The Pleasures of Virtue: Political Thought in the Novels of Jane Austen. - book reviews

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.

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.

Being hospitable, friendly, courteous, urbane, and open requires taste, and Henry and Eleanor Tilney demonstrate impeccable taste in contrast to the self-aggrandizing Thorpes. But the Thorpes are not villains so much as not virtuous. John Thorpe is unscrupulous, and Isabella is dangerously flirtatious; neither is worth Catherine Morland's friendship, even before she learns to think for herself. Unworthy of happiness, of lasting attachment, of love, the Thorpes lack sufficient virtue, and concern for virtue is the root of the capacity to love (49).

Love is based on friendship and friendship is, according to Aristotle and Austen alike, based on virtue rather than on pleasure or utility. Emma and Mr. Knightley, like Catherine and Henry Tilney, will stay together because they see virtues in each other. Marriage follows naturally when choosing a supportive friend for a life of continued perfection of virtues. Marriage brings less duty than mutual growth. Self-sufficiency gives way to love, and love results in happiness. Emma and Mr. Knightley feel something "so like perfect happiness, that it could bear no other name" (E 432).

Blake says that "Prudence is a rich old maid courted by incapacity," but to Aristotle, a prudent man can "deliberate well concerning what is good and expedient for himself, not with respect to a part . . . but for living well in general" (76). A prudent woman of Austen's definition requires considerably more complex elucidation. Ruderman links Anne Elliot of Persuasion, Fanny Price of Mansfield Park, and Elinor Dashwood of Sense and Sensibility, all of whom have strong sensibilities, keen self-awareness, and old-fashioned prudence. All three lose their childhood homes and must move on amid family and acquaintances who do not wholly understand them. Al] succeed because all have a respect for propriety, an aspect of prudence, and because all have deference and discretion consistent with good taste and fine judgment. Just because a pattern or practice is conventional does not make it right, but often "respect for convention is more reasonable than defiance of it" (emphasis Ruderman's, 69). Elinor has more freedom of thought than Marianne; her self-control is greater than her self-indulgence. Elinor's self-control, "far from being lack of feeling, increases with her feeling" (emphasis Ruderman's 71). All of Austen's work argues that the "exercise of reason and virtue [is] a fulfillment of human nature, not a pruning of it" (emphasis Ruderman's 71) The added emphases in these sentences may shout the argument Ruderman wishes to make, but her point is ably made without the shouting.

Good marriages in Austen's novels are not based on money or security, and true love is not based solely on sexual attraction. Marianne Dashwood's often criticized marriage to Colonel Brandon is a match of the "same kind of romantic sensibility" (emphasis Ruderman's 79) that characterizes the match of Louisa Musgrove and Captain Benwick; both couples are grateful for being loved by someone else and both couples find happiness in marriages that show that "imprudence leads to a greater dependence on such conventions [as marriage] than does prudence" (79).

Analysis of one virtue does not excuse Ruderman from reconsidering familiar arguments about the possible lack of v virtue or success of characterization. Fanny Price, passive and priggish to some readers, provides Ruderman a perfect opportunity for rereading character. Fanny marries Edmund Bertram for love and for virtue which each facilitates and encourages in the other. Fanny's childlike innocence coupled with a tough spirit that makes her constant in her longing for virtue for herself and others mom than compensates for her passivity and inwardness. She has both a desire for and a vision of virtue that earns her heroine status and final happiness. Yet she is neither smug nor self-righteous. Deftly and carefully leaving unsaid that it is wicked to marry one person while loving another, Fanny typifies moderation in her speech, behavior, and even in her gratitude for Edmund's eventual proposal.

Fanny and Edmund, cousins and nearly siblings in late childhood and adolescence, raise the spectre of sibling love rivalling that of conjugal love. Ruderman enters this battle eagerly, seeing the issue first from the perspective of women's friendship and then of sisters, one for another, and finally of sister for brother. She moderates between the extremes with as deft a control as Austen herself, lodging in explanatory footnotes her awareness of all the arguments that have bent the texts to accommodate ideological readings, misprisions, and exaggerated claims.

Whether or not Austen knew Aristotle's various dicta on virtue, Rousseau's on education, or Wollstonecraft's on the rights of women, she illustrates again and again the pleasures of virtue, distinguishing proprieties from manners, judgment from conventions, and proper pride from egotism. Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightley, often accused of being proud, am appropriately high-minded, properly proud of their virtue, representing a mean between extremes of excessive modesty and vanity. Being neither social nor concerned with what others think of them, Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightley speak less than they act, and they act for others rather than for themselves. Virtue rather than money and power sets off these heroes and earns them the gratitude of men and women alike. Religion undergirds the morality of Austen's heroes and heroines, but virtue is never solely a matter of religious faith or dogmatic obedience, not even in Persuasion or Mansfield Park, the most explicitly religious of Austen's novels. Individual morality supersedes evangelical or Anglican fervor, for virtue or its lack is practiced devotedly not devoutly. Moderation even in religion makes for happiness on earth.

The Pleasures of Virtue elucidates Jane Austen's characters in opposition to the prevailing political thought of Austen's fume. But the result is a timeless exposition of the human capacity for reason and virtue that leads to happiness, to the principal pleasures of life. Being constant to principles may require self-sacrifice, but none of Austen's heroes or heroines am saints. Instead they am decidedly human, courageous in speech, generous in action, and rewarded by happiness for having virtue. This essay is a fine study of moderation and a promising first book from a scholar who practices the moderation Jane Austen herself endorses.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Wayne State University Press
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group