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  • Moral Taste: Aesthetics, Subjectivity, and Social Power in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
  • D. Rae Greiner (bio)
Moral Taste: Aesthetics, Subjectivity, and Social Power in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, by Marjorie Garson; pp. 483. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2007, $75.00, £48.00.

Savoir-faire, a certain sprezzatura: the sine qua non of the bon vivant. If you have to ask, you haven't got it, and you can't get it without a little Latin, good Italian, and better French. In Joseph Litvak's Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel (1997), the sophisticate's eloquent (yet ineffable) good taste is limned by the gustatory pleasures, erotic appetites, and phobic snobbery shaping nineteenth-century moral and aesthetic discourses. Coming ten years later, Marjorie Garson's study focuses not on Litvak's queer tastemakers, nor on that Bourdieuian taste which transcends moral (indeed, all) content, but on "moral taste" and the bedeviling problems that come with it, particularly how "taste," as aesthetic or personal judgment, acquires any reliable moral valence. Garson is, to be sure, asking hard questions: how do "apparently trivial gestures," such as arranging fruit on a plate or draping an Indian shawl, "come to function as an expression of what Bourdieu would call 'charismatic' moral distinction?" (5). The answer isn't clear, in part because the moral taste of which Garson speaks, along with those authors to whom she devotes her chapters—Walter Scott, Jane Austen, J. C. Loudon, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot—is notoriously difficult to historicize, precisely because it is so difficult to define. While Garson finds in these primary texts [End Page 312] copious examples of improper behavior, vulgar dress, effortless decorum—evidence of taste both bad and good, often laden with unambiguous moral value—it is more challenging to account systematically for their moral cast and to historicize the hierarchy of value purportedly maintained through aesthetic choices. Garson offers genuinely original readings of these materials but provides only a loose framework for theorizing the moral value of taste in the history she seeks to delimit.

The result is a series of chapters rich with detail yet lacking a strong unifying thesis, a heavily footnoted study of moral taste that nevertheless fails to mention, along with Strange Gourmets, Jukka Gronow's The Sociology of Taste (1997), and Regenia Gagnier's The Insatiability of Human Wants (2000), a host of influential essays on Garson's subjects: Bourdieu's "distinction," Thorstein Veblen's "conspicuous consumption," or the trend for "improving" estates, like Anne Banfield's "The Moral Landscape of Mansfield Park" (Nineteenth-Century Fiction 26.1 [1971]: 1–24), which deals explicitly with simplicity as aesthetic ideal, the gendering of resources, and landscape gardening as an analogue for cultivating moral character. Were these omitted due to concerns over length, their absence might not register, but Garson's habit of repetition suggests that this particular editorial pressure cannot be held responsible. The force of Garson's often compelling discussion in chapter 3 of Austenian "natural taste," and her avatars' limitless fund of "inner resources," is undermined by redundancy. Her claim that "the discourse of taste requires that literary quotations be injected into conversation concisely, obliquely, and probably with some irony, so as to imply that the common culture . . . does not need to be spelled out," but that paradoxically—and this is her point—"such naturalness takes practice" (134), is repeatedly made in subsequent paragraphs: "the everyday skills of genteel self-presentation require practice" (142); "naturalness needs to be practiced" (143); "feminine education in the widest sense . . . takes more than 'natural taste.' . . . No doubt it also takes some practice" (149). No doubt, indeed, for Garson has made the point abundantly clear, or perhaps abundantly but without the clarity for which readers seeking a more global explanation of this apparent fact might wish.

While Garson's chapters surprise and engage with provocative local insights, these are too frequently in the service of less striking general pronouncements. The introduction's invocations of Veblen, Bourdieu, and Judith Butler do not materialize in the kinds of radical departures from, and innovations in, formal methodology or interpretive conventions we might anticipate. This book...

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