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...and Sensibility (1811), of Tom Bertram's fall from a horse in Mansfield Park (1814) that brings on his illness, or of Jane Fairfax's near fall into the water while boating in Emma (1816), from which she is rescued by Mr. Dixon in one of the episodes that stimulate Emma's imaginings. Indeed, it is fair to say that Austen's "imagination of disaster" seems to be curiously linked to the idea of falling, a connection perhaps fueled by her recollection of her close friend Mrs. Lefroy's fatal fall from a horse. (1) But moral falls are just as potent a force in the novels as such bodily accidents. Consider, for example, how Austen's heroines almost always undergo mortification (such as Emma's humiliation on Box Hill) before being allowed into the blessed state of matrimony. Or how she often shadows the court-ships of her happy heroines with the threat of fallen woman narratives, such as those of the two Elizas in Sense and Sensibility or of Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park. And men as well as women are capable of falls from grace, as Edmund demonstrates during the period of the theatricals in the latter novel. He succumbs to what Fanny cannot help but recognize is "wrong," although curiously his fall is a happy one--not so much for himself as for his less righteous siblings, Tom and Maria: "Edmund had descended from that moral elevation which he had maintained before, and they were both as much the better as the happier for the descent." (2)
I began this litany of falls with Persuasion and ended it with Mansfield Park. In what follows, I wish to suggest that these two texts offer us Austen's deepest reflections on the many implications not only of falling in general but also of the Happy Fall in particular. For as the description of Edmund's descent begins to suggest, Austen's understanding of falling relates intimately to her conceptions of both happiness and education, that is, of making people "better." And while Austen's novels commonly include falls, they positively radiate happiness; the word happiness is sprinkled generously throughout their pages. (3) This tendency should come as no surprise, given when she lived and wrote; her era was peculiarly preoccupied with the notion. As Adam Potkay puts it, in the eighteenth century "[p]ublic happiness, private happiness, and the relationship between the two were issues entertained on both sides of the Channel ... the goal of happiness is enshrined in marmoreal utterances from the American Declaration of Independence to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man." (4) Potkay shows that the ranks of the happiness-obsessed also include Austen's self-declared favorite moralist, Samuel Johnson. (5) He, in turn, was influenced by John Locke's discussion of the "pursuit of happiness" in his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689). (6)
Suggestively, the Essay links happiness to desire (happiness "moves" desire) and specifically to the desire to put to rest inherent feelings of uneasiness. (7) Locke actually describes a kind of "happy fall" into desire that lies behind all human industry: "When a Man is perfectly content with the State he is in, which is when he is perfectly without any uneasiness, what industry, what action, what Will is there left, but to continue in it? of this every Man's observation will satisfy him. And thus we see our All-wise Maker, suitable to our constitution and frame, and knowing what it is that determines the Will, has put into Man the uneasiness of hunger and thirst, and other natural desires, that return at their Seasons, to move and determine their Wills, for the preservation of themselves, and the continuation of their Species." (8) This fall into a state of uneasiness is simultaneously a fall into action and into time: into a state in which there are befores and afters (and even "Seasons") and in which the pursuit of certain goals leads agents from one to the other. It is, in a sense, a fall into narrative. Potkay notes that the kinetic aspect to Locke's understanding of happiness--his belief that the activity of pursuit itself represents a necessary condition of happiness--is rooted in a bourgeois understanding of the world, in which there is a "marketplace of objects and services, all of them needing homes and clients." (9) Of course, Austen's deepest concerns are with the marriage market, and the object needing a home in her fiction tends to be the marriageable young woman.
So, appropriately, the word "happiness" crops up most often in the novels in the context of marriage, which is not to say that the marriages Austen shows are uniformly (or, for that matter, usually) happy. Locke acknowledges that true happiness often fails to stimulate our actions because we become misled by more proximate--even present--pleasures: "yet when we compare present Pleasure or Pain with future, (which is usually the case in the most important determinations of the Will) we often make wrong Judgments of them, taking our measures of them in different positions of distance." (10) Such failure to take into account the rules of perspective can lead us astray from what should be the goal for all: "that perfect durable Happiness hereafter," the reward of a good life. (11) In Austen's Emma, Locke's phrase translates into the perfect happiness of the union that is said to prevail in the hereafter of the novel: that safe space outside of its margins in which so much of Austenian marital happiness must be presumed to occur. One is reminded of Solon's famous dictum to call no man happy till he dies; in the world of the novel, the end of the book suffices. And in fact, one of the curious side effects of Austen's focus on a kinetic understanding of happiness is that it forces much present happiness beyond the parameters of the action of the novel, which instead concentrates on the promise of happiness in marriage, such as that with which Emma opens (ostensibly in describing Miss Taylor's union to Mr. Weston, but really, as every reader knows, in forcing Emma herself into the courtship plot). (12) Austen is capable of understanding and even describing static happiness; witness, for instance, in Emma, Isabella Knightley, "a model of right feminine happiness," or Miss Bates's "standing lesson of how to be happy" in spite of difficulties, or Mrs. Weston's extraordinarily saturated pleasure at receiving a letter from Frank Churchill assuring his speedy return: "She was happy, she knew she was happy, and knew she ought to be happy." (13) Nevertheless, the kinetic version of happiness dominates in the novels, allowing for the trips and falls that provide temporary breaks from the progress of the plot. (14)
But Austen's use of the word happiness is often far less exalted than Locke's "perfect durable Happiness," seeming to indicate nothing grander than present pleasure; she is well aware of the problem of perspective addressed by Locke. Alexander Pope's Essay on Man also shows the influence of Locke in describing how
Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never Is, but always To be blest: The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come. (15)
Yet while the Fourth Epistle of his Essay begins with Aristotelian eudaemonism ("Oh Happiness! our being's end and aim!"), it soon lapses into a bewildered attempt at definition: "Good, Pleasure. Ease, Content! whate'er thy name." (16) Happiness is a notoriously difficult concept to define, especially in its relationship to the good--a difficulty highlighted in the paradoxical idea of the felix culpa. Early Utilitarians such as Francis Hutcheson and Jeremy Bentham appear to have been untroubled by the need to moralize their definitions of happiness, suggesting that the eighteenth-century conception of happiness was inherently...
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