Community and morality: Towards reading Jane Austen
This chapter attempts to encourage reflection about such moves by looking at some of the ideological and social dimensions of the way Jane Austen hopes to educate the understanding and feelings of her characters and readers. Although Marilyn Butler has little to say about 'the community' that existed in Jane Austen's England she carefully situates the novelist in her intellectual and ideological contexts. The chapter focuses on 'Emma', with occasional reference to 'Mansfield Park', and argues that Jane Austen's art and morality reveals contradictions whose roots are in the dominant ideology. It illustrates the way Jane Austen fulfils this process, and the way she mediates social reality, and deals with a part of the novel where she deploys her famous 'irony' in launching Emma's 'moral' education. The novelist isolates individual aberration in a way designed to prevent any critical questions being asked about the total social structure.
