Austen's powers: Engaging with Adam Smith in debates about wealth and virtue

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2000 by Michie, Elsie B

I argue here that in her novels Austen participates in the longstanding debate about the choice "between virtue and commerce, virtue and corruption, virtue and passion," a debate that has been engaged in "every phase of Western tradition, [where] there is a conception of virtue-Aristotelian, Thomist, neoMachiavellian, or Marxian-to which the spread of exchange relations is seen as presenting a threat" (Pocock 123, 104). As Pocock goes on to explain, the radical contribution that eighteenth-century political economists like Hume and Smith made to this discussion was to argue that the pursuit of wealth could itself be virtuous, providing benefits to commercial society as a whole and to the individuals living within that society. While Smith was perhaps the single most famous advocate for the expansion of commerce, he was also extremely troubled by the effects on the individual of a culture where money was increasingly becoming the dominant social power. As Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff note, "it is not an easy task to reconcile his evident distaste for the vulgar materialism of the 'great scramble' of commercial society with his clear endorsement of economic growth" (8-9). Smith articulated this ambivalence most powerfully when revising The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1789 after writing The Wealth of Nations to which he added a passage to the effect that the

disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, [which] though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. (61)

The distaste articulated in this passage is evoked in Austen's novels through a series of satirically portrayed rich women whose obsessive interest in property, rank, and status makes them emblems of what Smith feared, namely, that in a commercial society the idea of wealth would so engross individuals that they would no longer have any interest in virtue. Yet by providing in Mary Crawford and Emma Woodhouse portraits of wealthy women whose behavior is appealing rather than distasteful, Austen, like Smith, also acknowledges that with the expansion of commerce and a commodity-based economy the pursuit of wealth was an unavoidable part of her culture, an enterprise that would appeal even to the most virtuous of individuals. The changes in the depiction of the rich woman as we move from Pride and Prejudice to Mansfield Park to Emma show Austen wrestling with the ambivalences we find in Smith's writings: the sense that in a commercial culture the desire for wealth will be both beneficial and harmful and the need to find a way to acknowledge and accept the universality of such selfinterested impulses while at the same time imagining psychological and social mechanisms that will keep them in check?

Through the rich woman, Austen addresses anxieties about the effects money has on the psyche, the anxiety that "different modes of property may be seen as generating or encouraging different modes of personality" (Pocock 103), an anxiety that is implicit in Smith, for example, through references to individuals' dispositions, but explicit in Austen. Modifying Christopher Herbert's observation that "the hypothetical actors of political economy are homologous with themes of literary imagination" (133), we could say that Austen's fictional characters embody the fears that haunt the social imaginations of eighteenth-century political economists, specifically the fear of engrossment, the term writers like Smith and Hume used to define the negative effects of wealth.' Associated with both the consolidation of land (the engrossment of estates) and the accumulation of money (the engrossment of monopolies), the principle of engrossment is represented in Austen's novels through rich women's assumption that ideal marriages are financial mergers, uniting one great estate and/or fortune with another. The rich woman's drive to consolidate or engross rather than disperse wealth is epitomized in the opening pages of Sense and Sensibility, where the wealthy Fanny Dashwood, nee Ferrars, persuades her husband, John Dashwood, not to provide financial aid to his genteelly impoverished stepmother and half sisters, because, as Fanny explains, "'when the money is once parted with, it never can return"' (7). Here Austen gives her readers a virtual image of Burke's central fear that "the expansive power of the monied interest" would lead to the "intellect divorced from all natural relations-from manners and subordinations, from the laws of nature and nature's God-feeding on its own fantasies and substituting itself for every other form of power" (Pocock 204). This is the state that Percy Shelley later describes as "the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation" (152). It is this combination of the desire to amass, consolidate, or privilege wealth with the psychological impulse towards egotism, coldness, or self-absorption that Austen evokes through rich women who are variously described as "shallow, purse-proud, intriguing," "cold-hearted, vain ... mercenary and ambitious," and "proud, luxurious, and selfish" ("Female Novelists" 139; Mansfield Park 342; Emma 163). We find the first extended portraits of such characters in Pride and Prejudice, where the rudeness of Miss Bingley and Lady Catherine de Bourgh shows readers how living in a commercial culture in which "relationships and interactions with other social beings, and with their products, became increasingly complex and various" (Pocock 49) could lead not to the enrichment but to the impoverishment of the personality.'