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One of the taboos of polite English bourgeois society is about the discussion of money: well-bred people do not talk about the source of their income. According to this rule, Jane Austen is neither genteel nor well-bred, for all her novels demonstrate a most unladylike concern with the income of her characters. Thus whilst Charlotte Bronte is content to describe Mr Rochester as ‘wealthy’ in Jane Eyre, Jane Austen has no such inhibitions about situating Mr Darcy et al. very clearly and precisely in the material world. In the first seven chapters of Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen tells us exactly how much money Mr Darcy, Mr Bingley, and Mr Bennet possess: moreover, we know their different sources of income and are thus able to locate them within different sections of the English bourgeoisie. In the same novel we also find that although Jane Austen allows one of her sterling male characters to be a traditional landowner, she does not associate virtue solely with the possession of land or with an income drawn from agriculture. Hence she is no anti-trade conservative; on the contrary, trade and professional activity are positively endorsed.
Her attitude to money, therefore, is not one of straightforward endorsement of established wealth: a concern of her fiction is to demonstrate and articulate a morality which endorses the responsibility of male individuals to maintain themselves and their dependents and yet demands that no character – male or female – should be motivated in their actions solely by material concerns. To be materially irresponsible is, to Jane Austen, a sign of moral failing, just as an over-interest in money suggests greed and a false set of priorities. In all, she demonstrates a belief in maintaining property, and in securing a harmonious relationship between material and moral prosperity. It is a view of life which values care and consensus in human relationships: resolve questions about material existence by greed or carelessness, she argues, and the potential harmony of social life is distorted. To maintain oneself is a human responsibility: for men the responsibility takes the form of the obligation to provide a sufficient income for a household, for women the duty is to organize the proper expenditure of the income. It is not an ethic which endorses the enjoyment of wealth without the earning of wealth, equally it is not an ethic which excuses material calculation through subjective perceived need.
That money, and material existence, are both central issues in Austen’s fiction needs emphasis, since her work has often been read as distant from the real concerns of the material world.1 Yet in every novel characters appear who direct their lives – and often those of others – by naked material self-interest. There can be few other passages in fiction which so forcefully record the power of human greed over human responsibility as the passage in Sense and Sensibility in which Mrs John Dashwood justifies the miserly provision of help for Mrs Dashwood and her daughters. Inclined to provide assistance, Mr Dashwood is swayed by the arguments of his wife:
‘Indeed, to say the truth, I am convinced within myself that your father had no idea of your giving them any money at all. The assistance he thought of, I dare say, was only such as might be reasonably expected of you; for instance such as looking out for a comfortable small house for them, helping them to move their things, and sending them presents of fish and game, and so forth, whenever they are in season. I’ll lay my life that he meant nothing further; indeed, it would be very strange and unreasonable if he did!’2
This mixture of powerful greed, apparent sincerity (‘I’ll lay my life’), and reference to a general law of behaviour (‘it would be very strange and unreasonable if he did’) wins the day, and John Dashwood’s vague inclinations towards generosity disappear. A central theme of Sense and Sensibility is, therefore, material greed and its effect on individual behaviour: Mrs John Dashwood, Lucy Steele, and Willoughby are all primarily motivated by financial gain.
So in her first published novel, Jane Austen suggests to us a concern which is to recur throughout the rest of her work: how to balance moral and material concerns. A survey of her work reveals that she has a diverse experience of the means by which members of the late eighteenth-century gentry, bourgeoisie, and aristocracy maintain themselves and that her social range is far greater than an impressionistic study of her works might suggest. It is true that Jane Austen includes at least one large country estate in all her novels, but around the country seat are clustered men who maintain themselves through the church (always the Church of England), the army and the navy, trade, and the professions. Some of these men – for example Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility – derive income from country estates (and in his case actually possess one) although they are not defined solely in terms of their relationship to the land. But whilst there is a range of possible activity for men in Austen, no such range exists for women: women, in the novels, are attached to landed estates through men, and only the possibility of employment as a governess (for Jane Fairfax in Emma) is suggested as an alternative activity for women to that of daughter, wife, and mother. If women possess property, it is capital: Emma is the wealthiest of Austen’s female characters, and something of an exception, for it is generally the case that the women characters possess, in their own right, less than the men. Such a situation reflects, accurately enough, the social reality of the period: estates were, in general, entailed on a male (usually the eldest) child, whilst daughters were provided with capital sums, transferable – in the days before the Married Women’s Property Act – to their husband on marriage. No woman in Austen thus appears as an active maker of money: the crucial economic activity of women was marriage, and through marriage access to the husband’s income.3
A division of the sexes in terms of their access to property thus suggests a far more passive role in the economic world for women than for men. Women cannot – or do not – make money in Jane Austen, and their moral values about money are revealed in different ways from those of men. Women’s morality about money is revealed, Austen suggests, largely through the extent to which they actively seek to marry for money, and regard money as a crucial consideration in the choice of their husband. Men’s relationship to property is inevitably more complex, since it is more varied. The country estate is again crucial here, for Austen makes men’s attitude to it one measure of male virtue and good judgement. But estates also have another importance in the way that they can bring together (or divorce) the understanding of men and women. For example, in Pride and Prejudice, Mr Darcy’s estate – though geographically and socially distant from the Bennet home and the main events of the novel – is in a structural sense the most important place in the novel, for it is at Pemberley that Elizabeth Bennet sees for the first time that Darcy is no male dilettante but a man with a genuine – if hierarchically organized – concern for the lives of those people who depend on him. Mr Knightley’s estate in Emma is, in the same way, to be Emma’s spiritual and emotional home: although eventually Mr Knightley has to begin his married life in Mr Woodhouse’s house, it is only because of the very ‘strength, resolution and presence of mind’ of Mr Knightley that the marriage can occur at all, and he has aptly demonstrated that strength of character in his care and cultivation of Donwell, an estate which he has, in a sense, been ‘saving’ for Emma as she grows from infancy to adolescence and maturity.
Emma and Pride and Prejudice both contain instances of the way in which Jane Austen associates secure, well-tended, and well-cared-for country estates with male virtue. The process of the moral education of the heroines that occurs in these novels in part involves their recognition of the virtues of individual character that have made possible the prosperity and stability of Pemberley and Don well Abbey. Both of these estates are prosperous, Jane Austen points out, not through an accident of nature, but because of the care, the attention, and the good judgement exercised by the owner. The housekeeper whom Elizabeth Bennet meets at Pemberley thus commends Mr Darcy: ‘“He is the best landlord, and the best master,” said she, “that ever lived. Not like the wild young men now-a-days, who think of nothing but themselves. There is not one of his tenants or servants but will give him a good name.” ’4
But access to these fine estates, and the world of their owners, is not to be given without a concession from the heroines, and what Emma and Elizabeth both have to abandon is a belief in the infallibility of their judgement. Elizabeth Bennet cannot become mistress of Pemberley, and an overseer of the Darcy inheritance, until she can be trusted to value the qualities that have made that inheritance possible. Educated – or perhaps mis-educated – by her father into the very accurate recognition of pomposity and dullness, Elizabeth has failed to recognize the possibility that liveliness and wit do not constitute virtue. Like other characters in Austen (most particularly Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park) Elizabeth has to learn that those qualities which can guarantee the happiness and security of others are not necessarily those which are most immediately apparent in drawing-room conversation.
Emma’s belief in her own judgement is as developed as that of Elizabeth Bennet, but more active. If we were to conjecture on the causes of this difference, it might be that the reason for Emma’s greater interest in the manipulation of others arises not just from the greater material resources at her command but also from the experience of living with Mr Woodhouse, a man who has made inactivity into a career. If Emma is driven to meddle in the affairs of others the motive may be derived from frustration at her father’s refusal to take any part in social life. Mr Bennet, on the other hand, though in a sense as inactive as Mr Woodhouse (as Mr Bennet seldom stirs from his study so Mr Woodhouse seldom stirs from his fireside), is nevertheless more actively engaged in the social world in his constant mockery of it and the activities of individuals within it. Both men have, of course, developed strategies for absence from social life: the one by satire and cynicism, the other by invalidism and learned incompetence. Both their daughters, on the other hand, show a marked inclination to take on the social world: Elizabeth Bennet is the most physically active of Jane Austen’s heroines and Emma is by far the most socially interventionist. Deprived of active masculinity in their fathers, both these daughters more than adequately take on some of the masculine characteristics of sons.
So the liveliness, the vitality, and the energy of Elizabeth and Emma are, perhaps, the result of the inactivity of their fathers: people who are, after all, supposed to be positively involved in the affairs of the world. But as with all reactive characteristics – and hence the need for the moral reeducation of Emma and Elizabeth – the energy of both is easily falsely directed. What the energy requires is proper organization by the solid patriarchal figures of Mr Knightley and Mr Darcy. Thus on an interpersonal level, the marriages of Emma and Mr Knightley, and Elizabeth and Mr Darcy, seem to be entirely appropriate: the women are, in a sense, tamed by the better judgement and the wider experience of the world of their husbands, whilst the men are given more levity by interaction with their lively wives. Hence in the concluding chapters of Emma Mr Knightley acquires a greater vivacity and certainly a less ponderous conversational tone than had previously been his, whilst Mr Darcy, in his final conversations with Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, speaks with greater elan and fluency than had previously been the case. Jane Austen leaves her readers in no doubt that these marriages will unite people who have lived through mutual misunderstanding, and who have acted – through misunderstanding – in ways which they will renounce.
In all, female impetuosity has been tempered by male judgement and women who could not admire their fathers have found in their husbands those virtues absent in the patriarch. The material equations of the marriages are not, of course, identical: Elizabeth takes nothing to Pemberley, Emma is independently wealthy. Yet if we consider what Mrs Knightley and Mrs Darcy do give to their husbands – in a metaphorical rather than a personal sense – we will find that what they are taking to the ancestral estates is a spirit which will give them a justification for existence. However carefully tended Pemberley and Donwell Abbey might be, they are not, in the absence of heirs and a set of social relationships, living estates. The liveliness of Elizabeth and Emma is such that it suggests a continuity of existence: whatever the ‘culture’ of Donwell and Pemberley they are nothing without the ‘nature’ of lively women. Property, therefore, is given a meaning through the appropriation by men of the energies of women.
In Emma and Pride and Prejudice the central estate of the novel is – as we have seen – a well-arranged one, that only needs the appropriate mistress to make it into a wholly integrated community. In the other novels it is more often that the estates are mismanaged, and either need reparation by a female hand or involve the exile of a heroine. Mansfield Park is far from a mismanaged estate in the literal, material sense, but it is crucially mismanaged morally: in an interesting parallel, just as Austen ensures the continued existence of Pemberley and Donwell by the character of their new mistresses, so she in part suggests the potential – and eventual – structural weakness of Mansfield Park through the vapid, empty presence of Lady Bertram. A series of ‘ifs’ thus emerges in Mansfield Park about the relationship of women to property – if Lady Bertram had been more actively and positively involved in the education of her daughters, then matchmaking on their behalf might not have been left to the dubious judgement of Mrs Norris. Equally, if Sir Thomas Bertram had not given such a high priority to the appearance of his estate (in the sense of the absolute maintenance by all its members of rigid, formal codes of behaviour) then his daughter Maria might not have been so tempted by the appearance of Mr Rushworth’s estate and property – a considerable wealth that was empty of either talent or intelligence.
But Lady Bertram was not inclined to take any part in the activities of her daughters and Maria Bertram was tempted by the wealth of Mr Rushworth. In this temptation it is possible to see an individual who parodies the values of a person they dislike: Maria, who dislikes her father and his values, makes a mockery of him and his apparent interests by the marriage to Rushworth. Existing as she has to, under patriarchal authority and constraint, it is an act of defiance to marry Rushworth – to say to the constraining father that this is the human embodiment of his apparent values and to make of that human being an albatross for the parent. This act of revolt is, for Maria, the act that ruins her, for she can no more tolerate Mr Rushworth than can her father, and in her rejection of Rushworth and flight with Henry Crawford she lives to humiliate her father, and exile herself for ever from the community at Mansfield Park. The rot in the estate has worked itself out – and Mansfield Park is only saved by the presence of Fanny Price, the angel in the house who eventually becomes the moral centre of Sir Thomas’s estate. A woman, as in Emma and Pride and Prejudice, is produced to give certainty to the property of men. The Victorian hymn which ends with the lines ‘speak through the earthquake, fire and storm, O still small voice of calm’, summarizes the place of Fanny Price in the turmoil of events at Mansfield Park in the conclusion to the novel. Other people – men – rush about, write letters, travel to London, and generally engage in frantic activity in order to repair the damage of Maria’s adulterous elopement, Julia’s marriage, and Tom’s profligacy: all these energetic activities have nothing like the same efficacy as the return to Mansfield of the slight figure of Fanny. It is an event which – uncharacteristically – provokes Lady Bertram to leave her sofa and to say to Fanny, ‘Dear Fanny! now I shall be comfortable.’5
When Fanny returns to Mansfield Park she brings with her the promise of a reorganized community, one which values more than formally correct behaviour. If we read Mansfield Park as a metaphor for English society (and it is tempting to do so, since it is Jane Austen’s most enclosed novel), we find that she suggests to us that a society cannot live only through the observation by its citizens of formal rules and regulations – those legalistic, or quasi-legalistic, restraints on their behaviour have to have a basis in morality of concern for others and a community of values. To force, or constrain, individuals to act in certain ways is to ensure the kind of delinquency that manifests itself in the Bertram sisters – desperate behaviour that is born out of a desperate sense of constraint. The violence of the reaction of Maria and Julia (and they rebel far more actively than other Austen characters) is therefore a measure of the sense of frustration that both have endured for years. Too much constraint, Austen suggests, is therefore likely to lead to evil, to truly reprehensible behaviour – whereas too little constraint (as in the case of Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice) leads to folly, rather than what Austen might describe as vice. The perception by Sir Thomas that he can only safeguard his property, and indeed his world, through formal legislation, rigid rules, and constant surveillance is – if reproduced by a society – a perception that will only lead to precisely the kind of behaviour that its constraints are designed to eliminate.
Mansfield Park is in many ways Austen’s most fully ideological novel, in that she sets out in it with almost evangelical clarity her views on the proper organization of society. But in the context of a discussion of property relations, it must also be observed that it is the novel in which she comes closest to suggesting an alliance, in ideological terms, between those with property and those without. What she is in effect saying, therefore, in Mansfield Park is that no community, however rich or prosperous, can prosper or survive without a secure moral basis and that morality is not derived from property, or from the relationships of property. Indeed, the relationships of property in the novel – those between Maria and Mr Rushworth, Sir Thomas and his dependants (in that he regards them as part of his property and therefore subject to his absolute control) – are those which are most doomed to fail. Self-interested self-aggrandisement (the temptation to marry his daughter to a wealthy man, ‘a marriage which would bring him such an addition of respectability and influence’, and the further possibility of a match between his niece and Henry Crawford) is Sir Thomas’s moral flaw: the enlargement of his world is a seductive possibility, and he is, at first, unable to ask critical questions about the need or the fitness of acquiring new territories for his patriarchal influence. The temptations of property, Austen is suggesting, are therefore many: individuals do not merely wish to maintain their property, they also wish to enlarge it, and they are prepared to sacrifice the interests of individuals in order to do so. Readers are left in no doubt that Sir Thomas recognizes Rushworth as a stupid young man, and that Fanny is indeed attracted to Henry Crawford. But people, and human happiness, are not concerns which patriarchal capitalism takes seriously: just as the Harlowes would happily sacrifice Clarissa to Lovelace to enrich themselves, so Sir Thomas is content to give other interests precedence over the personal happiness of Fanny and Maria.
Property and wealth can therefore be a trap, a cause of unhappiness and dissent. In Mansfield Park the correction to the prioritization of property comes from Fanny, a person who, entirely alone and literally penniless, confronts the wealth and the power of Sir Thomas. In fiction it is an encounter from which Fanny emerges victorious, in the sense that it is her values and her judgement which will prove to be correct. But in reality, in the real social world of inequalities of wealth and power, it is difficult to see how the same influence could be brought to bear on arbitrary power. Thus when Austen suggests in Mansfield Park that wealth and the wealthy are not necessarily good, and that only a community with a moral sense can survive, she still leaves outstanding the issue of how, in reality, wealth and power are to be constrained and limited. It is comforting to read in Mansfield Park of the vindication of a heroine who has had a difficult childhood and adolescence, but the real world might not so conveniently provide an Edmund Bertram to reward Fanny for her faithfulness and tenacity. However, the moral message of the novel is not one that is concerned with reality and fantasy: the substance of Austen’s message is the more substantial suggestion that wealth, the pursuit of property, and a developed fondness for it do not constitute virtue. Here, then, is the potentially radical message of Mansfield Park: the ownership of property is not in any sense a guide to the moral worth of the individual.
This message challenges one of the central tenets of capitalist thinking both in the early nineteenth and the late twentieth centuries, that material and moral prosperity are synonymous. Although the belief has, at specific points in British history such as wartime, been rejected, it is still very much the case that it is constantly necessary to demonstrate that the poor are poor through the circumstances of the material and social world and not through their individual failings or shortcomings. The belief in the possibility of each and every citizen to be prosperous within the existing relations of capitalist production is one that not only dies hard, but shows no sign of even the beginning of a terminal illness. Indeed, at the present time the policies of the British Conservative Party positively endorse the belief that people’s poverty is in some way related to their moral capabilities. The message of Mansfield Park is deeply disturbing for those who hold this view: the rich demonstrate not only their capacity for vice, but the poor demonstrate their capacity for virtue. According to the calculating ethic of self-interest promoted by the champions of the market economy of sexual relations, Fanny should have (indeed, would have) married Henry Crawford: how could such a match have been resisted? When Jane Austen remarked that she had, in Fanny Price, created a character who would not be liked by everyone, she meant, perhaps, that many people would find Fanny Price difficult to accept precisely because of her capacity, that few people share, for absolute resistance to capitalist values. Of all the Austen characters, Fanny Price has a complete integrity of purpose, an integrity which is a direct challenge to notions of personal self-enhancement or enrichment. With consummate skill, Austen teases her readers into supposing that Henry Crawford is not, perhaps, such an unacceptable man after all: perhaps, she artfully suggests, we should overlook Henry’s flirtation with Maria or his cold-blooded decision to amuse himself by ‘making a small hole in Fanny Price’s heart’.6 As Henry Crawford sets out to make himself a more attractive man, so he gradually becomes more considerate and more apparently committed. He survives the rigours of a meeting with the Price family with credit, and is looking more and more morally creditable when an idle inclination encourages him to stay in London. There, of course, he meets Maria Bertram again, and just as the maintenance of his wealth and social position is Sir Thomas’s fatal weakness, so the exercise of his sexual powers is Henry Crawford’s. Tempted once again to demonstrate to himself the powers of his sexual attractiveness, he finds himself involved in a situation which eventually guarantees his exile from Fanny for ever.
So it emerges that Fanny was right in her judgement of Henry Crawford: vanity has an organizing force in his character and it is a vanity which plays havoc with the lives of others. But the one person whose life is unaffected by this failing is Fanny Price; precisely because she is disinclined to value either property or socially constructed concepts of sexual and personal charm, she is untouched by the consequences of living out the pursuit of these seductions. Henry Crawford represents therefore the temptations of both money and sexuality: his estate is substantial, and his charm, in the sense that it is conventionally understood by characters other than Fanny, is considerable. Given the extent of Fanny’s resistance to convention, it is small wonder that Jane Austen expected few readers to like her; even less would they like the author’s articulation of a deep suspicion of many apparently engaging and amusing aspects of social life. Yet Fanny – both poor and female – overturns the values of Mansfield Park, and has by the end of the novel succeeded in making the majority of the characters look either ridiculous, evil, or unreliable in their judgement. Perhaps no character in fiction offers such a radical critique of bourgeois patriarchy, its norms, and values of behaviour, as Fanny Price, a woman who does not end the novel dead like Clarissa, but alive, well, and valued.
The limits of the social and physical space of Mansfield Park make possible the very thorough examination of the motives and actions of its central characters. The pressures of intimate family life are vividly described; apparently spacious and gracious, life at Mansfield Park is in fact closely circumscribed by a rigid code of behaviour. The inadequacies of this code for dealing with human passions and inclinations are fully described by Jane Austen, but she also shows that in part the code enforced by Sir Thomas represses real needs to such an extent that they appear in distorted forms: because Julia and Maria have never been taught anything but the manners of genteel society they have no capacity to recognize the realities of stupidity and folly. The paradox of Fanny’s difference from Julia and Maria is that although apparently the most sheltered and circumscribed of the three, it is in fact she who can recognize selfishness, vanity, and lack of consideration for others. Julia and Maria, in their greater sophistication and worldliness, have lost or have never developed the ability to see individuals in other than social terms. Using an index of social manners – which measures appearance, wit, and charm and is uninterested in the ways in which individuals behave towards each other – the Bertram sisters evaluate people in superficial terms. Both of them represent that perception of individuals which takes the values of the market-place (both sexual and material) and accepts them as the only values of human existence.
So to the world of fashion and success Jane Austen demonstrates an implacable resistance. Which is not to say that she is not as capable as any other educated person of recognizing charm, beauty, and taste: the distinction between her recognition of these qualities and that of the Bertram sisters is that she recognizes them as created, learned capacities. Money, she realizes, can buy taste, charm, and the appearance of education. Wealth does, of course, have its spectacular failures, in that no amount of money can transform Mr Rushworth into anything other than a very stupid, dull young man, but equally the balance sheet of her novels suggests that Jane Austen is inclined to conclude that the possession of wealth can give human beings the appearance, albeit sometimes false, of charm and personal attractiveness. Throughout the novels Austen creates characters – most frequently men – who can make themselves appear attractive through the purchase of the means of personal ostentation and appropriately masculine behaviour. Tom Bertram is ‘dashing’ – not because of any innate qualities, but because, in common with other young men of his class, he can afford to ride around on expensive horses. Marianne, in Sense and Sensibility, is charmed by Willoughby’s appearance and his smart carriage. The glamour and the seductive vision of herself that Marianne constructs from this vehicle, and a brief acquaintance with its owner, are very nearly responsible for her death. Disappointed in what she had regarded as a perfect love, Marianne almost succumbs to a fever. Physical objects and physical appearance are thus suggested as the fantasies that can frequently deceive: or if deceive is too strong a term, then at least promise more than is actually to be found. ‘All that glitters is not gold’, ‘beauty is only skin deep’ are not the sentiments that Jane Austen is expressing: her message is more complex than a simple suspicion of wealth (although that is certainly an element in her argument). Rather than suspicion therefore, she is suggesting that we should examine very carefully the ways in which we regard the possibilities of human action and creation. Yes: people can create vast wealth, exhibit astonishing beauty and physical prowess, but the question then to be asked – and to be asked most urgently in a society in which the creation of vast wealth appears an immediate possibility – is how we evaluate these possibilities in moral terms. What, in short, should people with moral and ethical concerns and values do – and think – about money?
It is apparent, from Northanger Abbey to Persuasion, that Jane Austen never alters her basic and fundamental belief in the inadequacy of relating the possession of money to the possession of virtue. But this position is, of course, hardly adequate to the description and the understanding of social life; what is more central to Austen’s concerns is an examination of the ways in which the possession of money, or lack of it, structures and organizes human motivation. Some characters in her fiction are, as we have seen, both rich and ‘good’ in a quite straightforward sense of the term. Mr Darcy, Colonel Brandon, and Mr Knightley are, therefore, honest, kind, and scrupulously honourable in their dealings with other people: they do not lie, dissemble, or flirt with women (whether married or unmarried), and they exercise a consistent loyalty to their families and their dependants. As models of behaviour they therefore represent all those characteristics which Austen obviously values. Equally, just as Mr Darcy, Colonel Brandon, and Mr Knightley are straightforwardly rich and good, so Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mrs John Dashwood, and Mrs Ferrars are rich and unpleasant. Not actually evil in any deeply destructive sense, but, at the very least, biased, rude, and prejudiced. In Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma we therefore have both the good, and less good, rich. We also have – in the forms of Willoughby and Wickham – men who are inconsiderate and selfish in their treatment of others, and who act badly largely on account of material greed. But in case we should suppose that it is only men who are materially greedy, Jane Austen offers us, in Sense and Sensibility, the person of Lucy Steele, a female adventurer in the tradition of Moll Flanders.
These characters, however, represent cases of clear motivation and straightforward perception – whether right or wrong, selfish or otherwise. The more complex cases, and in an important sense the forerunners of the more thorough investigation of the relationship between property and virtue in Mansfield Park and Persuasion, are Mr Bennet, Charlotte Lucas, and Emma herself. All these characters, in one way or another, pose interesting moral questions in terms of the way in which they deal with the material world. They are not selfish in the same way as Willoughby or Wickham; equally Jane Austen suggests to us that the way that they regard the material world is a very good guide to their character. Mr Bennet, clever, well-read, and witty, is therefore lazy and indolent in his attitude to property: disinclined to pay any serious attention to his estate, he has created a situation in which his wife and daughters face poverty on his death. Charlotte Lucas, in the same novel, is prepared to endure a lifetime with Mr Collins in order to secure for herself material provision. Her obvious and admitted reservations about Mr Collins therefore pale into nothing compared to the evaluation of his worth as a material provider. And finally Emma herself, rich and self-assured, but inclined to waste her talents and energies on idle matchmaking and dilettantish attempts at sketching and music. Mr Bennet and Emma therefore suggest the possibilities of the waste of resources – whilst Charlotte Lucas suggests an attitude of cynical calculation.
The puzzle, and the interest, of all these cases, is how these characters come to act as they do. Is Mr Bennet actually indolent, or is the task of amassing a small surplus actually impossible? Is Charlotte Lucas just enough like Mr Collins to endure life with him? And is Emma, without the guiding hand of Mr Knightley, the thoughtless heiress that her behaviour sometimes suggests? In these novels, the central events occur too quickly for us to assess the reasons for the characters’ behaviour: there is – unlike in Mansfield Park and Persuasion – no alteration in the material circumstances of the characters and hence no insight into how they might behave in the light of different situations. The Dashwood sisters, like the Bennet sisters, enter the novel poor, and – like them – are redeemed at the end by men, and men’s fortunes. But in Mansfield Park and Persuasion material life has a greater instability: what is suggested in these two novels, unlike the others, is structural instability in material life, rather than material difficulties arising from personal circumstances. Mansfield Park – unlike Pemberley and Donwell Abbey – is thus a threatened estate: it is difficulties at the estates in the West Indies that remove Sir Thomas from his rightful place as head of the household. No such difficulties confront Darcy or Mr Knightley. The security of the life of the landowner is, in both cases, absolute, and Mr Darcy can leave home in the perfect security that his income will continue. Mr Knightley, it is true, seldom leaves home, but this is less due to concern for his estate than personal taste. But the continuum of material security along which Jane Austen’s novels move reaches the extreme of banishment from the estate in Persuasion, her final novel. Here, the idle and extravagant Sir Walter Elliot has so conspicuously failed to make his estate pay that he is forced to go and live in furnished rooms in Bath, an unhappy exile with only tenuous aristocratic connections to console him for the loss of his property.
The years between the publication of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Northanger Abbey on the one hand, and Persuasion and Mansfield Park on the other, cover a period in English history in which the livelihood of the gentry, and the aristocratic landowner, became more materially problematic. As already suggested, all Austen’s novels (with the exception of Northanger Abbey) carry hints of the world outside that of the materially secure. But only in Mansfield Park and Persuasion do we see middle-aged men forced to include material questions and problems in their calculations. What this suggests is a world of changing economic patterns: the men who have to make their fortunes, by fair means or foul, in Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility, are all young: the middle-aged, the married, the socially established all have a place in the material world that is apparently secure. But not so for Sir Thomas and Sir Walter: their worlds are threatened, and an established order of patriarchal figures is under attack. Indeed, what begins to occur in Mansfield Park and Persuasion is a separation of the moral and the material qualities of individuals, an increasing recognition that the greatest security for human beings lies in their personal qualities and not in their material circumstances. Thus we are assured that William Price will make his way in the world because of his application and his integrity; in the same way Captain Wentworth, in Persuasion, has made his way through conscientious commitment to his profession.
So what emerges in the late Austen novels is an entirely self-made, morally admirable hero. The message to the decadent Tom Bertram and Sir Walter Elliot is clear: your world will not be maintained through behaviour that is careless and arrogant, a new code of values has to be evolved for the propertied in order for that property to be maintained. Even more important perhaps, Jane Austen asks us to consider the value of maintaining the worlds of Sir Thomas and Sir Walter: the world of Sir Thomas is repressive and over-formal, that of Sir Walter silly and vain. The mistake of Anne Elliot – in initially refusing Captain Wentworth because of his apparent lack of standing in the world of the country gentry – is a mistake which Austen demonstrates as arising from a too conservative commitment to an outmoded set of priorities about a vanished world. Aristocratic titles (the baronetcy so dear to Sir Walter’s heart) and formal manners are shown as a barrier to the existence, and the development, of human happiness. The blindness of Elizabeth Elliot to the lack of interest of Admiral and Mrs Croft in her invitations is a vivid representation of the potential failure of a redundant aristocracy to perceive their irrelevance to a world changing in both its material and its social relationships.
By the time Persuasion was published in 1818 it must have become apparent to an astute observer of the social world that radical changes were occurring in the organization of social and economic life. For the gentry, the crucial change was the increased commercialization of agriculture. Men who did not regard their estates as commercial ventures were less and less able to remain financially viable. Hence to regard a country estate primarily as a source of status (as did Sir Walter Elliot) was to commit economic suicide: in a capitalist society all assets have to be regarded as material and exploitable. And included among the assets of the world that are to be exploited are human beings themselves: exploitable not only in the sense that the maximum labour should be extracted from them, but in the sense that it is a primary duty of human beings to contribute to the social world. For some critics of Austen’s work, notably Marilyn Butler and Alistair Duckworth, this places her firmly in a tradition of conservative values: both see Austen as arguing that a properly organized moral sense can, if integrated into a traditional community (be it a family or an estate), save it from corruption and decay. Duckworth emphasizes the importance Austen places on attitudes to estates and their management by individual characters: the ‘good’ manage their estates properly, the ‘bad’ are uninterested landlords. Marilyn Butler, in sharing Duckworth’s view of Austen as conservative, suggests that a further – and crucial – element in Austen’s world view is her suspicion of individualism. Associating this with Austen’s anti-Jacobin sentiments, Butler argues that Austen is profoundly suspicious of individual inclination that is not tempered by social and moral values; concluding her discussion Butler writes:
‘Jane Austen’s novels contain central characters more given to rejection than fictional heroes and heroines of the first part of the century, and she makes it clear how much she values the probings of the rational moral intelligence…. Her plots are a movement from ignorance to knowledge, culminating in a moment of intelligent discernment, and this in itself is bi-partisan.’
(Butler 1975: 293)
And Butler continues: ‘The plots of Jane Austen’s novels begin in the conservative camp and, very significantly, remain in it.’
In identifying Jane Austen with the anti-Jacobin movement of the late eighteenth century Marilyn Butler contributes enormously to scholarship on the author by demonstrating that she is far from removed from the ideological debates and disputes of her day. Yet what still needs to be explained in the work of both Marilyn Butler and Alistair Duckworth, is why Austen’s perception of the dangers of romance and intuition – and her care for the stability of human relationships and communities – should be regarded as conservative.
In assessing the reasons why Austen is regarded as conservative and deeply traditional, two emerge as particularly important. The first is that Austen is generally regarded as seeing urban life as morally suspect; thus Butler writes that Mary Crawford has been given ‘selfish values’ by urban life (1975: 224). In this same vein we can cite those other examples in Austen which seem to associate city life (and particularly London life) with frivolity and corruption: Frank Churchill goes to London to get his hair cut, it is in London that Willoughby so publicly and callously rejects Marriane, and it is in Bath that Sir Walter Elliot finds the parties and assemblies at which to play his silly social games. But against these examples we must also set those of Mr and Mrs Gardiner, a couple who live in London (indeed, in sight of their ‘own warehouses’) and yet are models of good sense and courteous manners, whilst it is in Bath that Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot recognize their still strong affections. There is, therefore, no absolute connection in Austen between cities and vice, and the country and virtue. Characters who are corrupt remain as such whether in the town or the country.
But to twentieth-century eyes it can appear that Austen is praising the life of the countryside as in some sense morally superior to that of the town, and thus apparently endorsing ‘traditional’ life over that of a more modern form of society. The point here, however, is that for Jane Austen – unlike her twentieth-century readers – the country was typical rather than traditional: few people lived in large urban areas and the general experience of community life was that of a small village. Austen’s objection to the city – if that is as substantial as is sometimes suggested – is therefore that it allowed more possibility for unchecked folly than did a small community. It is not then city life per se – in terms of the occupations of people within the city – that Austen suspects, but the loss in large-scale, relatively anonymous communities of people’s better judgement and better sense. The temptation of the city is that of undefined and unstructured social space: the space which suggests to individuals that there is a possibility of living out, without notice or constraint, their more dubious inclinations. Writing of Paris in the nineteenth century Walter Benjamin observed that it was in the city that people could live out their fantasies: they could escape notice and yet at the same time they could also receive recognition without judgement (1973: 157-76). Much the same view is echoed by characters in Austen: city life provokes all the female characters into a flurry of clothes buying and anxious attention to dress – here at last is an audience to satisfy narcissism. It is clear that Austen regards this as harmless (her own letters show that as soon as she set foot in London and Bath she engaged in much the same exercise) but what she does not regard as harmless is the excessive value which some characters attach to the range of possibilities offered by towns. Thus the major point of her critique of urban life is not that towns are inherently immoral, rather that urban life can allow the silly, or the morally corrupt, to articulate and demonstrate more fully the range and depth of their cupidity. To those with the kind of values that Austen endorses the city offers no threat: the city may be dirty and noisy and the glare from the buildings oppressive (as Austen herself found was the case in Bath) but it is not in itself a cause of corruption.
So Austen’s view of the city is more complex than that of the simple-minded conservative who regards the mere sight of the countryside as in some sense morally uplifting. To suspect the values that can be encouraged in conditions of anonymity and the pursuit of fashion is, perhaps, not so much conservative as radical: to ask questions, in the context of capitalist social relations, about exactly what is being valued and lauded by leaders of fashion and arbiters of taste is to ask questions about conspicuous consumption, false distinctions, and misleading constructions of individuality. Although Northanger Abbey is Austen’s most imperfectly realized novel, it does contain a vivid hint of her suspicion of the hold of fashion and the dream of a fashionable appearance on young girls. Thus Catherine Morland’s chaperone in Bath, Mrs Allen, is described:
‘The air of a gentlewoman, a great deal of quiet, inactive good temper, and a trifling turn of mind were all that could account for her being the choice of a sensible, intelligent man like Mr. Allen…. Dress was her passion…. Mrs. Allen was so long in dressing that they did not enter the ballroom till late…. With more care for the safety of her new gown than for the comfort of her protègèe, Mrs. Allen made her way through the throng of men by the door.’7
A sense of priorities is established here, harmless enough in this case but possibly deeply damaging in others.
Those other cases are Maria Bertram, Mrs Elton, and Lucy Steele: women for whom what is an innocent enjoyment in dress in Mrs Allen becomes a strong desire for the means of its purchase (in the case of Maria Bertram and Lucy Steele) or the means of judging others (in the case of Mrs Elton). Fashion and appearance are thus seductive – and for some individuals, irresistible. This suspicion of an overdeveloped interest in appearance leads to a second theme in Austen which has been regarded as an instance of her conservatism – her suspicion of romanticism and individualistic expressions of sentiment and passion. Again, it is appropriate to question the presumption that this suspicion is conservative rather than radical, and inhibiting rather than liberating. In those passages in Sense and Sensibility in which Marianne Dashwood enthuses most energetically about the countryside, it is possible to see the forerunner of the twentieth-century romantic adolescent (or indeed individual of any age) who will repeatedly fail to recognize either the reality of his or her own needs or the possibility that other people will create artificial desires. When Edward Ferrars remarks that he would ‘call hills steep, which ought to be bold; surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregular and rugged’8 he is speaking for accuracy and veracity in speech and representation. Against the unbridled romanticism of Mariane, Edward is maintaining that it is possible to describe the physical world in precise and objective terms.
As Sense and Sensibility unfolds it is clear that Jane Austen is developing a sustained and coherent attack upon fantasies of romance and visions of transcendent relationships between men and women. The semi-fantastical figure of Willoughby who emerges out of the woods to rescue Marianne is a figure who eventually reveals himself to have been created by Marianne’s dreams and romantic aspirations: the ‘real’ Willoughby, in the sense of the specific human being who enters into specific social and sexual relationships with others, is a callous and inadequate adventurer. The ‘real’ feeling which Marianne sees in Willoughby is little except his need to demonstrate sexual power over women, and it is a power in part created by her own need for romance and identification with a male other. Hence it is precisely Marianne’s lack of genuine autonomy or sense of self that encourages her to project fantasy on to Willoughby – a projection that elicits from Willoughby the living out, in the isolation of the Devon countryside, the dream of the romantic hero.
That dream cannot be sustained in the real world of social – and particularly material – relationships, for neither Willoughby nor Marianne has an income sufficient to maintain themselves in marriage. The fantasies that the pair have created thus prove entirely inadequate for a sustained relationship. The intimacy which both had believed existed was one which did not include the intimacy of shared responsibility or shared commitment – it was an intimacy of feeling, and of a particular kind of romantic feeling that Jane Austen suggests to us is deeply problematic in the real world. But to label this suspicion of romanticism and fantasy as conservative is perhaps questionable, for far from endorsing the sentiments, and the organization of sentiment, in capitalist society, Jane Austen is surely questioning it, in that she is asking us to examine critically those emotional states which we label as ‘love’, and ‘need’, and ‘passion’. That strong affections exist between human beings she accepts, and indeed endorses, but what she is questioning is the development, in the late eighteenth century, of ideologies of romance and transcendence in individual relationships. The fully developed characters in Austen’s fiction are not, therefore, those who ‘need’ others in a desperate sense; they are already able to live in a certain harmony both with themselves and with others.
That romance is a trap for both men and women is a message which Austen repeatedly suggests. But more than that, she questions the individualization of feeling that was emerging in the earliest years of industrial capitalism and has remained ever since. She therefore asks her characters to look less at their specific individuality than at their generality: it is far more important, she argues, that people recognize the needs that all share – for material provision, social recognition, commitment, and the means to support their children – than individualize need by romance or fantasy. Jane Austen’s detached observation of the social world clearly led her to conclude that the recognition of material and emotional need was too often distorted, and indeed obscured, by socially created ideologies. Nearly 200 years of the burgeoning of the industries of romance, sexual titillation, and pornographic representations of sexuality suggest that the very same relationships of property which existed in Jane Austen’s day have developed an increased capacity to obscure many of the realities of both the material and the emotional needs of individuals. The fantasy figure of Willoughby is a forerunner of the sexual hero of late capitalism – a man created and endorsed by precisely those conservative – and patriarchal – interests which Jane Austen challenges.