The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels

INTRODUCTION: SOME CRITICAL AND LITERARY CONTEXTS

The family of Dashwood had been long settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner, as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance.

THE SITUATION of the Dashwood family at the beginning of Sense and Sensibility reflects the sense of inherited security that is the birthright of the self in Jane Austen’s world. Initially, existence is enclosed and the estate into which an individual is born provides him with a little world of harmony and peace. As he lives at the center of his property, so he belongs to a family which is surrounded by other families and has been “for many generations” settled in its place. He comes to consciousness in a community that is corporate and structured in all areas. In the possession of a public language and of common modes of behavior, in the very disposition of buildings and landscape, such a community manifests an organization that has evolved over a long period of time. Though it is a human organization, it is complete, inherited intact, and it has about it an air of consecration. It seems to be “truth … come to dwell anonymously upon the earth.”1 Preceding human consciousness and serving as a framework of order external to the mind, society, at the beginning, both protects and supports the individual self.

Soon, however, the self in Jane Austen’s world loses its birthright, the initial security is withdrawn and in its place a very different world appears. It is a world which receives its most extreme expression in the description of Mrs. Smith in Persuasion:

She was a widow, and poor. Her husband had been extravagant; and at his death, about two years before, had left his affairs dreadfully involved. She had had difficulties of every sort to contend with, and in addition to these distresses, had been afflicted with a severe rheumatic fever, which finally settling in her legs, had made her for the present a cripple. She had come to Bath on that account, and was now in lodgings near the hot-baths, living in a very humble way, unable even to afford herself the comfort of a servant, and of course almost excluded from society. (152–53)

Mrs. Smith, a minor character in Jane Austen’s last novel, is important as the final embodiment of a fate that haunts all her novels. Here at the last is the entirely unsupported woman, reduced to bare existence without husband, society or friends. Though she appears at the end of Jane Austen’s writing life, Mrs. Smith has always existed as a latent possibility in the novelist’s thought, an unvoiced threat, the other possible pole of existence. Meeting her old friend after twelve years, Anne Elliot comes face to face with her own possible fate; but Mrs. Smith is also a more unfortunate Miss Bates, or an older and socially unrescued Jane Fairfax. Further, she is the possible outcome of a Marianne Dashwood, an Elizabeth Bennet, or a Fanny Price. For this is the danger facing many of Jane Austen’s heroines, that present security may become total isolation, that residence “in the centre of their property” in the enjoyment of “the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance” may be exchanged for life “in lodgings” without the money even “to afford … the comfort of a servant.”

At one level, the danger that presents itself is that of “degradation.” The Dashwoods, “long settled … for many generations” at their large estate in Sussex, are required to leave the protective confines of Norland Park and to travel into Devonshire, “so far from hence” (25), where they exist, somewhat in the manner of dependents, in a cottage at some distance from the great house. In Pride and Prejudice, it is true, the Bennets are not evicted from Longbourn, but they live in some danger of social dislocation. Their estate, in default of a male heir, is entailed upon the egregious Mr. Collins, and should their improvident father die, the income of the five sisters will be quite insufficient to keep them in the comfort to which they are accustomed.2 In Persuasion, finally, “degradation” becomes a central theme as the Kellynch estate is rented by its self-centered owner, and Anne Elliot is forced to leave the cherished space of her home.3

At a deeper level, however, the degradation that threatens Jane Austen’s heroines has implications beyond the social, implications that are metaphysical or theological in nature. Isolated from a stable and inherited “estate,” an individual suffers more than loss of station; he is, more importantly, excluded from his “grounds” of being and action. Without the customary reference points of a structured inheritance, he may feel at a loss how to act. First and last in Jane Austen’s novels, in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, exclusion from home is literal as Catherine and Anne travel into worlds where few received principles are found exemplified in social behavior. Anne Elliot’s is much the more troubling journey. Forced to leave Kellynch when it is rented to the Crofts, she travels to Uppercross, Lyme and Bath, and finds it difficult to discover in any of these localities a pattern of order or continuity. Mrs. Smith in the same novel is “almost excluded from society,” and the immediate meaning is clear: she is unable on account of her sickness to visit the Assemblies in Bath. But the phrase may also be read to mean that society, considered as a support and protection for the self, as a body of public manners and conventions in accordance with which the self may act, is denied Mrs. Smith. In such a contingency, the reduced self may resort to subversive stratagems to ensure survival.4

Persuasion, particularly, apprehends a world in which traditional grounds of selfhood no longer obtain; but the apprehension in lesser degree attaches to all the novels. And it is perhaps a recognition of the failure or weakness of the self’s social inheritance that has led a number of readers to sense in Jane Austen’s fiction a dislike of society and of traditional forms, and to discover in her work a tendency toward ethical subjectivism. Such a reading receives support from the discovery that the deprivation that comes or threatens to come to many of Jane Austen’s heroines can be attributed to parental failure. Like Mrs. Smith’s husband, who had been “extravagant” and “left his affairs dreadfully involved,” the heads of families in the novels—Henry Dashwood, Mr. Bennet, Sir Walter Elliot—are irresponsible or deficient in the performance of their duties as husband, father, landlord, and trustee. When to these failures are added the too complacent common sense of Catherine Morland’s parents, the hypochondria and old-maidishness of Mr. Woodhouse and the errors of Sir Thomas Bertram in respect to his children’s education, a hypothesis that has long been favored by a persistent tradition of Austen criticism seems inescapable. Through the failure of parents properly to provide for their children the typical Austen heroine is deprived of a secure inheritance and called upon early in life to act as a “centre of self-responsible moral judgement.”5

Taken so far, the hypothesis is unexceptionable; it is the argument that sometimes develops from this point which I find unacceptable. No longer supported by the social structure, the argument runs, Jane Austen understandably responds in a subjective and ironical manner to the debased world she encounters, discovering value and order only in herself or in a closed friendship with a sister or brother (as Elizabeth Bennet confides in Jane, or as Fanny Price shows affection for William). Her subjective response and social withdrawal, however, cannot be made openly in her art but must be suppressed and disguised in the interests of family harmony, or under the pressure of a conventional society, which is, after all, the only arena of her existence and self-fulfillment. As Reginald Farrer, one of her first critics in this mode, put it on the centenary of her death:

[Jane Austen] was obviously ill-served by her circumstances. Behind the official biographies, and the pleasant little empty letters, and the accounts of how good she was to her mother and wouldn’t use the sofa, we feel always that she really lived remote in a great reserve. She praised and valued domesticity indeed, sincerely loved her own family, and made domestic instincts a cardinal virtue in all her heroes. But the praise and value are rather official than personal; her only real intimate at home was her sister Cassandra, and it is significant that only upstairs, behind her shut door, did she read her own work aloud, for the benefit of her chosen circle in the younger generation. Yet more significant, though, is the fact that nowhere does she give any picture of united family happiness.… This … speaks volumes, in its characteristically quiet way, for her position towards her own family. She was in it; but she was not really of it.6

Extend Farrer’s view of the relation of Jane Austen to her family to the relation of Jane Austen to society as a whole, and we have here in embryo an entire modern attitude—an attitude that has received its most extreme and articulate expression in the works of D. W. Harding and Marvin Mudrick, the deans of what has come to be called the “subversive” school of Austen criticism.7

The extreme opinions of the “subversive” critics—that Jane Austen undermines the social values she seems to affirm, that she can discover personal equilibrium in a society she detests only through the secret ironies of her art—are implicitly opposed throughout this study. Here the emphasis which this criticism places on Jane Austen’s moral individualism, on “the detachment and autonomy of the individual as a centre of self-responsible moral judgment,” in D. W. Harding’s words, may be briefly questioned. There are occasions, indubitably, where such individualism is admirable (one need only recall the splendid response of Elizabeth Bennet to Lady Catherine), and a recurring requirement of Jane Austen’s moral vision is that the formal and static façade of authority be enlivened and regenerated by individual energy. But this is a long way from saying that individual action of a subversive or antisocial nature is sanctioned, even unconsciously, in Jane Austen’s novels. True, her heroines often find themselves in an insecure world through no fault of their own, but what is remarkable is how positively they respond, either consistently or finally, to the endangered world they encounter. Indeed, in one instance, that of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, it is precisely the resistance of the heroine to those forces endangering her world which permits the continuity of an integral society. Given the irresponsibility of others, we might say, it is the more incumbent upon the Austen heroine to support and maintain an inherited structure of values and behavior.

Furthermore, Jane Austen has a continuous awareness of the dangers as well as the values of individualism. This is surely the point of Emma. As a heroine, Emma Woodhouse is unusual in having no apprehension as to her social place and social future. Socially and financially she is at the opposite pole from Mrs. Smith, and unlike Fanny Price or Elinor Dashwood she has no cause to exhibit fortitude in the face of adversity or isolation. In one sense only has she been deprived: she has lacked firm adult supervision since her mother’s death, and has consequently “a disposition to think a little too well of herself” (5). But even if the lack of parental direction is considered partly responsible for Emma’s individualism, it is by no means a wholly adequate explanation. As is true of Marianne Dashwood and Elizabeth Bennet before her, Emma’s self-assertion is a characteristic inherent in her nature which has been given license rather than brought into being by her father’s incompetence. Emma glories in her freedom to define her world outward from a center of self, yet we are to be aware of how closely she comes to fragmenting the little world of Highbury with her “schemes” and of how heinously she fails in her social responsibility when she insults Miss Bates on Box Hill.

Against the regulated hatred, the detached irony, and the subversive morality that much recent criticism has stressed, it is necessary to take more seriously a Jane Austen “thoroughly religious and devout,” who has the additional “merit … of being evidently a Christian writer.”8 In this connection it is appropriate to mention one important response to deprivation that is dramatized in Jane Austen’s novels which seldom finds its way into critical commentary. At times of greatest distress the “reduced” self in Jane Austen’s fiction is apt to fall back on its “resources,” an idea which suggests a Christian stoicism, an inner resilience in the face of adversity. Elinor Dashwood, Fanny Price, and Anne Elliot all at times approach a kind of Christian heroism which recognizes that, whatever the distresses of the moment, this world is not after all the place of ultimate reward.

Such a tone, genuine enough when it is sounded, is never of course dominant in Jane Austen’s fiction; her religion, as Archbishop Whately first noted, is not obtrusive. Moreover, the isolation and, often, real despair that her heroines experience is followed by a reinstatement into society. After dispossession comes possession, as each heroine in the novels (with the significant exception of Anne Elliot) is finally located in a properly organized space for her socially responsible activity, in a “suitable, becoming, characteristic situation” (E, 358) such as Donwell Abbey, Delaford, Pemberley, or the Mansfield parsonage. The typical Austen plot may move in the direction of isolation and subjectivism, but in the end there is a rapprochement between self and society.

This formal relocation of the individual protagonist in society is perhaps what the “subversive” critics find hardest to reconcile with their view of Jane Austen as an author who commits a covert assault on society’s values. Often, it appears, her plot resolutions are considered as acts of “bad faith,” as refusals to accept the responsibility of her intuitions or the implications of her “original choice.” She is a heretic to her own early recognition of the inadequacy of society, and in affirming finally that society is the proper context of individual behavior she evades the burden of achieving personal equilibrium outside of crumbling—but comforting—conventions.9 Discovering meanings beneath or beyond her explicit formulations, “subversive” criticism has presented us with an author who in different circumstances would have permitted her dislike of social values to surface in her fiction and proclaimed the unfettered freedom of the intelligent self to define its own morality and order.

As I am well aware, such views have not gone unchallenged in recent criticism.10 Nevertheless they remain prevalent, and for understandable reasons. Brilliantly destructive of the cult of “gentle Janeism” as they are, armed with the weapons of Freudian insight, secretly enamored, perhaps, of an existentialist morality, they present a more “interesting” Jane Austen—just as Lytton Strachey presented a more interesting Florence Nightingale when he proposed that her faith and efficiency (her confusion of the deity with drains) were suspiciously motivated. Yet, if one believes that Jane Austen genuinely affirms the prior, objective existence of moral and social principles in her fiction, such views are unacceptable—unacceptable because they misread the nature and quality of her moral commitment.

One way to support my argument is to consider the typical pattern of Jane Austen’s plots, not as an expression of her submission to social pressures or as a fictional response to her own biographical predicament, but as an indication of her attitude to society and to the individual’s place in society. If her fiction looks forward to modern themes and responses (as in Persuasion and Sanditon I believe it does), it also grows out of an eighteenth century novelistic concern with the predicament of the dislocated individual. It is in the eighteenth century novel that the recurring pattern of Jane Austen’s plots—the movement from a condition of initial security to a period of isolation and then to a final reinstatement in society—finds its origins. It is there, too, that individualism, often viewed in religious contexts, has interesting implications for a consideration of Jane Austen’s fiction. By setting her novels in the context of what might be termed the “providential” fiction of the eighteenth century, we may qualify the subversive readings of her moral vision. Then, by briefly looking ahead to the “contingent” fiction of the nineteenth century, we may suggest ways in which her novels do indeed anticipate later nineteenth century novelistic preoccupations.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY fiction, at least until the emergence of the Gothic and of Godwin, tends not to question the constitution, however much it may deplore the conditions of society. “Things as they are” are given, cannot be essentially otherwise, and the eighteenth century novelist, generally speaking, defines the individualism of his protagonists within these assumptions. A glance at the structure of representative works will reveal what is meant by “things as they are.”

Wherever we look, the protagonist begins life experiencing harmony and peace. Robinson Crusoe is brought up in “the upper station of low life,” a situation considered to be the “best state in the world” by his father; Tom Jones grows up at Paradise Hall, the pleasant country seat of Squire Allworthy; Rasselas lives initially in the Happy Valley; the Vicar of Wakefield inhabits “an elegant house, situated in a fine country and a good neighbourhood.” In all cases, however, a separation from initial security occurs. Robinson Crusoe disobeys “the will, nay, the commands of [his] father,” leaves his “father’s house,” and the eventual consequence of his “original sin” is his complete isolation on the island. Tom Jones is expelled against his wishes from Paradise Hall. Rasselas is impelled by “original curiosity” to escape from the the “security and delight” of the Happy Valley, and to seek with Imlac a “choice of life.” Parson Primrose is suddenly relieved of his fortune and parish; his eldest son is forced to go out into the world to seek his fortune; his house is burned and his cattle driven off; one daughter is thought to have died, another is abducted; and the vicar is reduced to a condition of life that makes a mockery of his early deuteronomic belief that the righteous in this life are always rewarded.

All these heroes (and many others) find themselves, like many of Jane Austen’s heroines, excluded from “a state of happiness,” either through voluntary choice or through factors over which they have little or no control. But in every case their dislocation is a temporary, if sometimes desperate, state. Always the hero returns after his experiences to a more or less stable existence; usually he is reintegrated into society, having undergone a growth of awareness en route. Crusoe is rescued from his island and, after “Farther Adventures,” returns home an old man, conscious of the “value of retirement and the blessing of ending our days in peace” and fully prepared to take “a longer journey.” Tom Jones, after narrowly escaping hanging, marries Sophia and, having learned enough in the way of prudence to survive in a postlapsarian world, returns to Somersetshire. Rasselas, less happily it is true, finds neither marriage nor lasting peace; nor, though he returns to Abyssinia, may he ever re-enter the Happy Valley. But if his project to rule a little kingdom seems doomed to continual frustration and his experiences seem to have taught him only that “human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed,” there still remains for him, as for his sister, the Princess, the “choice of eternity.” Parson Primrose, after all his tribulations, is restored to his former prosperity through the help of Sir William Thornhill, and at the end has “nothing now on this side of the grave to wish for.”

Beyond all the manifold differences—of morality, tone, genre—that undoubtedly exist among these works, one similarity is striking and significant: the circularity of the plot structure. Evidently based to a quite explicit degree on the myth of the fall, such a structure may be used in different ways and for different effects by different authors. But one general effect of their common use of the felix culpa topos is surely this: individual isolation in their novels is rendered explicable in terms of universal Christian experience. Expulsion from paradise is the common lot of all men since Adam, but the fall, like Adam’s, is not entirely unfortunate and the possibility exists for a return, not of course to the untrammeled bliss of Eden, but to the modified happiness that is proper to the mortal condition, or, if this too seems unattainable (as in Rasselas), then to the eternal happiness of the afterlife. By secularizing the structure of the fortunate fall (as Fielding does), or by writing in the tradition of spiritual autobiography (as Defoe does), or by cutting his fictional cloth to a scriptural pattern (as Goldsmith uses the story of Job in the Vicar of Wakefield), these authors reveal a belief in a world directed according to God’s providential plan.

Of course, qualifications need to be made. Clearly these novels are not merely prosaic versions of Paradise Lost. Even in Tom Jones, where we are asked to see Tom’s journey in Adamic terms, the use of the fortunate fall is not entirely serious, and Fielding is obviously aware of the comic (as opposed to cosmic) lengths to which the analogy of Tom to Adam and of his work of God’s creation can be taken.11 Then again, readers of Rasselas may doubt the consolatory effect in this somewhat lugubrious work of Johnson’s use of the myth of the fall. If the apologue has a religious meaning, one might argue, it is closer to Ecclesiastes than to the New Testament. And even in The Vicar of Wakefield, a novel which explicitly attempts to “explain” existence in orthodox terms, problems arise. Like Job, The Vicar brings into question the doctrine of rewards and punishments; the righteous man is not necessarily to rest secure in the belief that he need never go begging for his bread. But (again as in Job) The Vicar, after plunging its protagonist into terrible hardship, returns him to a condition of even greater prosperity than before. Parson Primrose’s renewed prosperity is brought about by the watchful benevolence of Sir William Thornhill, and it may be that Goldsmith intends us to read the knight as a secular Christ. Despite this, one is left somewhat uneasy by the ending of the novel. Having raised the specter of unrelieved misery in this life, can Goldsmith so easily effect a happy conclusion? Sir William seems more like a deus ex machina than a redeemer.

Such demurrers made, however, it is nevertheless possible to argue that the eighteenth century novel generally reflects faith in a society whose grounds are divinely validated. Though no generalization can adequately cover a genre whose representative forms include the psychological structure of Tristram Shandy as well as the ontological structure of Tom Jones, there are sufficient family resemblances among major eighteenth century novelists (Sterne excepted) for us to say that, while individualism is coextensive with the “rise” of the novel, it is an individualism for the most part contained within traditional, religious terms.12 However comically Fielding uses the fall story in Tom Jones, for example, his fiction is in other than simple allegorical ways a convincing expression of Christian optimism. Eden may not be recreated in the world—the impossible hope and mistaken strategy of Mr. Wilson in Joseph Andrews—but human life can be structured satisfactorily in this world, for beyond the viciousness, hypocrisy, and vanity that mark society as a fallen structure there is a natural moral order, just as behind the corruption of such words as “honour” and “prudence” there are fixed, normative meanings. It is the duty of the individual to discover this moral order, to ascertain the true meaning of moral concepts, and, having done so, to live within these valid structures.13

A brief examination of perhaps the greatest eighteenth century novel will suggest the importance of an understanding of eighteenth century attitudes to society for a reading of Jane Austen’s fiction. Richardson’s Clarissa may seem far from the mood of Jane Austen’s novels, but many of the issues Richardson treats are less absolute concerns in Jane Austen, and in some interesting ways the dilemma and response of Richardson’s heroine looks forward to, and comments upon, the dilemmas and responses of Jane Austen’s heroines. The basic conflict of Clarissa, moreover, that between the individual and authority, recurs in most of Jane Austen’s novels, and since it is precisely in the matter of how this conflict is resolved that critics are in disagreement, an examination of Richardson’s masterpiece is in order.14

Required by the “family plan” of the ambitious, social-climbing Harlowes to marry a man she hates, Clarissa is at the same time tempted by the aristocratic Lovelace to leave her home. Both abhorrent possibilities are for a time successfully resisted: she will not marry the rich but toadlike Solmes, nor will she accede to Lovelace’s scheme. But Clarissa’s situation cannot long remain in such precarious balance. The coercion of her father and brother reaches the point that she is convinced that a forced marriage to Solmes is imminent; at the same time Lovelace’s overtures become more persuasive and impelling to a degree which Clarissa does not consciously realize. The crucial scene in which Clarissa is separated (or separates herself) from her family takes place at the garden door of Harlowe Place.15 Clarissa is aware that in leaving her father’s house she will be “taking a step which nothing but the last necessity could justify” (I, 461), but against her conscious will she is tricked by Lovelace into fleeing.

In leaving her “father’s house” by way of the garden, Clarissa is clearly, in some sense, repeating the expulsion of man from Eden. In a later conversation between Clarissa and Lovelace the parallel is explicitly made when Clarissa says: “here, sir, like the first pair (I, at least, driven out of my paradise), are we recriminating” (I, 502). But in broad historical rather than mythic terms, Clarissa’s journey from the garden is the journey from the corporate life of a traditional society, in which the individual (in Jacob Burckhardt’s famous formula) knew himself “only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation,”16 into a modern capitalistic world in which competitiveness and individualism have separated man from a society of enclosure and support. There is, of course, no implication here that Clarissa is the first literary work to suggest this historical transition or that its date (1747–48) indicates the inception of a crucial change in the structure of human consciousness. My point is merely this: a great many novels, including Jane Austen’s, treat the dilemma of an individual in a society in which traditional and corporate values are giving way, or are felt to be giving way, to new economic and individualistic ones. Whatever precise date is assigned to the transition, the radical change in values and in an entire social orientation that has accompanied the emergence of the modern world has been a central theme of prose fiction from Lazarillo de Tormes to Lawrence’s The Rainbow.

A more important consideration than the presence of such a theme in a given novel, however, is the nature of the response elicited from a novelist in face of the transvaluation of morality he experiences. Here it is necessary to distinguish Richardson’s response (as it is also necessary to distinguish Jane Austen’s) from other responses that are commonly discovered in fiction. There is, for example, the individualistic response of the picaresque hero in which moral action is identified with the available means of survival. Smollett’s Roderick Random may serve as typical of the picaresque response in English fiction. His whole life a series of hardships, Roderick has arrived at a philosophy of adaptive individualism:

If one scheme of life should not succeed, I could have recourse to another, and so to a third, veering about to a thousand different shifts, according to the emergencies of my fate, without forfeiting the dignity of my character beyond a power of retrieving it, or subjecting myself wholly to the caprice and barbarity of the world. (Roderick Random, chapter 23)

Life is assumed to lack order and the world to be inimical to individual security. Society must be resisted and circumvented. Yet society is nevertheless the necessary backdrop for individual adaptability and it usually becomes, as in Roderick’s case, the final domicile of the hero. Moreover, the thought that society may be a historically determined structure capable of change would never enter the head of a picaresque hero or author.

Just such a thought, of course, is at the heart of Scott’s historical fiction, where a choice between cultural attitudes existing in time, rather than between moral attitudes existing in an atemporal realm, transforms the novel from a genre treating ethical antitheses to a genre offering dialectical possibilities. Before Scott’s novels, however, such a choice between cultures is rarely, if ever, found in English fiction. What we face in Clarissa, as in modified form in Jane Austen’s fiction, is a choice between “things as they are” and individual resistance. Precisely here caution is necessary. What is the nature and quality of Clarissa’s resistance? For the Marxist critic, Clarissa appears as a historical “type,” the nexus of forces in flow in mid-eighteenth century England, and her resistance to her family carries revolutionary overtones for the capitalist society in which she lives. Such Marxist individualism is not, however, descriptive of Clarissa. It is true, as Alan McKillop has said, that Clarissa comes into “conflict with the whole system,”17 but she becomes neither a Roderick Random adaptively changing to the coloration of a temporary background, nor a revolutionary protagonist in dynamic opposition to a corrupt system. Expelled from “all other protection and mediation,” she reaches a state of extreme subjective isolation; she must become “father, mother, uncle” to herself (II, 294). Her reduced state, however, leads her neither to the pragmatic expediency advised by her friend Anna Howe—to marry Lovelace as soon as possible—nor to a disaffection with the true values of her culture. In the end, she sets out “with all diligence for [her] father’s house” (IV, 157), expecting in heaven the happiness denied her on earth, and even asserting with her dying breath that it was good that she was “afflicted” (IV, 346). Her resistance to the economic corruption of her home is not revolutionary but reactionary. Though she sets herself in heroic opposition to those forces that would compromise her principles, her opposition is not subversive, for she is affirming the religious principles which ideally underlie society. The quality of her resistance looks forward to the individualism of Jane Austen’s own Christian heroines, Fanny Price and Anne Elliot, both of whom are likewise under pressure to accede to proposals which violate their social and personal beliefs. The price Clarissa has to pay is of course great. No reintegration into society is possible and only in heaven is Clarissa’s virtue to be rewarded.

Clarissa’s absolute allegiance to a theological interpretation of conduct underscores the suspicion of excessive individualism that is a feature of eighteenth century fiction and (a point that is also important in a reading of Jane Austen’s fiction) reveals that isolation from society need not lead to a “survival morality” or to disaffection and subversive attitudes. Nevertheless, the conflict in which Clarissa is engaged, while it affirms the necessity of acting always in accordance with religious principles, also reveals the “pull” of individual freedom. Something of the tension between providentialism and individualism that is discovered by modern readers in Robinson Crusoe reappears in Clarissa. Richardson, however, is conscious of the incipient individualism that his novel contains and is genuinely successful in exposing its theological insufficiency.

Free individual action in Clarissa finds its advocate, of course, in Lovelace, but it is important to recognize that Clarissa, too, “falls.” Like Eve, she is seduced by a diabolical figure to go against her father’s command, and like Eve she is culpable. Although it seems harsh to blame her for leaving her father’s house—since he has through his greed and cruelty forfeited all claim to stand in god-given authority over her, and she has even so refused voluntarily to disobey him—Clarissa is herself guiltily aware that she has permitted an unsanctioned secret correspondence with Lovelace, and she need not, after all, have gone to meet him at the garden gate. In this act, particularly, we are aware of a slight, if unconscious, movement on Clarissa’s part toward the freedom which Lovelace offers her. Richardson’s description of the actual interview at the garden door, replete with the imagery of keys and locks and of swords and sheaths, not only gives an appropriately sexual tone to Clarissa’s fall but suggests that she is genuinely tempted by his words and actions. Indeed it might be argued that it is precisely at this point that Clarissa symbolically loses her virginity (the later rape, done while she is drugged, leaves her blameless and only permits Lovelace to discover, in Yeats’s phrase, “the perpetual virginity of the soul”). Certain it is that Clarissa sees her action in leaving the garden as irrevocable and one by which she has “laid up for [herself] remorse for [her] whole life” (I, 509).

Clarissa, expelled from (partly choosing to leave) the garden, is forced (partly forces herself) to be free. But her freedom is something she fears and ultimately rejects in her submission to God. She takes the traditional view of the fall, that it is a sin of ultimate consequence by which she has forfeited the security and peace of her enclosed home. But need the fall, which leads to her freedom, be considered such an irrevocable step? Need it even be considered a sin? Such questions enter Clarissa almost in spite of Richardson. From another point of view, the journey out of the garden is the first real, human act—that act whereby an individual first defines himself in specifically human terms. This point of view is held in the novel by Lovelace. Recognizing that Clarissa’s “sudden transition” has caused her to treat him with coldness, Lovelace is at first confident that she will soon have the gratitude to “distinguish between the confinement she has escaped from and the liberty she has reason to rejoice in” (I, 494; my italics); and his belief is sincere (if ultimately mistaken, in Richardson’s view). A relativist and an individualist, Lovelace rejects all systems except that which he confidently places in his own breast. From his faith in his own sufficiency he is able to tell Clarissa that he will be “a father, uncle, brother, and … a husband to [her], all in one” (I, 480). All the security she has lost in leaving her father’s house, she will rediscover in the intense and passionate relationship he offers her. Nor in her new state is it simply that he will be “all” to her; she, for her part, will be “all” to him. At several points in the novel, Lovelace sees Clarissa as his “salvation,” or as a person with ultimate power over his life. He cries, “Include me in your terms; prescribe to me; promise for me as you please; put a halter about my neck and lead me by it…” (II, 80). In the intensity of such pleas his outlook is revealed as not only extreme and self-contradictory but heretical. Promising to “provide” for Clarissa, Lovelace desperately needs Clarissa to “provide” for him. If he has said that he will replace the whole family structure in Clarissa’s life (and beyond this, by implication, God’s authority), then she, the “divine” Clarissa, will act as God to him, will be the “ground” of his being. As novel after novel in the nineteenth century will insist, no person can act as the “providence” and “substance” of another.

Clarissa’s heroic refusal to submit to Lovelace’s impassioned appeal is to be understood, therefore, in the context of theological orthodoxy. Driven from a family enclosure that has been economically corrupted, unable to accept the expedient morality of Anna Howe, Clarissa cannot “sanction” or “sanctify” (the words are again and again repeated) the passionate union Lovelace offers her, for this would not only defy her father’s authority but go against God’s law. Lovelace may have led her to forfeit all her “temporal” hopes, but she is determined he will not destroy her eternal happiness. Her “soul disdains communion with him” (III, 521); she has more pleasure in thinking of death than of such a husband. Something of this conflict between religious obedience and passionate love recurs in the character of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, and while Jane Austen, like Richardson, gives a good deal of sympathy to passion, no less than Richardson does she reject the possibility of a passionate relationship becoming a substitute for the relation between an individual and God. Like Richardson too, as we shall see especially in Emma, Jane Austen is fully aware of the “evils” of complete subjective freedom, of the problems attendant on the departure from the “father’s house.”

Clarissa testifies to its author’s sincere faith that the world is structured according to divine plan. As long as such a faith persists, one might conjecture, it is unlikely that we will find many novels granting ultimate sanction to the individual to define his own order. But with the loss of a deeply experienced faith in God’s providence, will not such a sanction be claimed and exercised? Looking ahead to later English works that take the conflict between father and child as a central theme, one discovers very different resolutions. The individual protagonists of such works as The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), The Way of All Flesh (1884; 1903), Father and Son (1907), and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), all in one way or another find it essential to the continuance of their authentic existence that they resist the coercive systems they inherit and are expected to live within. Edmund Gosse, faced by his father’s intransigent fundamentalism, clings “through thick and thin” to “a hard nut of individuality,” refusing ever to resign a belief in his “innate and persistent self.” Stephen Dedalus, declining to serve that in which he can no longer believe, “whether it call itself [his] home, [his] fatherland or [his] church,” uses for his defense “silence, exile and cunning,” as he sets out “to discover the mode of life or of art whereby [his] spirit [can] express itself in unfettered freedom.” Yet the intense self-reliance of Gosse and Dedalus is, I think, a less typical response than one might expect and self-sufficiency is more often claimed than achieved even in “modern” works.18

The point may be supported by briefly considering the predicament of representative nineteenth century novel heroes. Like their predecessors in the eighteenth century, they are apt to find themselves isolated from society, but unlike a Tom Jones or a Crusoe, or even a Marianne Dashwood, their isolation is an immediate fact. They have been expelled from no initial paradise and their lives can in no sense be considered to repeat the fortunate fall of Adam. Like Pip in Great Expectations (1861), the nineteenth century hero is likely to come to consciousness “turned … upside down” in a hostile world. Facing such a world he has no choice but to be free; but it is a freedom he would, if he could, escape. At the end of the century, Jude Fawley in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) seems to bring to a culmination the plight of the nineteenth century individual: “As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering.” Man, who had once existed in a world whose dimensions were laid down and continuously sustained by God, now discovers that he is himself the sole legislator of order in an alien world. To be at the center of one’s existence, rather than to exist in a world whose center is God, is a horrifying discovery that is made again and again in the nineteenth century novel. In a world whose center cannot hold, desperate strategies are undertaken to regain a sense of divine substance to existence. Jude, after his “shuddering” discovery, seeks to escape his existential freedom by investing Christminster with divine meaning; it becomes the center of the universe to him, a “city of light,” the “Heavenly Jerusalem.” Dorothea Brooke, victim of “soul hunger” in the godless society of Middlemarch (1872), tries to recline “in the lap of [Casaubon’s] divine consciousness.” Cathy, in Wuthering Heights (1847), tells Nelly that her “love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath.” Jane Eyre sees in Rochester her “whole world … almost [her] hope of heaven,” and he stands “between [her] and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun.” All such attempts to invest a person (or, in Jude’s case, a place) with divine meaning are doomed to failure and, if unchecked, lead to destruction. No person can act as God for another person, or justify another’s existence, or guarantee another’s selfhood. These are among the salient lessons of the nineteenth century novel which, as a rule, reveals the difficulties involved in discovering a sense of personal equilibrium in a world where external order cannot be assumed.19

The positive aspects of individualism (suggested as early as Crusoe and fulfilled, seemingly, in Portrait of the Artist) are not, on the whole, discoverable in the nineteenth century novel. When Pip, finding that the self can have no great expectations that life will somehow be taken care of without individual effort, learns that he must take responsibility for his own future, he grows importantly in awareness, but his discovery hardly brings him joy. Existential freedom, indeed, seems seldom to be viewed after the Nietzschean fashion as a glorious opportunity for man to fulfill his human potential, and the discovery that self is prior to structure is more often a case for despair than for hope in the nineteenth century. The Übermenschen who begin to appear in English fiction as the century turns have negative value: one thinks of Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness (1899), the universal representative of Europe, an emissary of the European mind, appearing (as he thinks) as a god to the African savages; or, somewhat later, of Gerald Crich, in Women in Love (1921), with his burning ambition “to extend over the earth a great and perfect system in which the will of man ran smooth and unthwarted, timeless, a Godhead in process.” The “horror” that both men discover is that man cannot be God, that ultimate value and order are not theirs to bequeath to the world. Crich, looking inward and finding, like Kurtz, hollowness at the center of his being, seeks “reinforcements” in the face of “universal collapse” in a relationship with Gudrun, making her (much as Cathy makes Heathcliff, and as Lovelace wished to make Clarissa) the guarantee and justification of his being: “If there weren’t you in the world, then I shouldn’t be in the world, either.” (Compare Cathy’s words: “If all else perished and he [Heathcliff] remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty stranger.”) But Crich, like Heathcliff and Lovelace before him, comes to recognize before his death the negative implications of subjectivity in a world which lacks a theological orientation.20

Such a brief and arbitrary notice of the theme of individualism in English novels after Jane Austen undoubtedly begs many questions. For example, not all Victorian and modern novelists are helpless before the nihilism that is often consequent upon the discovery of the death of God. In the Feuerbachian humanism of Middlemarch and the “star equilibrium” of Women in Love, positive and admirable solutions to a world without a transcendent origin of value are discovered and dramatized. Nevertheless, the anxiety and desperation that frequently attend the passage from an ontological world in later novels permit us, when we look back to Jane Austen and realize her own awareness of cultural instability, to view with understanding her distrust of excessive individualism and her affirmation of inherited structures.

IN THIS selective bracketing of Jane Austen’s fiction I have attempted to suggest ways in which a persistent novelistic preoccupation with individualism over two centuries can usefully provide a large context for an examination of her novels. The eighteenth century novels which precede her fiction, though they occasionally contain troubling implications (at least for modern readers), generally testify to a world that is divinely structured. Behind the appearance of discontinuity and randomness that the fallen world presents, a divine order exists, so that even individual isolation is explicable in terms of universal Christian experience. Secure in the knowledge that the world is essentially ordered, the individual is also confident that it will—after much personal tribulation and a difficult process of education perhaps—provide him with a place. Usually this place is in society, but even when, as in Clarissa, his place is only to be found in the afterlife, the consolatory effect of knowing that his continued existence is guaranteed by God remains. In the nineteenth century, however, precisely this consolation is lacking. Many novels in that century testify to the loss of faith in any extrahuman foundation for society or individual existence, and, as I have argued, dramatize a situation in which the self is discovered as the only determinant of order and value. Far from rejoicing in his new-found freedom to structure his existence as he thinks fit, the typical nineteenth century hero is appalled by the burden of a responsibility he has not sought, and tries, in ways I have indicated briefly, to escape from an intolerable isolation.

It is not possible to provide satisfactory causal reasons why the nineteenth century novel was faced with a new metaphysical or theological situation. Sociological factors such as the continuing disruption of society from the effects of increasing industrialism; philosophical factors such as the idealistic course of British empiricism (leading to the epistemological subversion of the external world and the increasing isolation of the self); the loss of belief in such ordering structures as concordia discors and the great chain of being; an emerging historicism—these and other developments undoubtedly accompany, if they do not cause or explain, the shift from ontology to psychology, from public orders to private worlds, that recent scholars consider to have occurred between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.21 Questions of cause aside, however, the point here to be emphasized is that Jane Austen’s fiction is intermediate, and in no way more importantly so than in her attitude to the problems of individual identity and morality. Existing at a point of transition between two centuries, she may also be seen as situated between two texts: “Therefore that ye shall rise, the Lord sends down” and “Gott ist tot.”

In certain structural ways her novels follow in the tradition of eighteenth century fiction. The initial security, subsequent isolation, and final relocation in society that her heroines experience are stages reminiscent of the journey of the self in many previous novels. Occasionally, too, there are vestigial suggestions of the expulsion from the Garden theme, as when in Mansfield Park Maria Bertram breaks out of the gate into the park with Crawford at Sotherton. It can be argued further that Tom Bertram’s disobedience of his father in the same novel (along with other sins against his father’s house) invites something of a traditional suspicion of filial disobedience. Certainly Mansfield Park, by its very title, invites an allegorical reading. On the other hand, it is clear that Jane Austen’s plots no longer work explicitly within the controlling theological framework of earlier novels; they do not secularize the pattern of felix culpa; and there are intimations that the isolation of the individual is no longer explicable in terms of universal Christian experience.

The last point may be supported by another reference to Mrs. Smith, whose “situation” could hardly be more “cheerless”:

She had been very fond of her husband,—she had buried him. She had been used to affluence,—it was gone. She had no child to connect her with life and happiness again, no relations to assist in the arrangement of perplexed affairs, no health to make all the rest supportable. Her accommodations were limited to a noisy parlour, and a dark bed-room behind, with no possibility of moving from one to the other without assistance, … (P, 154)

In such passages Jane Austen’s last novel moves out of the eighteenth century and gives suggestions of Victorian Angst. “There is so little real friendship in the world” (156), Mrs. Smith tells Anne Elliot, and one is tempted sometimes to hear modern chords in the sad melody of Persuasion, and to sense in Anne’s marriage to Wentworth at the end of this novel an anticipation of Matthew Arnold’s existentialist response in “Dover Beach” to a world lacking value and consolation:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor hope for pain; (11. 29–34)

As I argue in chapter five, however, the danger is not that we will miss the new directions of Persuasion but that we will grant them too much prominence. Persuasion brings into central focus what had been latent and peripheral in the other novels, but even here Anne Elliot’s response to her reduced existence is in several respects nearer to Clarissa’s than to that in “Dover Beach.” Thus, while it is significant that Anne does not return to her father’s house—either literally, or in the tropological sense Clarissa intends—it is also important that she remains, throughout her period of isolation, faithful to an inherited idea of conduct and that, in the end, she refuses to repudiate her early habit of obedience and sense of duty. In these respects Anne retains what other Austen heroines either possess or come to accept: a belief in the prior existence of certain imperatives for individual action.

Where are these imperatives located? Where does the individual in Jane Austen’s world place his allegiance? Two important answers to these questions are not generally to be found in criticism. The first is that it is to religion that the individual owes his duty; the second and connected answer is that it is to society. Ultimately, I believe Jane Austen’s morality is based in religious principle, and religious responses are not uncommon in her fiction. But I am not concerned here to argue for the dramatized presentation in her novels of a religious basis for individual behavior. Few novels may be properly termed “theological” (though in the eighteenth century they may look to theological sanctions for society and the self). As a form the novel’s area of concern seems typically to be “ethical.” This is perhaps to say with Angus Wilson that the English novel after Richardson deals with the question of “right and wrong” rather than with “good and evil.”22 Certainly most novels are more interested in the relation of the individual to others in society than in the relation of the individual to God, more interested in morality than in theology.

A morality fit for man in society need not be, as Dickens and other nineteenth century novelists reveal, a social morality, and here perhaps we have another means of placing Jane Austen’s novels by setting them against certain tendencies that precede and follow her fiction. Thus, whereas the eighteenth century novelist, generally speaking, can accept society whole, as a given structure within whose terms the individual must act, the nineteenth century novelist tends to question the ethical constitution of society and to set against it a morality generated by the interaction of two people or a small group. On the one hand, to make the point quickly, we have the man of the hill in Tom Jones, whose withdrawal is wrong both as strategy and as morality; on the other, we have Wemmick’s moated “castle” at Walworth in Great Expectations, a pocket carefully separated from the taint of surrounding London. From Fielding’s comprehensive affirmation of society, the English novel, we may say, moves, no doubt through Sterne and the sentimental tradition, to Dickens’ circumscribed ethic in which a small enclave is purified through love amid a world of wickedness. In this comparison, Jane Austen’s affiliation is with Fielding rather than Dickens (though Persuasion will require qualifications at the proper time). Her fiction puts forward a positive vision of society, and although her great novels, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma, each end by describing the “perfect happiness” of hero and heroine in the company of a “small band of true friends” (E, 484), this is not to be read as a circumscription of Jane Austen’s ethical concern, or as an indication of her loss of faith in an inherited structure of morality. In each case, society has been reaffirmed around the central union, and the social fragmentation that initially threatened has been reconstituted through individual commitment into a new whole. A measure of Jane Austen’s social affirmation may be gained from comparing the final union of Knightley and Emma with the concluding marriages of Dickens’ novels—with, for example, the muted and circumscribed happiness of Arthur Clennam and Little Dorrit: “They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar” (Little Dorrit, concluding sentence).

I wish to argue, then, that Jane Austen affirms society, ideally considered as a structure of values that are ultimately founded in religious principle, at the same time as she distinguishes it from its frequently corrupted form. The latter distinction permits one to oppose the charges (often made by critics favorably disposed to Jane Austen) that she disliked her society, that she was, in Lionel Trilling’s phrase, “conscious of, or unconsciously aware of, not a good society but a bad one, a predominantly vulgar society,” that she, in David Daiches’s words, “expose[d] the economic basis of social behavior with an ironic smile.”23

To answer the first charge, it is surely only necessary to admit that the discovery and depiction of viciousness within society need not lead to a rejection of society. Fielding’s example is before us. At least as aware of the viciousness and corruption of society as Jane Austen, Fielding, working on the assumption of a fallen world, is able to define ways in which an individual can come to terms with an ubiquitous vanity and hypocrisy. Jane Austen, I would argue, especially in her early novels, not only takes over much of Fielding’s ethical framework—his division of moral responses into opposed pairs which are exemplified in characterization—but she also comes to broadly similar ethical resolutions. The individual, by reconciling his benevolence and his prudence, his sensibility and his sense, can satisfy the claims of society without compromising his integrity. As Trilling insists, Jane Austen was indeed aware of “a predominantly vulgar society”; she calls it “the neighbourhood,” or “the world,” and the coercive power it may exert is recognized. But she is also aware, as Fielding was, of an ideal society behind corrupted forms, which provides in its manners and conventions, properly understood, a framework of morality and order to which the self can authentically respond.

To answer Daiches’s charge, it is necessary to be clear about Jane Austen’s attitude toward money. That she had an awareness of pressing economic factors in the society of her experience is no more to be denied than her awareness of widespread “vulgarity.” Sense and Sensibility particularly, we will see, reveals the evil that may result from economically motivated conduct. But to suggest that she was “the only English novelist of stature who was in a sense a Marxist before Marx” is totally to misconceive the direction of her thought. In what sense is she Marxist? Daiches’s own argument—that her heroines escape from the possibility of financial indigence into the “country house ideal”—is scarcely a satisfactory one. Clearly, he is not really arguing that Jane Austen is a Marxist author; what he is doing is to express a Marxist disapproval of the economy of a hierarchical social structure.24

A more extreme and influential argument, identifying (by implication, at least) Jane Austen’s morality with the available means of economic survival, is to be found in Mark Schorer’s much cited “Fiction and the ‘Analogical Matrix.’” Persuasion, for Schorer, is a “novel of courtship and marriage with a patina of sentimental scruple and moral punctilio and a stylistic base derived from commerce and property, the country house and the inherited estate.” The morality, that is, is explicit but superficial; the harsh economic reality, implicit in the “metaphorical substructure” of the novel, is basic and the real determinant of the novel’s values. The comedy “lies in the difference between the two orders of value which the metaphors, like the characters, are all the while busily equating.”25 But can this be fairly argued? Would it not be truer to say that Jane Austen is aware of the confrontation between traditional and economic values in her society, and that, like Richardson before her, she resists any economic transvaluation of a traditional morality whose roots are ultimately religious? Schorer has been led by his hypothesis to overemphasize the importance of the “buried” metaphor. Not only are his “economic” derivations frequently false—such words as “credit,” “figure,” independence,” and “prospect” may have quite other than economic meanings in given contexts—but he also fails to realize that Jane Austen’s use of economic words is often conscious and thematic, that she is fully aware of the motivations which a financial vocabulary may reveal. It is a consistent mark of moral integrity in her novels that solely financial considerations be excluded from personal decisions, though there are also occasions on which it would be unwise, if not immoral, not to take them into account. Frequently, “economic” words are employed intentionally to assert that possession of money entails a commensurate moral responsibility. One example only need be given here. When Maria Bertram, realizing that Henry Crawford will not marry her, decides for purely expedient reasons to marry the very rich Rushworth, we are told that “independence was more needful than ever.” Though Crawford has destroyed her happiness, Maria determines that “he should not destroy her credit, her appearance, her prosperity too” (MP, 202). Financially and socially she secures her “independence” and “credit” through marriage, but the moral content of these words is ironically present (or “buried”) beneath Maria’s interpretation of their meaning, and what she loses by her marriage is any claim to a moral “independence” or “credit.” Her consistent references to Rushworth as “Sotherton” are another indication of where her real “interest” lies.

Two other charges against Jane Austen’s social vision may be appropriately mentioned here. The first, argued forcibly and in different ways by Arnold Kettle and Graham Hough, questions whether Jane Austen’s fiction is not limited by the “class basis” of her moral standards. I try to come to terms with this, in my view mistaken, charge in chapter four. The second charge, implicit in criticism since Sir Walter Scott’s favorable review of Emma in the Quarterly, has to do with scale. How comprehensive is her society? Is she limited by being, in Gilbert Ryle’s witty phrase, “exempted by the width of the Home Counties from having to try to portray in her pastel-shades the ebony complexion of urban sin”?26 The answer to this perennial question has to be of the yes-and-no kind. Quite clearly she is limited in respect to subject (and was well aware of this, as her celebrated letters to the Prince Regent’s librarian attest). When she describes “urban” life, it is either Bath, which has, at least in Northanger Abbey, little sign of the massive effects of the industrial revolution, Portsmouth (discussed in the next chapter), or London, which is wicked enough, but which owes more, one suspects, to theatrical stereotype than to felt experience. But against this kind of limitation, deliberately chosen in the interest of an aesthetic end, one has to emphasize her deep awareness of a transitional society and her special ability to invest the everyday occurrence—a walk in a garden, a visit to an estate, an outing to Box Hill or to Lyme Regis—with large and (though one hesitates to use the word) symbolic significance.

Jane Austen’s serious concern over the state and continuity of the social structure is not, I think, to be doubted, and the novel which more than any other expresses this concern is Mansfield Park. Often considered a heresy to her early individualism, this novel seems to me central to Jane Austen’s convictions, the work where her morality and ontology are most clearly in evidence, and for this reason I consider it first of all her novels. As its title implies, it is a novel concerned with place and tradition and with the relation of the individual to his inheritance, but it is not, as many critics have charged, a reactionary defense of the status quo. One of the crucial motifs of the work, indeed, discussed at some length in the next chapter, has to do with the “improvement” of estates, and in developing this motif Jane Austen is able to distinguish with precision and skill between proper and improper responses to an inherited culture. The “estate” in Mansfield Park is symbolic of a whole social and moral inheritance, a fact which explains, inter alia, why the theatricals are so distrusted.

In Mansfield Park the “moral autonomy” of which Harding speaks is rather a moral commitment to an ideal of conduct, which the heroine cannot discover in her vicinity, but which she nevertheless believes in as an ideal and attainable order, and which she is able by virtue of her fidelity and consistency to bring once more into being. Fanny’s conduct suggests that, for Jane Austen, individual behavior must be in accordance with social principle, but this, I think, is a constant in her fiction. Those who undermine society are either entirely rejected (as Lady Susan is, pace the sympathetic reading of Marvin Mudrick), or they come to learn the necessary limits of human freedom and to affirm their moral “estate.” It may be argued that this is an enclosure of individual choice, but it cannot be argued that this is bad faith. Quite consciously Jane Austen limits the individualism of her heroines from a recognition of the possibly destructive effects of excessive freedom. Something of the eighteenth century novelist’s distrust of curiositas lingers in her novels, where a persistent theme treats of the dangers posed to the social fabric by the strongly subjective self.

In stressing a traditional rather than a “modern” or a “subversive” Jane Austen, I do not wish to ignore recent criticism and scholarship, much of it excellent, that has itself in one way or another taken this route. To the work of Trilling, Babb, Litz, Southam, and Moler I am particularly indebted, and—if the sentiment be not too suspiciously reminiscent of the gratitude of the Reverend Mr. Collins—future chapters will acknowledge the influence of these, and other, critics and scholars. Nor, in asking that Jane Austen be read as an author who affirms society, do I wish to ignore her keen awareness of the dangers of automatic formality and a complacent pride in status. Conscious of the possible weakening of external structures and of the possibility of an economic transvaluation of morality, however, she insists on individual commitment to, rather than mere acceptance of society. Her novels may be seen as the continuing record of a responsible woman concerned with right conduct in “such days as these” (PP, 38).

A final consideration of this introduction may be to notice how deeply Jane Austen was aware of her responsibilities as author. Conscious that of all human activities imaginative creation permits the greatest freedom, she quite consciously delimits her powers of expression. R. W. Chapman long ago noted how “exceptionally, and even surprisingly, dependent upon reality as a basis of imaginary construction”27 she was in her novels, and the reason for this surely is that she is as aware of the dangers of unlimited imaginative freedom in authors as in heroines. Throughout her writing it is remarkable how meticulously careful Jane Austen is to ground her world in a precise temporal and spatial frame. The chronology and geography of her novels are exact. She uses almanacs and road books in their construction and, ignorant of Northamptonshire, she enquires of her sister if it is a “country of Hedgerows” (L, 298). Learning that it is not, she probably altered a scene, later to include her original description in Persuasion, whose setting (Somersetshire) would permit its authentic introduction.28

In an interesting series of letters to her niece Anna Austen—the only extended literary criticism Jane Austen left—we meet this same demand for exact realistic fidelity:

Lyme will not do. Lyme is towards 40 miles distance from Dawlish & would not be talked of there.—I have put Starcross instead. If you prefer Exeter, that must be always safe. (L, 394)

Yes—Russel Square is a very proper distance from Berkeley St.—We are reading the last book.—They must be two days going from Dawlish to Bath; They are nearly 100 miles apart. (L, 395)

The last chapter does not please us quite so well, we do not thoroughly like the Play; perhaps from having had too much of Plays in that way lately. And we think you had better not leave England. Let the Portmans go to Ireland, but as you know nothing of the Manners there, you had better not go with them. You will be in danger of giving false representations. Stick to Bath & the Foresters. There you will be quite at home. (L, 395)

Twice you have put Dorsetshire for Devonshire. I have altered it.—Mr Griffin must have lived in Devonshire; Dawlish is half way down the County. (L, 396)

Accuracy as to geographical distances and traveling time (and in other passages as to the appropriateness of her niece’s choice of names) points to more than the recognition that “an artist cannot do anything slovenly” (L, 30), or to the aim of the miniaturist concerned with a “little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory” (L, 469). Her awareness of the “danger of giving false representations” in its adjacence to the mention of the play is not only a comment on the nature of the theatricals in Mansfield Park, but evidence of a concern that the novelist should describe things that are really there, that imagination should be limited to an existing order.

It is in this manner too that we should view her frequent requirements that her niece should pay attention to the minutiae of social decorum:

I have also scratched out the Introduction between Lord P. & his Brother, & Mr. Griffin. A Country Surgeon … would not be introduced to Men of their rank. (L, 394)

We are not satisfied with Mrs. F.’s settling herself as Tenant & near Neighbour to such a Man as Sir T. H. without having some other inducement to go there; she ought to have some friend living thereabouts to tempt her. (L, 400)

This kind of sentiment is probably what led D. H. Lawrence to accuse Jane Austen of a “sharp knowing in apartness,”29 but it is perhaps fairer to discover in this ligature between fiction and reality a philosophic indication. It is inadvisable to follow the Portmans to Ireland because that would be to leave a location one knows in every detail of geography and social behavior and to enter an unknown realm, one of imagination without reference to fact. The strength of a novel is like that of Antaeus; it depends upon frequent contact with the ground. The ungrounded imagination is as dangerous for an author as it is for a character within the novel, and imaginative limitation is welcome, for it is proof that there is a center to reality other than the individual mind. In her close attention to physical fact Jane Austen declares her belief, not in man as the creator of order but in man’s freedom to create within a prior order. Thus her individualism as author, like the individualism of her heroines, respects finally the given structure of her world. Her careful attention to topographical details, as found in Mansfield Park, takes on in this regard something of an ontological significance.