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The Pleasures of Virtue: Political Thought in the Novels of Jane Austen. - book reviews
Criticism, Spring, 1997 by Patricia L. Skarda
By Anne Crippen Ruderman. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995. Pp. ix + 202. $21.95 paper, $57.50 cloth.
At this time when Jane Austen's stock is up, way up, Anne Crippen Ruderman's The Pleasures of Virtue reminds us why Austen's novels continue to please both close readers and viewing audiences of film adaptations. Austen repeatedly identifies, explains, and illustrates the pleasures of virtue through consideration of heroes and heroines who find noble thoughts and activities pleasant. First among these noble things is attachment to others, love, the tip-top of Keats's "pleasure thermometer" in Endymion, culminating in marriage in Austen's novels. But love is not all that constitutes happiness, for happiness naturally ensues for the morally virtuous, not as an inevitable reward but as an accident of the way Jane Austen's world works.
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The old arguments of self versus society or self-interest versus community building that have encouraged recent critics to factor Kant into Austen's framework are put to rest while Aristotle's classical moderation becomes the ideal: "Austen, like Aristotle, implies that the pleasures of self-control are the truest pleasures" (8). Ruderman repeatedly recognizes that we have no evidence that Austen read Aristotle or his commentators, though, deep in the heart of her argument, she admits parenthetically that "It is tempting to say that Austen looks at the world in the way Aristotle does but from the perspective of a woman" (143). The specific virtues, suggested by Aristotle and fictionally illuminated by Austen, are prudence, sensibility, justice, proper pride, modesty, and moderation, the last being the key to Aristotle's definition of moral virtue: "A mean that lies between two vices, one of excess and the other of deficiency . . . . the mean is the most praiseworthy state." Through moderation of deep feeling by self-command, Jane Austen defends the enduring possibility of a human life that both benefits others and perfects oneself. Somewhat surprisingly, Ruderman notes that happiness is not dependent on marriage but on living a measured life of virtue acquired by habit; marriage follows naturally from a love that is salutary for society as well as for individuals because it is grounded,on the virtue aimed at by both.
Ruderman provides a credible and creditable corrective not only to the new historicist approach that aims to locate in Austen's novels more politics than propriety but also to the feminist approach that converts relationships into gendered power plays. But because she is alert to both approaches, Ruderman controls her own argument by finding the precise mean between these extreme views. Pitting Aristotle against Kant and Wollstonecraft against Rousseau, Ruderman reasserts a balance that has been lost in the rush of current arguments about Jane Austen as historian or as feminist or even, in the flap over Terry Castle's London Review of Books review of Deirdre Le Fay's edition of Jane Austen's Letters, as lesbian. Jane Austen remains in Ruderman's good judgment a novelist and a moralist, whose heroes and heroines acquire happiness because they have and continue to cultivate moral virtue.
This is no book for Janeites, those who love Jane Austen more than they understand her. Each of the four long chapters considers all of the novels, almost at once, so that occasionally the sensibilities of one capture the sense of another: "Frank [Churchill in Emma] might be asked the same question that Elinor Dashwood asks Lucy Steele in Sense and Sensibility after hearing of her engagement to Edward: has she any plan for marriage `but that of waiting for Mrs. Ferrars' death, which is a melancholy and shocking extremity'" (SS 148). Frank Churchill knows no Mrs. Ferrars, of course, and a paraphrase of the point might serve better than does the quotation. When arguing for firmness of principle in heroines, Ruderman appropriates without credit Edmund's definition of Fanny Price, who is "firm as a rock in her own principles" (MP 351), as though equal to Jane Bennet who is, by the narrator's definition, "firm when she felt herself to be right" (P&P 595. But despite the copious quotation from the novels, Ruderman never loses sight of her own argument on the pleasures of virtue.
She proceeds systematically through education in virtue, where the focus is principally on Emma and Northanger Abbey to consideration of particular virtues. As she proceeds, she reconsiders why Mr. Knightley and Emma Woodhouse are a more suitable match than are Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax, and why Emma does not choose Jane as her particular friend. The gallant Frank and elegant Jane have "a kind of selfishness that keeps them from being the true hero and heroine of the novel" (28). Emma's openness is preferred to Jane's reserve, Mr. Knightley's frankness and sensitivity to Frank's mysterious secretiveness. To be hero or heroine each must have taste, and taste is, in Austen's reckoning, what Austen often calls delicacy, "an ability to take pleasure in principled behavior" (37). The best characters take pleasure in the very act of resisting or overcoming their feelings, and the best characters always rise to be heroes and heroines.
