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

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

This immaterial image is of particular interest to Austen's critics because it has been used to characterize not just the heroines of her novels but also the novelist herself. Typically reviewers have emphasized Austen's smallness and lack, praising her "minute fidelity of detail" and "the power that out of materials so slender ...

could fashion a story." Similarly, when they criticize her, they note that "the narrowness of [the novel's] sphere of action ... [means that] there was no large field of view open to her" and, perhaps most tellingly, that there is "a want of body to the story" which means that "[t]he action is frittered away in over-little things" (Southam 96, 195, 227, 117). More recently, critics have condemned this history of criticism in terms that echo Austen's own construction of her poor heroines, describing it as "disembodied" and "impoverished" (Fraiman 808; Sedgwick 836). I want to add to their critical reevaluation of Austen by pointing out that in her novels there is already a character who is neither disembodied nor impoverished, "a contradictory figure neither pretty nor little," the rich woman who is associated with the historical and economic concerns typically conceived to be absent from Austen's texts (807).11 Austen uses this larger, grosser, more embodied figure to evoke the refined, delicate, or disinterested heroine whose image critics associate with the author. In Pride and Prejudice, for example, the scenes at Netherfields and Rosings where Darcy expresses his attraction toward Elizabeth Bennet are also the scenes where Miss Bingley's and Lady Catherine's behaviors are described at greatest length." In these scenes engrossment is depicted in such detail, catalogued and caricatured with such perverse pleasure, that it is natural, virtually inevitable, for Darcy, as well as for Austen's readers, to prefer its opposite, those intangible values represented by Elizabeth Bennet." These scenes implicitly follow the logic spelled out by Mrs. Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility when she asserts of Edward Ferrars that "'to say that he is unlike Fanny is enough. It implies every thing amiable. I love him already"' (13). Such representational logic suggests that, despite her association with delicacy, Austen could more vividly conceive and represent the engrossment that permeated commercial society than the refinement that was supposed to counter those materialist impulses. Like Austen, eighteenth-century political economists tended to define refinement as imperceptible, almost an absence, in relation to the more visibly present engrossment. Hume, for example, argues in "Of the Standard of Taste" that "the critic [who] has no delicacy ... judges without any distinction, and is only affected by the grosser and more palpable qualities of the object: the finer touches pass unnoticed and disregarded" (147). Similarly, John Millar asserts that, "a 'people engrossed by lucrative trades ... whose great object is gain, and whose ruling principle is avarice' [need] 'not that nice and delicate justice, the offspring of refined humanity, but that coarse though useful virtue, the guardian of contrasts and promises"' (qtd. in Hont & Ignatieff, "Needs and Justice" 43). These passages suggest that with the rise of commodity culture it became increasingly difficult to imagine an alternative to commercial values that was not simply a negation of them; the best that individuals could hope for was, as Lynch argues, "a way to be acquisitive and antimaterialist at once" (119).