Ethics and the English Novel from Austen to Forster

Valerie Wainwright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317141211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Complicating a pervasive view of the ethical thought of the Victorians and their close relations, which emphasizes the domineering influence of a righteous and repressive morality, Wainwright discerns a new orientation towards an expansive ethics of flourishing or living well in Austen, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy and Forster. In a sequence of remarkable novels by these authors, Wainwright traces an ethical perspective that privileges styles of life that are worthy and fulfilling, admirable and rewarding. Presenting new research into the ethical debates in which these authors participated, this rigorous and energetic work reveals the ways in which ideas of major theorists such as Kant, F. H. Bradley, or John Stuart Mill, as well as those of now little-known writers such as the priest Edward Tagart, the preacher William Maccall, and philanthropist Helen Dendy Bosanquet, were appropriated and reappraised. Further, Wainwright seeks also to place these novelists within the wider context of modernity and proposes that their responses can be linked to the on-going and animated discussions that characterize modern moral philosophy.

PART 1
WHAT MATTERS (MOST)

Chapter 1
Modes and Sensibilities: Varieties of Ethical Thought

From 1800 onwards one major English author after another took up the topic of eudaimonia. These moderns had plenty of ideas about what makes for lives that are satisfying, worthwhile, meaningful. Flourishing was the novel’s aim and ideal – if not a character’s motivating thought. But failure to achieve fulfilment often seems likely to be the fate of a heroine or hero. Fanny Price comes pretty close to disaster, while Margaret Hale and Dorothea Brooke face anguish and self-doubt. All their striving, all their idealism,1 cannot prevent them from experiencing the horror of breakdown. Ravaged at the time of his wife’s death by self-conflict, unknowing as to what he is and what made him that way, Clym Yeobright admits that he is ‘getting used to the horror of [his] existence’ (444). At these times the ‘imperial self’, abhorred by the postmodernist, gives way to a rather more fragile creature, one who is faced with an unbearable sense of incoherence.

To get to be one’s own person, to be clear-headed, responsible and self-controlled, was a feat the difficulty of which John Stuart Mill, the heir to the Enlightenment, and one of the ‘great self-dissatisfied’ (to borrow a term from Nietzsche) did not underestimate. In looking at Mill’s Autobiography, at the breakdown experienced by this thinker, we are invited also to consider conditions that must be met if an individual is even to embark on an ethical project. The type of account Mill gives us at a certain point in his Autobiography – a sort of personal case-history or narrative-cum-commentary of the effects of certain states of mind and being – seeks to further our understanding of the psychological prerequisites of meaningful endeavour – which may in turn contribute to a sense of self-fulfilment.2

The Autobiography is the story of Mill’s life-long pursuit of activities that might count as truly worthwhile: these are the ‘inspiring prospects’ that give ‘colour to one’s existence’, and are thus worth the effort of achieving. However, as he endeavours to make sense of his life, his aims and relationships, so does Mill come up against the brute fact of moral disempowerment, a condition which is strictly connected to what he diagnoses as a fundamental psychological lack – the cause of which Mill attributes to the profound impact of analytical ways of thought. Where postmoderns want us to confront the potential violence of the self, Mill’s account invites us to reconsider the ethical implications of ‘ego-loss’, of a self bereft of certainty, of self-esteem, of all sources of comfort. It invites us to take a look at a state of moral paralysis. For Mill meaningful endeavour cannot get going in the absense of self-affirming moral attitudes. Crucially, he finds, as if awakening from a dream, that he is not on ‘good terms with himself’.3 He is left hopeless by a dire self-conception that he seems unable to do anything about. Stranded in this state of wretchness, he cannot summon up the ‘pleasure of sympathy,’ the feelings of empathy or benevolence that might propel his reforming ambitions. His development, such as it has been is, he senses, anything but harmonious.

Mill’s self-found therapy draws upon two crucial resources; another story of the self is instrumental in setting to work the power of the imagination: Mill is able to (re)create a ‘conception’ or visualization of a significant scene (that in Marmontel’s Memoirs, where the author tells of his father’s death), and it is this scene that serves, in turn, to trigger the emotions that are essential to a satisfactory self-image: ‘I had still it seemed, some of the material out of which all worth of character, and all capacity for happiness, are made’ (117). In Mill’s Autobiography moral attitudes and meaning are tightly intertwined, but the possibility of pursuing what gives life meaning, and thus happiness, depends in the first instance on acquiring a (minimal) sense of psychological coherence. In exercising his creative faculties, Mill revives and refashions the psychically healthier self he desperately needs. He learns from his experience ‘that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities, and required to be nourished and enriched as well as guided’ (118). Nurturing and protecting certain capacities in order to create a viable self: Mill discovered that certain modes and sensibilities were required to sustain his arduous ethical enterprise.

J.S. Mill is a substantial presence in this study. In more than one chapter Mill’s thought constitutes a crucial point of reference. Gaskell shares with Mill a common source of inspiration; Dickens shares grave doubts about the value of his Benthamite legacy; Forster respects but also queries facets of his ‘developmental’ model. Significant connections can be made between Mill’s thought and that of his contemporaries and followers. But of the three terms that seem most applicable to the works of these and the other realist authors at the centre of this study – complexity, subtlety and diversity – it is the fact of diversity that I shall be highlighting here. A survey of the ethical interests of all these authors should point up the striking variety within their ethical thought.4 These novelists certainly share fundamental concerns about the possibility of achieving eudaimonia, but they present the reader with contrasting conceptions of virtue or morality; they add something distinctive to discourses on the subject of what is conducive to well-being.5 These eudaimonistic designs are informed by specific conceptions of moral psychology, by a variety of ideas about capacities that should be energized and others that are best modified or suppressed. So how might we conceptualize the ethics of each author? What aspects of moral phenomenology will matter most? What is the proper place of morality in a good life? What kind of intuitions serve as a background ‘theory’ of healthy self-functioning? What does a fine or fertile responsiveness to the challenges of life entail?

*

Writing at the time Jane Austen was approaching adulthood, the philosopher Thomas Reid remarked that the good life was the virtuous life so that any man who believed that ‘virtue was contrary to his happiness, on the whole’ ‘was reduced to the miserable dilemma whether it is better to be a fool or a knave’.6 Another way of putting this thought is to claim that for a rational being virtue is inseparable from his/her overall best interests: we cannot live well prudentially independently of living well morally. For Reid ‘moral perplexity may arise because of the plurality of basic [moral] principles’, but on the whole ‘the path to duty is a plain path’.7 For readers well versed in recent criticism of Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, it would be easy to conclude that Austen is in full agreement with Reid. The good life is above all the moral life, where the moral life is interpreted in terms of moral steadfastness and righteousness, acute sense of duty and obedience to principle. And this virtuous mode of proceeding will show an individual where her best interests lie. I would suggest, however, that Austen would have found much to agree with in the writings of Forster’s contemporary, William James.

For James ethics must attempt to settle the issue of what is good or valuable, or really important, what makes life worth living, what gives it meaning or point and substance. And part of this enquiry into what matters (most) must ascertain ‘the relation of the good we call virtue, the qualities of conduct and character that we commend and admire, to other good things’.8 Ethics is thus practical when it seeks to integrate the different claims constituted by the interests and welfare of others to whom we are more or less attached, and to reconcile these claims with other aims, and in particular with the aim of personal well-being, which may take the form of self-realization or self-perfection.9 It is the view of James that serious thinkers who possess sensibility, cannot but engage in attempts to find ‘the measure of the various goods and ills that men recognize, so that the philosopher may settle the true order of human obligations’. This is a pressing need. For ‘every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire … Some part of the ideal must be butchered, and [the ethical philosopher] needs to know which part’. From the perspective of the individual life, although this may seem simply to entail choosing goals, and the means to achieving them, such an aim is, at critical moments, linked to the question of who one chooses to be:

[When] we reach the plane of Ethics … choice reigns notoriously supreme. An act has no ethical quality whatsoever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible. To sustain the arguments for the good course and keep them ever before us, to stifle our longing for more flowery ways, to keep the foot unflinchingly on the arduous path, these are the characteristic ethical energies. But more than these; for these but deal with the means of compassing interests already felt by the man to be supreme. The ethical energy par excellence has to go farther and choose which interest out of severally, equally coercive, shall become supreme … When he debates … his choice really lies between one of several equally possible future Characters.10

In Austen’s ethical vision the sort of morality that envisages and encourages attractive self-refashioning counts for a great deal, but so does personal well-being or comfort (a term which flourishes in this text). And well-being is achieved through the enjoyment of great goods: in fact a wide variety of goods makes for the best kind of life. The intelligent Henry Crawford’s list of the goods he can offer Fanny Price is pretty comprehensive: ‘happiness, comfort, honour, and dignity in the world’ (130). (Consider that of Mrs Norris, who values ‘the comforts of hurry, bustle, and importance’, 154.) Certainly high up on Austen’s wish-list are honour or consequence (as improved social status and recognition), influence and intelligent conversation, as well as the affection that is grounded in shared tastes and esteem. All these goods contribute to personal well-being as well as to one’s capacity to promote the happiness of others less fortunate. Morality matters, but the morality that works best is a morality of reasonableness and fairness. Such moral skills and qualities make for the best kind of interpersonal relations and provide for the kind of moral stance that is essential for thinking through dilemmas, and hence for making the right choice. While this activity, in turn, may constitute a significant step in the business of self-improvement. Attitudes of reasonableness combined with resolute attempts at fairness supply the conditions for promoting mutual recreation, so that the steady and unadventurous (Fanny and Edmund) may become more animated, and the animated (Mary and Henry) a little more steady. In Mansfield Park these virtuous modes of being offer the means of bringing about the most inclusive ideal.

Yet Austen’s novel reveals that even the most staunchly principled, those who intend to do what is right, to do their duty, may be insufficiently alert at times to their own unreasonableness. And this is often because specific but inadmissable intentions prevail. These can become of paramount influence in the process of reasoning whereby states of doubt and anxiety are overcome. As in her other novels, a rhetoric of virtue permeates the text, but in Mansfield Park she is intrigued by patterns of behaviour that frustrate the creative process of virtuous self-refashioning.11 For Austen normative ethics is checked by psychology. This does not mean that the distinction between the actual and the ideal simply disappears from sight. It means that articulating moral ideals and principles is ‘appropriately constrained by knowledge of the basic architecture of the mind, core emotions, patterns of development, social psychology, and the limits of our capacities for rational deliberation’.12 The question which faces Austen’s reader is whether an individual can ever achieve the necessary state of self-awareness that reasonableness requires. Locke could see the difficulty and held it to be a ‘Disease’ or sort of ‘Madness’, though one common to ‘very sober and rational Minds’:

There is scarce any one that does not observe something that seems odd to him, and is in it self really Extravagant in the Opinions, Reasonings, and Actions of other Men. The least flaw of this kind, if at all different from his own, everyone is quick-sighted enough to espie in another, and will by the Authority of Reason forwardly condemn, though he be guilty of much greater Unreasonableness in his own Tenets and Conduct, which he never perceives, and will very hardly, if at all, be convinced of.13

‘Custom’, Locke observed, ‘settles habits of Thinking in the Understanding’ (396). And Fanny Price, her cousin noted was one ‘over whom habit had most power, and novelty least’ (349). Like Gaskell and Eliot, Hardy and Forster, Austen is only too well-aware of what can make good lives elusive: the lasting antipathies of early impressions, the unruliness of desire, the impact of pseudorationality and multiple forms of evasion, compulsive self-doubts and delusions. She never underestimates the difficulty of disentangling motives so as to gain mental clarity.14

Of all the novelists discussed here it is the ironists Austen and Hardy who reveal the greatest degree of scepticism about the possibility of successful, in the sense of reliable, self-interpretation. In Mansfield Park Austen wonders whether failure is largely a matter of up-bringing, temperament, or the consequence on occasions of the power over the mind of a particular rationale. If her heroine, Fanny Price, had perused Franklin’s Autobiography she might – but probably would not – have recognized the appropriateness of a certain, ironic, passage: ‘so convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do’.15

The idea that reasonableness must prevail if challenging, but also stimulating and mutually supportive, personal connections are to be forged, is central to Austen’s vision of possibilities. Here reasonableness must be perpetually striven for. The capacity of the mind to engage in this kind of struggle is revealed in the endeavour to overcome the propensity to both self-serving modes of thought and the slide into censoriousness, the self-righteous or severely judgemental attitude. Like Edmund Bertram (her hero), Austen cannot admire a mind that ‘does not struggle against itself’ (116); that fails to break a habit of going for the easier, the most congenial, option.

Fanny Price is certainly remarkable in sustaining an unusual degree of mental autonomy, sticking earnestly to her own ideas of what is right and wrong. She may be truly anxious to please – a state of mind, which, it has been suggested, is far from conducive to winning the inner struggle to keep one’s own thoughts intact.16 But anxious or not, she remains true to her own moral vision. This does not mean, I have suggested, that she realizes or obtains what she mi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 What Matters (MOST)
• Part 2 Ethical Designs
• Afterword: Utz
• Bibliography
• Index