Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time (review)

REVIEWS 125 Mary Waldron. Jane Austen and the Fiction ofHer Time. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ix + 194pp. US$54.95. ISBN 0-521-65130-1. "The work of Jane Austen comes after over a century in which women novelists played an important part in forming the novel's conventions, and her achievement, so much greater than the achievements of her precursors, arises out ofthe tradition they established"—thus Jane Spencer affirms in The Rise ofthe Woman Novelist (1986), and this view, I believe, is now widely accepted; yet, though attempts have been made to demonstrate Austen's debt to "her precursors," few have hitherto fully elucidated the question of where her "greatness" lies in comparison with them. In this book Mary Waldron brings out Austen's unique achievement in clear relief against her contemporaries; at the same time, Waldron casts grave doubt on the attitude of current Austen criticism. The eighteenth-century demand for a moral tendency in the novel escalated in the 1790s when in the wake of the French Revolution the novel became the focus of a radical-conservative debate about morality. From Marilyn Butler on, a number of critics have regarded this as a context indispensable to the appraisal of Austen's work, and so does Waldron. Unlike Butler or recent feminist critics, however, Waldron insists that what absorbed Austen was not politics but fiction itself. In the 1790s the novel became an instrument for delivering ideological messages, which led to "a hardening of novelistic formulae"; as a result, the novel lost "nature" and "probability" (p. T). Waldron asserts that dissatisfaction with this trend in contemporary fiction gave rise to Jane Austen as a novelist, and that throughout her career she repudiated "the obligation to give a moral lead," choosing instead "to present human interaction in an untendentious way" (p. 165). In discussing the novels Waldron demonstrates the ways in which Austen exploits certain stereotypes prevalent in the fiction of the time—"the deluded female who reads too many novels, the model girl, the female rebel, the hero/guardian who has all the right answers, contrasting pairs ofheroines, one right, the other disastrously wrong," and so on (p. 2)—and transforms these stereotypes in a subtle way, "putting the locus of moral approval in continual doubt" (p. 13). Waldron's method is highly analytical, characterized, above all, by close and intelligent reading ofthe text, which is most fully shown in her discussion ofMansfield Park. This novel, and its "prim" heroine Fanny, have evoked dissatisfaction among critics, who have considered either that "the novel fails because it is too didactic ," or that "it fails because it is inconsistent in its didacticism" (p. 89); but Waldron argues that those critics have entirely misunderstood the author's intention . Using a structure similar to that of such didactic or "Evangelical" novels as Sarah Burney's Clarentine, Hannah More's Coelebs in Search ofa Wife, and Mary Brunton's Self-Control, Austen repeatedly puts Fanny into difficulties in which her moral principles prove helpless. Counteracting "an increasing tendency for fiction to sermonise through ideal object-lessons" (p. 86), the novelist aims "to give the lie to Evangelical fictional certainties" (p. 110). Waldron narrowly scrutinizes Fanny's conduct—her frailty, egoism, or self-deception—and 126 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 makes it sufficiently clear that, "although she is presented as meaning to be selfless and good, she is also in too much confusion and conflict to carry the moral authority she has seemed earlier to promise" (p. 102). Indeed, Waldron's analyses are exhaustive enough to convince us that the view that Fanny is faultless is "not reconcilable with the text" (p. 105). In a similar way Waldron explores the other novels and plumbs the depth and complexity of characters who on the surface seem to be simplistic stereotypes— showing, for example, that Elinor and Marianne are by no means such unadulterated embodiments of unerring reason and anarchic feeling as are often seen in the fiction of the time, or that Mr Knightley is a far more complicated figure than that of the conventional hero/guardian. Much of Waldron's attention is thus devoted to charting the way...