20th WCP: Chapter 5: Narrative Cultural Interweavings: Between Facts and Fiction

In this chapter, I would like to concentrate on the complex historical processes of re-reading and reinterpreting women's views of themselves, which have constituted the different levels of the symbolic order.

As we have already seen, women have dealt extensively with a whole range of new interpretations of the symbolic order and the cultural interweavings of subjects' own self-conceptions. (1) Feminists have developed a new hermeneutics for dealing with the past while embarking on a critical study of the present, thus discovering a new level of interconnectedness between the moral and the aesthetic spheres. Through genealogical research, they have narrated plots allowing women to expose power struggles and to question the narrowness of the so-called universal claims of reason. Women have rechartered the dimension in which the political and the literary spheres intersect and exchange, offering public opinion a whole new conception of "human being" and "human capabilities". Women developed their claim for recognition on the new grounds of a shift to a cultural paradigm. This new paradigm has allowed them to find a new language. As is clear in the previous chapters, I consider literature and cultural "readings" a very important tool in developing my thesis.

In this chapter, I want to focus on how women have used "fiction" as a cultural strategy for performing identity claims, once they became aware of the high impact that literary works had on public opinion. I will focus on Jane Austen's novels and their impact on the public sphere through the recent recovery of her fiction in the cultural domain in feminist reinterpretations, movies, and discussions. Then, I shall return to a philosophical approach that uses "fiction" to delve further into the categorical reweaving that is necessary to acknowledge the transformation that has taken place in contemporary societies because of the new "public" of women. I will address particularly Martha Nussbaum's insistence on an Aristotelian reframing of human capabilities and moral agents through fiction and literature.

I believe that women's identity formation has been more a process of invention than a recovery of something lost, hidden or forgotten. This perspective takes into consideration the importance of language and shows the changes that occur through its use in outlook and life styles. Another relevant issue here is the creation of identities. By narrating a past that best generates our own sense of personal identity, women have developed a pattern in which the present is the source of future possibilities. We will see that women have used the word personal because emplotment has been their tool to create individual meaning through other stories -- of women of the past-- in order to tie into a historical understanding the ongoing content of our lives within narratives that offer a wider conception of "agents" as moral subjects. In this sense, persons do not simply have memories in the historical sense, but, by adopting everchanging attitudes toward them, continuously reconstruct them, they are prone to develop new interpretations. That is why we constantly observe changes in public opinion. Identity is conceived differently in narratives not only because our past experiences are rewoven through time, but also because each new and broader narrative gives new meaning to society's own larger narrative.

Hannah Arendt's most important insight into the public sphere lies in her idea that "disclosive" qualities are attached to the "who's" through speech: "Only the actors and speakers who re-enact the story's plot can convey the full meaning, not so much of the story itself, but of the 'heroes' who reveal themselves in it". (2) For Arendt, "action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller". (3) In this case, our storytellers are women themselves becoming the subjects configuring a new conception of "moral agents".

Our cultural paradigm is based partly on Paul Ricoeur's theory of narratives in his book Time and Narrative. (4) We will call the different symbolic meanings that are woven and rewoven in the public sphere the three stages of "mimetic representation". (5) "Mimesis 1" is the stage in which we experience and conceive our life linguistically in the everyday world of action. "Mimesis 2" is the authorial stage of creative narrative configuration. Finally, "mimesis 3" is the appropriation of "mimesis 2" by the world of the readers. (6) Narratives draw on the materials of everyday life, but, as the stories unfold in the public sphere, they return to and reconfigure life itself. In this way, complex "webs" of narratives emplot action, experience, and speech, and stimulate further levels of those same categories in the subsequent readings and self-understandings of the subjects. Anthony Paul Kerby, for example, says that "The level of mimesis 1 already has a considerable degree of narrative structuring that allows actions to be viewed within a purposive and historical dimension. This structuring becomes even more apparent if we consider... that mimesis 3 feeds back into the life-world of the reader, for structuring at the level of mimesis 1 is very much the product of earlier configurative acts that have been appropriated by the individual or taken by society in general". (7)

Jane Austen's Narratives as a Moral Source

Our reading of Jane Austen must begin in the present, with today's explosive attention to her works, which are not only studied by literary specialists and critics, as well as philosophers, but also by a popular public in the form of major motion pictures. Films are narratives in our contemporary societies. Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion were recently made into movies that have attracted the attention of a wide public. In the last few years, BBC, the English television channel, has successfully staged Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. This year we have seen another of Austen's novels become a film, Emma. The sudden interest in Austen's narratives can be traced to her vision of the roles of men and women in society and, what is more important, the fact that all her stories are portrayals of moral agents with a very specific view of justice and the good. (8) The present is a critical scenario where abstract and formal models of moral agents are increasingly questioned. Both communitarians and feminists agree on this point.

However, the notion of "mimesis 1" (9) leads us to understand that Austen portrayed women as very different from the women of her times. (10) Her heroines cut a different kind of moral "figure", one that broadened the moral scope of deliberation, judgement and understanding. Allison G. Sulloway, in referring to Austen's time, writes that "the decade of the 1790s was characterized by a legacy of the Enlightenment, which for a brief few decades was almost as volatile as the international debates over 'the Rights of Man'. All over Europe, and especially in England, France, and Germany, pre-Revolutionary women had already begun to think that the injustices imposed upon women of all classes were as legitimate a subject for rational debate as the wrongs of any other disenfranchised groups. But when Austen began her mature work, champions of women's rights were considered as insurrectionary as those other restless reformers whom Trevelyan described. As a member of a clerical family, she was anxious to spare herself and her family any ugly notoriety, and so she adopted policies of thematic and rhetorical caution and hid behind the anonymity of authorship. Even possibilities of finding a publisher at all depended not only on what she said but how she said what she said". (11) With this strategy, Austen stepped into "mimesis 2" (12) and created her own world, reordering the balance of moral virtues --in a combination of Aristotelian and Kantian senses-- to offer a specific outlook on women's sphere of life. (13) "Rather than inverting private and public", says John Ely, "Austen tends to ignore (at least, superficially) the latter (understood in traditional terms) and reconstructs the former as an intellectual and morally congealed community of friends, one composing her own concept of the 'good life'". (14) Moral subjects were incarnated in her works by women, their qualities were displayed within a series of what were considered devalued features of women's behavior; at the same time, she combined these features with "impartiality" and reasonableness. In Austen's view, these women portrayed a new possibility for moral learning through a revalorization of feelings by reason, and a new conception of the capacity for "judgement" and "deliberation" as moral learning tools.

While philosophers like Gilbert Rye (15) and Alasdair MacIntyre (16) did link Austen's views to Aristotle, more recently, in what I will call the stage of "mimesis 3", (17) some authors have begun to offer more original versions of what is distinctive about her "Aristotelianism". According to Ely, for example, "this community, as she portrays it, allows her to transform the traditional Aristotelian order of the virtues, giving 'feminine' dispositions and attitudes a more significant role". (18) In my opinion, however, Austen does this without giving up the valuable tools of reason in its Kantian sense. That is why the experience of Austen presupposes a moral and intellectual equality between women and men. (19) We have to consider the possible influence on Austen of the Scottish Enlightenment. (20) However, as a moralist, she needed to overcome the limits in which this "equality" was conceived in her time. (21) She used Aristotle in a discourse that recaptured experiences of "perception", "impressions", "sensations", "sensibility", "judgement" and "feelings" within a broader conception of "moral reasoning". John Ely has suggested, (22) for example, that while Austen came from a Tory tradition, her moral vision seemed already to be pointing to a new interrelation between justice and the good. As opposed to Ely, MacIntyre and others, however, I believe that Austen shared some basic features with the Scottish Enlightenment, with authors such as Hume (23) and Adam Smith, (24) who regarded feelings as important elements of moral life. As I see it, the most striking feature of Austen's narratives is that she portrayed feelings as morally relevant, not as opposed to reason but as complementary to it. (25) This is shown by the fact that she thought of feelings as "ethically rationalized". (26) They were character traits to be cultivated, not to be subordinated to the "rational will" but integrated with it. In Sense and Sensibility, for example, Elinor Dashwood cultivates feelings along with reason. Marianne Dashwood, on the contrary, suffers because she has not yet learned to cultivate her feelings as a source of knowledge and kindness. Austen describes Elinor as possessing "strength for understanding, and coolness of judgement, which qualified her frequently to counteract... She had excellent heart; her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings strong; but she knew how to govern them: it was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn, and which one of her sisters had resolved never to be taught" (italics added). (27) Marianne, by contrast, "was sensible and clever; but eager in every thing; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting: she was everything but prudent". (28) Throughout the novel, Elinor displays that combination of reason and feelings, becoming the only member of the Dashwood family to cope with the complexities of their life. Marianne, on the contrary, learns through her mistakes and prejudices, and her disappointment in the one she first chooses to love.

Another intriguing element of Austen's process of "mimesis 2" is that, while most of her heroines are portrayed as highly cultivated, this learning is described in a very original fashion. In Mansfield Park, for example, Fanny Price's cousins were educated by their aunt, who only taught them to memorize data. Fanny, however, learned mostly from her close contact with Edmund Bertram. As Ely puts it, "Fanny is anything but a model of Calvinist repression of desire through Christian law and conscience. She has rather 'pity and kindheartedness'". (29) Fanny Price is the only one who possess enough judgement to not participate in the theater play, not to violate the dignity and status of "Mansfield Park". She does not, Austen informs us, because she knew about "respect". This knowledge and sincerity, this cultivated heart and reasonableness, gives her access to a different level of moral reasoning. In the end, she has learned more than her cousins, and knows that her reading and her daily life are two interrelated ways of cultivating herself.

In Persuasion, Anne Elliot engages in conversation with Captain Benwick, who has lost his love and mourns her. Anne suggests that he read more "prose" than poetry, allowing the experiences of human complexity and the different characters of human experiences to teach him a less romanticized view of life. (30) Austen describes the scene in this way: "and having talked of poetry, the richness of the present age, and gone through a brief comparison of opinion as to the first rate poets... she ventured to hope he did not always read only poetry; and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly... she ventured to recommend a larger allowance of prose in his daily study; and on being requested to particularize, mentioned such works of our best moralists, such collections of the finest letters, such memoirs of characters of worth and suffering, as occurred to her at the moment as calculated to rouse and fortify the mind by the highest precepts, and the strongest examples of moral and religious endurances". (31)

The third aspect of "mimesis 2" that Austen develops in her works is the idea of friendship and love. Again, we find that the best relations are the product of lasting friendship. Elinor chooses Edward Ferrars because "his behaviour gave every indication of an open affectionate heart". (32) When Marianne questions his worthiness, Elinor replies, "I have seen a great deal of him, have studied his sentiments and heard his opinions on subjects of literature and taste; and, upon the whole, I venture to pronounce that his mind is well informed, his enjoyment of books exceedingly great, his imagination is lively, his observation just and correct, and his taste delicate and pure". (33) As the novel develops, Elinor will prove that her respect, her friendship towards Edward, remains untouched even when she thinks that he is going to marry someone else (Miss Lucy Steele). As proof of the sincerity of her friendship for Edward Ferrars, Elinor passes on Colonel Brandon's offer for him to become parish priest.

In Mansfield Park, Fanny Price has two great friendships, her brother William and Edmund Bertram. Again, it is through Edmund Bertram that she learns to live a good life in Mansfield Park. He is the first and only person to show his concern for her longings, her needs, her pleasures. He seeks comfort in conversations with her and trusts her judgement when he thinks he is in love with Miss Mary Crawford. Both learn the meaning of friendship as the plot develops. It is this friendship that becomes the best example of true love.

Even Emma, the only heroine of Austen's who is totally confused and has no idea of the meaning of life and love, establishes a true friendship with Mr. Knightley. And in spite of the fact that he "was one of the few people who could see the faults in Emma Woodhouse", (34) his conversations with her, his critical judgements toward her stubbornness, his loyalty towards her are the signs of his real love. Emma will realize this only at the end of the novel, once she has learned to see her mistakes, and she acknowledges her lack of judgement in conversation with him. However, contrary to the opinion of many critics who have thought that Mr. Knightley is "the idealised English gentleman", and that Emma is the conventional novel about the heroine's education provided by the hero, Margaret Kirkham argues against this earlier interpretation of the novel--" Mr. Knightley is as ignorant as Emma about the state of his own feelings and, though many of his criticisms of her are just in themselves, he is often motivated by unconscious jealousy and envy of Frank Churchill. If Emma is unjust to Jane Fairfax, he is unjust to Churchill." (35) Thus, it is through real friendship that both will learn about themselves showing that Austen had already managed to subvert tradition and use it to develop her own creative perspective.

Thus Austen provides a new conceptualization of moral agents. For her, the heart is not an apetite, or a passion, which must be dominated by the mind; on the contrary, it is the combination of reason and judgement, of feelings and responsibility. Both Anne Elliot and Elinor Dashwood show signs of a permanent reflection on human complexity. They are not moved by abstract rules, but rather find forms in which to link deliberations with what is going on in sensibility, to explain why things happen in one specific way and not another. (36) One might be tempted to think Jane Austen's view of women was influenced only by Aristotle, as Ryle or Ely have argued. In fact, however, her women are moral characters who coherently combine reason with feelings (37) in a non-traditional way. The virtues of Anne Elliot or Elinor Dashwood are intellectual and moral, those of culture and experience. These aspects of her works, which in the past were considered a sign of a highly traditionalist view of life, have recently been seen in a new light by the reading public. Let us focus on the stage of "mimesis 3", where the readers and critics have begun to reinterpret Austen's legacy.

In my opinion, the modern side of Austen's moral conception lies mainly in the concept of "moral learning". The way she portrays her characters in successive stages of moral reasoning and deliberation presupposes a "reflexive", "critical" attitude on the part of the moral agent. That is why, again and again, she recommends the reading of literature as a highly reflexive exercise. When Anne Elliot offers Captain Benwick her opinion -- that he should read more "prose", more works from moralists, in order to acquire a more complex, less romanticized view of life-- she is thinking of this "reflexive" stage of moral learning. Marianne Dashwood, on the other hand, is the perfect example of bad reading habits. She needs to learn how to use "reason" as an "antidote" to her outbursts of feelings. She has been "alienated" by her readings. Emma Woodhouse is a character that needs explicit instruction concerning her lack of moral sense and judgements. The reader discovers this in the very first pages.

This "reflexivity" is Jane Austen's device. As Wayne Booth puts it: "The resulting 'reading assignment' given by our teacher, Jane Austen, is complex indeed. We must learn to read as I am quite sure Austen herself wrote: both remembering and forgetting what we know about real life. We all know, or should know, that no union can possibly produce perfect happiness; we know it as surely as we know that geese do not lay golden eggs. We know that no man can possibly provide for Emma all that the novel in its conventional form suggests. We can be sure, once we think about it, that Austen did not believe in the existence of such a paragon as Knightley, and she tells us in many ways that she does not see the whole of a woman's life as the pursuit of a single moment of perfect happiness in a perfect union, all past and future qualifications ignored. Again and again she makes absolutely clear that she could never swallow such nonsense. But her work asks us to swallow it, in some sense, if we are to savor it to the full. And unless we know how to read, and to criticize what we read, first thing we know we'll be thinking about love and marriage and life itself with about as little sense as is shown by Sir Edward" (italics added). (38) Thus, the "antidote" that Austen brings to her narratives is the "reflexive criticism" of the modern reader, a fact that has not escape some of the new "feminist" readings of Austen. (39) The reader must have some of the basic characteristics of an "impartial" judge, allowing for a "double vision". As Booth puts it: "Our journey from page to page is not for the most part focused on some future convention of good fortune but rather on the way people behave here and now. To be in a certain way in the world, to behave in a certain way, is its own justification or damnation". (40)

Feminist readers and critics of Austen's work have found her satire and critical exposure of problems to be indicators of an awareness of her task as a modern moralist. As Allison G. Sulloway suggests, "that women from Mary Astell to Jane Austen revenged themselves, sometimes with equal fierceness and persistence and with the very weapons of satire that had been inflicted upon them, may surprise even some scholars who are now unearthing the social history of women". (41) For Sulloway, "satire" performs an exclusively reflexive political task, as a way of exposing the social distress of injustices. In the same tone, Margaret Kirkham adds--"Jane Austen learned to tell the truth through a riddling irony wich "dull elves" might misread, but which she hoped readers of sense and ingenuity would not". (42) Let us compare this conclusion with Wayne Booth's, who argues: "We are asked to embrace standards according to which the ending can only be viewed as a fairy tale or fantasy. The author has been teaching us all along what it means to keep our wits about us, to maintain a steady vision of the follies and meannesses in our world... All is not well, either for their kind (if any such exist) or for those less fortunate men and women who surround them. Every fully engaged reader will discover, in that 'realer' world aggressively insisted on in the midst of all the subtle pleasures, that the circumstances of women are considerably more chancy and often more threatening than those surrounding men (italics added)". (43) Thus, it is possible for us to understand that a reading public on the stage of "mimesis 3" is prepared to enjoy the double level of Austen's work. It is also for that reason that the adaptation of Austen's works into films has been so successful. Sense and Sensibility attracted the general public because the novel was not seen merely as a curiosity of English traditional views of life. The script was written carefully by an English actress, Emma Thompson, who seems to have understood all its subtleties, knowing the work so well that she was even able to transform certain aspects (44) of Austen's original version for greater clarity in the film version. Thompson's script won an Oscar, and the film was a great success. The BBC television shows based on Austen's work met with a similar reaction. The revival of her fiction in the public sphere has attracted extraordinary attention from the media because it seems to fit so well with contemporary views of women as moral agents, thus revealing the complex interrelation between moral and personal themes, as we shall see.

From Philosophy to Literature

As we move into the philosophical scenario, we step into a different order. In a manner that offers striking parallels with contemporary interpretations of Austen, and with Austen herself, we are now entering a new vision of "mimesis 3", where critics of the Kantian moral tradition often turn back to Aristotle's views of life, of the relationship between justice and the good, in order to give a modern interpretation of his work. Martha Nussbaum stepped into the stage from "mimesis 3" to "mimesis 2" through the creation of a female character, Nikidion, (45) who learns the key concepts of moral philosophy in Aristotle's school. Her recovery of emotions serves, however, as more than a critical element opposing the prejudices we have inherited from the Enlightment. This recovery of Aristotle through the figure of Nikidion is actually a device to discover a different view of emotions. "Emotions are forms of intentional awareness", Nussbaum argues: "That is (since no ancient term corresponds precisely to these terms), they are forms of awareness directed at or about an object, in which the object figures as it is seen from the creature's point of view". (46) Nussbaum's point is that these emotions are not irrational, as many Enlightened theorists believed, because they are clearly linked to beliefs, and beliefs can be modified. Therefore, a moral education nurtured by emotions is possible. (47)

The second element that Nussbaum shares with Austen, is her recovery of Aristotle's concept of "love" as philia. (48) Philia here, as in Jane Austen's works, means mutual affection, reciprocity in the desire for the wellbeing of the other, mutual recognition of the other as a person for her sake. Emotions --as cognitive elements of our textures as moral agents-- and the recognition of the importance of others for our own sake, are the central elements of the feminist interpretation of a moral agent. (49)

But there is another element in Nussbaum's text that seems relevant to me: she joins Austen in viewing literature as a source of moral learning. (50) After the success of her interpretation of the Stagirite in her book The Fragility of Goodness, her contribution to an Aristotelian feminism became even more original by introducing literature as an especially important tool for moral deliberation. Nussbaum establishes the theoretical importance of expressive and normative relations in this double dimension of validity in her book Love's Knowledge. (51) The aesthetic vision offered here, is that form and content are inseparable in literary expression, just as certain "truths" about human life can only be expressed in a narrative, that is, by means of the specific language of literary forms. (52) Novels also use a language that shows the complexity of life itself, and, at the same time, encourages us to develop perception, weigh problems in the light of several contexts and, through our identification with the characters we love, make the values that we admire in them our own. (53) This is the most relevant aspect derived from "mimesis 3" and going back to "mimesis 1".

By making these connections in Austen's and Nussbaum's works, between literature and moral life, and between the aesthetic and the moral dimensions, it is possible to trace the conceptualization of women in the public sphere through the definition of "moral persons" or "moral agents" in "mimesis 3". Another path this reconceptualization takes deals more directly and empirically with the interpretation and development of moral stages and postraditional agents. In the field of social science, this has been followed by Carol Gilligan, whose work bears similarities to Austen and Nussbaum's discussion of "moral agents" and is based on her empirical research regarding women and moral deliberation.

The Pattern of New Voices

Despite the criticisms of her book, In a Different Voice, the importance of Carol Gilligan's empirical work cannot be denied. (54) In the first place, she shows the weakness of Kohlberg's theory that human beings deliberate best when relating to moral issues from the perspective of rules and procedures (when the basic concepts are believed to be based on the idea of impartiality, of depersonalized subjects, of justice and rationality as unconnected to feelings and emotions). To Gilligan, one of the main attributes of moral subjects is that they are not divorced from their affective ties and relationships. Moral characteristics are defined in terms of emotional support for other human beings. Her differences with Kohlberg consist, primarily, in the fact that Gilligan envisions moral subjects as radically contextualized with specific characteristics. In addition, the moral agent must understand other people as specific beings, not only in terms of formal features that configure them as "individuals". In the third place, Gilligan believes that gaining specific knowledge about another person with whom one is to interact is a complex and difficult moral task, one for which certain moral skills must be nurtured on ethical grounds. The role of responsability, she has found, implies a specific "relationship" which is achieved through care, empathy, compassion and emotional sensibility. The final characteristic separating her from the Kantian views of Kohlberg is that Gilligan believes that moral subjects are also defined by their affective relationships with others. Morality, for her, implies emotional, cognitive and affective active relationships that cannot be easily separated. Gilligan, like Austen and Nussbaum, has challenged the separation of form and content in the evaluation of moral judgements.

Some discussions of Gilligan's work imply that it is women, with their specific way of relating to others, who gave rise to this ethics of care. (55) Although Gilligan did not originally stress such female exclusivity, her data was, indeed, based on (white middle class) women. In recent works, however, she does seem to consider the differences between men and women as differences in the ways they perceive moral deliberation. (56) Still, Gilligan challenges the public to relate universalist approaches to justice with an ethics of care by considering problems of human lives in the moral domain. Her women developed new patterns of thinking about moral agents and moral deliberation, I believe, not because of "gender characteristics", (57) but because they discover that issues of the good life and justice do have a specific link. Previous models of moral deliberation were, in fact, reductionist, despite their claim to be "the universal" model for the behavior of moral agents. (58) What is valuable in Gilligan's formulation is the idea that the development of sensibility and the emotions --of that "special voice" which is more human, more complex, and in which the cognitive and the emotional interrelate-- is a better way of conceiving moral deliberation.

If this definition of an ethics of care is seen as characteristic of women, if the difference is attributed to the condition of being female as such, then the radical criticism of Kohlberg's model of impartiality loses its relevance. Access to this very particular form of deliberation becomes limited. The characteristic of care appears as a gender-related trait which tends to differentiate and classify human beings as being better when they are women and worse when they are men. Thus, instead of promoting a new field of ideas in which morality opens its dimensions to specific interactions with the sphere of the good life, it becomes a dichotomous ontologized area that actually reinforced partialized the accounts of universality.

We must understand that Gilligan's enlightening research is done from the perspective of psychological theory, that inserts itself into wider discussions of moral evolution, but, at the same time, challenges previous normative conceptions by generating a "disclosive" pattern of our own self-understandings as human beings. If we understand her work in this way, then the normative criticism towards previous conceptions calls for a transformation of our ideas about moral agency. Gilligan's research should be viewed as highlighting a pattern in which questions of care become moral issues and, therefore, are related to the universalist conception of justice. Her work provides the connection between empirical data and the normative and aesthetic dimensions in which our reflexive and theoretical horizon can thematize moral subjects as agents of moral deliberation.

This view, emerges from the perspective of our three different stages of "mimetic representation". It allows us to complete our model of moral agents and their human capabilities in an interrelation of justice and the good. We must now turn to a discussion of a new perspective of human agents linked to human capabilities.

Moral Concepts as Concrete Universals

The "mimetic" stages of representation in the public sphere can be understood as learning processes. Narratives can be seen as instruments and expressions of learning. The learning to which I am referring takes place when narratives are used in the context of particular acts of attention. Narratives also have spatio-temporal and conceptual contexts. We have seen, through our recovery of Austen's fiction and Nussbaum's reweaving of her same themes, how our initial view is clarified when these issues are exposed as processes in the construction of the symbolic order. We can also frame those views from the perspective of the social sciences, particularly in the research conducted by Carol Gilligan. However, if we consider how these processes are interwoven, how continuous they are, and how imperceptibly they build up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised to find ourselves in a whole new paradigm of moral thinking.

Our conception of moral agents and their capabilities thus connects the will and reason as faculties. Our will continually influences our beliefs, and it does so in the perception of moral complexity. Martha Nussbaum's redefinitions of our "human capabilities" summarize the shift in our understanding of moral learning process within women's narratives. (59) She begins by acknowledging that life should be lived for a normal span, that is, not be subject to the contingencies of sicknesses, famine, and wars, which ravage many countries in the so-called third world. Life must be lived not just any way, but healthfully, with good nutrition and adequate shelter, without any form of violence. We should be able to prevent unnecessary pain, to make use of our senses, our imagination, our reason, connecting all of them with our experiences through education. We need access and the ability to love other people and things, thus supporting all human forms of association. We need to develop our own reflexive conception of the good and happiness, which implies, at the same time, being able to plan our lives at work, at home, and politically; to develop solidarity towards others as a capacity for being sensitive to justice and friendship: and in doing so, to become socially responsible for maintaining and transforming the institutions which help make these processes and abilities possible. It is also important to have the opportunity to develop our affection and care for animals and plants, for the world of nature placed in our charge for future generations; the freedom to enjoy recreational activities, to be able to laugh and play. We need to live our own life, not that of others, which is to say, we must have the right to choose what we want to be, and recognize ourselves. And, finally, we must be able to live in our own context, in our own historical and social situation, without the risk of loosing our integrity as human beings. These are the abilities associated with this new view of moral agents.

At first glance, this seems a list of things that, in some fashion, we all have come into contact with. But perhaps we have not considered that each one of these points substantially affects the life content or capabilities of a person in any given situation. These conditions are fundamental for describing what makes a human being being human. However, they do not stem from a theory of needs, and they do not need to subscribe to any metaphysical or anthropological paradigm. They are the products of our "reweavings" of "shared experiences of human beings within history" (60) in conceiving ourselves and life within a specific interactive view that includes feedback between the aesthetic and the moral domains. I do not believe that this list could have been written with such clarity if we had not had, on the one hand, a serious reflexive process --a public debate-- on what it has meant for women to inhabit a world in which it was continuously questioned whether we were as human as men. Nor could this list have been conceived if we had not detected all the flaws in the discourses that attempted to conceive the world of justice and equality while turning their back on half of humanity. Both these critical processes, simultaneously linked in the historical reappraisal of experience, action and speech, have made it possible for us to present a project of moral subjects in which the image of woman has been connected to the very roots of our definitions of capabilities and potentialities. (61) As Iris Murdoch puts it: "The area of morals, and ergo of moral philosophy, can now be seen, not as a hole-and-corner matter of debts and promises, but as covering the whole of our mode of living and the quality of our relations with the world". (62)

Notes

(1) See, for example, the imaginative research of Gabriele Schwab about "otherness in literary language" in her newest book --(1996), The Mirror and the Killer Queen. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. See, especially, "Witches, Mothers, and Male Fantasies: The Otherness of Women". pp.103-124.

(2) Arendt, Hannah,(1958), The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.p.187.

(3) Ibid. p.192.

(4) Ricoeur, Paul, (1984), Time and Narrative. K.McLaughlin and D. Pellauer translators. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

(5) As Paul Ricoeur has argued--"action as the object in the expression mimesis praxeos...The action is the "construct" of that construction that the mimetic activity consists of." in:Ricoeur, Paul,(1984), Time and Narrative.Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Vol.1.pp.34,35.

(6) Ricoeur says--"I named mimesis 1, mimesis 2, and mimesis 3. I take it as established that mimesis 2 constitutes the pivot of this analysis. By serving as a turning point it opens up the world of a plot and institutes, as I have already suggested, the literariness of the work of literature. But my thesis is that the very meaning of the configurating operation constitutive of emplotment is a result of its intermediary position between the two operations I am calling mimesis 1 and mimesis 3, which constitute the two sides of mimesis 2. By saying this, I propose to show that mimesis 2 draws its intelligibility from its faculty of mediaton, which is to conduct us from the one side of the text to the other, transfiguring the one side into the other through its power of configuration". Ibid.p.53.

(7) Kerby, Anthony Paul, (1991), Narrative and the Self. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University press. p.44.

(8) Margaret Kirkham argues--"In these circumstances it is not surprising that the first major woman novelist to make her mark on English literature in a powerful way was a moralist, acutely interested in moral discourse as it affected the status of women in society and bore their representations in literature"...(her work)"was concerned with establishing the moral equality of men and women and the proper status of individual women as accountable beings(italics added)" in:Kirkham, Margaret, (1997), Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction. London: The Athlone Press.p.3.

(9) Paul Ricoeur defines "mimesis 1" as--"To imitate or represent action is first to preunderstand what human acting is, in its semantics, its symbolic system, its temporality. Upon this preunderstanding, common to both poets and readers, emplotment is constructed and, with it, textual and literary mimetics" in: Time and Narrative. Vol.1.p.64.

(10) Margaret Kirkham argues--"Through her own practice as a novelist she criticises Johnson as well as Richardson and Fielding, giving her heroines sound heads as well as warm, susceptible hearts, and generally discerning taste in literature" in: Kirkham, Margaret, (1997), Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction.p.18.

(11) Sulloway, G. Allison, (1989), Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. p.4.

(12) Again, Paul Ricoeur defines "mimesis 2" as--"By placing mimesis 2 between an earlier and a later stage of mimesis in general, I am seeking not just to locate and frame it. I want to understand better is mediating function between what precedes fiction and what follows it. Mimesis 2 has an intermediary position because it has a mediating function...The dynamism lies in the fact that a plot already exercises, within its own textual field, an integrating and, in this sense, a medianting function, which allows it to bring about, beyond this field, a mediation of a larger amplitude between the preunderstanding and, if I may dare to put it this way, the postunderstanding of the order of action and its temporal features" in: Ricoeur, Paul,(1984), Time and Narrative.Vol.1.p.65.

(13) "Her novels are the culmination of a line of development in thought and fiction which goes back to the start of the eighteenth century, and which deserves to be called feminist since it was concerned with establishing the equality of men and women and the proper status of individual women as accountable beings" in:Margaret Kirkham,(1997), Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction. London, and Alantic Highlinds NJ: The Athlone Press.p.3

(14) Ely, John, "Jane Austen: A Female Aristotelian" in: Thesis Eleven. Num.40, 1995. pp.93-111. p.94.

(15) Ryle, Gillbert, "Jane Austen and the Moralists" in: (1971) Collected Papers. London : Hutchinson. Vol.1. pp.287f.

(16) MacIntyre, Alasdair, (1984), After Virtue. Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame Press.

(17) This third definition by Paul Ricoeur claims that--"mimesis 3 marks the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the hearer or reader; the intersection, therefore, of the world configured by the poem and the world wherein real action occurs and unfolds its specific temporality" in: Ricoeur, Paul,(1984), Time and Narrative.p.71.

(18) Elly, John, "Jane Austen: A Female Aristotelian". p.95.

(19) "Austen mocks those who fear that women could not be trusted as readers, and she makes sure that critics, as well as novelists, are included in her attack" in: Kirkham, Margaret, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction.p.17

(20) Margaret Kirkham agrees with this connection when she further explains that--"The disagreement"--between Kirkham and Dr. Marilyn Butler--"turns on how one sees Jane Austen's insistence upon Reason as the supreme guide to conduct, from which follow her criticism of Romanticism and her belief that sexual passion ought to be subjected to rational restraint" in: Kirkham, Margaret,(1997), Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction.p.xxii. There are also concrete references of Jane Austen readings of Hume. See: Tucker, George Holbert,(1994), Jane Austen. The Woman. Some Biographical Insights. New York: St. Martin's Griffin.p.133.

(21) Again Margaret Kirkham adds--"but through participation in the new fiction women were to acquire a public voice, and the authority of moral teachers. The "female philosopher", who was never anything but a joke while she attempted the kinds of discourse from which her education disqualified her, was to become a powerful and respected influence through the novel".Ibid.p.14.

(22) Ibid. p.94.

(23) For a feminist outlook on Hume's work see: Baier, C. Annette, (1994), Moral Prejudices. Cambridge, Massachussets: Harvard University Press.

(24) Smith, Adam,( 1984), The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by Raphael and A.L. Macfie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

(25) Ely argues that--"The Aristotelian ethical principle of habit becomes, in Austen, the cultivation of feeling; and the heart is for Austen a morally educated organ. The heart is the source of 'active kindness'" in: Ely, John. "Jane Austen: A Female Aristotelian". p.95.

(26) Op.cit. p.94.

(27) Austen, Jane, (1986), Sense and Sensibility. With an Introduction by Tony Tanner. London: Penguin. p.38.

(28) Ely, John, "Jane Austen: A Female Aristotelian". p.94.

(29) Ibid. p.95.

(30) Margaret Kirkham also focuses her defense of Austen's work in this particular scene--"In Sanditon the avarice and pretentiousness of a minor seaside resort, aping the Prince Regent's Brighton, is satirised. In both strictures are made, or implied, on the most fashionable Romantic authors, Lord Byron and Scott. In both, the burlesque stereotype of a young woman deluded by romantic reading and corrected by a hero of sense is reversed. Anne Elliot advises the self-dramatising Captain Benwick to read less poetry, Charlotte Heywood begins to think Sir Edward Denham deranged when she hears the way he talks about Wordsworth, James Montgomery, Burns and Scott" in: Kirkham, Margaret,(1997), Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction.p.145.

(31) Austen, Jane, (1965), Persuasion. Edited and with an introduction by D.W. Harding. London: Penguin. p.122.

(32) Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. p.47

(33) Ibid. p.52.

(34) Austen, Jane, (1971), Emma. Edited and with and introduction by Ronald Blythe. London: Penguin. p.42.

(35) Kirkham, Margaret,(1997), Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction.p.133.

(36) See, for example, the passage in which Elinor listens to the confession of Willoghby, the character who deceived her sister, Marianne, and who confesses to her why he did so: "Willoughby, he, whom only half an hour ago she had abhorred as the most worthless of men, Willougby, in spite of all his faults, excited a degree of commiseration for the sufferings produced by them, which made her think of him now as separated for ever from her family with a tenderness, a regret, rather in proportion, as she soon acknowledge within herself, to his wishes than to his merits. She felt that his influence over her mind was heightened by circumstances which ought not in reason to have weight; by that person of uncommon attraction, that open, affectionate, and lively manner which it was no merit to possess; and by that still ardent love for Marianne, which it was not even innocent to indulge. But she felt that it was so, long, long before she could feel his influence less" in: Austen, Jane, (1967), Sense and Sensibility. p.341.

(37) Allison G. Sulloway argues that-- "The signature of all these women is also an Austenian signature: they all insisted that the mind thinks through the heart as often as the heart thinks through the mind" in: (1989), Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood. p.120.

(38) Booth, Wayne, (1988), The Company We Keep. An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley, California: The University of California Press. p.432.

(39) Margaret Kirkham argues--"Such a view arises from failure to recognise the author's feminist point of view and the play of ironic allusion upon the whole construction, plot and characterisation(italics added)"in: Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction.p.101.

(40) Op.cit. p.433.

(41) Sulloway, Allison, G., (1989), Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood. p.63.

(42) Kirkham, Margaret,(1997), Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction.p.162.

(43) Booth, Wayne, (1988), The Company We Keep. An Ethics of Fiction. p.435.

(44) For example, the enlargement of the role of the youngest sister in the interaction within the Dashwood family. It is important to show that Edward Ferrars has a gentle and kind spirit. Emma Thompson thus made the youngest sister appear totally depressed on leaving their house once the father is dead. Edward understands this situation and tries to recover her by offering his friendship and understanding. Elinor watches the scene and smiles.

(45) See: Nussbaum, Martha, (1994), The Therapy of Desire. Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

(46) Op.cit. p.80.

(47) Nussbaum argues: "Thus, rather than having a simple dichotomy between the emotional and the (normatively) rational, we have a situation in which all emotions are to some degree "rational", in a descriptive sense --all are to some degree cognitive and based upon belief-- and they are to be assessed, as beliefs are assessed, for their normative status (italics added)". Op.cit. p.81.

(48) Nussbaum clarifies her original position when she says -- "which, strictly speaking, is not an emotion at all, but a relationship with emotional components (italics added)". Op.cit. p.90.

(49) Martha Nussbaum had already dealt with these elements in her previous works. See: Nussbaum, Martha, (1986), The Fragility of Goodness. Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge, Massachussets: Cambridge University Press. See, also: Nussbaum, Martha, (1990), Love's Knowledge. Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Cambridge, Massachussets: Oxford University Press. In the latter, for example, she agains points out that --"Because the emotions have the cognitive dimension in their very structure, it is very natural to view them as intelligent parts of our ethical agency, responsive to the workings of deliberation and essential to its completion". p.41.

(50) Nussbaum, invoking Aristotle, says --"One obvious answer was suggested already by Aristotle: we have never lived enough. Our experience is, without fiction, too confined and too parochial. Literature extends it, making us reflect and feel about what might otherwise be too distant for feeling. The importance of this for both morals and politics cannot be overestimated". Op.cit. p.47. Compare how Austen felt about her world, and how her heroines felt the need to compensate their lack of experience with literature as a source of moral learning.

(51) Nussbaum, Martha, (1990), Love's Knowledge. Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.

(52) A similar idea is expressed by Iris Murdoch in her essay "The Idea of Perfection" --"But the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations. We are men and and we are moral agents before we are scientists, and the place of science in human life must be discussed in words. This is why it is and always will be more important to know about Shakespeare than to know about any scientist: and if there is a 'Shakespeare of science' his name is Aristotle" (italics added) in: Murdoch, Iris, (1970), The Sovereignty of Good. New York: Routledge. p.35.

(53) This connection has also been brilliantly appraised by Wayne Booth in his book (1988) The Company We Keep. Nussbaum recognizes the similarity between her formulation and Booth's views when she argues that --"although, as 'Discernment', most novels focus in some manner on our common humanity, through their structures of frienship and identification, and thus make some contribution to the pursuit of those projects" in: Love's Knowledge. p.45.

(54) Gilligan Carol, (1982), In A Different Voice: Pyschological Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge, Massachussets: Cambridge University Press.

(55) See, for example, Tronto, C. Joan, (1993), Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge.

(56) Lawrence Blum has drawn attention to this issue in at least two chapters of his book Moral Perception and Particularity. See: Blum, A. Lawrence, (1994), Moral Perception and Particularity. Cambridge, Massachussets: Cambridge University Press. See the chapters in Part III, "The Morality of Care", pp.173-237.

(57) As Blum rightly argues --"this binary conception of morality is a very misleading way to think about morality and the moral life... It overemphasizes the differences that do exist between men and women, and potentially contributes both to further divisions between them and to unequal treatment of women" in: Moral Perception and Particularity. p.241. Similar objections based on strong arguments that justice and care are complementary have been offered by Seyla Benhabib in her essay "The Debate over Women and Moral Theory Revisited" in: (1995), Feminists Read Habermas. Gendering the Subject of Discourse. Johanna Meehan, editor. New York: Routledge. pp.181-203.

(58) Seyla Benhabib defends Gilligan on grounds similar to the perspective I am developing here. She has also argued against criticism from feminists that think that Gilligan's findings are not relevant because she did not address "gender difference" in her psychological explanation of moral development. Benhabib also answered the oppossite charge from feminists that believe terms such as care will mean again submitting ourselves to the features which men have considered the signs of woman's inferiority. See: Benhabib, Seyla,"The Debate over Women and Moral Theory Revisisted".

(59) Nussbaum, Martha, "Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings" in: (1995), Women, Culture and Development. A Study of Human Capabilities. Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover editors. Oxford: Clarendon, Press.pp.61-104.

(60) Nussbaum, Martha, "Human capabilities, Female Human Beings".p.74.

(61) Nussbaum also argues that her project is--"The result of this inquiry is, then, not a list of value-neutral facts, but a normative conception...The account is meant to be both tentative and open-ended...It claims only that in these areas there is considerable continuity and overlap, sufficient to ground a working political consensus". Ibid.p.74.

(62) Murdoch, Iris, (1989), The Sovereignty of Good. New York: Routledge. p.97.