Aristotelian Approach to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

Many authors have held that Austen was a follower of one philosopher or another. In a short paper entitled "Jane Austen and the Moralists", Gilbert Ryle argued that Austen was an Aristotelian by means of being a Shaftesburian. D.D. Devlin in his book Jane Austen and Education claimed that Austen was a Lockean when it comes to her philosophy of education. In After Virtue-his call for a return to a broadly Aristotelian virtue ethics-Alasdair MacIntyre devotes a chapter to comparing what he argues are the virtue-based theories of Homer, Jane Austen, and Benjamin Franklin, suggesting that for Austen the most important virtue is constancy. Anne Crippen Ruderman's book The Pleasures of Virtue: Political Thought in the Novels of Jane Austen also pursues the increasingly popular line that Jane Austen was an Aristotelian. In a short article called "Jane Austen and the Aristotelian Ethic," David Gallop gives his own support to the idea that Austen is an Aristotelian. Sarah Emsley's short book Jane Austen's Philosophy of the Virtues is another argument in favor of Austen's being an Aristotelian. In her book Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Joyce Kerr Tarpley explores further MacIntyre's idea of constancy in the specific context of the novel Mansfield Park. Jeanine Grenberg's "Courageous Humility in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park" makes use of Austen in a longer examination of Kant's virtue theory. Although she does make the strong claim that Austen herself is a Kantian, Grenberg uses Mansfield Park's heroine, Fanny Price, to illustrate the Kantian virtue of "courageous humility." Most recently, E.M. Dadlez has argued that Austen is a Humean in her book Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume. In this introduction, I will briefly examine some of these arguments and I will suggest that a good deal of the evidence provided by these authors in support of their favored philosopher can function equally well as evidence for Jane Austen's having a broadly Aristotelian view of ethics.