Moral Taste: Aesthetics, Subjectivity, and Social Power in the Nineteenth-Century Novel.

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray is a private scholar, writing and
editing in Souris, Manitoba.

Victorian fictional heroines, as Marjorie Garson points out, are always known for their ineffable natural good taste. Moral Taste examines how novels of the 19th century portrayed middle-class anxieties surrounding subjectivity and entitlement through the portrayal and sanctioning of contemporary constructions of taste. The very concept of “taste,” which was applied to a wide variety of social behaviours and sensibilities, held a quality of prestige in Victorian middle-class society that conveyed a broad sense of refinement and privilege. It was this privilege to which the middle classes aspired in their quest for cultural and moral authority within 19th-century British society, and their appropriation of the discourse of taste played an important role in bourgeois social and cultural advancement.

Referencing the work of scholars in aesthetic, sociological, and postmodern gender theory, Garson studies the different representations of taste in a selection of representative literary texts of the period, tracing the links and correspondences between fictional portrayals of tastefulness and the ongoing cultural and social agenda. She refers to the theories of Thorstein Veblen, Erving Goffman, and Judith Butler concerning material consumption, social performance and subjectivity, and gender, and she points to the relevance of their arguments in the study of the discourse of taste in writers such as Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë. Her principal reference, however, is the social analysis of Pierre Bourdieu, who theorizes that taste is a series of cultural choices that determine and define an individual’s moral and cultural status rather than an aesthetic response to high art. Through a formalist close reading of selected primary texts, which seeks to examine the internal literary structure while revealing its inherent instabilities, contradictions, and cultural dependencies, Garson reveals the interplay between the embedded representations of taste and the construction of middle-class subjectivity and provides a valuable contribution to current Victorian scholarship.