Abstract: “Money, Markets and Values in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion”
This paper comes from a book-length study about Austen’s work inspired by Carl Polyani’s Great Transformation (1948), E. P. Thompson’s Customs in Common, and Ellen Meiskins Wood’s Origin of Capitalism (1999) which illuminate Britain’s transformation during the French and Napoleonic Wars from a society in which the marketplace was a marginal aspect of social life into one in which capitalist markets became its essence. Through this revolutionary change the word value reduced towards merely economic value or market value, marginalising ideas of moral value, social value or ethics (Brian Massumi, 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value, 2018). This historical thesis illuminates our reading of Jane Austen whose novels explore precisely this transformation.
Jane Austen’s father was a clergyman in Hampshire, but also a farmer, an aspect of his life veiled by historians precisely because it involved investment capital, the employment of wage labour and the search for profits (Clark 2005). In addition, George Austen’s clerical income came from tithes, a tax of 10% levied on the agricultural output of the parish, hence a value determined by the market price of wheat. Clerical livings were also in themselves capital assets bought and sold by landowners and the wealthy bourgeoisie to provide their sons with stipends for life and a respectable rank in ‘gentry’ society. Jane Austen’s entire life was therefore saturated by and funded by agricultural capitalism: from George Austen’s first tenure in Steventon in 1761 to Jane Austen’s birth in 1775 his income doubled, and from then to the family’s move to Bath in 1801, it doubled again. Agriculture funded the family’s leisurely retirement in a resort that had become notoriously expensive.
Austen’s first novel, Northanger Abbey (1803), was written in and about Bath when she was 28, providing a brilliant satire on the market mentality she discovered living in a city which had developed across the 18th century into Britain’s second largest centre of luxury consumption. Bath had also become a marriage market where the middle and upper classes could broker marriages between their offspring, aiming to ensure the continuation and augmentation of their capital through succeeding generations. These phenomena are brilliantly satirised in Northanger Abbey where Austen shows how women are commodified and personal emotions are corrupted by market mentalities. In her last-completed novel, Persuasion (1816), written when she was 41, Austen returns to Bath in 1814-5, during the acute economic stress precipitated by the end of the French wars and return to the gold standard. In this novel Austen mocks the pretentions of aristocracy through Sir Walter Elliot’s obsession with the baronetage, praises naval officers as men of intelligence, entrepreneurial intelligence, and moral stability, yet also exposes through William Elliot the corruption of the soul by capitalist self-seeking. She asks what persuades people in making their marriage choices. My paper explores the similarities and differences between these two novels, illuminating Austen’s satirical representation of market society, and how capital corrupts moral awareness, comparing their romance plots and her conception of a good marriage.
Bio: University of East Anglia, UK
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