Pride, Prejudice, and Skeptical Intimacy

Epistemological perspectives on Jane Austen's fiction have been reworked a good deal lately, but the ethical and aesthetic ramifications of this reworking have yet to be thoroughly explored. Austen's debt to Enlightenment philosophy, once dismissed as superficial and secondhand, has been convincingly established in studies by Felicia Bonaparte, Peter Knox-Shaw, Nicole Coonradt, and others.¹ Of these, Bonaparte's reading of Pride and Prejudice (1813) makes the most pointed case for a new Austenian epistemology. Situating that novel firmly within the milieu of eighteenth-century empiricism, Bonaparte argues that its theory of knowledge is a fundamentally skeptical one: Austen stresses, thematically and narratively, the uncertainty of all knowledge claims, painstakingly shapes her syntax and diction to describe appearances and probabilities rather than facts, and presents observation and evidence, more than reasoning or tradition, as the bases of Elizabeth Bennet's moral agency.² Such readings powerfully clarify the material-historical ground upon which Austen's protagonists must operate: the faculty of judgment itself, long of special interest to her readers, emerges in another recent account as a dynamic tool for the provisional management of ongoing indeterminacies.³ Austen's irony, released from the didactic and moralistic channels into which past criticism has sometimes shunted it,⁴ once more flourishes in these readings. We recognize an author who builds restless cogitation into her every word and whose authoritativeness as a writer is wielded in part to unsettle the very idea of authority. It is only through incessant inquiry, Bonaparte concludes, that Austen's characters might have any functional semblance of truth "despite the skepticism of the empiricist position, despite the profoundly reflexive reality of its subjective point of view, and despite the relative nature of any truth it claims to find."⁵

If this thesis has a shortcoming, it coincides with its most notable strength: namely, that the story it tells is so familiar. It is for "primarily epistemological reasons," Bonaparte writes, that Austen concerns herself so minutely with Elizabeth Bennet's thought process—"not as a limitation of character . . . but as an obstacle to knowledge." Elizabeth's central function in such an account is to surmount epistemological setbacks and assemble (if imperfectly) a working approximation of reality: "Austen's development of her heroine is essentially philosophic, all her other acquisitions being ancillary to this end."⁶ This is at once satisfying and unsatisfying. Although Bonaparte usefully argues that knowledge in the traditional sense is unattainable, the quest for knowledge—and, notably, the valence and consequences of its absence—look much as they do in classic criticism by D. D. Devlin, Jan Fergus, Tony Tanner, and others.⁷ Elizabeth forms her judgments, in traditional pedagogical readings, on the basis of reliable authority; for Bonaparte, she judges "despite" the absence of any such authority. Even as it rightly questions the possibility of ultimate intelligibility in Austen's novel, this account accepts it as an epistemic and ethical ideal. Uncertainty, acknowledged to pervade her fictive society to the end, comes across nonetheless as more of a bug than a feature.

What would Elizabeth's courtship with Mr. Darcy look like if the skepticism posited at Pride and Prejudice's heart, and the irony roiling its surface, were not philosophical "obstacle[s]" to be overcome, but were afforded dramatic and affective consequence in their own right? The novel's structure seems to demand as much. The culminating scene of the couple's betrothal is as remarkable for sustaining epistemological tensions as for easing romantic ones. Mindsets here are understated, even speculative, and conveyed through deliberate approximation and cliché: "The happiness which [Elizabeth's] reply produced, was such as [Darcy] had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do."⁸ Yet this mediate view, which calls the psychological continuity of the protagonists openly into question, supports the most jubilant emotional effusion of the novel, comprising "happiness," "gratitude," "pleasure," "delight," and "love" (406–7). The trajectory of Austen's knowledge plot, at the very crux of its conclusion, seems to eschew anything...