Whatever her view here, the nar-ratological “I” has a rhetorical power that depends upon the ability to select the best point of view from which to view an object or scene, to move freely enough within that scene to effect ironic distance and sympathetic access, and to exploit the wisdom that both nature and art provide.

She has abilities, however, as well as affections; and it is now a doubtful point whether his cunning, or hers, may finally carry the day.

Who can be in doubt of what followed?

regime of the picture.

he novel commences with Sir Walter’s limited per-spective in order to satirize it, and both he and the book that monopolizes his attention are presented to us from a distance.

Anne sees, feels, and reflects upon the growing regard mirrored in Wentworth’s twice-mentioned glance, and the result is a change in the way she sees herself

Anne becomes disciplined within the regime of the eye

The comparative modifiers highlight the self-ratifying nature of their views as well as their habitual framing of the environment, for the objects that claim their attention are only those associated with fashionable society

-ated through a kind of pulsation between the regimes of the eye and the picture...allowing for visual recognitionof and identificationwith the object(s) in sight

Identified in the previous section as the perspective that guides our view of Lyme

the eye allows for an education that occurs in the act of looking itself,

three competing discourses

esituating the Gilpinian practices known to Austen, then by exploring how late eighteenth-century habits of visual perception are reflected in the characters’ views and movements, and, finally, by considering how those habits may have shaped the writer’s narrative practices

sen-timental looking”

I would like to argue that Austen’s strangely felt presence in the Lyme landscape is a function of the “sentimental look” with which she regards it

one may become rather unnerved by this glimpse of Austen—a sentimental “stranger

indeed, the only charac-ter who has warranted such trust thus far is Anne

The next thing to be done was unquestionably to walk directly down to the sea

the perspectives of character and commentator are traversed quite freely in Austen’s work through focalization and free indirect style

Thus, the “deserving” picturesque viewer is one who also moves about freely, shifting his or her point of view as necessity, or art, demands.

the tourist, wandering through unimproved country must both delight in its unspoiled condition and at the same time de-vote considerable effort to identifying the right viewpoint from which the land-scape may become Picturesque:

forms its pictures, not only from the most admirable parts of nature, but in the best taste

instruct these aliens on how best to see, appreciate, and horde up in memory a fleeting acquaintance with a scene that is not their own

the writer could be recon-structing from memory a landscape she visited as much as eleven years earlier. Or, she may have had a sketch of Lyme in her possession as she wrote

Gilpin’s writings on picturesque travel and sketching were well known to the author,

he shifts the emphasis from the content of the visual field to the techniques and practices of aesthetic appreciation

I will draw considerably upon the popular-ized picturesque theory of Reverend William Gilpin, as well as art historian Peter de Bolla’s The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain

This essay therefore seeks to italicize Austen’s persuasive use of focalization and free indirect discourse in Persuasion by considering the various spectatorial stances eighteenth-century seers might take, and what those stances suggest about knowledge, cultural authority, and feeling.

attending closely to the techniques by which Austen authorizes certain points of view illuminates how the narrative’s form enacts its thematic content

ewer arguments have explored the relationship be-tween landscape representation and narrative point of view

Critics considering the scenic element have focused largely on its role in developing character or advancing plot, high-lighting how it allows characters to demonstrate their aesthetic sensibility (or lack thereof), to expand their self-awareness and agency, and to test new dra-matic possibilities.