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

Introduction. Reading Austen’s Ethics

1 Introduction Reading Austen’s Ethics y Austen’s Philosophical Synthesis Among the qualities that account for Jane Austen’s enduring appeal , her ability to synthesize, or combine and unify, seemingly disparate elements and ideas within a complex and coherent whole suggests itself to be an essential one. This synthesizing habit of mind distinguishes various aspects of her work, from her realism to her ethics.1 Most significant for this discussion, however, is Alasdair MacIntyre’s insight regarding Austen’s synthesis of ethical themes: “It is her uniting of Christian and Aristotelian themes in a determinate social context that makes Jane Austen the last great effective imaginative voice of the tradition of thought about, and practice of, the virtues which I have tried to identify.”2 In Mansfield Park, Austen’s representation of constancy enacts the kind of synthesis that MacIntyre describes, yet it guides Fanny Price, who is her model for constancy, to rely primarily on a Christian philosophical framework. 1. Ian Watt, Norman Page, Jocelyn Harris, Julia Prewitt Brown, Alice Crary, and Gilbert Ryle represent just a few of the voices that recognize and praise this aspect of her art. Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957), 297. Page, The Language of Jane Austen (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1972), 197 (see preface, n. 9). Harris, Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 131. Brown, Jane Austen’s Novels, 29. Crary, “Does the Study of Literature Belong within Moral Philosophy? Reflections in Light of Ryle’s Thought,” Philosophical Investigations 23, no. 4 (2000), 326. 2. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 240. 1 2 2 Reading Austen’s Ethics A philosophical framework needs a context.3 Within this reading of Mansfield Park, I use the word in several ways. First, the “determinate social context” mentioned above is the families of the three Ward sisters: the Bertrams, Norrises, and Prices. This tripartite estate, set in the early nineteenth-century English countryside and ruled over by Sir Thomas Bertram, extends beyond the families to their neighborhoods at Mansfield Park, the parsonage, and Portsmouth. I also use the word “context” to mean the foundation for the ethics of a community : it grounds the life of reflection, conversation, deliberation, choice, and action. It represents the shared values, laws, principles, and ends that a community takes for granted, their rules of the game, so to speak. For the social groups with which Austen most concerns herself—the family, estate, and neighborhood—the ethical context often takes in the form of a narrative. Memory of a shared narrative tradition allows members of a group to make its ethical rules or laws intelligible. For example, Homer and Hesiod provide the narrative context for the classical period. Recalling the Iliad, the Odyssey, Theogeny, and Works and Days, Aeschylus, Plato, Sophocles, Aristotle, and Euripides create their philosophy and/or their art. The Romans add Virgil’s Aeneid, thereby revising the Greek narrative context to fit their ethical project. The Hebrews refer to the patriarchal narratives within the Old Testament Pentateuch, while the Christians add to that tradition the New Testament Gospels , a revision of the former’s meaning according to Jesus Christ’s vision . Finally, for this reading the modern context refers to the political narrative constructs of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, who offer various views of the “state of nature” as their understanding of man’s original context. Austen synthesizes, or unites “Christian and Aristotelian themes,” from these narrative traditions, and her narrative setting , or “determinate social context,” represents key themes and issues of modernity. Philosophically, Mansfield Park may be usefully, although slightly, compared to Plato’s Republic.4 Plato investigates justice, his cardinal 3. For a discussion of two prominent readings, that of Alasdair MacIntyre and Edward Said, see Dunn, “The Ethics of Mansfield Park.” 4. Richard Simpson was perhaps the earliest commentator to compare Austen’s 3 Reading Austen’s Ethics 3 virtue, within the republic as macrocosm and within the soul of the philosopher-king (his model for virtue) as microcosm. Austen investigates constancy, her cardinal virtue, within the estate (represented by three interconnected families) as macrocosm and within the soul (or consciousness) of Fanny Price (her model for virtue) as microcosm . The goals of the two models differ, however, in that Plato’s philosopher -king is educated to rule the republic justly, whereas Austen’s Fanny Price...