The importance of Miss Austen

Elinors character is certainly reminiscent of Austens own. She embodies all the virtues
that Austen understood to be the essential constituents of good moral character, as
against the self-absorbed, reckless, and self-indulgent revolution of Romanticism that
threatened to destroy a world that, through tradition, was still largely defined by
prudence. Austen was not a feminist; she not only accepted patriarchy, but was quite
fond of it; and she was a brilliant literary artist, a novelist whose deep understanding of
human nature and human character has justly been compared to Shakespeare.

Many modern literary critics, however, detest Austens conservatism, her gentle, loving
treatment of English hierarchical society, but even more, her fundamental assumption,
upon which the delicate, penetrating, and ingenious plots are built, that union of man
and woman in marriage is the great and natural goal of male and female. As Elizabeth
Kantor notes, The one possibility that the feminists refuse on principle to consider is
that the traditional differences between male and female roles are necessitated by the
real, natural, and ineradicable differences between men and women. Feminists who
loathe Austen, distrust the patriarchy, and repudiate tradition, and therefore assume
the liberal conviction that structures (in this case, sex roles, marriage, and so on) are the
cause of evil and misery.

Austen, a stellar conservative, assumed that sin was the cause of evil. Sin affects
everyone, male and female, in every station, from the noble to the peasant, and so
(continues Kantor) Austens novels are defined by this fundamental conviction that
every member of the human race, male or female, is capable of vice and folly and has a
duty to struggle against them. This struggle not the war between the sexes or a
campaign of subversive resistance to the patriarchy provides the drama in Jane
Austens novels.

We could well imagine a Willoughby holding forth to a rapt audience on the rights of
women to break the chains of patriarchy, cast aside the remnants of tradition, free
themselves from sexual repression, and throw themselves into the spontaneity of
passion. Willoughby is the archetypical sexual revolutionary who leaves a trail of
wrecked lives behind him. There a plenty of Willoughbys and Elizas in our culture, and
perhaps a few Mariannes yet unfallen, but where are the Elinors? They, unfortunately,
are increasingly rare, thanks to liberalisms war on tradition, virtue (including the
virtues of honor and self-denial), and the primacy of family. One of the great gifts of
Jane Austen is that, through the power of her literary art, she cuts through the cant of the
Willoughby, which is really, in a political sense, the all-too-familiar rhetoric of
liberalism.
(10 books every conservative must read: plus four not to miss and one impostor, Part
IV: The Conservative Story, and Conservative Stories, Chapter 12: Sense and
Sensibility: Jane Austen)