Some critics condemn Jane Austen for triviality. They complain that she wrote only of small, everyday rituals of one class of people, while events that shook the world happened around her. She lived through the French Revolution, the establishment of the American nation, the Napoleonic wars and the madness of King George III. They grumble that she never discusses these events in her novels. But such was not her purpose. Austen wrote of what she knew. She was born and died in southern England and did not travel beyond her nation’s borders. As a clergyman’s daughter, she lived among country gentry in a parsonage for most of her short life and never married.
Austen did not intend her novels to be commentaries on world events but of the importance of the small moral choices that everyone makes. Twentieth century author C.S. Lewis, Oxford don and literary critic, noted: "Contrasted with the world of modern fiction, Jane Austen's is at once less soft and less cruel. ... The hard core of morality and even of religion seems to me to be just what makes good comedy possible. 'Principles' or 'seriousness' are essential to Jane Austen's art..."
Morality in Emma
One of the most celebrated examples of Austen’s comedy is the novel Emma. Emma Woodhouse is a rich, spoiled, young lady of twenty-one who amuses herself with matchmaking. Not everything goes as Emma planned, however, and she is confronted with the fact that honesty,kindness, and humility are virtues that she needs to acquire. Morality is woven into the fabric of the novel; it is what makes readers admire Mr. Knightley, doubt Frank Churchill, pity Miss Fairfax, and scorn Mrs. Elton.
Emma centers on the importance of tiny moral choices: decisions which make the difference between an unhappy or a happy existence. For example, Mrs. Churchill is depicted as querulous, sickly, and selfish. At her death no one is deeply grieved. Austen describes it thus, “It was felt as such things must be felt…Goldsmith tells us, that ‘when lovely woman stoops to folly, she has nothing to do but to die’; and when she stoops to be disagreeable, it is equally to be recommended as a clearer of ill-fame.”
On the positive side, even the minor characters in Emma who act with virtue receive their rewards. Mrs. Goddard, the headmistress of a Highbury school for girls, is esteemed by the town for her industry and motherly care of the girls and is happy in her work, which allows her the “occasional holiday of a tea-visit” to her neighbors.
Both these examples deal with minor characters in the novel. With the protagonists the same principles hold true on a larger scale. Emma, for instance, finds her relationship with Mr. Knightley jeopardized by her arrogance and vanity, and must repent with tears before she finds happiness.
It is the characters who live with integrity that are rewarded at the end of Emma, just as those who lack principles suffer the consequences of their folly. Austen marries wit and morality in her writing as surely as she unites her heroine with a deserving husband. Her books, in a wholesome weave of wit and morality, do not have their equal.
Sources
Austen, Jane. The Complete Novels. New York: Crown Publishers Inc., 1981.
Booth, Wayne C. “Point of View and the Control of Distance in Emma.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 16, No. 2. (Sep., 1961), pp. 95-116.
Honan, Park. Jane Austen: Her Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.
Lewis, C. S. “Essays in Criticism: A Note on Jane Austen.”(1954) Accessed May 31, 2009.
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