The Pride of “Prejudice”?—Jane Austen's Revision of Edmund Burke

초록

In the last three decades, feminist critics have proved that Jane Austen’s seemingly parochial social scene possesses much significance in the context of feminine concerns of the late eighteenth century. Moreover, Austen’s novelistic vision can be easily connected to much more general social concerns in the aftermath of the French revolution. As F. R. Leavis and Alistair Duckworth recognized many years ago, Austen offers succinct responses to various moral issues that resonate in her contemporary society. More recently, Marilyn Butler illuminates the significance of Austen’s moral vision by defining the main conflicts within her fictional world as those between conservatism and sentimentalism and arguing that the conflicts lead to the triumph of conservatism. While Butler’s argument certainly possesses considerable persuasive power, it tends to simplify Austen’s way of dealing with moral issues and thereby fails to capture the complexity inherent in her social vision. This paper attempts to re-examine the complex ways in which Austen fictionalizes the crisis of the existing social order and proposes novelistic solutions to the crisis. For this purpose, I connect Austen's understanding of “received ideas” with Edmund Burke’s conceptualization of “prejudice,” the key term by which he designates a set of inherited ideas and principles. Burke’s concept of “prejudice” merits attention especially because it displays much similarity to Althusser’s idea of “ideology.” In Pride and Prejudice, Austen shows that the social structure of knowledge is fundamental to one’s perception of truth and that an extreme trust of one’s own judgment could be misleading. Pemberley is depicted as a symbolic place in which inherited ideas are preserved at their best. Yet, at the same time, Austen values individual attempts to continuously re-orient one's way of perception and ultimately improve the existing social structure of knowledge. This is partially due to Austen’s acute awareness of the gap between actual society and the ideal world of Pemberley. The central issues of Mansfield Park are religion and education, the key institutions that uphold the Burkean “prejudice.” While the novel shows the ways in which religion increasingly loses its influence on society, it carefully examines the process of Fanny Price’s education. Through Edmund’s tutoring and her own efforts to improve herself, Fanny becomes a successful product of education, who values inherited ideas, yet simultaneously recognizes the importance of “usefulness,” a new kind of value required of a modern individual. However, Austen’s anxiety accompanying the ending of Mansfield Park informs us of her awareness of the profound moral crisis of her own society, which renders Fanny’s task arduous and unfeasible.

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