Persuasions #2, 1980                                                                                                                                            Page 19

 

HOW MANY BELIEFS HAD LADY JANE?

by Avrom Fleishman
Department of English, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

When I was asked to participate in a panel discussion on Mansfield Park, I was led to do something that very few other requests could have induced me to in cold blood. I re-read my own book on that novel – or at least portions of it where I didn’t find the prose style too embarrassing. I was of course curious to recall what I said some thirteen years ago, and to find out how much I could still agree with, after taking account of the important work that’s been done in Austen criticism in that time. I’m not going to bore you with a public confession of errors, or try to improve my delivery in a second go-round. But one facet of the social-history chapter of my multiple approach to the novel now gives me pause. I seem to be saying that Austen constructed the work as she did and said certain things by it or in it because she believed certain things to be true about the England in which she lived. It is that kind of statement in literary criticism that I want to examine briefly today.

I hope to distinguish two distinct ideas of a novelist’s beliefs, which are by no means logically related in the current expectation that we read “to hear him speak of his beliefs and also … to observe how in fact he reacts to people.” It is my modest proposal that in reading Mansfield Park we never get to hear the author speak of her beliefs, for the simple reason that she is unlikely to have had any – in the sense of formulable positions on politics, religion and even ethics.

With the kind of material I’ve presented, no conclusions can be reached about what Jane Austen may be said to have believed. We might, on the other hand, venture a few generalizations about the kinds of beliefs that are unlikely to have been held by her in a programmatic, expostulative form. She was clearly in touch with the anti-Jacobin propaganda of the day and with the prevalence of apologue-like novels which put down bad girls with romantic sensibilities and upheld good ones with firm moral backbones. But she didn’t write those novels; she wrote Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park, which are very different things. If they aren’t, then indeed we must put her on the literary-historical shelf along with Jane West and Elizabeth Hamilton and other ideologues.

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