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Jane Austen’s Civilized Women Morality, Gender and the Civilizing Process
Enit Karafili Steiner
London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012 Hardcover. vii + 228 p. ISBN 978-1848931770. £60
Reviewed by Wendy O’Brien University of Melbourne
‘You have proved yourself upright and disinterested, prove yourself grateful and tender-hearted; and then you will be the perfect model of a woman, which I have always believed you were born for.’ Mansfield Park [322]. With this ‘kind’ tutelage, Edmund Bertram beseeches Fanny Price to display the feminine gratitude and acquiescence expected of her. Fanny is Edmund’s unequal in every particular; she is impoverished, female, displaced from her home, and lacking the publicly ratified moral certainty of his religious calling. She should, according to the prevailing moral paradigm, heed the sage advice of her superior cousin, and gratefully accept the offer of marriage proffered by the handsome Henry Crawford. Female and impoverished though she might be, “little” Fanny Price does know her own mind. Edmund’s earnest plea is eclipsed by the vehemence of her response: "Oh! never, never, never; he never will succeed with me." This exchange typifies a strain of relational morality found in Jane Austen’s work, emblematic of Austen’s contribution to a ‘reformative agenda that refuses to conceive of women’s submissiveness as the inevitable price to be paid for the survival of affections’ [16]. Enit K. Steiner reads Austen’s women as possessing a self-awareness and an inter-subjective understanding of the artifice of received ideas of feminine morality that means they are rarely content to comply with the requirements for ‘the perfect model of a woman.’ Not for Steiner the passive constructs of a debilitating moral zeitgeist: Austen’s women are featured as moral agents in their own right. Through Austen’s juvenilia and her six complete novels Steiner charts the moral development of Austen’s most significant female characters. Steiner draws largely on the sociological theories of Norbert Elias to advance her reading of the processual and relational aspects of this civilising process. Austen’s novels display female consciousness as a process, characterised by an inter-subjective balance between individual desires and obligations to others. In this, Steiner sees Austen’s work as challenging conceptions of morality as fixed, universalisable and ineluctable: there is no singular or static moral sensibility to be narratively couched. Steiner sets her work apart from popular readings of Austen as ‘the archetypal author of good manners’ [1], by identifying Austen’s refusal to narrate morality in any authorial or omnipotent sense. Austen’s narrative restraint leaves the civilising process to Austen’s women who, to varying degrees, embody a relational and introspective understanding of female consciousness that reveals received morality as artifice. Indeed, Steiner finds Austen’s work to be far more interrogative of conventional social mores than is often credited. Austen’s oeuvre maintains an interest in ideas considered unconventional in her time, including; female emancipation, self-gratification, and women’s enthusiasm for understanding and advancing their own moral agency by virtue of their interactions with others. In love, in domestic and public life, in language, narrative, history and in dress, the codes of femininity are read as finely wrought artifice. Steiner traces this fictive femininity through Austen’s early work and also through the six novels that comprise her mature oeuvre. Following Steiner’s broadly contextual introduction, the constituent chapters take up various aspects of female moral agency evident in Austen’s work. Chapters One and Two deal with Austen’s early work; the juvenilia, Lady Susan and Northanger Abbey. The juvenilia are read as displaying a feisty resistance to the dictates of received morality. Collectively, the heroines of Austen’s juvenilia embody a fearless pursuit of self-gratification, and a tendency for spontaneous love and friendship that Steiner, and others, see resisting received ideas of feminine propriety. Steiner also identifies that frank expressions of sexual desire suffuse Austen’s work, with the juvenilia, in particular, depicting women’s active role in courtship. These early texts are also replete with acts of violence, a feature that Steiner affords a brief, but nuanced, analysis on feminist terms. Steiner identifies this violence, lessened in Austen’s later work, as committed, at times, by women in protest against impediments to realised desire. She cautions against overly celebratory feminist accounts, however, suggesting that these might be tempered by an acknowledgement that Austen’s women endure violence more often than they inflict it. Steiner’s diachronic reading links the feisty strain of femininity in Austen’s juvenilia with the tempered and more subtly fashioned critique of received feminine morality that she finds evident in Austen’s mature work. In Chapter Two, Steiner reads Lady Susan’s manipulation of language as an artful appropriation of ‘false delicacy’, the very patriarchal language against which Mary Wollstonecraft rails. Lady Susan uses patriarchal language, and patriarchal expectations about her “situation” to advance her position. Lady Susan forgoes the violence and rash narrative action of the heroines in Austen’s juvenilia, in favour of discursive manoeuvres that highlight, at once, the marginalisation of women in narratives that concern them, be they literary, historical, moral, but also the power of female knowledge production with regards to these self-same narrative modes. Northanger Abbey provides the grounds for Steiner’s extended critique of the exclusion of women from knowledge production and narrative form. Steiner suggests that Austen’s gothic novel portrays the power of women, as an excluded group of knowers. Using Sandra Harding’s work on standpoint theory, Steiner suggests that the narrative incorporation of hitherto marginalised female voices highlights the means by which hegemonic narrative modes perpetuate domestic despotism. Chapter Three reveals Steiner’s abiding interest in the dialogic character of Austen’s morality. Steiner provides explicit analysis of this dynamic in the novels Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, concluding that self-awareness and consciousness are developed via dialogic engagement with difference. For Steiner, Austen’s work promotes an understanding of the individual as always inter-subjective: the I is, in fact, always part of a ‘we’. In Pride and Prejudice, for example, dissimilarities are seen as fruitful opportunities for exchange that promotes a greater sense of self-awareness and growth. It is this logic that accounts for the improvement in Darcy’s deplorable manners towards Elizabeth Bennet. Steiner reads Sense and Sensibility as building on this theme by portraying morality as a produce of inter-subjective experience. By Steiner’s account, Austen eschews the disembodied thinking agents of Rousseau’s Social Contract, in favour of a dialogic conception of consciousness as informed by otherness. To pursue this concept Steiner engages Bakhtin, reading Sense and Sensibility as a dialogic conception of existence and moral judgment that ultimately refutes both the primacy of the essential self and the idea of universalisable moral maxims. Chapters Four and Five, respectively, deal with Mansfield Park and Emma, novels that Steiner links through her analysis of human autonomy. The vastly different characters of Fanny Price and Emma Woodhouse are both read as autonomous agents, whose actions frustrate and exceed the gendered determinates of eighteenth-century philosophy. In her final chapter, Steiner reads Persuasion as Austen’s most explicit comment on the socially constructed notion of femininity. Here, Steiner reads the experience and moral agency of Anne Elliot as insisting that the homogeneity of public civil life be made to accommodate desire and feeling. In so doing, Steiner makes a powerful case for Austen as foreshadowing the feminist refrain that the personal is political. There is already a great deal of feminist scholarship on Austen, to which Steiner’s text makes a valuable contribution. Her project might more properly be considered philosophical, however, and it is to this discipline that Steiner’s text makes the more necessary scholarly contribution. Although not the first to situate Austen’s work according to the eighteenth-century philosophical tradition, Steiner’s text is unique both for its broad-ranging philosophical treatment of Austen’s work, and for the sustained feminist reading that carefully links Austen’s civilising process to the concerns of contemporary readers. Part of the value, and the challenge, of Steiner’s ambitious work is that it evades temporal or disciplinary boundaries. Steiner situates Austen’s work within a constellation of theoretical frameworks, including post-structuralist feminist, standpoint theory, sociological theories of habitus, Enlightenment theories of societal development, as well as eighteenth-century and contemporary philosophical and literary readings. Jane Austen’s work is very often read as a reinscription of received morality as it pertains to femininity, domesticity and the rules that govern women’s place in social life. Such readings place Austen as ‘the archetypal author of good manners’ [1]. To consider Austen thus is to imply that she operates merely as a mouthpiece for the received morality of her zeitgeist, promulgating the patriarchal language of Rousseau and Burke that demands female submissiveness, subservience, and gentleness. Steiner is not blind to the limitations of Austen’s work—her project, after all, is to embed Austen’s texts in the political and moral ideas of Austen’s time. But she has little time for the suggestion that Austen’s is a simple patriarchal morality, imposed on an atomistic subject. Instead, Steiner engages the brilliant retort that Wollstonecraft offers the eighteenth-century proponents of ‘received morality’. In so doing, she reveals substantial complementarity between Wollstonecraft’s work and the active moral agents of Austen’s civilising process. The unquestionable value of Steiner’s text is, in the end, powerful in its simplicity. If we accept it as axiomatic that the tradition of moral philosophy has largely functioned to exclude women, then Steiner’s text constitutes a welcome addition to the philosophy by women that seeks to redress this imbalance. Steiner mobilises Austen’s heroines in order to offer a sustained philosophical account of female consciousness, and the multiplicitious ways in which its legitimacy has been denied. She makes superb use of Wollstonecraft to further this end. Far from a “miss manners” then, Austen assumes a role as an advocate for women’s active moral agency. And there is a hook for the contemporary reader too. By Steiner’s reckoning, Austen’s work encourages readers to produce rather than consume moral judgment. With this gesture, Steiner opens a space for an ongoing relational dialogue about the moral concepts with the greatest implications for women. Perhaps then, moral philosophy need not be a male preserve after all.
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