Austen, one of the greatest of all writers of dialogue, also developed a technique that is not usually noticed: the selective denial of quoted speech to particular characters.
Sometimes this denial is like a little joke that must have delighted the author exactly because it is difficult to spot. Such seems to be the case with Captain Benwick, the grieving poetry-lover in Persuasion. (...) Anne Elliot spends much of her time deep in talk with this mournful naval officer, yet not a word that he speaks is ever quoted. (...) The fact that we never hear him speak means that he never quite achieves singularity. We are left with the suspicion that he is performing by rote. The author’s buried joke is that all his outpouring amounts to no real expression of individual feeling or opinion.
And outpouring it seems to be. (...) When he is first encountered, he is described as a young man with ‘a pleasing face and a melancholy air’, who ‘drew back from conversation.’ Yet his avoidance of conversation does not mean that he does not want to talk. Au contraire. On her first evening in Lyme, Anne gets Captain Benwick for company and finds that, though he is ‘shy’, he eventually has plenty to say– notably about his ‘taste in reading.’ In fact, ‘he did not seem reserved’, and soon he is talking about poetry and repeating the appropriate chunks of Scott and Byron that he has got by heart. He has found out the lines that seem to dignify his own feelings. Anne spends most of the evening with him (not without motive: she is keen to avoid the conversation of Captain Wentworth). But, being full of quotations himself, he says nothing that the author thinks worth quoting.
The next day Captain Benwick seeks Anne out and he is soon talking again, disputing over books. Captain Harville is grateful to her for ‘making that poor fellow talk so much’. He has been silently brooding over his books, it seems, while ‘shut up’ with the unbookish Harvilles. Now Anne has done the ‘good deed’ of a thoroughgoing therapist and given him the chance to talk. The sense is delicately given that Anne is becoming rather the victim of this silent man who has so quickly discovered the consolation of talk. As the party walks along the Cobb for a last time before leaving, ‘Anne found Captain Benwick again drawing near her.’ Of course he is going to talk and recite some more, but Austen is not going to tax the reader with what he says. Her heroine’s response is charitable rather than delighted: ‘she gladly gave him all her attention as long as attention was possible’. Not enough attention for any of his words to lodge.
When Charles Musgrove returns from Lyme and tells Anne about Captain Benwick, it is about him talking. (...) He will never actually speak to us. The ‘poor fellow’ is sad, no doubt of it, but by declining, among all his effusions, to give us his own words, Austen animates our doubts about all his feelings. It is funny and it is narratively cunning, for Captain Benwick’s rapid tumble into an engagement with Louisa Musgrove will provoke Anne’s dispute with Captain Harville about the retentiveness of men’s and women’s feelings, prompting Captain Wentworth to his declaration. We should already know from the absence in the novel of Benwick’s own speech that there has been something self-pleasing in his discussion of the poetry of feeling.
-What Matters in Jane Austen?, John Mullan
In the words of a mutual, “Lockwood (in Wuthering Heights) is a small piece of satirical beauty like Austen’s Captain Benwick in Persuasion; & EB does it twice as Linton Heathcliff is a perverted Keats!”
Some of the side characters in this novel are more ~grounded~ and less overtly satirical than others in Austen (while some are still caricatures, i.e., Sir Walter), so it might be tougher to see how Austen’s using them to satirize a subject; but the likes of Benwick, Charles Musgrove, Mr. Elliot, etc. are presented as alternate and inferior, undesirable paths to Anne because they, too, are vehicles for social commentary, and Anne makes the conscious choice of avoiding the fates of Louisa, Mary, or Elizabeth. For all that’s said about Persuasion being overtly romantic for Austen, I think it’s interesting how Austen still retains some skepticism toward the “Byronic” and what she views as excess sensibility, as she was with young Marianne Dashwood.
If this is a novel that makes a point of valuing meritocracy over inherited land and titles, then there’s also a sense of valuing “productive” over unproductive grief. Captain Wentworth is slightly criticized by the narrative for throwing himself into his work and ambitions in the wake of grief (though Anne had also tried doing so, to an extent; it’s just that the options and environment available for ladies were limited compared to that of ordinary gentlemen, let alone sailors who travel even outside the country, so she had achieved greater self-knowledge of her heart than he has by the start of the story), but the narrative is also impressed with his industry and "honourable toils;” meanwhile, Benwick’s wallowing is inhibiting him a great deal (it is Wentworth’s intervention in having “never left the poor fellow for a week,” after all, that “saved poor James,” and it is Anne speaking to him about “patience and resignation” that helps him recover at last), and Austen is slightly disapproving. But Fanny Harville has only been dead for a few months, so shouldn’t he be allowed to wallow a little? Austen disagrees perhaps because his grief has an element of performance. This is contrasted with the “never inconstant” Wentworth; for all his initial determination to think and seem otherwise, it is actually he, not Benwick, who has had “a heart pierced, wounded, almost broken.”
Anne likewise thinks Benwick is melodramatic and slightly immature (“He is younger than I am; younger in feeling, if not in fact; younger as a man;”) and now I’m picturing what a modern-day Benwick would be like - maybe one of those 'sensitive young guy' types who are always drowning in Kafka or Kerouac or something, dear god, so maybe that makes him and Louisa well-suited - and in the future, Louisa and Captain Benwick can grow and mature together!
