Austen, ethicist

Joyce Kerr Tarpley’s Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is not only an excellent study of Austen’s deepest and most important novel, but also a thorough vindication of the thesis that Austen was no mere spinner of fluffy romances but a thinker of the first rank. Following up on a suggestion of Alasdair MacIntyre, for instance, she compares Mansfield Park to Dante’s Purgatorio :

Like Purgatorio , Mansfield Park is a study of “a variety of disordered loves in the principal characters. The Purgatorio divides these loves into three categories: perverted love, defective love, and excessive love. Pride, envy, and wrath are perverted loves, and to various degrees, Sir Thomas, but especially Maria, Julia, Henry and Mary represent these vices. By her sloth, Lady Bertram represents defective love. Hers is a will to weak or lazy to pursue the good. Excessive love includes avarice, prodigality, gluttony, and lust. Mrs. Norris has an excessive love of money, or avarice, while Tom’s wasteful spending and dissipation demonstrate his prodigality. Furthermore, Maria’s adultery with Henry, which continues for an extended period of time after their initial flight, reveals the way in which perverted loves of pride, envy and wrath can so affect the will that it loses the power to curb wrong desires; they then become excessive desires such as lust.”

Like Dante, Austen knows that the “primal will or innate taste for beauty” is unreliable, and that the imagination must be trained so that the right beauties are pursued.