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

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

It is when Sir Thomas returns from Antigua and turns his attention to the domestic sphere, planning the marriage not just of his daughter but of Fanny Price, that the distinction between the rich and the poor woman, hence between wealth and virtue, collapses."8 By holding a ball in Fanny's honor, Sir Thomas forces the character who most fully exemplifies non-materialist virtues into the arena of self-interested exchange.

The language used to describe Fanny's participation in the ball associates it with commerce; Edmund tells her that she will need "to harden [herself] to the idea of being worth looking at" even though she "ha[s] not been brought up to the trade of coming out" (159, 215). Edmund's wording echoes his earlier description of "good hardened real acting" as opposed to "the raw efforts of those who have not been bred to the trade" (101) and the narrator's characterization of Henry Crawford attempting to "sharpen [Fanny's] avarice, and harden her heart" during the game of speculation (193).11 The similar phrasing in these comments links these various activities together, associating them all with the hardening of self, the pursuit of self-interest necessary for successful commerce. Appropriately, it is at the ball that Fanny first finds herself not opposed to but in the same position as the wealthy woman, feeling uncomfortable because of "be[ing] placed above so many elegant young women! The distinction was too great. It was treating her like her cousins" (223). Even more unsettling than the shift in Fanny's social position relative to the Bertram sisters is the fact that, at this point in the novel, her virtuous male cousin Edmund Bertram proves unable to distinguish her from the wealthy Mary Crawford. Alhough the narrator repeatedly emphasizes the two women's absolute difference-"Miss Crawford was very unlike her. She had none of Fanny's delicacy of taste, of mind, of feeling" (65)-Edmund sees them as virtually identical, telling Fanny, "I would not have the shadow of a coolness between the two whose intimacy I have been observing with the greatest pleasure, and in whose characters there is so much general resemblance in true generosity and natural delicacy as to make the few slight differences, resulting principally from situation, no reasonable hindrance to a perfect friendship. I would not have the shadow of a coolness arise ... between the two dearest objects I have on earth" (213). Edmund's simultaneous attraction to "two dear objects" marks the way that in a commercial society wealth may appear so attractive that it will no longer be possible to distinguish it from virtue; the two will look the same.20