Jane Austen and the sin of pride

Murdoch's essays-although they bespeak a deep respect for the Christian moral tradition-remind me of Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion because they posit no such metaphysical presence as is necessary to Lewis' reading of the word "serious." They remove all religious denotation from the word, without removing any of its seriousness. And I think Austen's novels can be profitably read as doing the same thing. Marianne Dashwood's penitence originates not from a relationship with a deity, but from within herself, and from what her familial and social relationships teach her: specifically, the virtuous example of her elder sister. Emma feels shame not before the eye of God, but before the eye of Knightley. Knightley may be clumsily handled by his author; he seems at times to operate more as a model of just perception and rationality than as a fully realized character. (The jealousy he feels toward Frank Churchill may be a clumsy attempt to correct this defect.) And we may be uncomfortable that this standard of justice and reason in Emma comes in the figure of an older male; we may see him as a standin for the patriarchy. But he is certainly not a stand-in for God. He possesses no mystical powers, only that combination of keen perception, and an ability to put others' interests before his own, which distinguish admirable human beings like Elinor Dashwood, Anne Elliot, and the maturing Emma Woodhouse.

SITUATED within our provisional history of ideas, then, Austen's novels lead in this direction: toward a twentieth-century sensibility, like Murdoch's, which takes the moral life seriously, but as implying no afterlife, no accountability beyond a social, or perhaps historical, one. If either Murdoch or Austen retains a sense of mystery and wonder before invisible reality, it is an invisible psychological reality, not a magical one. (Perhaps Simpson had such an intuition when he compared Austen to Shakespeare, for Shakespeare too seems to me a writer who depicts an entirely earthly reality.) Murdoch's and Austen's view of reality and morality, then, can be strategically described as Christian in its ethical outlook, but secular (i.e., strictly non-metaphysical) in its ontology.

Next I shall summarize-at necessarily great length-Murdoch's exposition of this view. Then I shall be able to explain why I believe Austen's fiction leads in this direction, why I believe Murdoch's essays provide an illuminating "translation" of Austen. Modern psychology, says Murdoch, has provided us with a doctrine of original sin more useful than its religious source. She takes pains to say that she is not a "Freudian," not concerned with "this or that particular view" of Freud's, but that she agrees with him in the following broad sense:

Freud takes a thoroughly pessimistic view of human nature. He sees the psyche as an egocentric system of quasi-mechanical energy, largely determined by its own individual history, whose natural attachments are sexual, ambiguous, and hard for the subject to understand or control. Introspection reveals only the deep tissue of ambivalent motive, and fantasy is a stronger force than reason. Objectivity and unselfishness are not natural to human beings. (51)