Jane Austen and the sin of pride

This unsurpassably clever heroine maintains, for much of the novel, that she has no desire to get married herself, that she is perfectly happy and satisfied as head mistress of Hartfield. Eventually we (and she) realize that this too is false: when Mrs. Weston causes her to consider Jane Fairfax as a threat to her place of first affection in Knightley's heart, the sexual nature of her motives painfully asserts itself:

"Mr. Knightley and Jane Fairfax!" exclaimed Emma. "Dear Mrs. Weston, how could you think of such a thing?-Mr. Knightley!-Mr. Knightley must not marry!-You would not have little Henry cut out from Donwell?-Oh! no, no, Henry must have Donwell." (172-73) Of course we know that concern for "little Henry" has nothing to do with Emma's dismay at the possibility of this match. But the ambiguity of her sexual desire makes it difficult for her to know as much about herself as we do, difficult for her to obey the Biblical command "Know thyself." Her continued flirtation with Frank Churchill, and her unjust dislike of Jane Fairfax (the one woman of roughly her age with whom she could compare herself and her merits), further evince that her sense of self-worth derives largely from a sense of sexual potency-even if she never intends for this potency to consummate itself. To speak paradoxically, the "ambiguity" of her sexual attachments to Knightley and Frank Churchill should be made clear by the fact that Emma herself misunderstands them for so long.

Her sexual attachments are complex as well as "ambiguous," to return to Murdoch's summary of Freud. Knightley attracts Emma not merely as a lover (someone her own age would make a more conventional object for such passionate and lasting attachment); but also as a surrogate father (he is the firm, self-sufficient older man that she lacks at home); and even as an embodiment of the reality principle itself, which the novel's universe constructs, over and against narcissism, as the central principle of the moral life (more of this later). To borrow another Freudian term, Emma's "motives" are "ambivalent"; and her sexual attachments are ambiguous, difficult to understand, and therefore almost impossible to control, because they tend to be overdetermined, imbedded so thoroughly in the deep tissue of a complicated personal history. We can see why "objectivity" and "unselfishness" are desirable qualities, given the pain and inconvenience which Emma's selfishly motivated matchmaking causes in the lives of Mr. Elton, Harriet, and Robert Martin; and given her inability "objectively" to evaluate Jane Fairfax, who might have been a valued friend, rather than a spited rival. They are desirable qualities, but immensely difficult to achieve, blocked as they are from the nobly resolved mind by a system of egocentric, ambiguous, and uncontrollable energies.

To elaborate upon the implications of such psychic energies, I will return in greater detail to Murdoch's actual words, in hopes of distinguishing her system of thought from Freud's (to which it owes much), and of providing further avenues into Austen's fiction. To repeat, let us imagine Austen's fiction as initiating a profound transition, from metaphysical Christianity, toward a secularized Christian ethic. Such an ethic sees pride as the primal sin, and the human condition as fallen, i.e., inevitably self-centered. Salvation, to the degree that it is possible, requires overcoming this fallen condition, likely by virtue of something close to what Lewis called "serious reflection" and its resulting "undeception." Austen could perfectly represent the initiation of this secularization, because the social realist novel (Austen's, Eliot's, Tolstoy's, Stendhal's) did so much to depict the multifaceted and ubiquitous sin of pride, and to articulate the broadly Freudian context of ambiguous, sexual, egocentric motives from which the "sin" emerges. That the word "sin" still seems to fit, even as the notion of eternal punishments and rewards loses its hold, shows how difficult the transition is, from a theological to a psychological vocabulary and sensibility, particularly when psychological ethics retains as its founding insight the danger of pride. Austen, it would appear, was more successful than I at escaping the tyranny of this particular theological term.