MORAL IMAGINATION: BIBLICAL IMPERATIVES, NARRATIVE AND HERMENEUTICS IN PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, THE

JANE Austen has been described as the writer above all others whom it is hardest to catch in the act of greatness (Woolf 155). In this essay I shall consider the way in which the third-person omniscient narration of her text provides a moral perspective, despite the supple use of free indirect discourse that enables the introduction of other subjective points of view. The shaping power of omniscient narration, as Austen uses it, balanced by dialogue, has affinities with the method of biblical narration described by Robert Alter and invites a similar kind of imaginative engagement.11 shall then consider the moral vision that informs Austen's text and its relationship to biblical theology and a particular understanding of the ideal human telos, whether Aristotelian, relativistic, Christian, or a synthesis of perspectives,2 examining particularly the form of the novel as comedy and its resolution in a marriage of romance and complementarity. Finally, I will look at Austen's presentation of prejudice and the way it intersects with the hermeneutical acuity and challenges that face Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy especially, in relation to the tiny polis of which they are a part, and their encounters with one another. There are many other moral dimensions which could be explored, but this essay will focus on the concepts of telos, self-understanding, perception and action. These patterns of engagement with the other and growth in self-knowledge are often modelled on a Christian narrative of self-awareness, repentance, and reconciliation leading to transformation and ultimately happiness. This situates Austen's romance within the biblical metanarrative of ultimate salvation imaged in the marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelation 21.

In Pride and Prejudice Austen uses the 'imaginative form' of 'dramatic prose,' which entails that the 'moral "sense" or "philosophy"' informing the text is implicit in its form. Any attempt to 'translate' this moral philosophy of necessity alters or reduces it (Woolf 111 ); the aim of this essay is to consider the implications of this imaginative form when seeking to elucidate both Austen's moral vision and, more generally, the working of the literary imagination. In refusing to separate 'imaginative form' and 'moral "sense"' in this way, I am following the line of reasoning put forward by Martha Nussbaum:

Style itself makes its claims, expresses its own sense of what matters. Literary form is not separable from philosophical content, but is, itself, a part of content - an integral part, then, of the search for and the statement of truth. . . . [C]ertain truths about human life can only be fittingly and accurately stated in the language and forms characteristic of the narrative artist. . . . The telling itself - the selection of genre, formal structures, sentences, vocabulary. . . Life is never simply presented by a text; it is always represented as something. (Love's Knowledge 3,5)

Given this premise, the third-person omniscient narration developed by Austen, as she represents a particular fictional world in her novel, has significance in itself.3 This kind of narration is by no means unique to Austen, and the observations made here can be equally applied to any number of other novelists. However, she was instrumental in forging this method of narration at the initiating stages of the novel's efflorescence in England, (Bray 108-114, 131) and her use of it enables the connection between biblical and literary narrative art to be made explicit, also demonstrating the similar function attributed to the imagination in both.

It has frequently been recognised that Austen's method of narration was shaped by her familiarity with the epistolary fiction of the eighteenthcentury. Joe Bray suggests that Austen displays her mastery of the style by shifting 'the tensions within consciousness,' which the epistolary novel privileges, to 'the interaction between character and narrator.' Her deployment of free indirect thought enables subtle transitions in point of view from the omniscient perspective of the narrator, to the subjective experience of various characters (108-9). While the shift in form is not disputed, the significance and implications ascribed to Austen's choice have been interpreted in a variety of ways. Bray argues that 'the widespread infiltration' of omniscient narration 'by the perspectives of characters . . . hinders moral unity and closure, preventing rather than enforcing judgement.' Rather than restricting subjectivity, third-person narration, as Austen handles it, reveals the tension that defines subjectivity through the 'fraught debate' between the consciousness of the narrator and that of the characters revealed in free indirect thought (117). April Alliston also observes the transition from epistolary form to free indirect discourse in Austen's novels; however, she claims that the omniscient narration 'frames for the reader the interiors inhabited by her heroines,' 'fixing [the heroine] more squarely in its exemplary frame,' and thus placing her in the tradition of criticism that suggests Austen's third-person narrative provides an authoritative voice offering 'clear moral judgements' in place of the moral anarchy and untrammelled subjectivity of epistolary fiction (Qtd. in Bray, 117).4 It seems unnecessary to dichotomise these two schools of interpretation so rigidly, though. The self-effacing narrative voice of Austen's texts gains an omniscient authority similar to that present in the biblical narratives, through selective disclosure and a general opaqueness of presence. But this also foregrounds the individuality of various characters that are effectively dramatised through direct speech and action. Nevertheless, the form of third-person omniscient narration does appear to me at least to frame the interiors of Austen's heroines, in the sense of possessing ultimate moral authority in the context of the narrative as a whole (Alliston 234-9).