Vanity, Grief and Mary Musgrove : A Psychoanalytic Analysis of Jane Austen's Persuasion

Abstract: The novel Persuasion by Jane Austen stands out from her canon partly due to the explicit reflection of society’s changing view of the British nobility in the early 19th century. The shallowness and alarming lack of responsibility displayed by the Elliot family is a representation of the growing opinion of the landed gentry being useless and not fit to lead the nation. The family, not including the protagonist Anne, is depicted as vain and flat, a set of characters without any real depth; more like caricatures rather than real people. However, the purpose of this essay is to show that there is much more to the youngest daughter of the family, Mary Musgrove, than what first meets the eye; that she actually is a complex character who has been through a lot of suffering and is feeling very lonely. By doing a close reading and using psychoanalytic literary theory, the connections between Mary’s childhood experiences and her adult behaviour will be made clear in order to support the theory of her being controlled by the power of her unconscious. She is still suffering as an adult from repressed feelings of being unloved and neglected as well as actively grieving the loss of her mother.