Chapter 8 - Saving Individual Virtue

Summary

As public criticism of Britains war-making became more vocal and searching in the later decades of the eighteenth century, the process of moral insulation (distancing the public morally from the violence of war) became more important. It allowed the pacific ideal of feminine virtue to be reconciled with support for war, as seen in the emergent figure of the wife-at-war. Expressions of sympathy for the victims of war, reinterpretations of pacific Christian doctrine, and attempts to dissociate the officer classes morally from the violent practices of those they commanded, all provided some moral insulation for members of the reading public. The chapter ends with reference to Jane Austens fiction, which both depends upon, and exposes the limits of, such insulation.