Jane Austen, Game Theorist by Chwe Michael Suk-Young

Author:Chwe, Michael Suk-Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

STRATEGIC THINKING IS NOT ECONOMISTIC

Strategic thinking can also be confused with a variety of concepts related to “economy,” such as thrift, materialism, and money-centrism. But Austen clearly distinguishes between economistic values and strategic thinking, especially through Mrs. Norris, who follows “a very strict line of economy,” with “nothing to impede her frugality” (MP, p. 9). She wants to continue with the play Lovers’ Vows regardless of the play’s subject or whether Sir Thomas would approve, because “the preparations will be all so much money thrown away—and I am sure that would be a discredit to us all” (MP, p. 166). Sewing a curtain for the stage, she manages through meticulous planning to save a whopping three-fourths of a yard out of an entire bolt of green baize. When Sir Thomas returns and the play is called off, the curtain “went off with her to her cottage, where she happened to be particularly in want of green baize” (MP, p. 228). Mrs. Norris thinks of herself as a strategic sophisticate. But, as discussed in chapter 5, when she maneuvers to exclude Fanny from the trip to Sotherton, “more from partiality for her own scheme, because it was her own, than from any thing else,” Edmund easily bests her, having already secured an invitation for Fanny (MP, p. 92). Mrs. Norris is proudest of Maria’s marriage with Mr. Rushworth: “She took to herself all the credit of bringing Mr. Rushworth’s admiration of Maria to any effect” (MP, p. 221). But the marriage’s unsoundness should have been obvious from the start; at the wedding, Sir Thomas is anxious, but Mrs. Norris “was all joyous delight.… [N]o one would have supposed, from her confident triumph, that she … could have the smallest insight into the disposition of the niece who had been brought up under her eye” (MP, pp. 237–38).

The strategic sophomore John Dashwood also believes in the cash nexus, evaluating his sister Marianne’s illness as an income reduction: “At her time of life, any thing of an illness destroys the bloom for ever! … I question whether Marianne now, willmarry a manworthmore than five or six hundred a-year, at the utmost” (SS, p. 258). When he hears that Colonel Brandon has offered a living to Edward Ferrars, he evaluates the offer not in terms of the Colonel’s kindness but in the living’s monetary value had he sold it instead: “[S]upposing the late incumbent to have been old and sickly, and likely to vacate it soon—he might have got I dare say—fourteen hundred pounds” (SS, p. 334).

Of course Austen’s strategically skilled heroines do not ignore money altogether. Marianne believes that marriage cannot be “only a commercial exchange, in which each wished to be benefited at the expense of the other” (SS, p. 45), and that “money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it” (SS, p. 105), but famously states her basic needs as “[a]bout eighteen hundred or two thousand a-year,” twice what Elinor thinks luxurious (SS, p. 105). When Elizabeth talks to Mrs.

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