A Discussion of Bourgeois Equality Chapter 18 “No Woman but a Blockhead Wrote for Anything but Money”
In this chapter, Dr. McCloskey is continuing with the idea initiated the last chapter: Jane Austen illustrates the bourgeois ideals in her writing, though she herself was not bourgeois.
Austen is gentry, not bourgeois. She provides nonetheless a model for good bourgeoisness — not sense alone, but combined with sensibility; not amiability alone, but also a prudent marriage. ‘I consider everyone,’ she declared in a letter in 1808, ‘as having a right to marry once in their lives for love, if they can.’ But watch the balance sheet, dears. (p. 171)
Essentially, McCloskey is detailing how a shift in what virtues are held in esteem allowed the flowering of the Bourgeois Deal described in chapter 3.
McCloskey is putting the development of ideas in chronological order with the romantic hero of medieval age aspiring to virtues fit for his role, such as a courageous knight, giving way to the prudent businessman arising in Austen’s day, with warnings of a coming discussion on the rising counter view that will be anti-bourgeois.
Bourgeois Virtues
In an earlier chapter, McCloskey detailed the classical 7 Virtues to note that for the Great Enrichment to continue, we need to not let one be valued over the others.
Here in this chapter, she is noting how there is a shift in society’s valuation of the virtue, prudence, which undergirds modern business and economic thinking: using your resources wisely and without waste.
Austen is focusing on prudence, but an ethical prudence in her writings. That is, prudence should not be valued to the exclusion of the other virtues. She also exemplifies this shift in values in her life.
In her writings, Austen uses her characters to show a good and bad way to implement prudence.
In Austen, the admiration for prudence is undercut, I say, when it shows as prudence only. The minor characters are often idiotically strategic…But the major characters never talk in this prudence-only-way…the major characters in Austen’s novels, and their talk about their behavior, always mix prudence with simple love and justice and temperance and moral courage. (p. 165)
In her life, she earned £400 in total from her writings which McCloskey notes was 20 times the yearly income of a working family in that day. (p. 162)
(S)he felt in her last six years, 1811–1817, that she was an Author, because she was making money at it…And it was a bourgeois standard, the trade test for literary progress in, say, the technique of free indirect style. When the buying public pays, you are a professional. (p. 162)
Conclusion
What McCloskey wants us to realize is society putting positive value on business and the money it generates was a radical shift at the time. And it was a cultural shift that had to happen for the trade tested betterments of the Great Enrichment to catch hold.
While in this chapter, she is relying on Jane Austen’s writings and life as an indicator of this shift, she also illustrates how this way of thinking is embedded in our lives today.
In a business-respecting civilization — which I am suggesting Jane Austen stood smiling at the doorway of — the bourgeois is highly honored for his sense. Without making it his whole purpose in his life (if he has sensibility, too) he strategizes, though not always correctly. (p. 166)
The cultural approval of prudence is clearly important to the trade tested betterment functioning well, but as Austen showed in her writing and her life, it should be held in check with the other virtues: justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope, and charity.
Reference: McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen, 2016. “No Woman but a Blockhead Wrote for Anything but Money,” Chapter 18 of Bourgeois Equality, The University of Chicago Press.
