The Mother’s Unnarratable Pleasure and the Submerged Plot of Persuasion

What do we know about Anne Elliot’s mother? The narrator’s extremely brief account seems to leave little room for speculation, as she appears never to have deviated far from the norms associated with the time, place, and circumstances in which she lived. Yet even before Anne is introduced to us as a woman disappointed in love, a woman who, “forced into prudence in her youth . . . learned romance as she grew older” (29), she is introduced to us as a motherless daughter, one in whom Lady Elliot’s closest friend “could fancy the mother to revive again” (7). In fact, the marriage plot of Persuasion is constantly influenced by a submerged plot in which Anne seeks her absent mother’s story and finds it by repeating her mother’s experience. The little we are told about Lady Elliot gives a glimpse into this crucial submerged plot, crucial because it significantly affects our understanding of the family situation Anne must negotiate and of her own reactions to and decisions regarding Mr. Elliot and Captain Wentworth. Tracing the submerged plot reveals that Anne’s quest is to discover that which, in the world of this novel, cannot be narrated: her mother’s experience of pleasure. Indeed, one way of understanding why the pleasure Anne ultimately experiences must be delayed is to recognize that, before pleasure can be hers, she must find validation for it in her mother’s unnarratable story. In this essay, I shall offer a theoretical account of this concept of a submerged plot and how it relates to other work in narrative theory on plot and progression, relate the submerged plot of the mother’s pleasure to previous work on the unnarratable, and build on these theoretical accounts to trace the submerged plot’s substantial effects on the surface plot of Persuasion.