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

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

A narrative plot that endorses the choice of the poor woman over the rich provides a fictive counterbalance to this perceived social valuation, suggesting that if in the commercial realm individuals are drawn to wealth, in their personal lives they may choose virtue. The fact that plots like this have such prominence in Austen's novels suggests that when she was writing, anxieties about the spread of materialism had intensified to a point where such a counter was felt to be both necessary and desirable.

Indeed, it seems to me that we can identify the moment at which the split between the rich and the poor woman enters the history of the novel as a means of countering anxieties about the expansiveness of commerce. It is in the mid-eighteenth century, slightly prior to Austen's period, when Richardson and Burney both begin successful novelistic careers by telling first, in Pamela and Evelina, the story of a poor woman rewarded for her virtue and then, in Clarissa and Camilla, the story of a rich woman who undergoes much the same struggles as her poorer counterpart but in the course of them loses her wealth and sanity. 14 Both these authors seem to have felt compelled to tell similar stories about a poor and a rich woman, thereby inviting readers to compare the differing outcomes of the two. That implicit comparison becomes explicit in Austen's narratives where the two figures are brought together in a single story, with the rich woman being punished not so much by what happens to her as by the satirical way in which she is represented. By the nineteenth century the split between the rich and the poor woman had become an accepted means, almost a narrative shorthand, for marking the choice between wealth and virtue. Smith could be talking about any number of nineteenth-century novels when he describes how "Two different characters are presented to our emulation; the one, of proud ambition and ostentatious avidity; the other, of humble modesty and equitable justice. Two different models, two different pictures, are held out to us, according to which we may fashion our own character and behaviour" (62). To realize how prevalent this pattern is one has only to think, among many other examples, of Great Expectations with Pip poised between the wealthy Estella and the impoverished Biddy, of Jane Eyre with the big bodied and propertied Bertha Mason and Blanche Ingram opposed to the tiny, almost ghostlike Jane Eyre, of The Eustace Diamonds with Frank Greystock vacillating between Lizzie Eustace and Lucy Morris, of The Small House at Allington with Augustus Crosbie mistakenly choosing Lady Alexandrina de Courcy rather than Lily Dale. By the end of the century the contrast between the rich and the poor woman had become so familiar to individuals from the novels they read that it began to show up in their psychic life as a means of working through ambivalent responses to living in an openly acquisitive commercial culture."