ABSTRACT

Austen's experience of Anglican Christianity during the late Georgian period underlies her presumptions about society's moral order; the "value of that Holy religion" manifests itself in all Austen's presumptions about how the world is put together. One key concept of natural law provides a reason for everything that happens to human beings, good or bad: Providence. Providence denotes God's creation of the world with its ultimate redemption in view, his sovereignty over history and events, and his continual agency in ordinary people's lives. Austen both adheres to presumptions about social rank found in natural law and subjects them to a thorough and consequential exposure. The Great Chain and its corollary ideas about the universe thus resonated throughout Austen's worldview and her fiction. The metaphor of sovereignty speaks to a presumption that language has God-given order; the metaphor of usurpation speaks to Johnson's acknowledgment that humans change languages themselves.