Jane Austen and the State (Rle Jane Austen) by Evans Mary;

Jane Austen and the State (Rle Jane Austen) by Evans Mary;

Author:Evans, Mary;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1039259
Publisher: Routledge


4

Women, men, and the state

When Jane Austen sat and composed her novels, often shielding her work from critical gaze, we should not suppose that she wrote with the interests and concerns of the bourgeois state in mind. Her intention, which is perfectly matched by her achievements, was to show how ‘three or four families’ in the quiet of the country conduct their daily lives and order and establish their social relationships. Yet all her novels show an understanding of the world outside the quiet of the country village; indeed, considerable sections of Persuasion, Sense and Sensibility, and Mansfield Park are set not in rural isolation but in urban centres. The world which her characters inhabit is not, therefore, as isolated or as confined as some readings of her work might suggest; on the contrary, by the standards of the late eighteenth century her characters are citizens of the world and demonstrably familiar with fashion, with the artefacts of urban culture, with developed and sophisticated manners, and with the debates of contemporary social and political life. Life in a country village was not, therefore, cut off from worldly concerns and information: Jane Austen is, after all, writing about (and in) the settled and cultivated southern counties.

So the sense of separation between town and country that is sometimes read into Austen is, perhaps, very much a twentieth-century reading. Much closer to Austen’s own conception might be a model of the world as a single social construct, with the same social relationships conducted in more or less crowded and noisy places. It is not, therefore (as I have already suggested in an earlier chapter), that town life per se corrupts, but that the greater opportunities for corruption that exist in towns (through fashion and the conspicuous parade of wealth) can mislead or seduce the credulous or the morally inadequate. The power of towns over the morally circumspect and developed characters is non-existent: we do not need to see Mr Knightley in a town to know that his sense of himself, and his own understanding and code of values, would not be vulnerable to the temptations of a parade of power or conspicuous consumption. We know, anyway, that Mr Knightley has no objection to the process, or the results, of accumulation: his reservations are about the way in which people dispose of their surplus income. Thus even his wedding is a modest affair; as Mrs Elton incredulously observes, ‘Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business! – Selina would stare when she heard of it.’1

But Mrs Elton – like Lucy Steele, Maria Bertram, Sir Walter Elliot, and numerous others in Austen’s fiction – demonstrates an attitude to money and the material world that represents – to the obvious disapproval of Jane Austen – a crucial acceptance of the values of the emergent bourgeois state. Three themes therefore suggest that Austen expresses, throughout her work, a significant scepticism about the values of the market economy and the social and political relationships emerging in the early nineteenth century.



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