’[Scholar Judy van Sickle Johnson] teases out themes of passion, sex, and anticipation in what she calls [Persuasion] Austen’s most physical book.
Persuasion’s physical reactions and interactions create a novel Johnson calls “surprisingly vibrant and seductive, though understated.” As in Austen’s other books, she uses the eyes and hands to create a world that is “physically stimulating, if not sexually suggestive”—a world of shy glances, chance meetings, and cramped spaces that throw its heroine and hero together again and again.
Johnson explores Austen’s use of blushes, beating hearts, physical gestures, and almost-contact—devices that weave a web of physicality around Anne and Wentworth. “Little circumstances—when eyes just miss, or when hands touch, whether by accident or intent—are interspersed among more dramatic scenes in which a man and woman feel acutely each other’s physical presence,” she writes. Johnson finds deep significance in these tiny gestures, and analyzes moments of physical intimacy between Elliot and her suitors.
For some readers, Persuasion is unsatisfying, a novel of stifled passions and unspoken desires. But Johnson finds pleasure and passion in its physicality, which she argues is the strongest in all of Austen’s novels. Though it is subtle, she writes, “Persuasion is more than a slight acknowledgment that men and women have physical needs and desires for closeness and contact.”’
- ‘The Physical Pleasures of Jane Austen’s Persuasion’ by Erin Blakemore
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