Practising the Virtues of Amiability and Civility in Pride and Prejudice. (Conference Papers)

Sarah Emsley has published articles on Eliza Fenwick, Harriet Jacobs, Caroline Kirkland, and Chaucer, as well as Jane Austen. She is a doctoral candidate at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. ********** [T]HERE IS PERHAPS NO ONE of our natural Passions so hard to subdue as Pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself. I'm quoting Benjamin Franklin, from his Autobiography, first published in 1793. He concludes this passage, famously, by saying that even if could conceive that had compleatly overcome it, should probably by [be] of my Humility (160). Franklin's approach to the virtues was systematic: I conceiv'd the bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection (24). Notice that he intends to arrive at moral perfection, not simply to strive for it--a rather statement, think. He lists twelve virtues that he intends to achieve, adding a thirteenth-- Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates (150)--when a Quaker friend suggests to him that he is generally thought proud (158), and he implements a scheme of focusing on one virtue per week, examining his cond uct at the end of every day and recording it in a notebook in order to gauge his success in attaining each of his ideal virtues. Like Franklin, George Washington had his own set of rules to follow, 110 of them, in fact. When he was a teenager, he copied into a notebook a set of rules derived from a sixteenth-century French Jesuit compilation entitled Decency of Conversation Among Men. Recently edited by Richard Brookhiser and published under the title Rules of Civility, Washington's guidelines focus on etiquette and manners, though Brookhiser points out that they do address moral issues indirectly (9). They deal with appropriate language, dress, table manners, grooming, and conduct, and most of them can be summed up by the first rule, that Every action done in company ought to be done with some sign of respect to those that are present. The late eighteenth century produced countless conduct books, each with its own list of rules for manners, etiquette, and civility, and many of them, including Dr. James Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women (1765) and Dr. John Gregory's Father's Legacy to His Daughters (1774), focusing specifically on moral advice for women. Many novelists, such as Elizabeth Inchbald and Anne Radcliffe, for example, also explored female virtue. Most writers suggested that a woman's virtue was directly linked to her attractiveness to men: virtue was gendered, and the virtue of women was simplified from the moral pursuit of the good life to the pleasant manners and sexual purity that made women polite and acceptable to society. The virtue of men, too, was seen more as a matter of manners than of the philosophical desire for the good. Franklin and Washington both attempted to follow rules that would make them civil and amiable, with the idea that virtue rewarded meant material success. Alasdair MacIntyre says that for Franklin, [t]he end to which the cultivation of the virtues ministers is happiness, but happiness understood as success, prosperity in Philadelphia and ultimately in heaven (185). This utilitarian idea of virtue is founded on strict codes of conduct, just as Fordyce's and Gregory's rules for women are intended as guidelines for good behavior--follow these rules and they will make you good, and you will be rewarded. But virtue just isn't that simple. While it isn't necessarily easy to follow the rules in these books, it is much harder to use one's own judgment, to determine how virtue might best be practised in a specific situation. The rules of virtue are Mary Bennet's kind of morality--what Jane calls thread-bare morality (60). In Jane and the War of Ideas Marilyn Butler argues that Austen is conservative in a sense no longer current. …

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