Mansfield Park (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

The last years of Austen’s life were relatively quiet and comfortable. Her final, unfinished work,
Sanditon,
was put aside in the spring of 1817, when her health sharply declined and she was taken to Winchester for medical treatment of what appears to have been Addison’s disease or a form of lymphoma. Jane Austen died there on July 18, 1817, and is buried in Winchester Cathedral.

Mary Crawford is, or so it seems, the very model of a Jane Austen heroine. Spirited, warm-hearted, and, above all else, witty, she displays all the familiar Austen virtues, and she stands in need of the familiar Austen lessons as well. Like Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine
of Pride and Prejudice
(1813), she banters archly with the man she is falling in love with, and, like Elizabeth, she must learn to set aside her preconceptions in order to recognize that love. Like Emma Woodhouse, the heroine of
Emma
(1816), she speaks more brilliantly and speculates more dazzlingly than anyone around her, and, like Emma, she must learn to rein in the wit that tempts her at times to impropriety. But Mary Crawford is not the heroine of
Mansfield Park
(1814)—Fanny Price is, and therein lies the novel’s great surprise. For Fanny differs not merely from Mary, but also from our most basic expectations of what a novel’s protagonist should do and be. In Fanny, we have a heroine who seldom moves and seldom speaks, and never errs or alters.

“‘I must move,”’ Mary announces, “‘resting fatigues me’” (p. 85). Before her arrival at Mansfield, she had made a glamorous circuit of winters in London and summers at the country houses of friends, with stops at fashionable watering places in between, and at Mansfield she is no less mobile. A vigorous walker, she soon takes up riding, cantering as soon as she mounts. Fanny, by contrast, has hardly left the grounds of Mansfield since her arrival eight years before, and she is further immobilized by her weakness and timidity. A half-mile walk is beyond her, a ball, she fears, will exhaust her, and she is prostrated by headache after picking roses. She must be lifted onto the horse she was long too terrified to approach, and her exercise consists of being led by a groom.

“‘Now, do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat,’” says Mary to her listeners, who have not, in fact, caught the joke at all (p. 54). So dazzling a talker is Mary that she must serve as her own best audience, amusing herself with witticisms the others cannot hear. With a keener eye and a sharper tongue than those around her, Mary sets her words dancing alongside the inanities, vulgarities, and hypocrisies that make up the other characters’ speech. Fanny, by contrast, barely speaks at all, and when she does, it is in the silencing language of moral certainty. “‘Very indecorous,’” Edmund says of Mary’s far more captivating discourse, and Fanny is quick to agree and contribute a judgment of her own: “‘and very ungrateful’” (p. 56). There is little that can be said after that.

‘“I will stake my last like a woman of spirit,’” Mary proclaims in the midst of a card game that Fanny had been reluctant to play at all (p. 210). Mary wins the hand, only to find that it has cost her more than it was worth, and, in doing so, she reminds us that to act is necessarily to risk being wrong. Fanny, by contrast, is always right. “‘Fanny is the only one who has judged rightly throughout’” (pp. 162)—this is Edmund Bertram speaking to Sir Thomas in the aftermath of the theatricals, but it could just as properly be the narrator at the novel’s end. The language of Fanny’s right judgment suggests, however, that her moral certainty is a function of her passivity: “‘No, indeed, I cannot act,’” she had insisted (p. 128), and the double meaning of “acting” suggests that Fanny knows not to “act” in a theatrical sense because she never really “acts” at all.

It is in the contrast between Fanny and Mary that we can most clearly see that
Mansfield Park
is, in the words of the critic Tony Tanner, “a novel about rest and restlessness, stability and change—the moving and the immovable”
(Jane Austen,
p. 145; see “For Further Reading”).
Mansfield Park
is hardly the only Austen novel to take as its subject matter a pair of opposed terms, but typically these terms stand in a dynamic relation to one another, each altering the other until a proper synthesis or balance is achieved. In
Sense and Sensibility
(1811), for instance, the rational Elinor Dashwood and her romantic sister Marianne must each learn from the other to moderate her mode of feeling; similarly, Mr. Darcy must modify his pride and Elizabeth, her prejudice before marriage can unite them. Other of Austen’s novels draw careful distinctions within a single term, as when
Persuasion
(1818) establishes a continuum from the most laudable to the most lamentable instances of conforming to the wishes of others.
Mansfield Park
stands alone in this regard, for it unequivocally endorses one set of terms and unequivocally condemns the other. Rest has, in this novel, nothing to learn from restlessness, and restlessness can in no way be redeemed.

The values that
Mansfield Park
endorses, and the certainty with which it endorses them, can best be understood when we restore the novel to its historical context.
Mansfield Park
was written at the end of one tumultuous era, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and at the beginning of another: the industrialization and urbanization of England. Events like these might seem too large for the carefully circumscribed world of Austen’s novels, and Austen’s insistent modesty has done much to encourage such a view. In one letter, she identified her ideal subject matter as “3 or 4 families in a country village,” and, in another, she described her novels as “those little pieces (2 inches square) of ivory.” Her nephew repeated both of these statements in A
Memoir of Jane Austen,
published after her death, and they have long shaped our reading of the novels. But these are surely the most ironic statements ever made by this most ironic of novelists. For what Austen’s novels in fact demonstrate is not only that world-historical events manifest themselves on the scale of the “country village,” but also that such events can be represented and analyzed even within the compass of a novel only “2 inches square.” Recent criticism has come to recognize the full range of Austen’s subject matter, and there are now vehement debates over whether Austen was feminist or anti-feminist; capitalist or anti-capitalist; imperialist or anti-imperialist; radical, conservative, or moderate. That these debates persist unresolved is a sign of Austen’s characteristic obliquity: It is now clear that she was, among other things, a political novelist, but it remains far from clear what her actual politics might have been.