Absent Signifiers in Jane Austen: Toward an Archaeology of Morals

It is probably a sign of the times that contemporary readers can find so much to enjoy in a discussion of the moral values at work in Austen’s world. Nothing is more difficult to convey in a college classroom today than the concept of decorum with all its ramifications, social to aesthetic. Yet students gravitate toward the concept and desperately want to understand it. Mona Scheuermann has performed a great service to teachers and students alike in this study of Austen’s moral compass, her abiding commitment to right relations amongst members of her society. It may sound naive to us, but people were expected to be decent, thoughtful, honest, and good, especially within their own class. Even across class boundaries there were rules of respect and charity. Though Austen’s novels are conspicuously concerned with love, Scheuermann argues convincingly that any wholesome love is contingent on morality, that, for example, Elizabeth Bennet needs to discover that Darcy is a good man before she can open herself to feelings of affection toward him. No small share of credit for the Austen revival in our time must attach to the novelist’s firm conception of civil, decent, rational conduct in complex human situations.

Scheuermann takes issue with a view common among critics that Austen’s morality simply defends the status quo. The last chapter of this book reviews the turbid political history in Austen’s lifetime and sufficiently reminds us of the threats to received values. Yet Austen’s novels seem almost immune to those threats. Scheuermann explains, “So self-evident are her values for Austen that she does not write in defense of the status quo: for that to be the case, she would have had to recognize a challenge to that structure and be responding to it” (10). Modern readers have real difficulty understanding a novelist of such depth and complexity whose moral codes are so fixed and assured. But we seem to like her anyway. Those fixed codes are also most particularly demanded of the upper classes who populate her novels. One of Scheuermann’s most valuable contributions is in lacing her analysis of Austen’s morality with specimens from contemporary moral literature like Thomas Gisborne’s An Enquiry into the Duties of Men in the Higher and Middle Classes of Society (1794). In this popular conduct book, we find the phrase “truths universally acknowledged” that Austen later applied to eligible men of fortune, but Gisborne attaches it without irony to the duties detailed in his handbook. Those duties establish the order and structure of a successful society, Austen would agree, and Scheuermann connects them with lines from Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–34, which are strangely printed with center-justification in this book). Assumptions about correct morality, Scheuermann argues, transcend political divisions in Austen’s time. Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft may have been poles apart politically, but when they wrote on the education and conduct of young women, “their advice was identical” (4).

Austen expected a degree of rigor and integrity from her “Higher and Middle Classes” that can easily escape recognition by readers in today’s relatively classless societies. But she was certainly not alone. Coleridge’s important lay sermons expose their assumptions in their full titles: The Statesman’s Manual; or the Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight: A Lay Sermon, Addressed to the Higher Classes of Society (1816) and A Lay Sermon Addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes, on the Existing Distresses and Discontents (1817). By specifying his intended readership, Coleridge hoped to achieve a greater degree of intimacy and unanimity, preconditions, he thought, for successfully engaging his readers and transforming their deepest values. Austen’s novels have had a more diverse, less predictable readership, and today we may need a little coaching as we search the paths of moral judgment that earlier generations would have found instinctively.

Scheuermann’s careful investigation of Austen’s “moral tapestry” is limited to what she considers the four major novels, omitting...