“Mr. Rushworth was from the first struck with the beauty of Miss Bertram, and being inclined to marry, soon fancied himself in love. Being now in her twenty-first year, Maria Bertram was beginning to think matrimony a duty; and as a marriage with Mr. Rushworth would give her the enjoyment of a larger income than her father’s, as well as ensure her a house in town, it became her evident duty to marry Mr. Rushworth if she could.”
Who’s Who or Debrett’s Guide to the Top Families of England might have held Maria and Mr. Rushworth in high esteem. After such a paragraph, Austen cannot—nor will she let her readers. The novelist exchanges the standard lens through which people are viewed in society, a lens that magnifies wealth and power, for a moral lens whose focal point is subtler qualities of character. Seen through this lens, the high and mighty may become small, and forgotten and retiring figures loom large. Within the world of the novel, virtue is shown to be distributed without regard to material wealth. The rich and well-mannered are not ipso facto good, nor the poor and unschooled necessarily bad. Goodness may be inherent in the lame, ugly child, the destitute porter, the hunchback in the attic or the girl ignorant of the most basic facts of geography. Certainly Fanny possesses no elegant dresses, has no money and can’t speak French, but by the end of Mansfield Park, she has been revealed as the one member of her extended family endowed with a noble soul, while all the others, despite their titles and accomplishments, have fallen into moral confusion. Sir Thomas Bertram has allowed snobbery to ruin the education of his children, his daughters have married for money and paid an emotional price for that decision, and his wife has let her heart turn to stone. The hierarchical system of Mansfield Park has been turned on its head.
Austen does not, of course, make explicit her concept of true hierarchy, boxing our ears with a preacher’s bluntness; she instead enlists our sympathies and marshals our abhorrence for its opposite with the skill and humour of a great novelist. She does not tell us why her moral priorities are important; she shows us why within the context of a story that also manages to make us laugh and that takes such a strong hold on our imagination that we want to finish supper early so we may read on. As we reach the end of Mansfield Park, we are invited to go back into our own world—the world from which Austen has drawn us aside—and respond to its inhabitants as she has taught us to do, detecting and recoiling from greed, arrogance and pride and seeking out the good in ourselves and in others.
Austen once modestly and famously described her art as “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour,” but her novels are suffused with greater ambitions. Each one attempts, by examining what she called “three or four families in a country village,” to criticise and so alter our lives.
2.
Austen was not alone in her aspirations. Almost every great novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries stages an assault on, or at the very least harbours scepticism regarding, the accepted social hierarchy, and each offers some sort of redefinition of precedence according to moral worth rather than financial assets or bloodlines. Only on rare occasions are the heroes and heroines of fiction the type of people to whom Debrett’s or Who’s Who would give priority. In the pages of these works, the first become something like the last, and the last something like the first. For example, in Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1834), it is not Madame de Nucingen, with her gilded house, who solicits our sympathies, but the toothless old Goriot, eking out his days in a putrid boardinghouse. Similarly, in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), it is not the Oxford dons whom we respect, but the impoverished, ill-schooled stonemason who repairs the gargoyles of the university’s colleges.
Standing witness to hidden lives, novels may act as conceptual counterweights to dominant hierarchical realities. They can reveal that the maid now busying herself with lunch is a creature of rare sensitivity and moral greatness, while the baron who laughs raucously and owns a silver mine has a heart both withered and acrid.
If we are inclined to forget the lesson, it may be in part because what is best in other people seldom has a chance to express itself in the sort of external achievements that attract and hold our ordinary, vagabond attention. George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) begins with a discussion of this human tendency to admire only the most obvious exploits, as the author draws an unlikely comparison between her heroine and Saint Theresa of Avila (1512–82). Thanks to good luck and circumstance, because she came from a wealthy and well-connected family, Saint Theresa was able (Eliot reminds us) to embody her goodness and creativity in concrete acts. She founded seventeen convents; communicated with some of the most devout individuals of her day; wrote an autobiography and a number of treatises on prayer and vision; and became not only one of the principal saints of the Roman Catholic Church but perhaps its greatest mystic. By the time of her death, Theresa could claim a status equal to her virtue. In that, she was singularly blessed, Eliot suggests, citing the legions of people in the world who, though no less intelligent or creative than the Spanish saint, nonetheless fail ever to externalise their finer qualities in useful actions. Through a combination of their own errors and unhelpful social conditions, these less fortunate mortals are thereby condemned to a status that bears scant relation to their inner worth. According to the novelist, “Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life; only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with a meanness of opportunity.” It is the life of one such woman, Dorothea Brooke, living in an English town in the first half of the nineteenth century, that Middlemarch sets out to recount, the novel as a whole offering a critique of the world’s habit of neglecting what Eliot calls “spiritual grandeur” whenever it is unlinked to “long-recognised deeds.”
Dorothea may well possess many of the same virtues as Saint Theresa, but they are not apparent to a world attentive only to the symbols of status. Because she first marries a sickly clergyman and then, little more than a year after his death, gives up her estate to wed her late husband’s cousin (who has no property and is not well-born), society insists that she cannot be a “good woman,” and everyone in the village gossips about her and shuns her company. “Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful,” Eliot herself concedes. “They were the mixed result of a young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state.” But then, in some of the most quietly stirring lines in all of nineteenth-century English fiction, Eliot asks us to look beyond
Status in Life vs. Status in Novels
NOVEL
HIGH STATUS
HIGH STATUS
IN NOVEL,LOW STATUSIN LIFE
IN LIFE,LOW STATUSIN NOVEL
Joseph Andrews
(1742) Henry Fielding
Joseph AndrewsParson Adams
Lady BoobyParson Trulliber
Vanity Fair
(1848) William Thackeray
William DobbinAmelia Sedley
Becky SharpJos SedleyGeorge Osborne Sir Pitt Crawley Rawdon Crawley