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Article Excerpt
This essay focuses on Jane Austen's portrayal of the growing prestige of the professions in her later and final novels, Mansfield Park (1914), Emma (1816), and Persuasion (1818). While Austen's early novels focus on a mainly leisure class, the gentry and minor aristocracy, the later novels reflect England's changing landscape during the early nineteenth century. The country was moving steadily then from a primarily agrarian way of life to a culture where industry and profession would assume equal if not paramount importance. Although Austen's novels are often celebrated as portraits of a stable ordered society, each of the later works reveals, in progressive stages, the changing and increasingly significant role that the professions play. No longer simply a source of income for second sons, the professions evolve into part of the identity of professional gentlemen and, finally, in Persuasion as an entry for middle-rank professionals into gentry circles.
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In Jane Austen's early novels, major characters for the most part derive their identity from their landed interests, just as their families have for generations. The focus of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Northanger Abbey (1818) is on a Leisure class that includes among others, Sir John Middleton of Barton Park, John Dashwood of Norton Park, and Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley, with a great deal of emphasis on their property and little sense in contemporary parlance of "what they do." The answer to that conundrum does not lie in a career or profession as modern readers might expect: occupation has little consequence for Austen's early gentry protagonists as long as there is income from their respective properties and inherited wealth to support their gentlemanly pursuits, large country houses, and families. Although the owner of a great estate might spend some time supervising his property, the bulk of that activity falls to an estate manager. There is the occasional reference to a profession, but readers learn little about those professions that are mentioned in the early novels: Edward Ferrars will eventually become a vicar but only because he has lost his inheritance; Colonel Brandon was in the military, but there is little talk of his military career and considerable conversation about his estate. Nevertheless, despite Austen's apparent disregard for the professions in the early novels, the professions receive increasing attention in each successive entry among Austen's final works--Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and Persuasion (1818). Gentry life was never static, and these later novels reveal the changing occupations and preoccupations of the English gentry during the early nineteenth century when the professions were growing in importance and prestige.
Surprisingly, there has been limited critical acknowledgment of the progressive development of the change that Austen portrays in the later novels. While critics have recognized an emphasis on the clerical profession in Mansfield Park and a changing social order in Persuasion, there has been little recognition that social change and the professions are linked in both novels and in Emma. Janet Todd's excellent article, "The Professional Wife in Jane Austen" (2006) is something of an exception in that she recognizes the role of the professions in all three later novels, but her focus is on the professional's wife, not on Austen's portrayal of a leisure class beginning to give way to male protagonists who are highly involved in their professional pursuits. (1) This progressive reading of the novels, and particularly of Emma, may appear counter to the prevailing critical view. That is not the case, but rather recognition that Jane Austen is a balanced social critic, who is able to promote the positive values of traditional gentry life, while showing at the same time and in the same novels that gentry life is evolving--and not necessarily for the worse. As Barbara Seeber notes, Austen's texts are dialogic and "to settle on one meaning is an act of authority that the text continually defies" (2000, 17). In that vein, it is worth recognizing one conservative element in the later novels: most major characters have strong ties to land transferred from one generation of a family to the next. Indeed, that setting in an older, agrarian world may be the reason that Mansfield Park and Emma represent for many readers and critics all that is stable and ordered in English country life. Alistair Duckworth has tellingly described Mansfield Park as the work of "an author, whose deepest impulse was ... to maintain and properly improve a social heritage" (1971, 80). In the same spirit, Christopher Brooke compares Emma to a detective novel where clues are liberally sprinkled about so that there will be few surprises at the end (1999, 99). While there is little reason to argue with the views of Duckworth and Brooke that Austen celebrates stability throughout her novels, there is, nevertheless, considerable evidence that she also portrays social change in Mansfield Park and Emma, just as she does in Persuasion.
The novels' publication history may also appear to work against the progressive reading posited here. Austen's six completed novels were all published in the nineteenth century and within a relatively short, seven-year time span, from 1811 to 1818. Thus, the suggestion that there is any marked change in her portrayal of English country life in the later novels may seem surprising. In Austen's case, however, publication history does not tell the whole story of the novels' creation and may in fact suggest a congruence of composition and publication that did not exist. Although Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abby, and Pride and Prejudice were published in the nineteenth century, all three were written in the 1790s and begun even earlier. Despite Austen's revisions--in the case of Pride and Prejudice, a decade after the work was presumably completed--the early novels are true to their eighteenth century birth, and they chronicle life in an older, more static world. The change from that life to the world of early nineteenth-century England, as portrayed in Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, is the work of a mature, socially conscious writer, who could not ignore the movement from an agrarian way of life, where the primary form of identity is property, to a world in which gentry protagonists are actively involved with occupations other than the supervision of their landed interests.
The professions that interest Austen most are the clerical, legal, and military but not, and rather surprisingly for modern readers, the medical profession, which is highly respected in the contemporary world. That level of respect was not accorded physicians in nineteenth-century England. While physicians appear in Sense and Sensibility and are mentioned in Emma, they do not figure in the social worlds of either novel. This disdain for the medical profession was no doubt related to its origins in the chemist shop with its connections to mercantilism, which was not highly regarded in Regency England. Indeed, it would be well into the nineteenth century before physicians began to receive the respect accorded other professionals of the time, one more indication that social changes rarely occur quickly. Change occurs slowly in Austen's works as well. The growing economic and social significance of the professions can be traced over the course of several novels, like steps in a ladder: Mansfield Park, with its emphasis on the clergy, the first step; Emma, with its magistrates and lawyers, the next step; and neither quite as cognizant of the implications of the professions in a changing social order as Persuasion.
Mansfield Park and the Clergy: More Than Just a Living
The professions in Jane Austen's time can be defined much as they are today as those vocations that require specialized knowledge, a degree of certification, and the provision of critical services to others. Mansfield Park is the first of Austen's novels to emphasize the importance of a major character's profession, the ministry of Edmund Bertram. Since Edmund is a member of the gentry by birth, his professional ties do not indicate the dramatic change in gentry society that will come later in Persuasion with the introduction of the middle rank to the world of the gentry. Nevertheless, if the composition of the gentry does not change significantly in Mansfield Park, Austen does provide important commentary on the changing values of gentry society. Thus, ordination has thematic, structural, and gender implications for the novel, with all three issues connected in various ways. For example, in contrast to the focus of the early novels on a female protagonist-Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, and Catherine Morland--Mansfield Park is as much about a young man's coming of age as it is about the development of Fanny Price, the main female character in Mansfield Park. In the tradition of the apprentice narrative or novel of development, Edmund Bertram, the second son of Sir Thomas Bertram, must find a profession, face temptation about his choice, and finally seek resolution of the moral issues involved. His ally in this journey is Fanny Price, a poor cousin of the Bertrams, who comes to Mansfield Park to live with her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram and Sir Thomas's wife, and children--Thomas, Edmund, Maria, and Henrietta. A highly moral but rather sickly young woman, Fanny lacks the high spirits of an Elizabeth Bennet or the strength of an Elinor Dashwood. Nevertheless, Fanny's integrity and character provide an important theme for the novel, since she is frequently contrasted with less worthy characters, the Bertram sisters and the Crawfords. Fanny also becomes Edmund's chief supporter in his road to the ministry.
Although Edmund Bertram's choice of a clerical profession is not unusual for a member of the gentry in the early nineteenth century, his deep commitment to his profession is not the ordinary response of gentlemen of the time. For many in Regency England, a clerical profession was simply one more benefit of an essentially feudal system, a hegemonic order that privileged members of the nobility and landed gentry and provided gentry sons with professions, awarded because of their family connections rather than any particular talent, calling, or commitment. The method of selection of the clergy of...
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