Austen's Oughts: Judgment after Locke and Shaftesbury by Karen Valihora (review)

Karen Valihora's clever and ambitious book locates the aesthetic at the heart of an eighteenth-century moral tradition that culminates, at the end of the century, in the novels of Jane Austen. Like Peter Knox-Shaw's Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (2004), Austen's Oughts challenges influential interpretations of Austen as a nostalgic Christian conservative by identifying her as very much a creature of her times—that is, of the Enlightenment. But, whereas Knox-Shaw turns to science and scepticism to make this point, Valihora foregrounds the eighteenth century's newly emergent discourse of aesthetics to illuminate the moral concerns of Austen's fiction. The narrative Valihora constructs begins with John Locke, whose empiricist turn to "sensation" in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding paved the way for an aesthetic language of "taste," even as Locke himself was unable to explain how sensations yield standards or judgments. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, exercised a crucial corrective influence in this context, retrieving sensation from his erstwhile tutor's reductions. Against Locke, Shaftesbury demonstrated that sensations are one element in a reflective model of aesthetic-ethical judgment, itself underwritten by a teleological neoclassicism prioritizing wholeness, proportion, harmony, and order. According to Valihora, the century of moral philosophy, fiction, and art criticism that followed the publication of Shaftesbury's Characteristics (1711) furthered its insights. Austen's Oughts identifies "Shaftesbury's work on achieving distance in our reflections on self and others" (33) as the springboard for such diverse intellectual and cultural developments of "the long century from Locke to Austen" (31) as David Hume's moral sublime, Adam Smith's impartial spectator, Samuel Richardson's rhetoric of disinterestedness in Clarissa, Joshua Reynolds's theory of the picturesque, and, of course, Austen's fiction.

As this overview suggests, Valihora's interests are remarkably wideranging. They yield a correspondingly eclectic and erudite study, though Valihora's understandable desire to give explanatory power to the intellectual background threatens at times to overwhelm her focus on Austen's fiction itself, which reappears, after a long introduction, only in the last third of her book. Her readings of the novels, however, represent the pinnacle of her achievement in Austen's Oughts. Regardless of how we feel about the Shaftesburian context she forwards—I will return to this point momentarily—Valihora deftly illuminates the interpenetration of ethics and aesthetics in Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. She shows how an aesthetic vocabulary of judgment, reflective distance, and point of view everywhere informs Austen's exploration of what it means for middle-class individuals to live, with a modicum of pleasure and moral integrity, in an increasingly crass commercial society. Reflective distance, as Valihora suggests, is integral to Austen's solutions, and it is enabled, significantly, by encountering the world through the "frame of art," a phrase Valihora borrows from David Marshall (The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience [2005]). Heroines such as Marianne Dashwood and Emma Woodhouse must learn the art of "othering" personal perspective by engaging "wholes" larger than the self, an emphasis that reappears, at the level of form, in Austen's pioneering use of free indirect discourse. This juxtaposes first-person and third-person points of view in ways that uphold the potential of a more disinterested, more impartial approach to oneself and one's place in the world.

Valihora's readings of Austen's novels are framed by a nuanced exposition of the eighteenth-century philosophical background, though it is in this context—more particularly, in the claims she makes for Shaftesbury's importance—that I find myself most substantively in disagreement with her. The strains of overstating Shaftesbury's significance are most evident in her readings of Hume and Smith, who are depicted as essentially furthering the neoclassical quest for absolutes that Shaftesbury enjoins. This move elides a crucial realism-constructivism distinction, among other things...