Jane Austen's Civilized Women: Morality, Gender, and the Civilizing Process by Enit Karafili Steiner (review)

In the introduction to Jane Austen's Civilized Women: Morality, Gender, and the Civilizing Process, Enit Karafili Steiner claims to draw on "the eighteenth-century philosophical background, particularly Scottish Enlightenment theories of societal development and early-Romantic discourses on gender roles; on Elias's theory of civilization; and on postmodern feminist positions on moral development and interpersonal relations" (p. 1). Actually, this oversimplifies the scope of this erudite book since she later discusses "Bakhtin's literary theory" (p. 77), "Benabib's philosophical thought" (p. 77), "Burkean conservatism" (p. 137), and "conjectural history" (p. 3), among other topics. The names Immanuel Kant, John Locke, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel also appear as part of her discussion. The enormous scope of this book is at once its greatest virtue and its greatest liability. She is attempting to view Austen from nearly every angle possible, an admirable goal, but one that cannot be accomplished in 228 pages.

Steiner occasionally assumes her readers are more conversant with the theories she discusses than they may be. A comparison may help. Whereas Claudia L. Johnson, in her groundbreaking book Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and The Novel (1988), clearly explains Edmund Burke's views and how he influenced Austen, Steiner, in one of her frequent references to Burke, merely says that some critics allege that "Austen . . . aligns herself with Burkean conservatism," assuming her readers will immediately know his political stance (p. 137).¹ The word "habitus," which recurs like a leitmotif throughout the book, first appears in the introduction and has a footnote that merely cites the word "civilization" and directs the reader to a singularly unhelpful website of the Oxford English Dictionary (p. 3). If "habitus" has some special sociological meaning—which her text implies—surely this should be made clear.

The book is not helped by Steiner's own heavily academic style. For example, in discussing "the relations between utterance and reply, between the 'I' and the 'other'" (that is, conversation), she writes,

I . . . will suggest that moral judgments cannot result from automatic consensus between disembodied thinking agents as Rousseau would have it. . . . Neither is consensus the necessary outcome that legitimates the validity of interaction, but the recognition of otherness in all its particularity that in return feeds into the consciousness of the self.

(p. 78)

This is a mouthful. In fact, it seems that she occasionally fears losing her audience since she will often stop mid-chapter to announce what she is attempting to prove: "In the following section of the present chapter, I assess Fanny's attraction to Mansfield as I take into account both the situatedness of that decision-making and Fanny's emancipatory function in Mansfield" (p. 122). Often, these pauses are helpful, allowing readers to catch their breath and get their intellectual bearings before reading on, yet she might do better to clarify the language of her arguments so she does not need to announce them.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Steiner's book is best when she turns her attention to Austen's specific works since this focus gives the reader a chance to appreciate how the abstract theory actually applies to Austen's fiction. Going back to the juvenilia, which Austen was still revising in 1809, Steiner shows that this early work—often hailed as a forerunner of feminism because of the dominance and lack of inhibitions of its female characters—actually depicts a world where chance reigns and violence is the result of action without thought of consequence, an important start to Steiner's taxonomy of the civilizing process that Austen's heroines undergo. It is fascinating to see how "the crudeness in the beginning of the civilizing process" (p. 33) in the juvenilia is slowly transformed to Emma's "persuasive" (p. 136) power and Anne's "gentleness" (p. 156), which becomes a power that allows her to function in society while upholding her own ideals.

At other times, however, it is...