Persuasion Essay

The classic novel ‘Persuasion’ by Jane Austen explores the character Anne Elliot, a 27-year-old unappreciated and self-sacrificing woman dealing with the emotional consequences of a returned love that she had been persuaded to reject in marriage seven years earlier. Austen exposes Anne as a timid and self-sacrificing character, her emotions and thoughts internalized and her presence dismissed by those around her. As the heroine of the novel Austen’s values are conveyed through Anne, displaying her distaste to aristocracy and preference to meritocracy, the challenge of genders and the convenience and social rules in acceptance to marriage, the rejection of these conventions displayed through Austen’s use of irony and satire throughout the novel. The film ‘Persuasion’ by Adrian Shergold (2007) however sees a storyline that fails to grasp these concepts displaying a storyline that is exaggerated and dramatic, focusing almost solely on the love story, often resulting in a film adaptation of Anne Elliot who wanders significantly from the novel’s original character who displays little to no character development.
The Anne of the novel is often isolated, particularly in regard to her emotional state, contrasting greatly to Shergold’s film adaptation where Anne is seen to be sharing her upset and feeling more openly. In the novel, Wentworth’s return is not accompanied by a debrief with Lady Russell where Anne expresses her distress and panic, rather, Austen displays her emotion through isolation and lack of communication with others, conveyed to the reader through narration rather than dialogue. Anne is adapted to a film audience to clearly display her state of mind and current emotion as to ensure that her reactions to certain situations are obvious, for example, the various scenes where Anne looks directly into the camera, connecting directly with the audience to show the devastation she is experiencing, pushing the emotion to solidify the facts of her distress that