Austen and the new dimension

In Austen's Mansfield Park the new thinking about the human being at the end of the 18th Century is presented by as creating intergenerational misunderstanding.

Elsewhere in Austen more explicit articulations of the new thinking are to be found - and in particular adumbrations of the core self that was, in its fully fledged form, to be located unambiguously 'within'.

The transition from the 18th Century conception to its successor is mediated through a metaphor. Only when Harriet declared her own interest in Mr Knightly did Emma Woodhouse with a shock become "acquainted with her own heart” (Emma, Ch 47). It is her heart that has been hidden from her all the while she had been manoevering the affections of others - the heart which in fact had attached her, without her knowing it, to Mr Knightly.

To speak of the heart in this way, an organ that is literally within, is not quite to speak of the self as figuratively within. Indeed it would be possible to construe Austen here as doing no more than speaking of a feeling that had hitherto gone unnoticed - by herself. There is something striking, against an 18th Century background, in speaking of a feeling of which the subject is unaware: it had been thought to be obvious at the beginning of the Modern period - by Descartes, for example - that feelings were things the subject was necessarily aware of. But the transparency of the mind (what a misleading way of putting it!) had not continued to be obvious and the possibility of having a feeling of which one was not aware was so much a commonplace by Austen's time that she placed it in the mind of Captain Tilney, as construed by his wife:

“Tilney says there is nothing people are so often deceived in as the state of their own affections, and I believe he is very right.” Northanger Abbey, Ch. 18

Figurative talk of 'the heart' however suggests an inner locus of feelings - and perceptions, and judgements - rather than simply an 'affection' itself. The heart of a person is their centre, she assumes (following a tradition that goes back to the first millenium, suggests the OED), and Austen is unmistakeably suggesting that it can lie hidden from the person it belongs to. In reflecting the idea of the self as a occluded core, she is therefore preparing the way for the conception of the self that was to emerge definitively a little later on - as Kant's conception of the noumenal self exerted its influence on the central thinkers of the 19th Century.

In two other ways Austen reflects how the person was thought about by Romanticism.

The first is often mentioned: the fact that her characters are represented as subject to development. Emma is represented as growing up: and Austen draws her maturation as a process of potential realized. The realization that she has made grievious misjudgments is presented - with unmatched subtlety - as something that is not actually there in the juvenile Emma - yes, she did make those misjudgments - but as something which nevertheless flows from what had been there, a flowering of what had been there in bud.

That is one way in which Austen expresses Romantic thinking about the human being. The second comes in the conception she presents of a person's character.

Tanner writes in the introduction to Pride and Prejudice:

"Just what constitutes a person's 'real character' is one of the concerns of the book: the phrase occurs more than once, usually with the added idea that it is something that can be 'exposed' (and thus, by the same token, concealed). In particular, D'arcy in his letter writes that whatever Elizabeth may feel about Wickham it 'shall not prevent me from unfolding his real character', just as later in the letter he narrates Wickham's attempt to seduce Georgiana, 'a circumstance. ..which no obligation less than the present should induce me to unfold to any human being'. " Tanner's Introduction to the Penguin Pride and Prejudice, Harmondsworth, 1972, p. 18,19..

For Austen, a person's character was not merely the portfolio of habits it had been identified with hitherto. 'Revealing' a person's character is sometimes for Austen displaying the full pattern of their behaviour, bits of which may have been previously unknown to some third parties. That would be the 18th Century understanding of 'revelation', as when...

But it is sometimes more than this. A person's character for Austen is such as may have been, up to a certain point in time, inadvertently misrepresented by relevant aspects of their behaviour. Such is her picture of D'Arcy: his behaviour in public with people he doesn't know is that of a man who is proud and aloof, but he is in truth neither.

Of course a person behaving respectably in the Country may in truth be a scoudrel, because of very different behaviour when he comes up to Town - so much was fully recognised - celebrated - in the 18th Century and its literature. By choosing his behaviour carefully a scoundrel is able in that period to hide his true character in the country. His true character, from an 18th Century perspective, is to behave well in the country and despicably in town. But D'Arcy, in appearing proud and aloof, is not trying to hide anything. This is behaviour that comes naturally to him, but it is behaviour which misleads others as to his true character.

It is open to D'Arcy, of course, as it is open to anyone, to engage in misleading behaviour deliberately. The point is that as a result of the changing conceptualisation manifest in Austen it becomes possible to think of natural behaviour inadvertently masking the true self.

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