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PARTISAN rUVIEW
seeking privacy evoke the child's fantasy of the primal scene; the couple's
passage through the wild, hidden channel inside the hedgerow is also
suggestive of the hidden parts of the body and the physical facts of sex.
As usual, Anne is on the outside looking in, almost like a child trying
anxiously to decipher the mysterious sexual goings-on of the grown-ups.
This part of the overheard flirtation, during which Louisa expatiates on
the firmness of her own character and her immunity to persuasion, ends
appropriately enough with Wentworth giving Louisa a nut, as if to
consummate the episode with a sexual pledge.
This scene, based on nineteenth-century literary convention and rich
in emotion and imagery, can of course be read in many ways. The psy–
choanalytic reading focuses on what is odd and off-center about it: the
heroine is not in her usual place within the courting pair, but is off to
the side listening in. This odd displacement of emphasis adds another, un–
conscious, strand to the complex of possible meanings.
Louisa's increasingly audacious flirting, her interest in being
"overturned," reaches its climax in the famous scene of her fall from the
Cobb at Lyme Regis. There is so little violent physical action in Austen's
work that this scene creates an effect of almost dreamlike strangeness. On
all their walks, Louisa has made Wentworth jump her from the stiles:
"the sensation was delightful to her." Her final daring leap from the high
sea wall at Lyme suggests a sort of sexual consummation, thrilling and
orgasmic, yet by the same token dangerous. In a revealing parapraxis that
shows his lack of serious interest, Wentworth lets her fall; she strikes her
head on the pavement and is "taken up lifeless!" Language itself, with its
preexisting idioms and cliched metaphors, provides the script for these
images. Louisa has acted out literally the metaphor of "throwing herself '
at a man, becoming a "fallen woman."
The accident has an aspect of wish-fulfillment for Anne, who sees her
more aggressive rival apparently fall dead on the spot. But Louisa may
also represent one side of Anne's own dilemma: her fall is a fantasy of
what might happen to an Anne who did not repress her feelings. Louisa's
"lifeless"-ness is, of course, only a concussion - "there was no injury but
to the head" - suggesting that the significance of the episode is mainly
psychological: everything has taken place in the head. Having learned her
lesson, Louisa will become a rather sober young lady, somewhat like
Anne, and will even develop a taste for poetry and for the melancholy
Captain Benwick.
However, the physical aspect of Louisa's injury also links her with
other female characters, many of whom are stricken in some way. Louisa
only appears to be dead, but Fanny Harville really is dead, and so, of
course, is Anne's mother. Anne's friend Mrs. Smith is an invalid. As for
Anne's sister Mary, "her being unwell and out of spirits was almost a
