![\"SnipImage8\"](\"http:\/\/winedarksea.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/SnipImage8.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
After relating several details about her relationship with her aunt and uncle, Maria concludes: \u201cBEING in this unfavourable disposition towards me, he [Sir John] was easily persuaded to press me to a marriage, in which my in|clinations were much less consulted than my interests.\u201d This sentence illustrates some of the dynamics that Park described in her earlier post. On the one hand, Maria\u2019s letter immerses the reader in a scene from life, rendering vivid the circumstances that led her uncle to make a fateful decision about Maria\u2019s marriage prospects. Yet at the same time, the narrator dips frequently into the vocabulary of a more removed and somewhat static moral judgment \u2013 one that appraises \u201ccircumstance\u201d in relation to \u201cactions\u201d and \u201cinterest.” The red words, novelistic in our analysis, are the words that show us how something happened: Maria\u2019s uncle Sir John decided to force her into \u201cmarriage,\u201d ignoring his niece\u2019s wishes or inclinations because<\/em> he was in an \u201cunfavourable\u201d disposition that made him more easily \u201cpersuaded\u201d to this course of action. (We are getting contextual details \u2013 backstory \u2013 that make his decision intelligible.) These red, novelistic topic words \u2013 marriage, persuaded, unfavorable \u2013 are thus necessary for rendering the sequence of events that prompted her change of fortunes. A man was persuaded, his favor had changed, and a marriage ensued.<\/p>\n But the narrative sequence opens up onto a more general possibility for analysis. An abstract noun \u2013 \u201cinterest\u201d \u2013 is offered as the nominal criterion for her uncle\u2019s decision, but in the context of the sentence it seems to gloss the uncle\u2019s reasoning as he might represent it to Maria (\u201cthis marriage is in your interest<\/em>\u201d), not the narrator\u2019s feelings about that reasoning (\u201cit was<\/em> in my interest\u201d). What we are getting, then, is the narrator\u2019s view of how her uncle made his decision, what circumstances contributed to his thinking, even the abstract concept that he could have invoked in the absence of any residual \u201cnatural\u201d sympathy for his niece\u2019s inclinations. One sees, perhaps, a tension between the kinds of abstract nouns that appear in works of moral philosophy \u2013 in the screen shot above, \u201cnatural\u201d \u201cactions\u201d \u201ccircumstance\u201d \u201cinterest\u201d \u2013 and the concrete terms of relation that render action for us in a more vivid, immediate way.<\/p>\n What is interesting about this passage is that it shows us how flexible<\/em> the abstract vocabulary of moral philosophy can be when it is introduced into the narrative stream of a novel. In the passage above, Maria tells us that her aunt, Lady Harley, was stung by jealousy when she witnessed Sir John\u2019s pleasure at hearing his niece read. Out of spite, the aunt insinuates that there is a contradiction between the \u201coppression and faintness\u201d that Maria purportedly has complained of and her manifestly good spirits, which Sir John would otherwise take on face value. Maria then uses the abstract noun \u201ccircumstance\u201d to characterize the fact of her good spirits, a fact which Sir John is now (culpably) discounting.<\/p>\n The shift in register becomes necessary because Sir John has abandoned his natural sympathy for Maria and is instead bringing a quasi-judicial process of weighing her actions (thinking \u201ccircumstantially\u201d). It\u2019s the intermixture of these fragments of moral reasoning with images of life as it unfolds \u2013 a didactic mix of abstract nouns and personal actions \u2013 that are allowing Lennox to stage distinct layers of sympathy and indifference, serving them all up for the reader\u2019s observation. The shift to moral evaluation is even more decisive in the following passage from letter V, in which Maria tells Euphemia how Sir James came to doubt her aunt\u2019s deprecations and once again view his niece in a favorable light:<\/p>\n
![\"SnipImage12\"](\"http:\/\/winedarksea.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/SnipImage12.jpg\")
<\/a>Maria is moving into the realm of generalization (\u201cI have often observed\u2026\u201d), and this shift requires the writer to \u201cinvestigate\u201d the ways in which Sir James was led to \u201ccompare\u201d Maria\u2019s behavior with a secondhand \u201cpicture\u201d that has been drawn of her \u201cdisposition\u201d by her aunt. These blue words might be seen as\u00a0pivots in a process of moral judgment \u2013 the same process that the novel\u2019s reader<\/em> had to employ in evaluating Sir James\u2019 earlier souring on his niece. Because this process itself is now the subject of narration,\u00a0it is not surprising that the vocabulary needs to be more structured and abstract.<\/p>\n![\"SnipImage13\"](\"http:\/\/winedarksea.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/SnipImage13.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n