Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen's 'Mansfield Park'

Preface

vii vii Preface y Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” addresses the ethical dimension of Austen’s thought in her most controversial novel, Mansfield Park, by examining the portrayal of her least popular heroine, Fanny Price, and by focusing on her most important virtue, constancy.1 My aim is to show the way in which Austen’s ethical system works by using constancy as a unifying principle for her ethics and by analyzing its Christian basis; I hope to offer a reading that allows the richness and complexity of the characters and incidents in the novel to unite within a coherent whole. To do this I conduct a booklength exploration of constancy, whose primary ethical function is to ground the practice of virtue by regulating other virtues common to Austen heroines, including self-knowledge, love or genuine affection, gratitude, and humility.2 In Mansfield Park, constancy is much more than the romantic steadfastness with which it is usually associated in Austen’s other nov1 . Anne Crippen Ruderman and Sarah Emsley also explore constancy in their books, but not as a unifying theme in a single novel. Both commentators devote more time to constancy as Austen represents it in Persuasion. Anne Crippen Ruderman, The Pleasures of Virtue: Political Thought in the Novels of Jane Austen (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), 147–50. Sarah Emsley, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 154–57. 2. Two prior book-length studies of Mansfield Park have been published by Avrom Fleishman and Isobel Armstrong. Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park: An Essay in Critical Synthesis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967.) Isobel Armstrong, Jane Austen: Mansfield Park, Penguin Critical Studies (London: Penguin Books, 1988). viii viii Preface els. It is central to the practice of virtue because “without constancy all the other virtues to some degree lose their point.”3 For this reading of Mansfield Park, constancy functions like Plato’s justice, Aristotle ’s phronesis, and St. Thomas Aquinas’s prudence. Thus, it merits the kind of serious and sustained attention that Plato devotes to justice in his Republic—interrogating both its real meaning and its counterfeit, illustrating the kind of education that fosters its development, exploring its practice or lack thereof in the estate, the household, the professions , and the consciousness, and most importantly, considering its central role in guiding the heroine’s pursuit of beauty and truth. To make the case for constancy’s Christian foundation, I adopt what I define as a “wider conception” of religion to account for its presence in Mansfield Park. The wider conception does not concern itself with denominations, rituals, or other institutional or external manifestations of religion; rather its focus is the inner, spiritual dimension —what would today perhaps be called “spirituality”—that manifests itself in our daily lives; this is the way that Austen represents religion within the heroine of Mansfield Park. The springboard for my conception of constancy is Alasdair MacIntyre , who singles out Austen in his seminal book, After Virtue. She is the “only woman and the only novelist” so distinguished.4 Although Mansfield Park is one of two novels that represent MacIntyre’s version of constancy,5 and Fanny Price its exemplar, some commentators find it “surprising that Macintyre says so little about the shape of the life that Fanny leads or the background of practices that make her behavior meaningful.”6 Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” offers a reading that fully addresses this aspect of the narrative. It explains the way in which constancy (and the selfknowledge its practice engenders) supports the heroine’s Christian version of the good life. Furthermore, it suggests that Fanny’s realiza3 . Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 242. 4. Aileen Douglas, “Austen’s Enclave: Virtue and Modernity,” Romanticism 5.2 (1999), 150. 5. The other novel and heroine are Persuasion and Anne Elliot. 6. Allan Dunn, “The Ethics of Mansfield Park: MacIntyre, Said, and Social Context,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 78, no. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 1995): 487. ix Preface ix tion of this life does not depend on “the opulence of Mansfield Park”; rather it depends on striving to live the kind of life in which “virtues are a means to...