“The girls were now hunting for the Laconia”: Male Vanity and the Royal Navy in Jane Austen's _Persuasion_

The crucial relevance of the Royal Navy in shaping Jane Austen’s fictional world has been the object of vast literature (Fulford 1999; Southam 2001, 2003; White 2006; Russell 2009; Lamont 2009). General consensus has it that the Royal Navy is represented as a shaping, vital force in Austen’s fiction, embodying its power as a new and dynamic social class, set against the futility of a vanishing system, as personified, in Austen’s last novel Persuasion, in the character of Sir Walter Elliot. While this is certainly the case, close analysis of a number of narrative situations in the novel reveals that even the true romantic heroes in Persuasion are the object of Austen’s sharp perceptiveness of the weaknesses that often pertain to gender roles. This is the case, in particular, of Captain Frederick Wentworth, the male protagonist of Persuasion, and the object of the romantic interest on the part of a number of young women. Volume I, Chapter VIII, exemplifies this type of dynamics, as Austen’s narrative persona closes in on the officer’s light narcissism, as he is made the object of the young women’s open courtship at the Musgrove family dinner – which revolves exactly around the exercise of his profession, as iconized by the navy list the girls are handling. That the entire scene is filtered through Anne Elliot’s painfully conscious perception allows Austen to create a scene of extraordinary dramatic tension, and an insightful and revealing portrait of both characters.