Jane Austen’s Ethical Conversations
Jane Austen, the great chronicler of the leisured classes from 1790 to
1817, recognised the centrality of both “conversation” as an ideal and
“conversations” as practice in the lives she portrayed. In her novels, as in
Hume’s philosophy, there is a close and important link between
conversation and moral or ethical judgement. Austen is famously
economical with her use of visual description; it is through the voices of
her characters, either in direct speech or through her characteristic free
indirect speech that a reader comes to know them. Austen’s style is, in this
sense, truly “conversational” but she also uses the term “conversation” in a
very specific sense. Conversation, for her, is differentiated from mere
social communications. In Persuasion (1818), Anne Elliot regrets, for
example, that she and Wentworth had had “no conversation together, no
intercourse but what the commonest civility required”.20
Conversation must be meaningful, either emotionally or intellectually.
The difference between communication that is not conversation and
conversation itself is clearly spelt out in Northanger Abbey (1818), where
the imbecilic Mrs Allen spends the chief of her days “by the side of Mrs.
Thorpe, in what they called conversation, but in which there was scarcely
ever any exchange of opinion, and not often any resemblance of subject,
for Mrs. Thorpe talked chiefly of her children, and Mrs. Allen of her
gowns.”21 Although Emma Woodhouse and her father communicate all the
time, he “cannot meet her in conversation, either rational or playful”.22
Similarly, in Sense and Sensibility (1811), Elinor Dashwood is constantly
listening to others, but has very little conversation: “Neither Lady
Middleton nor Mrs. Jennings could supply to her the conversation she
missed; although the latter was an everlasting talker, and from the first had
regarded her with a kindness which ensured her a large share of her
discourse.”23
Conversation is vital in an Austen novel, because without it, it is
impossible to know another person—it is only through what they say and
how they interact that judgements about their character can be made. In
Mansfield Park (1813), for example, it is Mary Crawford’s conversation
that exposes her, for it demonstrates both her charm and her insincerity.
Edmund Bertram is bewitched by Mary’s liveliness and wit, but her moral
unsuitability is nonetheless revealed beneath the charms of her
conversation. Both Edmund and Fanny Price (the moral arbiter of the
novel) recognize that there was something “in her conversation that struck
you as not quite right” as soon as they meet her, and even when he is most
in love with her, Edmund worries that “the influence of her former
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companions makes her seem—gives to her conversation, to her professed
opinions, sometimes a tinge of wrong.”24 Mary reveals her moral
slipperiness by her verbal slipperiness: in a conversation about
conversations, she shows that she is happy to play around with the truth,
and that she fundamentally misunderstands the ethical necessity of
sincerity in conversation: “Never is a black word. But yes, in the never of
conversation, which means not very often, I do think it.”25
In an Austen novel, real conversation is impossible with someone who
is dishonest. The wickedness of her villains hinges almost entirely on their
untruthfulness. Unlike those of her contemporaries, Austen’s villains
rarely behave badly within the timescale of the novels. We may hear of
their previous misdoings—such as Willoughby’s seduction of Colonel
Brandon’s ward in the pre-history of Sense and Sensibility, or William
Walter Elliot’s unkindness to Mrs Smith in the pre-history of
Persuasion—but their wickedness within the novels always depends on
their verbal deceptions. Conversations are essential to knowledge of
another person in an Austen novel, but they are also peculiarly vulnerable
to exploitation. Emma Woodhouse is taken in by Frank Churchill because
of his plausibility as a conversationalist, and she is hurt by the difference
between what he says and what he is. As a novelist, Austen naturally
exploits the gap between speech and meaning—as she puts it in Emma,
“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human
disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or
a little mistaken”.26 As a moralist, however, she is deeply suspicious of
things that are disguised or mistaken, demonstrating the virtues of
sincerity and the dangers of insincerity in conversation through the plots of
her novels. For Austen, therefore, the term conversation has a moral
imperative: not only should it be meaningful and intelligent, it should also
be sincere. Like Shaftesbury, Austen also recognises the importance of the
particular relationship between text and reader, and moulds the relatively
new genre of the novel into a form that could create an ethical
conversation between text and reader. Austen’s famously spare, elliptical
and elegant novels demand from their readers a particular type of readerly
engagement: a willingness to fill in the gaps that are deliberately left open
for interpretation. At the same time, the narrative voice subtly manipulates
readers, ensuring that we are encouraged to recognise the difference
between good and bad choices, ethical and unethical behaviour.27
Austen’s faith in the morality of conversation28 and her recognition of
the dangers of the exploitation of conversation puts her squarely in a
tradition of female Christian moralists. Eliza Haywood is relevant here,
but we wish to focus briefly on Hannah More. Although elsewhere Austen
The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth
Century, 1688-1848
xvii
mocks and parodies More, their views on conversation are strongly
congruent. Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female
Education (1799) contains a long chapter on conversation, in which she
points out conversation’s vulnerability to the dangers of affectation, false
wit, pedantry, vanity, irreligion, flattery, duplicity, and a whole catalogue
of other sins. However, she claims that conversation also has an inherent
moral value precisely because of these dangers; by struggling against the
temptation to show off in conversation, we strengthen our Christian
humility:
Conversation must not be considered as a stage for the display of our
talents, so much as a field for the exercise and improvement of our virtues;
as a means for promoting the glory of our Creator, and the good and
happiness of our fellow-creatures. Well-bred and intelligent Christians are
not, when they join in society, to consider themselves as entering the lists
like intellectual prize-fighters, in order to exhibit their own vigour and
dexterity, to discomfit their adversary, and to bear away the palm of
victory. Truth and not triumph should be the invariable object; and there
are few occasions in life, in which we are more unremittingly called upon
to watch ourselves narrowly, and to resist the assaults of various
temptations, than in conversation. Vanity, jealousy, envy, misrepresentation,
resentment, disdain, levity, impatience, insincerity, and pride, will in turn
solicit to be gratified. Constantly to struggle against the desire of being
thought more wise, more witty, and more knowing, than those with whom
we associate, demands the incessant exertion of Christian vigilance; a
vigilance which the generality are far from suspecting to be at all necessary
in the intercourse of common society. On the contrary, cheerful
conversation is rather considered as an exemption and release from
watchfulness, than as an additional obligation to it. But a circumspect
soldier of Christ will never be off his post; even when he is not called to
public combat by the open assaults of his great spiritual enemy, he must
still be acting as a centinel (sic), for the dangers of an ordinary Christian
will arise more from these little skirmishes which are daily happening in
the warfare of human life, than from those pitched battles that more rarely
occur, and for which he will probably think it sufficient to be armed.29
For both Hannah More and Jane Austen, conversation is to some extent a
battleground, a struggle with oneself and one’s conversational partner to
discover truths about both self and other. To converse is to make oneself
vulnerable, but in doing so, to make oneself stronger. Conversation
encourages skirmishes with evils of many kinds, but it allows people to
resist and conquer these evils. It is for this reason that it can be a moral
force for the good, as well as a dangerous tool in the hands of evil. More’s
martial rhetoric, referencing the battlefield and the jousting list, may seem
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to us overblown and faintly ridiculous, but More is by no means unique
among eighteenth-century writers in conceptualizing conversational
choices starkly in terms of good and bad, right and wrong, and when
focusing on the long eighteenth century, it is always as well to bear in
mind the moral framework within which long eighteenth-century writers
understood themselves to be working. We may not generally associate the
Evangelical Hannah More with the sceptical David Hume, but we see here
an unusual degree of agreement in their shared interest in the moral value
of conversation. While the motive for paying careful attention to
conversational habits and practices is different for Hume and More, the
result is the same: the purpose is to make individuals into better citizens of
the social world.