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

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

Though the first half of Mansfield Park focuses not on Sir Thomas's activities in Antigua (which have been the object of so much recent critical attention) but on what is happening at home in his absence, we can still read those events as reflecting anxieties about the commercial sphere. As Moretti has recently argued, "Bertram does indeed, leave for Antigua, and stays away for a very long time.

If Antigua is not essential to his finances-why on earth does he go? He goes, not because he needs the money, but because Austen needs him out of the way" (26). Austen needs Sir Thomas out of the way in order to show how man's consolidation of his position in the economic or vocational realm can be achieved only, in Deleuze and Guattari's words, "at the price of a splitting of the sexual object into a rich woman and a poor woman" (353). Austen makes that price visible through the difference between her heroine, Fanny Price, and the wealthy Bertram sisters, a difference that Sir Thomas has himself engendered by choosing an education that emphasizes "the distinction proper to be made between the girls as they grow up." He is eager, as he observes, to find a way "to preserve in the minds of my daughters the consciousness of what they are, without making them think too lowly of their cousin; and ... without depressing her spirits too far, to make her remember that she is not a Miss Bertram" (Mansfield 7). Taught the privilege of wealth and status, Sir Thomas's daughters exhibit the self-interest that Smith argues is necessary for a thriving commercial economy most overtly when their father is away from home. The amateur theatricals they hold in his absence function, as Agnew argues the theater typically does in eighteenthcentury writings, as a microcosm for the marketplace; during the performances, "selfishness ... more or less disguised, seemed to govern them all" and "every body ... was gay and busy, prosperous and important, each had their object of interest" (Mansfield 107, 129). As Fanny refuses steadfastly to take part in these self-interested activities, she comes to represent the puritan values Smith endorses in The Theory of Moral Sentiments as a counter to commerce: "Temperance, decency, modesty, and moderation, are always amiable, and can seldom be directed to any bad end. It is from the unremitting steadiness of those gentler exertions of self-command, that the amiable virtue of chastity, that the respectable virtues of industry and frugality, derive all that sober lustre which attends them" (242).11 Thus, while, as a number of critics have noted, these opening scenes convey the domestic chaos that erupts when the patriarch of the family is away from home, they also would have reassured contemporary readers by chronicling a world where wealth and virtue are transparently easy to distinguish.