By now we all should be well into – if not finished – Austen’s Emma. We have also spent quite a bit of time thinking about the state of the British monetary system and the controversies surrounding it in Austen’s time. A number of you have commented already on the way the language of wealth, value, rank, and so on permeate Austen’s language. On Thursday I suggested that one of the ways Austen’s novel engages with the broader philosophical debate on money is through her use of Free Indirect Discourse (style). While the bullion debates tried to foreclose or resolve the “embarrassing” question of what, exactly, guaranteed the value of money, Austen’s use of FID provides a way for us to see “behind” the subjective points of view of her main character and toward some more “objective” standard of value (namely, her narrator). But can we trust in the narrator’s controlling presence, this “narrative institution”? Or, to put the question another way, can we trust the “machine” of Austen’s prose in the same way that we trust institutions like the Bank of England?
More specifically, what do you all make of the way Austen imagines Emma’s relationship with and manipulation of Harriet? If Walter Scott was right, and Harriet circulates through the novel “like a bank bill” what does this say about the way Austen herself manipulates monetary themes and issues?
What other ways might we see Austen engaging with the broader issues of the bullion debate? How, for instance, might we compare Austen’s novel with Defoe’s? How does the concern with marriage, class (or social rank), with landscape or nationhood that we find in both novels allow us to speak about the way capitalism had progressed by the turn of the 19th century?