Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation

by Bharat Tandon

Overview

This important study investigates how Austen worked with, and played upon, the cracks and faultlines which time had uncovered in the ideals of polite conversation. In a wide-ranging argument combining intellectual history and literary stylistics, Bharat Tandon explores such activities as flirtation and ventriloquism, in order to show how a form of conversational morality is what Austen's novels both describe and set out to achieve.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781843311010
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	03/01/2003
Series:	Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series
Edition description:	First Edition, First ed.
Pages:	305
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Bharat Tandon teaches at St. Anne's College, University of Oxford, and is the former External Director of Studies in English at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.

Read an Excerpt

Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation

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By Bharat Tandon

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2003 Bharat Tandon
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-756-4

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CHAPTER 1

THE MORALITY OF CONVERSATION

The Vortex of Eloquence

Why, she was a little old maid 'oo'd written 'alf a dozen books about a hundred years ago [...] But, as I was sayin', what beat me was there was nothin' to 'em nor in 'em. Nothin' at all, believe me.

Humberstall in Rudyard Kipling, 'The Janeites'

Edmund Burke, imperious in his silences, still found it necessary to shout. One of his most articulate and sympathetic recent defenders, Conor Cruise O'Brien, has suggested that silences are 'the dark side of the Burkean moon' – a metaphor in tune with Burke's enduring image as not only eloquent but magniloquent. Burke might have even been flattered by the felicity of O'Brien's conceit: as a teenage astronomer, he had enthused about 'System running into System! and worlds bordering on worlds!' and his mature vision of an hereditary social cohesion, realized most fully in Reflections on the Revolution in France, gains some of its strength from metaphors of an ordered or disordered universe. One famous example is Burke's memory of Marie Antoinette: 'It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, — glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy.' When speaking in public, however, Burke was capable of being elemental in other ways. Fanny Burney watched him at work in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, and found herself almost convinced: 'Yet, at times I confess, with all that I felt, wished, and thought concerning Mr Hastings, the whirlwind of his eloquence nearly drew me into its vortex.'

Burney's diary entry registers the impact of Burke's speech in its incongruous but strangely appropriate phrasing. Her attempt to make 'eloquence' consort with 'whirlwind' and 'vortex' responds to a conjunction of rhetorical aptitude and gale-force. However, if Burney was almost drawn in by Burke, Jane Austen's cousin Phila Walter was almost blown away. According to the family records, she certainly heard the proceedings of the impeachment differently:

They went to the trial one day "and sat from ten till four, completely tired; but I had the satisfaction of hearing the celebrated orators – Sheridan, Burke, and Fox. The first was so low we could not hear him, the second so hot and hasty we could not understand, the third was highly superior to either, as we could distinguish every word, though not to our satisfaction [...]"

Likewise, RB Sheridan noted of Burke's defence of the parliamentary status quo, that he 'attacked W. Pitt in a scream of Passion, and swore Parliament was and always has been precisely what it ought to be.' As many commentators on Burke have remarked, the fact that his writings and speeches 'are on occasion not above theatricality' is itself a part of their design, one which any critic needs to take on board. 'The very strength of his feelings,' notes JT Boulton, is a salient feature of the case he is arguing [...] his emotive prose is the embodiment of the fundamental nature of his thought.' Other distinctive textures of Burkean thinking, such as his scepticism about the self-sufficiency of abstract reason, combine with this emotive force to create the flexible alloy of principles for which he is celebrated.

Even with his eye for the political and aesthetic 'long view', though, Burke could not wholly have foreseen that the Reflections on the Revolution in France were to usher in one of the most vituperative slanging-matches in English political history, and that he would be indirectly responsible for works- which ranged from the epoch-making to the flimsy — such works as Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Men, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, and the anonymous Wonderful Flights of Edmund the Rhapsodist into the Sublime and Beautful regions of Fancy, Fiction, Extravagance, and Absurdity, exposed and laughed at. And inevitably, the tone of the 1790s controversy became steadily more shrill. If Wollstonecraft, writing within a month of Burke's publishing the Reflections, could still claim to be reasoning with him as she took him to task:

It is, Sir, possible to render the poor happier in this world, without depriving them of the consolation which you gratuitously grant them in the next.

such claims of reason themselves came to shrink into formal clearings of the throat, the stock preludes to less restrained forms of invective. The young radical John Thelwall was one of protégés of the linguist John Horne Tooke, that thorn in the establishment's side, and his own political imprisonment no doubt sharpened his animus; in his reply to Burke's Letter to a Noble Lord, six years after the Reflections, Thelwall claims the 'Sober' high ground against his 'Seditious and Inflammatory' opponent; he questions the tendency of political opponents to think 'that there can be nothing virtuous or liberal in the character of any man who is of an opposite principle to themselves,' while still reserving the right to paint Burke as a 'political maniac'. For Burke, too, there came points at which silence was the less honourable course, as when – realising that his unwavering commitment had alienated him even from his own party – he rounded upon the Whigs in a directly theatrical mode, as the embattled King Lear: 'The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me!' Theatrical gesture also embellished his silence in the speech of 21 December 1792, described by Gobbett's Parliamentary History with a fine eye for the melodramatic stage-direction: '[Here Mr. Burke drew out a dagger which he had kept concealed, and with much vehemence of action threw it to the floor].' One major meeting-place between the languages of literature and political rhetoric at this time was within the vocabularies of outrage and panic; Ian Christie, for example, has remarked on the prevalence of 'myth' in the conduct of late eighteenth-century politics, and Chris Baldick has pointed out that the monster-metaphors so popular in the 1790s pamphlet wars bequeathed in turn a resonant vocabulary to the likes of Mary Shelley.

Placed next to such vituperation and histrionics, exchanges marked by 'much vehemence of action', Austen's comedies of manners can seem to be little more than a case of looking after the pennies and leaving the pounds to look after themselves. Indeed, the novels are not only short on 'vehemence of action', but it could be argued that they are comparatively short on action of any kind (a fact which has not deterred film and television directors). It is against the background of these contextures and constraints that I shall explore the central role played in Jane Austen's art by her creative ear for familiar and familial conversation. In her novels, conversation is not simply a vehicle for abstract content, nor is it just 'an appropriate morally objective ground against which character can be judged'. Fittingly for a writer so attuned to pitch and attitude, conversation is in Austen less a technique than a constitutive atmosphere of her work. Growing up at the end of a century in which much had been hoped for and feared from the practices of talk and manners, Austen bore personal and aesthetic witness to a culture of 'polite' conversation which was increasingly feeling the weight of linguistic and social diffusion, and which could no longer take much for granted about what that conversation might represent or achieve. But this potential for confusion is where her writing takes its cue, and finds its voice.

The Reformation of Manners

At the end of Chapter V of Northanger Abbey, Austen's knowing narrator looks back to earlier writers as she mounts her defence of novels:

there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. "I am no novel reader – I seldom look into novels – Do not imagine that I often read novels — It is really very well for a novel." – Such is the common cant. — "And what are you reading, Miss —?" "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. — "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;' or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation, which no longer concern any one living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.

The passage is full of jokes, at the expense of those both under- and over-impressed with fiction; but its deepest ironies may not even be intentional ones. One of the joys (and definitions) of being young is that one can readily take earlier generations to task for being coarser and less sophisticated than oneself, without having to bother about one's eventual destiny as a target for someone still younger — this would have added resonance in a novel which 'leave [s] it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.' The narrator's defence of fiction, likewise, leaves it to be settled by the reader whether Austen is knowingly pastiching a distinctive feature of The Tatler and The Spectator, or whether she is unwittingly visiting on Addison and Steele a nineteenth-century version of their own reaction to Restoration manners. Compare, for example, Steele's account of Wycherley's The Country Wife, in which 'The Character of Horner, and the Design of it, is a good Representation of the Age in which that Comedy was written; at which Time Love and Wenching were the Business of Life, and the Gallant Manner of pursuing Women was the best Recommendation at Court.' That Austen's narrator could talk of The Spectator in tones uncannily similar to those in which Addison and Steele once berated their predecessors points to more than the inevitable cycles and displacements of literary history, that process of cultural weathering which Johnson detected in his comment that 'all works which describe manners, require notes in sixty or seventy years'; it shows what had happened to a distinctive cluster of ideas and linguistic practices in their transit through the contingencies of a century. A culture of polite conversation, which authors like Shaftesbury, Addison and Steele had hoped to nurture, and in part to create through their writings, is looked back upon in Northanger Abbey as something of a relic, a world whose voice is only imperfectly heard and sustained.

Edward and Lillian Bloom have commented on one of The Spectator's central values: 'In an age when conversation was regarded as a refinement of class, not divorced from the ethical, Addison and Steele more successfully than any preceding English writers translated the tone of civilized oral exchange into print. The easy flow of written speech became not only their literary signature but their avowal of communal identity.' This 'communal identity' carried greater weight in the context of the painful histories against which early eighteenth-century polite conversation came to define itself, and the more congenial and cohesive practices with which it sought to replace them. A writer at the beginning of the eighteenth century would have felt the pressure of the two major schisms that had divided English politics and culture in the previous century: the Civil War, and much more recently, the Exclusion Crisis, and the Revolution Settlement of 1688, whose after-effects were still palpable as the literary careers of Addison and Steele began. In such conditions, there would have been a particular appeal in a new mode of 'politeness' and gentlemanly civilization, a discourse of conduct which might replace the perceived factiousness of the past. In Spectator 125, for example, Addison has Sir Roger de Coverley, genial relic of the old Tory squires, recall his distant youth:

My worthy Friend Sir ROGER, when we are talking of the Malice of Parties, very frequently tells us an Accident that happened to him when he was a School-boy, which was at the Time when the Feuds ran high between the Round-heads and Cavaliers. This worthy Knight being then but a Stripling, had Occasion to enquire which was the Way to St. Ann's Lane, upon which the Person whom he spoke to, instead of answering his Question, called him a young Popish Cur, and asked him who had made Ann a Saint? The Boy being in some Confusion, enquired of the next he met, which was the Way to Ann's Lane; but was called a Prick-eared Curr for his Pains; and instead of being shewn the Way was told, that she had been a Saint before he was born, and would be one after he was hang'd. Upon this, says Sir ROGER, I did not think fit to repeat the former Question, but going into every Lane of the Neighbourhood, asked what they called the Name of that Lane. By which ingenious Artifice he found out the Place he enquired after, without giving Offence to any Party.

Sir Roger's age ('now in his Fifty sixth year'), which elsewhere in The Spectator serves to mark him as both an ageing man and as one of the 'Old Men' whom the Whig ascendancy and the Protestant succession had come to replace, here offers Addison another advantage: the chance implicitly to connect the two major conflicts of the previous century, as part of his larger argument against that divisiveness which, he suggests, gave rise to them. The excesses of political partisanship may manifest themselves as absurd social prejudice, forcing the young Sir Roger to go 'into every Lane of the Neighbourhood' in order to find one street, but within Addison's sketch, and within his Whig ideology, they tend towards more dangerous conclusions. Musing on Sir Roger's experience, Mr Spectator remarks: 'There cannot be a greater Judgment befall a Country than such a dreadful Spirit of Division as rends a Government into two distinct People, and makes them greater Strangers and more averse to one another, than if they were actually two different Nations [...] A furious Party Spirit, when it rages in its full Violence, exerts it self in Civil War and Blood-shed; and when it is under its greatest Restraints naturally breaks out in Falshood, Detraction, Calumny, and a partial Administration of Justice. In a Word, It fills a Nation with Spleen and Rancour, and extinguishes all the Seeds of Good-nature, Compassion and Humanity'.

'Falshood, Detraction, Calumny [...] Spleen and Rancour' contrasted with 'Good-Nature, Compassion and Humanity': Addison could be drawing up a table of the cardinal virtues and vices of the eighteenth-century mentality for which he and Richard Steele were among the earliest literary spokesmen. In place of the straitened manners and mutually uncomprehending rhetorics which Addison perceived in Restoration England, the new ideal of gentlemanly benevolence offered what Lawrence E Klein has called 'a centripetal rather than centrifugal force'; the culture of politeness aimed to transcend old enmities by creating an easy-mannered, clubbable morality, which would in turn foster intellectual and social progress (these Whig writers thus practised what is now known as the 'Whig interpretation of history'). Central to these aims was 'conversation' in its broadest senses – a term whose application, in this period, often blends, or hovers between, the social practices of talk and the larger '[m]anner of conducting oneself in the world or in society'. Put simply, conversation was, for Whig writers, not just a descriptive vehicle for the new culture's civilizing process, but could itself enact that process by bringing its participants together in the ideal conditions for mutual benefit. As Pocock observes, 'in the Spectator essays, politeness becomes an active civilizing agent. By observation, conversation, and cultivation, men and women are brought to an awareness of the needs and responses of others and of how they appear in the eyes of others; this is not only the point at which politeness becomes a highly serious practical morality [...] It is also the point at which Addison begins to comment on the structure of English society and the reconciliation of its diverse "interests".' For Addison, however, this could not be achieved without some re-mapping of the field in which the morality of conversation could operate, and the terms in which he describes the desired shift carry particular charges. If, in an increasingly legalistic society, 'manners' had come to be a deliberately narrowed-down version of the classical virtues, more fitted to the demands of a modern version of 'civic humanism', much depended on how one defined these manners, and the particular range of interests with which one could identify them.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation by Bharat Tandon. Copyright © 2003 Bharat Tandon. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents

List of Plates and Figures; Acknowledgements; Preface; 1. The Morality of Conversation; Interlude. Differential Narrative: Austen's Early Fiction; 2. Flirting; 3. Throwing the Voice; 4. Habit and Habitation; Notes; Bibliography; Index

Editorial Reviews

'Tandon has written a magisterial work.' —'Choice Magazine'

'A book brimming with insights and many acute perceptions... Bharat Tandon outlines a refreshing redirection for Austen studies.' —'Times Literary Supplement'

From the Publisher