempting to conjure a representational middle ground out of emotional disproportion.

sympathy, it turns out, is really hard. Confronted with other people and their emotions, we’d prefer to turn (if not run) away. sympathy operates best when we can abstract other people’s feelings, approximate rather than share them, and cases are the means through which this abstraction can most successfully take place. And because they are a means for abstracting feeling into narrative, they provide a useful model for thinking about what drives realism’s handling of, for example, the fictional type, a kind of case which “organically binds together the general and the particular both in characters and situations” or secures our sense of characters’ fictionality while simultaneously “conjur[ing] as its own ‘background’ an empirical cultural understanding that the type is only a mental abstraction from more real concrete individuals in the world.”15 realist representation yokes particularity and general-ity to a process smith aligns with the sympathetic case, matching a concern for the real conditions in which individuals are situated, on the one hand, with the willful production of an imagined, departicular-ized feeling on the other.16 sympathy’s golden mean—its concord of unmatched but harmonious feeling—recurs in realist form as fellow-feeling, as readers experience what smith called “going along with” others, imaginatively sharing the mentalities that unfold in narrative without being compelled to merge or even identify with them (T, 83). moving us between minds, the sympathetic case helps activate the impression of realism: not by sharing the feelings of characters but in our ability to think and feel “along with” them. marshall brown has described realism as a “structure of consciousness,” “an attribute, a quality, an impression created by the novel” and thus “not something ‘in’ the novel but the novel’s impact on readers.”17 nineteenth-century realism relies on sympathy to cultivate its particular mindset, giving


shape to a double impression: that these novels “feel real” is an effect of both the sympathetic structures of consciousness they generate and the fellow-feeling to which those structures give rise.

Chandler’s latest thinking about these issues focuses on an “inter-mediate moment in the history of the case,” visible in its “sentimental form.”18 The sentimental case implicitly critiques earlier models, es-pecially casuistic ones whose moral principles the reader must parse from given details. “smith insists that the moral life is debilitated by the logic chopping of the attempt to find moral guidance in the niceties of putting hypothetical cases,” Chandler writes; thus while smith retains the word “case” he means something new. “Case is the word that he uses to identify a person’s situation,” Chandler explains; “not, as in casuistry, the situation that they must ethically negotiate in respect to a set of rules, but simply the case in which they stand.”19 while there is no compelling generic reason to seek out such cases exclusively in eighteenth-century sentimental novels rather than in nineteenth-century realist ones, the latter making good use of senti-mentality in many forms, there may well be an historical one. with the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments sandwiched between that of samuel richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748) and the variously sentimental journeys of mackenzie and sterne, it makes a certain sense to say that smith’s sentimentalization of cases was of a piece with these novelists’ attempts to rewire our moral and aesthetic judgments ac-cording to the technical demands of secular literacy. but we might also emphasize how noticeably smith’s cases gear in the service of a leveling effect familiar to nineteenth-century realism. while Chandler offers a convincing account of what drew the sentimentalists to the case form, smithian sympathy privileges an aesthetics of “mediocrity” that would prove especially appealing to the realists (T, 27). stipulating that our passions be governed by “a certain mediocrity” of pitch—“the pitch which the spectator can go along with,” neither too high or too low to block his interest—sympathy’s moderating temperament prestructures realism’s affective domain (T, 27). As the engines of sympathy fire only as feeling is tempered to a middling pitch, so too does realist repre-sentation define its special purchase on the real through sentimental cases that compel our interest though similar feats of moderation. by fostering a kind of contentless, abstract fellow-feeling, the conditions out of which a sympathy with any feeling whatsoever might arise, the realist novelists sought to elicit sympathetic forms of responsiveness in readers who, in going along with the minds of others, don’t feel anything in particular and need not feel anything at all.

901Rae Greiner

The innovation of smith’s model lies in the fact that it joins ethics to aesthetic and affective mediocrity, configuring sympathy’s structure in terms that are soon recast as realist verisimilitude. The propriety sympathy always works to achieve does away with emotional and rep-resentational highs and lows, but is also context-specific: where some passions are “indecent to express very strongly,” there are others “of which the strongest expressions are upon many occasions extremely graceful” (T, 27). smith’s insistence that sympathy measure the fitness of a feeling to its situation or degree of expression works analogously, on aesthetic and ethical levels, in the realist novelists’ insistence that verisimilitude could be instrumental for cultivating sympathy, the realist novel good for cultivating ethical perspectives. Treating The Theory of Moral Sentiments as a work of social theory in which narrative is central allows us to more fully appreciate its influence on nineteenth-century novelistic practice. such a view is useful for better understanding the updated case form smith helps usher in, for while the perils of casuistry seem mostly to have vanished by the mid-nineteenth century, sympathy is endlessly evoked in the pages of that century’s novels.20 sympathy there isn’t something you feel but something you do. in gauging the propriety of someone else’s feeling, in determining whether or not it is suitable to its circumstance and thus to what extent we can extend our approval, we are in effect measuring its realism: how much it matters, whether or not it counts. The particular arbitrations that—refusing to settle or resolve into conclusion—propel the action of the sympathetic case mirror those that fuel the realist plot and its character system. it is in their deliberate efforts to achieve a version of sympathetic “me-diocrity” that we can best account for the ways authors like Austen, to whom we now turn, recast smith’s insights in realist form.

it is worth remembering another of smith’s insights here: that in most of our encounters with other people, neither sympathy nor feeling results. At a time of increasing urbanization and travel, in a world that had begun to seem newly crowded, smith worked to outfit sympathy for managing one’s ability to interact with and relate to strangers. in fact sympathy is the mechanism that equips us to feel an interest in those for whom we might otherwise care very little. That mediation should be sympathy’s central activity makes sense in this light, for it facilitates mutual and imaginative understanding between minds that might not otherwise meet.21 To say, then, that nineteenth-century realism arises not from things and stuff but from sympathy and other processes of cognitive mobility is to say that it is a case-based form in which imaginative speculation plays a crucial part.22 given the central


place her title accords to rhetoric, it is odd that discussions of Persuasion often bypass Austen’s many references to cases and the work it takes to make them. The remainder of this essay highlights the relationship between sympathy and realist case-making in Austen, particularly as the case becomes the novel’s key exemplifying technique. The novel’s temporal disjunctions, the multiple revisions that furnish its plot, reflect Austen’s formal concerns and the mentality of her principal character, a woman defined by nearly everyone around her in terms of an aggres-sive singularity, out of sync, out of order, and out of time. As we shall see, Anne’s way of making cases proves central to both her growing ethical sensibility and her potential for plot. Adapting sympathy to realism, Austen gives Anne elliot the potential for new life long after her own sad case has apparently been closed for good.

ii. PERSuaSION’s CAses

Anne elliot’s final conversations with wentworth involve a disagree-ment and a reprisal. both take place after the two lovers are happily reunited, the disorders of their earlier plot finally set right. in the first, Anne responds to wentworth’s harangue regarding the “horrible eligi-bilities and proprieties of the match” he once feared had secured her to her cousin, mr. elliot.23 wentworth’s mistake is that he has failed to see the two cases as “different”:

You should have distinguished . . . . You should not have suspected me now; the case so different, and my age so different. if i was wrong in yielding to persuasion once, remember that it was to persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of risk. when i yielded, i thought it was to duty; but no duty could be called in aid here. in marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been incurred, and all duty violated. (P, 197)

Later that same evening, even after “all the surprise and suspense, and every other painful part of the morning” is said to have “dissipated,” Anne continues reflecting on that difference:

i have been thinking over the past, and trying impartially to judge of the right and wrong, i mean with regard to myself; and i must believe that i was right, much as i suffered from it, that i was perfectly right in being guided by the friend whom you will love better than you do now. To me, she was in the place of a parent. Do not mistake me, however. i am not saying that she did not err in her advice. it was, perhaps, one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event

903Rae Greiner

decides; and for myself, i certainly never should, in any circumstance of tolerable similarity, give such advice. but i mean, that i was right in submitting to her, and that if i had done otherwise, i should have suffered more in continuing the engagement than i did even in giving it up, because i should have suffered in my conscience. (P, 198)

elements of both speeches are distinctly smithian, especially Anne’s efforts to summon an internal moderator who can adjudicate not right from wrong but this case from that. Anne is clearly waffling. “i must believe that i was right” becomes “i was perfectly right,” then eases into a kind of compromise: maybe it’s just “one of those cases . . . the event decides.” This last declaration has led to many a critical disputa-tion on the subjects of moral relativism and “moral luck,” yet the truth is that Anne is doing here what she does many times throughout the novel, which is to deliberate upon—but not settle—her own case.24 indeed, she suggests that wentworth should be doing this work too, or that, if he is, he isn’t doing it right. but what does Anne do, or gain, by turning herself into a case?

The case of Anne and wentworth covers an unusual expanse of time in this novel, unusual not because their romance is central—nothing odd in that—but because the case has already been decided when the novel begins. Anne elliot, with her “claims of birth, beauty, and mind,” was once engaged to wentworth, but as she isn’t the kind of girl “to be snatched off by a stranger without alliance or fortune” (P, 27), had long ago been “persuaded to believe the engagement a wrong thing” (P, 28). “A few months had seen the beginning of the end of their acquaintance,” we’re told, and if Anne’s “attachment and regrets” continued to last “for a long time,” the result of this—“an early loss of bloom and spirits”—is all that remains to her (P, 28). indeed, loss and diminution define her: she is “too little from home, too little seen. Her spirits were not high” (P, 18); she doesn’t count and isn’t thought of. Deserving better treatment from her family, she is instead ignored and inconsequential. Her “word had no weight. . . . [s]he was only Anne” (P, 11).25

Case closed.but of course, it isn’t. And Anne already suspects it isn’t as early

as chapter 4. Although (as we’ve just seen) she’ll change her mind on this point later, Anne has been actively keeping her judgment about the past open for some time and feels “persuaded” by the time wentworth returns to somersetshire “that under every disadvantage of disapprobation at home, and every anxiety attending his profession, all their probable fears, delays, and disappointments,” she “should yet


have been a happier woman in maintaining the engagement, then she had been in the sacrifice of it” (P, 29). “And this,” we are told, “she fully believed,”

had the usual share, had even more than a usual share of all such solicitudes and suspense been theirs, without reference to the actual results of the case, which, as it happened, would have bestowed earlier prosperity than could be reasonably calculated on. (P, 29)

in hindsight these sentiments look wrongheaded, especially so once the ending of the novel, reinforcing the value of duty over impru-dence, rewards Anne for waiting it out. maybe her later decision is “perfectly right” after all; obeying the injunction against marrying a man with “nothing but himself to recommend him” might be proof that in Austen’s novels hard lessons must be learned the hard way (P, 27). Love’s open declaration in the conclusion would seem to shut the case on this romantic plot once and for all. but how then should one reckon the force of Anne’s refusal of endings?

many more plots are opened up in this passage than can be realized. The most obvious coils around Anne’s regret, with Anne believing she ought to have married despite all the “probable” consequences. After all, the “actual results of the case” have come along to prove the prob-able wrong. it could be that hindsight is 20/20, but that’s not quite the whole story. most striking is that Anne claims to have “fully believed” the case would have happily resolved itself regardless of either the “probable” or the “actual results,” results she treats, rather surprisingly, as more or less incidental. The ostensible gap between what Anne thinks in chapter 4—that she was wrong not to have maintained the engagement—and what she says aloud at the novel’s end—that she was “perfectly right” to have been persuaded not to—isn’t as great as it once seemed. That is, even in the earlier passage, the facts of the case don’t make the case: the closed case opens up again, resurrected from the dead well before any indication that wentworth’s romantic feelings do. Though the estrangement between them must by now, seven years later, seem entirely final, Anne’s reflections on her own shut case generate a new one, that of the “happier woman” she “should yet have been.” representing her past with wentworth as a case whose actual results she need not reference, Anne rewrites the past into a subjunctive mood and a conditional tense, syntactic territory that endows both the future and past with the potential for “even more than a usual share” of “suspense.” by imagining what “should yet have

905Rae Greiner

been,” Anne treats the past as an unfinished business and a matter of continued speculation. she treats it, that is, like a case. This would seem wishful thinking, mere naïveté, were it not that her recourse to the language of the case allows Anne to re-think and unsettle the fixed conclusions of history itself.

Harry shaw has argued that nineteenth-century realist fiction rep-resents a quotidian world “[split] apart” into seemingly infinite levels, “the identity and coherence of which are underwritten by a sense of historical structure and progression.”26 That which “makes reality real,” he writes, “is immanent in the mundane itself; it is what orders and gives meaning to the epiphenomena of everyday life. what makes reality real is a process”(NR, 98–9). what roland barthes saw as a “farrago” of surface plenitude generating an effect of the real, shaw understands as a process involving “the creation of a set of ‘contingent’ (that is, historical) and systematic relationships, filling in the gaps as occasion serves and our needs require” (NR, 101). in other words, where realist metonymy for barthes constantly slides “from one damn thing to another,” in shaw realist contingency produces not confusion but historical method (NR, 101). To shaw’s insight i am adding that the process of making “reality real” in Austen is designed to produce a sympathetic realism. The contingent relations generating shaw’s historical imagination—“filling in the gaps as occasion serves and our needs require”—are structurally analogous to the sympathetic cases described by smith. in Persuasion, we can see this most clearly in the way that Anne’s exercise in self-preservation perpetuates a temporally mobile conception of self. Knowing full well that wanting and wishing alone cannot unmake it, Anne nevertheless refuses to let the past stay put. even as the novel’s many “should have” and “might have beens” stretch out against fact into improbable futures, tinctured with the hopeless knowledge of all that wentworth might have done differently, but didn’t, their sheer numbers hint at the latent power of imagining alternative endings and beginnings that comes from reckoning with where one is now.

indeed it is striking that Anne should continue to treat her own story as a series of cases even after the conflicts of her plot have been resolved, even as her story—along with the rest of the novel—comes to an end. incredibly, Anne is still imagining other endings for herself even as this one resolves itself into conclusion. incredibly, she does so even after wentworth’s avowal would seem to have put that desire permanently to rest. And though Anne will emphasize the difference between the two cases—a difference wentworth rather stupidly, by


Anne’s standards, overlooks—it is because they are cases that they con-tinue to be revisable, that they can continue to be formulated in terms of means rather than ends. if there are many ways in which to make cases in this novel, Anne’s method capitalizes on the creative power of a provisional logic that keeps history in suspension and cases pending. And we can see in this a reluctance to be permanently shielded from the dangers of that uncertainty, even by marriage. if making cases is Anne’s way of participating in the sort of temporal and virtual circula-tion that characterizes the experience of reading and fellow-feeling at once, the sympathetic imagination emerges as the chosen vehicle for doing so by unsettling the firmness of set conclusions. The histori-cal and sympathetic impulses converge in Anne’s desire to be both continuous with and other than past and future selves. she remains unsettled in this way through sympathy with herself.

Having begun in this way, the novel cannot resolve itself with the usual, tidy conclusions—and it doesn’t. “who can be in doubt of what followed?” the narrator asks in typical Austenian fashion (P, 199). but doubt steals back in. Anne in the end may be “tenderness itself,” but “future war” clouds the horizon, and the “glor[y] in being a sailor’s wife” is checked by “the tax of quick alarm” (P, 202–3). Critics often describe Austen’s plots as developmental, yet Persuasion—her only contemporaneously-set novel—upsets temporal and diegetic expecta-tions at every turn, beginning as it does with the conclusion of Anne’s plot and framing everything that follows from it as a readjustment to solutions that don’t stick and endings that refuse to hold. Tony Tan-ner has noted the “radical transformation or devaluation” in Persua-sion of all the “normal sources of stability and order in Jane Austen’s world.”27 more recently, mary favret argues that the novel’s “broken story” reflects its setting in the tentative peace following napoleon’s apparent defeat.28 Ushering members of the british navy back to land, even landing them in the elliot estate, Austen brings the rhythms of war home to the bodies and minds of those who remained on eng-lish shores: “the structures of feeling demanded by war—its peculiar blend of self-alienation, selfless caring for others, alarm, survival, even a felicity hard to distinguish from pain—migrate into everyday life, becoming so well understood, standing under everything one does, that one hardly knows how or when to account for them.”29 Arguing against the idea that Austen’s depicted worlds are sealed off from the influence of historical change, favret joins other critics looking to form as a record of history—in the “pervasive anteriority” of represented time, the many “could- and might-have-beens [that dwell] in [their]

907Rae Greiner

uncanny, inordinate detail.”30 As shaw notes, Anne is unwilling to al-low “a love-story capped with the acquisition of wentworth to exhaust the possibilities of her former self and to silence her earlier voice, the voice that said ‘no’ to him” (NR, 163). Anne’s refusal to relinquish even the most the painful aspects of her former life makes it difficult for readers to blot out the past for the sake of present joy.

in aligning the novel with the imaginative demands of sympathy i am joining in that chorus. for if the novel relies on elements of its form to provide a sense of what it feels like to live among the height-ened exigencies of embattled, historical life, Austen brings sympathy to bear on that form and on that experience: once the past is, like the real, a field whose meaning is not rigidly dictated by closed-off actuali-ties and completed events, perspectives taken and feelings felt in the present have a hand in determining its survival, modifying whether or not, and how long, its conclusions last. That possibility is central to how we should understand the particular force of Anne’s imagining, thrown into bald relief against the stubborn memorializing of nearly everyone around her, all of whom go to great lengths to refuse time and all that comes with it. mrs. Clay, elizabeth comments approvingly, “never forgets who she is” (P, 33); even sympathetic friends like Lady russell are of a sort who “never wished the past undone” (P, 29). engulfed in “a general air of oblivion,” the family practices a “perfect indifference and apparent unconsciousness . . . which seemed almost to deny any recollection” of Anne’s traumatic past (P, 30). Change occurs but is almost universally unacknowledged. even wentworth, telling Anne “to my eye you could never alter,” tells her a transparent if pleasing lie (P, 196). Anne’s dealings with the past are, as we have seen, far more flexible, but her connection to her former life is nei-ther simple nor one-directional. it is, rather, sympathetic, a relation modified by the smithian insight that subjectivity is a social construct borne of carving the self into an array of subject positions that are then—temporarily, imaginatively—reconsolidated.31 Alex woloch has suggested that being a character in Austen means being “continually contrasted, juxtaposed, [and] related to others,” yet throughout this novel Anne juxtaposes herself to herself, and to other, imagined selves.32 sympathy with the self, far from perverting the aim of fellow-feeling, proves to be constitutive of it.

some will argue that Anne’s moral compass stands out in the novel largely for being the only one in it. Persuasion’s readers can’t ignore Austen’s closed and decidedly cruel judgments, as when she characterizes mrs. musgrove—her “mental sorrow” along with her


corpulence—as a case of “unbecoming conjunctions” which “taste can-not tolerate” and “ridicule will seize” (P, 59). Lady russell assures sir walter that “it is singularity which often makes the worst part of our suffering,” and Anne’s awful singularity is nowhere in doubt (P, 16). even wentworth, who isn’t exactly clueless when it comes to ethical judgments, angrily vows to marry “any pleasing young woman who came his way, excepting Anne elliot” (P, 54). in other words, it may seem wrong to argue that Anne’s narrativizing strategies are the sine qua non of Austenian realism, given that she seems an exception to the rule in a world dense with moral imbeciles. That her energies are directed toward so much self-reinvention may give the lie to any claim extending Anne’s ethical reach beyond her own small life.

Yet the novel links Anne’s singularity to a wider ethical sociability by representing it as an art. Austen’s narrator refers to this art—“the art of knowing your own nothingness”—just after Anne first leaves home to live with her sister mary at Uppercross:

Anne had not wanted this visit to Uppercross, to learn that a removal from one set of people to another, though at a distance of only three miles, will often include a total change of conversation, opinion, and idea. she had never been staying there before, without being struck by it, or without wishing that other elliots could have her advantage in seeing how unknown, or unconsidered there, were the affairs which at Kellynch-hall were treated as of such general publicity and pervading interest; yet, with all this experience, she believed she must now submit to feel that another lesson, in the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle, was become necessary for her;—for certainly, coming as she did, with a heart full of the subject which had been completely occupying both houses in Kellynch for many weeks, she had expected rather more curiosity and sympathy than she found. (P, 39)

Anne is called on to “submit to” the “lesson” of her “own nothing-ness,” and it’s clearly painful to learn. but of course Anne knows her own nothingness all too well even at this early point in the novel. The difference hinges on understanding how that nothingness extends be-yond her and everything else she knows. Austen’s pronouns magnify that extension—this is the lesson of “our own nothingness beyond our own circle”—and, in calling such knowing an “art,” she urges the tie between this art and her own. Learning one’s own nothingness in rela-tion to the larger world is, after all, a case-making endeavor. neither Anne nor the novelist needs to call it as much for us to recognize the parallel: it’s the art of abstracting oneself into another body, the social

909Rae Greiner

body, now wholly generalized and distinct from any more local sort, including that of the family (a body from which the “nobody” Anne has, to a large extent, already been exiled).33 Austen calls knowing our own nothingness an art both because it is hard to do, a difficult imaginative labor, and because the abstract thinking it demands takes place through an aesthetic—and sympathetic—form. “The art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle” describes an awareness of one’s own exemplarity: the individuality and mutual unknowableness one shares with everybody else, the realization that what i share with the other is that i am living “this one [life] rather than that, only one, one at all.”34 in the absence of sympathy one must learn to expect in a world of strangers—and we’re told that sympathy is precisely what Anne is looking for, but lacks—such work is all the more needful.35 one’s own nothingness is the sort of historicist lesson Anne’s metonymic extension teaches, for this case can be like another thanks to the circumstantiality of both. what resonates most forcibly in this novel is that Austen isn’t just letting readers in on what amounts to an awareness of realist fictionality; it’s something the main character in the novel must also come to know.

in Anne’s case, the art of knowing one’s own nothingness creates an amplified sense of the foreignness afforded by even a three miles’ distance: conversation, idea and opinion undergo a “total change” one cannot but be “struck by.” Here to know one’s own nothingness is not to be exceptionally outside the social order but to identify entirely with the nothingness that constitutes a generality otherwise framed as history itself. it’s a kind of smithian mediocrity writ large, wherein knowing one’s own nothingness produces not nihilism but sympathetic intersubjectivity. in this novel, one of the rhetorical functions that, as Duncan put it, “literary discourse [has] in a modern culture,” involves spelling out the “art” of adapting what we might call a sympathetic persuasion, which can turn nothingness from exceptionalism and conclusion (“only Anne”) into capacious revision (“As,” 38).36 After all, Anne has “never been staying” at Uppercross without wishing the same art of knowing for those “other elliots” lacking “her advantage in seeing how unknown, or unconsidered there, were the affairs” of Kellynch-hall (P, 38). no doubt the world is brimming with still more “other elliots” who remain “unknown” and “unconsidered” and to whose circle Anne will never belong (P, 38).

“nothingness” in Persuasion describes a fully abstracted, heavily-trafficked field beyond the local and into which Anne’s imaginative peregrinations extend laterally, from “only Anne” to “nobody” to those


“other,” supplementary Annes to whose lives i now turn. “submit[ting] to feeling” that “necessary” nothingness is how the novel defines the act of fellow-feeling, a fact on which smith’s insistence that sympathy isn’t mere self-interest depends. The novel frames egoism of that falsely projective kind in terms of a blinkered sympathy, to be sure, but also, and tellingly, as illiteracy. sir walter can “read his own history with an interest which never failed,” but “every other leaf [is] powerless” to attract his attention (P, 9). bad reading obstructs the intersubjective circuit of exchange, disabling feeling and baulking plot. Knowing one’s own nothingness, on the other hand, makes sympathy into art.

iii. oTHer Annes AnD wenTworTH’s nUTs

Anne, at seven and twenty, thought very differently from what she had been made to think at nineteen.—she did not blame Lady russell, she did not blame herself for having been guided by her; but she felt that were any young person, in similar circumstances, to apply to her for counsel, they would never receive any of such certain immediate wretchedness, such uncertain future good. (P, 29)

The remaining pages deal with multiplication both within Persua-sion and without. for if the novel’s ethical force coalesces around a lonely heroine well used to nothingness, it turns out that “only Anne” is anything but alone with herself. in the passage above, Anne’s numbers proliferate. There is the nineteen-year-old Anne, persuaded against her inclination, and the “different” Anne of twenty-seven (P, 29). if the elder Anne is haunted by the younger, she is also shadowed by another version of herself, that “any young person, in similar circumstances” whose plot ought not repeat her own.37 she might be or become an-other (indeed an “other”) Anne. or she might not. nineteen-year-old Anne is doubly “remembered” as the Anne of the past and some newer incarnation whose life might turn out otherwise. it’s a fantasy enabling change in the narrating Anne as well. she morphs into a new and improved sort of Lady russell, giving good counsel this time around by giving time itself a new flexibility: the new Anne “would never” be made to suffer it as the old Anne did. recalled and vanquished is “im-mediate wretchedness” along with “uncertain future good,” as temporal modulations, like Annes, thicken and spread (P, 203). The novel ends in “sunshine” and the “dread of a future war” (P, 203). what comes around goes around. The hope is, with a difference.

911Rae Greiner

when wentworth plays a numbers game the result is decidedly different. for him, what multiplies are nuts, not Annes (he will later deny her change: “to my eye you could never alter”), and firmness, not modulation, what matters most (P, 196). Assaying on the outrage of “too yielding and indecisive a character,” wentworth congratulates Louisa on having a different, and ultimately rather treacherous, one made “of decision and firmness” (P, 74). They are walking near winthrop when wentworth announces: “Here is a nut . . . [to] exemplify: a beautiful glossy nut, which, blessed with original strength, has outlived all the storms of autumn” (P, 74). His speech joins the efforts of exemplifi-cation and character-making, since the discussion of glossy nuts and weaker ones is merely a platform for exemplification itself: that is, for generating types. He even goes so far as to proclaim that this particular nut has feelings, claiming that without “a puncture, not a weak spot anywhere,” this nut, “while so many of his brethren have fallen and been trodden under foot, is still in possession of all the happiness that a hazel-nut can be supposed capable of” (P, 74).

still? Leaving aside the question of how much happiness a hazelnut is capable of having, we might wonder instead how much “character” can sustain a logic that proclaims “the worst evil of too yielding and indecisive a character, [is] that no influence over it can be depended on” (P, 74). what sort of character can be both unimpressionable and receptive at once? And what happened to the nut? we have to assume that, after “catching [it] down” from its prominence in “an upper bough,” and despite its glossy sheen and the absence of “weak spots”—all things that made the nut exemplary in the first place—wentworth simply tosses it to the ground, conscribing it to the very commonality into which “so many of its brethren have fallen and been trodden under foot” (P, 74). exemplification undoes exemplarity. The nut shatters into pieces. Case cracked.

but of course, it isn’t. And while there can be no knowing that went-worth learns the lesson Anne has tried to teach him—“you should have distinguished. . . . the case so different” (P, 197)—what we can know is that the differences in their strategies matter. wentworth’s failure of imagination is, in the case of the nut, a marker of the inflexibility he’ll need to shed in order to revise his relation to the past and revive the possibility of a future with Anne. not that he ever does, quite. Unlike her, he makes canons of cases, and as a result a terrible literalization takes place: rushing to exemplify the rule of nuts, Louisa cracks her skull instead. if Harry shaw is right to say that realism expresses a contingent world—not the “random, just-happening-to-be-there-


associations” of flux, but a world operating through cause and effect—i have begun to suggest that the making of cases is Persuasion’s way of demonstrating the ethical force of that contingency and the methods one might use to make sense of it (NR, 101). smithian sympathy is the operation on which ethical acts of exemplification are modeled, both in terms of Anne’s developing sympathetic awareness of her own nothingness and the cases of others, and in the way her plot organizes a series of situations constantly underwritten by and subject to revision. The casuistry inherent in wentworth’s speech is ridiculous when set against Anne’s more nimble imagining, but that it is also nearly fatal tells us just how seriously we should take the case of wentworth’s nut and the mind it nearly splinters.

shaw’s “historicist metonymy” can assume, he says, “as many inflec-tions as there are realist novelists” since “metonymy involves a habit of mind,” one that asks us to process each situation in its own right (“as it comes along”) along with ranging over its possible alternatives (NR, 104, 107). smith provided a means for aligning sympathy with historicist narrative form, in the form of cases that exercise the mind’s facility in dealing with particular kinds of abstraction. if cases in Per-suasion offer provisional solutions, means not ends, the same basic principle endows realist representation more broadly with an inher-ently sympathetic design. That is, if sympathy is not a feeling but a relation between minds, if it is designed to cultivate a “mediocrity” of feeling, imaginatively shared, then realism can be said to instantiate fellow-feeling at the level of form, in its invitation to “go along with” and approximate the movements of other minds, including our own. nineteenth-century realism is world-making not because of how very full it seems, either of things or of certain knowledge, but for its sym-pathetic imagination, where worlds, like Annes and the plots available to her, expand and multiply.

Indiana university

noTes1 James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of

Romantic Historicism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 203. see also Chandler, “on the face of the Case: Conrad, Lord Jim, and the sentimental novel,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 837–64.

2 Chandler, England in 1819, 207–8.3 Lauren berlant, “introduction: what Does it matter who one is?” Critical Inquiry

34 (2007): 2. see also berlant, “on the Case,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 663–72. 4 berlant, “introduction,” 1.5 Chandler, England in 1819, 209.

913Rae Greiner

6 berlant, “on the Case,” 669.7 James eli Adams, a History of Victorian Literature (oxford: wiley-blackwell,

2009), 189. realism “nurture[s] an increasingly self-conscious narrative stance,” “tacitly appeals to an ideal of objectivity, and thereby raises questions as to whether such an ideal is attainable” (190).

8 ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: the Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princ-eton Univ. Press, 2007), 125.

9 i use the term “fictive” in wolfgang iser’s sense, as a “self-disclosing,” openly fictional form for simulating “as if” ways of thinking (The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary anthropology [baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993], 16).

10 renata Jermołowicz, “remarks on Adam smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,” Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 7.20 (2004): 201, 204.

11 Duncan, “Adam smith, samuel Johnson and the institutions of english,” The Scottish Invention of English Literature, ed. robert Crawford (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 37.

12 Chandler, “on the face of the Case,” 837.13 Adam smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, glasgow edition, eds. D. D. raphael

and A. L. macfie (indianapolis: Liberty fund, 1982), 9. Hereafter abbreviated T and cited parenthetically by page number.

14 maureen Harkin, “Adam smith’s missing History: Primitives, Progress, and Prob-lems of genre,” ELH 72 (2005): 438. see also Paul goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005); David marshall, The Figure of the Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, adam Smith, and George Eliot (new York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986) and The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988); and Audrey Jaffe, Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction (ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2000).

15 george Lukács, Studies in European Realism, trans. edith bone (new York: grosset & Dunlap, 1964), 6; Catherine gallagher, “george eliot: immanent Victorian,” 1996 Lectures and Memoirs, from the Proceedings of the British academy, ed. marjorie Chibnall (oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 158 (republished in Representations 90 [2005]: 61–74). for gallagher, the “mixed” type emerges from mid-eighteenth-century debates about how “typical a character’s behavior needed to be before it could be judged ‘probable’,” debates showcasing the extent to which novels “stressed their departure from”—not resemblance to—“plausible narratives with referential assumptions,” and thus emphasized their fictionality (“The rise of fictionality,” The Novel, Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture, ed. franco moretti [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006] 343, 345). she claims that the “widespread acceptance of verisimilitude as a form of truth, rather than a form of lying, founded the novel as a genre” and “created the category of fiction” (341).

16 The case form is “exemplary” in a double sense: it exemplifies by illustrating a common, representative type, and by singling out the rare or extraordinary example (the “exemplary” one that breaks the mold). Thomas Pavel differently concludes that the motion between these poles registers idealism in these novels: seeking “a credible place for beautiful souls at the heart of the empirical world,” they scour the world for “plausible examples” of moral strength, beauty, and the like (“The novel in search of itself,” The Novel, Volume 2: Forms and Themes, ed. franco moretti [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006]: 22).

17 marshall brown, “The Logic of realism: a Hegelian Approach,” PMLa 96 (1981): 233, 226.


18 Chandler, “on the face of the Case,” 837.19 Chandler, “on the face of the Case,” 841.20 on casuistry and the Victorian novel, see Andrew H. miller, The Burdens of

Perfection: on Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2008).

21 J. Hillis miller, in The Form of Victorian Fiction (Cleveland: Arete Press, 1979), is among the first to treat time and intersubjectivity as the constitutive elements of Victorian fiction.

22 Duncan argues that smith’s Lectures illustrate that “[language] is transparent not to ‘things’ but to ‘sentiment,’” and the function of rhetoric “to activate this intersubjec-tive circuit—to be ‘interesting’” (“Adam smith, samuel Johnson and the institutions of english,” 46).

23 Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. James Kinsley, introduction by Deidre shauna Lynch (oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 2004), 196. Hereafter abbreviated P and cited parentheti-cally by page number.

24 robert Hopkins (opening his essay with “a hypothetical case” about a nineteen-year-old Anne) focuses on this passage in “moral Luck and Judgment in Jane Austen’s Persuasion,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 42 (1987): 143–58.

25 on this issue see stuart Tave, Some Words of Jane austen (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973).

26 Harry shaw, Narrating Reality: austen, Scott, Eliot (ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1999), 98–9. Hereafter abbreviated NR and cited parenthetically by page number.

27 Tony Tanner, “in between: Persuasion,” Persuasion, the norton Critical edition, ed. Patricia meyer spacks (new York: norton, 1995), 237.

28 mary favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2010), 165.

29 favret, War at a Distance, 171.30 favret, “Austen’s Periods,” a Companion to Jane austen, eds. Claudia L. Johnson

and Clara Tuite (malden: wiley-blackwell Press, 2009), 406. 31 on this issue see Lynn festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century

Britain and France (baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2006). 32 Alex woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Pro-

tagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003), 43. 33 on how “nobody” is the constitutive characterological category enabling fictionality,

see gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing acts of Women Writers in the Market-place, 1670–1820 (berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994).

34 Andrew H. miller, The Burdens of Perfection, 2.35 smith writes that “it is always from that spectator, from whom we can expect the

least sympathy and indulgence, that we are likely to learn the most complete lesson of self-command” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 216).

36 on the relationship between free indirect discourse, public generality, and judg-ment, see frances ferguson, “Jane Austen, Emma, and the impact of form,” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000): 157–180.

37 we met additional “other Annes” in section ii, including the “happier woman” she might have been had she married wentworth (P, 29) and the one whose different case wentworth “should have distinguished” (P, 197). we might add the Anne who refuses Charles musgrove’s offer of marriage, “solicited, when about two-and-twenty” (P, 28), and another other, the future Lady russell: “the friend whom [wentworth] will love better than [he does] now” (P, 198).

The Art of Knowing Your Own Nothingness

Documents

Transcript of The Art of Knowing Your Own Nothingness