50
PARTISAN REVIEW
rooted in the unconscious. Like Cinderella, Anne has a benevolent god–
mother, although in this rather ambiguous version of the relationship,
the godmother, £:lr from helping the heroine to marry her prince, has
persuaded her to reject him because of his lack of a fortune. Eight years
after refusing Frederick Wentworth, a dashing young naval officer, Anne
remains immured at Kellynch Hall with her father, the fatuous Sir
Walter, and her hateful elder sister, Elizabeth. Paralyzed by her suffocat–
ing, narcissistic family, she seems unable to reach out for happiness. Only
after several scenes with powerful symbolic overtones, in which sexual
fears and conflicts are expressed, does she move toward hope, life, and
the rebirth of love.
As the novel opens, Sir Walter finds himself compelled by financial
necessity
to
let Kellynch Hall and disperse his family. Anne goes to the
home of her younger sister at nearby Uppercross, where she finds not
only the cranky, hypochondriacal Mary, but also the more cheerful soci–
ety of Mary's husband, children, and in-laws, the hospitable Musgrove
family. Moreover, Sir Walter's new tenants turn out to be the sister and
brother-in-law of Anne's former suitor, who soon reappears on the
scene, now equipped with a suitable fortune.
The most striking feature of Anne's response to this turn of events is
her resistance to it. This Sleeping Beauty nearly refuses to wake up; she
seems to be a victim not only of bad advice but of her own tempera–
ment and history. Instead of trying
to
recapture Wentworth, she avoids
him whenever possible. Kept from going to a party where she would see
him again, she is not disappointed but relieved: "She could not hear of
her escape with indifference." This "escape" from the man she loves is
typical of her behavior throughout, from her original rejection of
Wentworth almost until the end. To some degree she appears to choose
her melancholy fate, avoiding not only her former suitor but virtually
every opportunity for pleasure, at most joining in only to please others.
At the Musgroves' parties, Anne refuses
to
dance, instead playing the pi–
ano for the other young people, though with tears in her eyes. She is
even gratified by the Musgroves' preference for the mediocre playing of
their daughters over her own superior performance; their partiality gives
her "more pleasure for their sakes than mortification for her own."
In
her self-abasing withdrawal, Anne can be seen as acting out the
drama of loss described by Freud in "Mourning and Melancholia" -
"pain, loss of interest in the outside world ... of capacity to adopt any
new love object" - a normal enough response to a disappointment in
love, except for the fact that it has lasted eight years; mourning has in–
deed become melancholia. Freud asserts that in melancholia, the lost
object is "introjected," taken into the ego, where a sort of phantasmal
relationship is maintained through suffering. Indeed Anne has been
