Object loss, renewed mourning, and psychic change in Jane Austen's Persuasion

Austen's extraordinary realism in depicting the dynamic internal processes which follow on the heroine's loss in Persuasion becomes clear in the light of a psychoanalytic understanding of mourning. Persuasion dramatizes the effects of a mother's death in adolescence as these come into play at the time of the heroine's separation from her fiancée and her later mourning. The thesis of this paper is that, despite falling in love with the brilliant hero, an unfinished mourning and an unconscious identification with her dead mother helped to persuade the heroine Anne Elliot to break her engagement, to create a 'final parting' as her mother had done to her in dying. The heroine's internal monologues show that she has projected some of the darker feelings of mourning, her anger and resentment, on to the hero and that she reopens a complex mourning process, partly through the displacement of affect, showing how traumatic effects of loss can be worked through in deferred action, effecting positive psychic change.