and resentment of the Crawfords Fanny indulged in earlier. By this point in the novel, Fanny has grown into the role of silent watcher, judge of others' conduct. Upon her return to Mansfield Park from Portsmouth, Fanny becomes a mature, fully developed protagonist, one who is not simply the moral center, the angel of the house, but rather has grown into the position of the narrator; in the last few chapters, Fanny's subject position becomes indistinguishable from the all-wise perspective of the narrator.
Fanny watched him [Edmund] with never-failing solicitude, and sometimes catching his eye, received an affectionate smile, which comforted her; but the first day's journey passed without her hearing a word from him on the subjects that were weighing him down… She looked at him, but he was leaning back, sunk in a deeper gloom than ever, and with eyes closed as if the view of cheerfulness oppressed him [the spring landscape], and the lovely scenes of home must be shut out.' -292-
As Fanny's subjectivity assumes the wider purview of the narrator, in turn the narrator's role expands into assertive authorial omniscience and manipulation. In the last two chapters, the narrator sums up and closes by distributing punishment to the vicious and reward to the virtuous. The narrator opens the last chapter with this vast, providential overview:
Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault with themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.
My Fanny indeed at this very time, I have the satisfaction of knowing, must have been happy in spite of every thing. She must have been a happy creature in spite of all that she felt or thought she felt, for the distress of those around her. She had sources of delight that must force their way. She was returned to Mansfield Park, she was useful, she was beloved; she was safe from Mr. Crawford, and when Sir Thomas came back she had every proof that could be given in his then melancholy state of spirits, of his perfect approbation and increased regard; and happy as all this must make her, she would still have been happy without any of it, for Edmund was no longer the dupe of Miss Crawford.
Fanny never speaks again in this last chapter, but she does not need to: she has assumed ascendancy in the household and become the domestic guardian of virtue. It is as if the narrator has been grooming Fanny to take over both Mansfield Park and Mansfield Park.
At issue in the preceding discussion has been the development of the quintessential novelistic technique for representing subjectivity, the way that Austen uses free indirect speech to convey interiority. Literary historians tracing the development of novelistic technique uniformly conclude that Austen was the first great English novelist to master this technique of narrated monologue. In Transparent Minds, Dorrit Cohn writes:
The pattern set by Jane Austen thus unfolds throughout the nineteenth century: precisely those authors who, in their major works, most decisively abandoned first-person narration (Flaubert, Zola, James), instituting instead the norms of the dramatic novel, objective narration, and unobtrusive narrators, were the ones who re- introduced the subjectivity of private experience into the novel: this time not in terms of direct self-narration, but by imperceptibly integrating mental reactions into the neutral-objective report of actions, scenes, and spoken words.
Free indirect discourse is not, however, merely another technique in the progression to develop the best method of rendering character, such -293- that Austen is better at it than Richardson, Fielding, or Burney. Conventional literary history has assumed that the rise of the novel is the rise in formal realism: representing everyday life more accurately, more persuasively, better. But there are historical and ideological issues at stake here as well. Given the nationalist and conservative political climate of the period in which Austen wrote, beginning with the French Revolution and extending through the Napoleonic Wars, unbridled subjectivity or Romantic celebration of the freedom of the individual subject as conveyed in radical Jacobin novels such as Mary Wollstonecraft's or William Godwin's could be construed as coming at the expense of-indeed as an enemy of-social constraint and custom: individualism is necessarily set against preexisting social rules and order. Thus Austen's representation of subjectivity has considerable bearing on whether she is read historically as a conservative or a progressive writer, whether she celebrates or deplores the new Romantic individualism. In depicting in such detail the interior states of her protagonists, does Austen ask us to believe that there is a preexisting, immanent set of rules of conduct that all individuals must come to respect and obey? Or do her protagonists rely on their inner resources to determine for themselves what they should do and desire?
The significance of Austen's use of free indirect discourse and her representation of subjectivity is by no means a dead topic. Just as with Ian Watt's discussion of Austen's innovations in narrative technique, technical analysis soon modulates into moral issues, so that what sets Austen apart is the truth of her characters, and thus the nature of the novel as such-its truth and thus its moral force. It is evident that free indirect discourse has a lot to do with the representation of social order and authority. Literary historians concerned with such matters often connect the novel as a discourse with the issues of discipline as defined by theorist Michel Foucault: the ways in which a social formation orders itself and individual subjects within it by means of its various knowledges, technologies, and disciplines. The novel is one such technology and the authority of novelistic discourse is crucially dependent on its vision-what John Bender calls its transparency: 'Transparency is the convention that both author and beholder are absent from a representation, the objects of which are rendered as if their externals were entirely visible and their internality fully accessible.' What has been identified as free indirect discourse is but one aspect of 'narrative as an authoritative resource': 'novelistic conventions of transparency, com-294- pleteness, and representational reliability (perhaps especially where the perceptions being represented are themselves unreliable) subsume an assent to regularized authority'-i.e., what Theodor Adorno calls the administered life.
The use of Foucault to describe the function of novelistic authority by contemporary critics can be seen as an extension of an insight provided long ago by Jean-Paul Sartre, when he wrote of the nineteenthcentury novelistic narrator:
He tells his story with detachment. If it caused him suffering, he has made honey from this suffering. He looks back upon it and considers as it really was, that is, sub specie aeternitatis. There was difficulty to be sure, but this difficulty ended long ago; the actors are dead or married or comforted. Thus, the adventure was a brief disturbance which is over with. It is told from the viewpoint of experience and wisdom; it is listened to from the viewpoint of order. Order triumphs; order is everywhere; it contemplates an old disorder as if the still waters of a summer day have preserved the memory of the ripples which have run through it… Behind [even] the inexplicable, the author allows us to suspect a whole causal order which will restore rationality to the universe.
Novelistic narrative derives its authority from its transparency and employs that authority in a regulative or constitutive fashion, representing ordered subjects in an ordered world. This is what Fredric Jameson means by his assertion that 'the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal 'solutions' to unresolvable social contradictions.' Behind Jameson is the pioneering work by Georg Lukács from 1920, The Theory of the Novel, in which Lukács argues that the novel is fundamentally organized backward, representing the world as backdrop to the fortunes of the individual subject: 'the novel is the epic of an age in which the immanence of life is no longer directly given, in which the meaning of life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.' That is to say, while focusing so relentlessly on the particular life, the novel still aspires to show the meaning of the whole; the novel is thus both a representation and an interpretation of life, an attempt to show it as it is while implicitly, through the necessary ordering of its form, showing how the world ought to be.
The representation of subjectivity or interiority of character is the crucial step in the novel's ordering. However idiosyncratic a particular character, it is at the same time typical of human behavior. Character is -295- thus a representation of human subjects, but it is also an interpretation of how they behave and how they ought to behave; as Sartre puts it, the novel 'is explanatory; it aims at producing a psychological law on the basis of this example.' Psychological law presumes that characters are consistent and predictable; that is to say, character is ordered and ultimately rational, however irrational individual acts may be. Social order is thus dependent on the assumptions of individual stability and readability, for without stable and consistent character, no stable and consistent or even meaningful society can be represented. In Bender's words, 'the nature and function of novelistic realism lie in its ability to produce meaning by containing its own contradictions and thus to leave the impression that consciousness and subjectivity are stable across time.'
To return to the point with which we began, Jane Austen's work is accorded a special place in the history of the novel, for her work functions as a marker of transition, her novels provide a convenient bridge between the
