Mediating Happiness: Performances of Jane Austen’s Narrators

“What have wealth or grandeur to do with happiness?”¹ Marianne Dashwood asks in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811), echoing a lively eighteenth-century debate on happiness. In all of Austen’s novels, the narrator is part of a mimetic pattern of storytelling, a pattern comprised of such mimetic devices as generic parody, free indirect discourse (FID), ironic commentary/interpretation of characters’ perceptions on the part of the narrator, and, this essay argues, the silences of the narrator, which can serve as devices to produce an effect congruous with what some critics of the univocal position on FID (discussed below) have called the narrator’s “vacuity.” In this essay, I argue that Austen temporarily transfers authority to the reader in key passages that elicit judgment—moments, for example, when the question of happiness is at stake—through a narrator that temporarily appears self-effacing, thereby giving way either to the first-person impressions of a character, as in the turning point of Pride and Prejudice (1813), or to the first-person impressions of the reader, as when the question of happiness is raised overtly in Sense and Sensibility.

As a cultural concern, the question of happiness in the eighteenth century necessarily invoked the process of making moral judgments. Indeed, the act of making moral judgments is integral to a classical hermeneutic, whereby eudaimonia serves as the guiding telos of a life spent evaluating and making moral choices—a hermeneutic that informed eighteenth-century conceptions of happiness. Scholars in the field of virtue ethics, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Julia Annas, and Martha C. Nussbaum, have analyzed the relationship between eudaimonia and morality, both classical and modern, showing from a neo-Aristotelian point of view that happiness cannot exist without virtue.² More recently, arguing from a Solonian point of view (“Call no man happy until dead”), Vivasvan Soni shows how modern happiness became decontextualized from narrative and thus from a community’s moral judgment on a life lived.³ Eighteenth-century thinkers, especially those in the tradition of Scottish moral philosophy, such as Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Adam Smith, reveal in their writings an intrinsic reciprocity between happiness and sympathy.⁴ Within eighteenth-century conceptions of happiness, the act of making moral judgments intersects with the act of sympathetic identification; that is, eighteenth-century thinkers considered sympathetic identification to be a morally just act, one conducive to fostering happiness.

The term “moral judgment” is one of those elusive eighteenth-century terms, like happiness and sympathy, whose eighteenth-century meanings scholars are working to untangle.⁵ In using the term “moral judgment” in the context of Austen’s novels, it is necessary to draw a distinction between the type of judgment classically educated males would be practicing—aesthetic judgments, for example, associated with moral thinking—and the type of judgment (as this essay uses the term) many if not most of Austen’s readers would be expected to perform—namely practical, self-defining and self-preserving judgments associated with appropriate moral conduct during courtship for Regency women. As with the eighteenth-century conception of happiness, I would assert that eighteenth-century moral judgments exist along at least two different “horizons”⁶ —one existing for and visible to classically educated men, and the other becoming extant for and visible within domestic fiction such as Austen’s to formally uneducated, marriageable women. In short, audience helps to define the term “moral judgment”—its meaning created by the savvy or not-so-savvy reader, two tropes Austen’s novels frequently work to expose and redress.

Austen’s most famous admonition of the dangers of an unsavvy reader’s imagination is Northanger Abbey (1798–9; 1817), a parody in which the unlikely heroine Catherine Morland loses her senses and reasonable grasp on reality to an imagination that has been overly influenced by her reading of gothic novels. Northanger Abbey overtly parodies reader expectations that defy common sense, and in so doing, the self-reflexive act of reading becomes integral to the plot, in the vein of a Bakhtinian “figure of discourse.” Mikhail...