Jane Austen's Aesthetics and Ethics of Surprise

Abstract

����� ��� In a memorable scene in Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding likens Lady Booby, sexually rebuffed by her virtuous servant, to “the statue of surprize” spoken of by poets. 1 Presumably, he invokes an old metaphor of astonished or fearful people as petrified, but the ambiguity of his phrase raises the possibility of a sculpture fashioned to represent an allegorical figure named “Surprize.” 2 If such a deity did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it as the presiding spirit of the eighteenthcentury novel, an emergent genre that signally promised to exceed the reader’s expectations, as well as the equally new discourse of aesthetics, which adopted surprise as a key term in the emotional lexicon of artistic experience. The full title of Robinson Crusoe’s narrative, to cite only one example, advertises the wayward sailor’s Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures, the adjective of the new modifying an old signifier of romance. Defoe’s title indicates both the strangeness and veracity of the narrator’s experiences: real rather than fantastical, and thus all the more surprising; or, in Michael McKeon’s formula for the epistemology of seventeenth-century newsballads and early novels, “strange, therefore true” (5‐6). What the adjective “surprising” adds to “strange” is affect—the emotional response activated by the extraordinary, the foreign, or the inexplicable. It also encompasses a wider range of experience, since not everything that is surprising is necessarily strange; the mundane, too, can be arresting. In its participial ambiguity, the word aptly suggests the intersection of characters and readers in the eighteenthcentury novel: both are meant to be jolted out of ordinary patterns of perception and thought; both will be seized by an experience of the new. As an adventure-narrative, Crusoe promises an aesthetic form of surprise (delight in the new); and as a spiritual autobiography of self-correction, it delivers a salubrious moral surprise (the experience of being jolted from inattention into awareness).