Contemporary literary critics tend to be advocates. They think that books are places to promote their views on various matters, such as racial injustice or Feminism, or think that the primary purpose of a novel is to declare a social problem that is to be rectified. I found piquant, for example, when the most current Feminist Movement was on the rise, Jane Smiley, in his 1991 novel “A Thousand Acres”, retold Lear and his three daughters in a midwestern contemporary farm family to discover that the three daughters had each independently and in secret had incest with the father, as if that was what “King Lear” was really all about, never mind the infinite spaces and the general iniquities of people, as if the novel was to huff and puff and declare rather than explain that some people do this particular bad thing. There are also other periods when advocacy is a primary form of artistic life, Zola a key example, but even the Victorian novelists, who were not unwilling to point out the shames of the industrial world, were not, I think, even primarily about that. Even “Oliver Twist” pushes aside the miseries of poverty and crime for the figure of Fagin, who seems so much grander than his setting. In fact, one of the shortcomings of “The Grapes of Wrath”, another advocacy novel, is that Steinbeck documents the Okies but does not make the Joad clan as anything other than stereotypes of persistence in adversity. The book is not a drama that has been put in a setting but is only an illustration of a setting.
I am afraid that the very able critic Louis Menard has fallen into the advocacy pose and in his recent article in “The New Yorker” has seriously misconstrued Jane Austen. Menard works hard to find out how Austen must be making points to show he is advocating what we would today call a progressive or advocacy agenda, as if it were not possible that Austen was in fact clearly a political Conservative, as is clear in everything she wrote. Menard, for example, derides Sir Bertram in “Mansfield Park” from having had estates in Jamaica, his owning slaves undercutting his probity. But Jane Austen does not mention anything about those estates except that Sir Bertram is absent in England for a long time and that has an impact on his family The whole prospect of Menard and his brethren treat Austen as if they could not be Conservative, something a great writer could not be. That, however, is to denigrate the actual point of view where early Nineteenth Century English authors thought of Conservatism as an appeal to the sentiments of Hume, which meant a belief in the solid ground of human nature that was more important than the fashions of politics, those not being merely annoying, but creating serious injury to society, as had recently occurred in the French Revolution. Only much later will human nature come to be considered as a standard for changing the world to a better place. People will fulfill their human natures, Radicals and Socialists and Abolitionists to accomplish the natures that have been previously constrained by them because of social laws and conventions.
Austen’s profound Conservatism is evident from the very beginning of “Sense and Sensibility”, his first published novel. The Dashwood family is exiled from its home because inheritance goes with the son rather than to the daughter. It seems all very unfair, but that is not the important issue for Austen. It is a fleeting unfairness, as there are so many in life, the major point of the novel is that this unfair law is the pretext for having an accomplished and well bred family sent out of their well to do appurtenances so that they can make something of their lives. What is important is that they meet contrasts of character: first, people who are selfish and then people who are generous. And then the more important contrast between one daughter who is highly romantic and so pines about the idea of love as well as the wealthy man who spurns her first love, while the other daughter, provided with sense rather than sensibility, remains silent about her anguish about being separated from the young man she cares for. Character rather than injustice is the issue, there being no certainty that the stoical figure will ever get her beloved, because there is no justice, just a fact, that men have to run after women rather than the other way round, that pretty likely just a part of human nature and so not changeable by the law.
Emotions are more important than social structure even if there is no question that everyone is entrenched in the circumstances of their breeding, wealth and fortunes. Maybe giving women property is both right and will come to pass but Austen lives in her world rather than in the prospect of the world as it will be. Sometimes there are events and circumstances that are external to Conservatives that will make things change, though not through their own doing, at least at the start. Sometimes there are changes so profound that even the Conservative Everet Dirkson, the Republican Senate Minority leader at the time of Johnson’s Voting Rights Act and his Equal Accommodations Act said that sometimes a great change has to come.The true sentiment of the Conservative is to move slowly and then eventually only because it is inevitable.
Menard’s concern to be on the progressive side of advocacy leads him to misconstrue one particularly important political issue of Austen’s. Menard says that Austen is offering a critical bite against Mr. Knightly, in “Emma”, because Knightly is disclosed to be in favor of the enclosure movement, which allowed the wealthy to put fences around their lands and so abandon the common fields that allowed the poor to manage their farms. Radicals and contemporary progressives are against the enclosure movement and so that must be a blemish on Mr. Knightly. But, in fact, Jane Austen saw the enclosure movement as a virtue rather than a blemish. These forward looking estate managers were making their lands more productive and efficient, these people considered improvers of their farms, rather than simply letting lands be what they were so long as the landed gentry had enough money to busy themselves with hunting and city women. Mr. Knightly is sensible and industrious when he engages in his improvements. That isn’t Austen’s only example of her treating the enclosure movement as progress. One of Fanny Price's suitors in "Mansfield Park" is thought he will be obedient to what might be his headstrong future wife because he will support her in enclosing the land. Austen is, through and through, a Conservative and it is no help to say that she wasn't what she was.
What is required is to enlarge our sense that Conservatism in the early Nineteenth Century and even in present times can be seen as humane, reasonable, and clear thinking, as was also the case with Dr. Johnson in the late Eighteenth Century. Putting ideology aside, the bedroot of the two approaches to the conflicting values of Liberalism and Conservatism is a learned affinity. Conservatives, ever since the Wars of Religion subsided in the Seventeenth Century, have promoted the interests of the rich and the established. James Harrington, the Seventeenth Century English philosopher, preferred the rich because they had land and therefore would encourage the nation as a whole because they had something to lose, while the poor did not. Conservatives take the same view today when they favor money managers. Spinoza’s alternative view, and the bedrock of modern Liberalism, is that institutions, such as parliaments, rather than the wealthy and prestigious, maintained order and prosperity because managing those events were accountable to elections. The Liberal sentiment was altered and furthered so that early Nineteenth Century thinkers regarded the poor and the downtrodden as now objects of appeal and sympathy rather than derision and so were no longer only as they were objects of charity but government improvements for their conditions.
And so it remains. Republicans want more tax breaks to the rich and Democrats want more widened entitlements so as to improve the poor. This division is so long standing and the sentiments are so self-evident that each of the two sides find it difficult to ascribe the two basic principles, just to disdain he rich, as when the Sachler family keeps its money made from marketing opioids, or else disdain those who foment anarchy rather than exhibit, as Liberals think, that protestors are engaged in righteous indignation. The cudgels are also raised about literature, everyone taking their one or the other side, leading to a general coarseness of literature.
Yes, there is in Jane Austen, as Menard says and has always been the case, a separation between the professors who look in Jane Austen for latent themes while lay readers enjoy the pleasures of rural courtship and Jane Austen’s elegant phrases. But the truth of the matter is that the Austen novels really are about courtship as well as about human nature. Refresh Austen by putting ideology aside and begin with the purely aesthetic. The Austen novels are very straightforward. There is a problem, which is love and the prospect of fortune, and the story gets started in its first few pages and keeps developing until the pairings are accomplished. I don't know any novelist who is as much forward driven and on point. What else we get are how complicated the people are and how fluid is the particular constellation of people through which the characters maneuver. Austen is indeed embroiled with social issues, such as the military swarming over the English countryside, the ebbs and flows of the country, London and Bath, as well as the very central social issue whereby money replaces land and prestige. But the main thing is the plot, a Romantic comedy about people having their travails in pairing off. and all the other things going on in England. And her preferences are clearly Conservative in that Emma is quite properly concerned that a woman she favors will not marry a farmer, though Mr. Knightly chides her to recognize him as an inestimable person. But matching people of different social classes is a dubious proposition, as is certainly made clear in “Pride and Prejudice” where the two will have to alter themselves very much so that they can accommodate one another about serious issues rather than just Elizabeth being too witty and Darcy concerned about his estates. The combination in her novels of both being deep and still silly is part of why Austen is just the best novelist ever.