Mansfield Park (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (4 page)

It is hardly surprising, then, that threats to Sir Thomas’s authority multiply under Mrs. Norris’s incompetent rule. Mary and Henry Crawford pose the first threat. Dashing and glamorous Londoners, the Crawfords seduce us as easily as they seduce the provincial Bertrams. It is only in the context of country-house writing that we can recognize the danger they represent. For Mary is not only contemptuous of religion, but also indifferent to nature, and she refuses to honor the seasonal rhythms of rural life. When told that no cart is available to transport her harp in the midst of harvest season, she is shocked to discover that the “‘sturdy independence of your country customs’” will not yield to London cash (p. 52). Henry should be closer to the land than his sister, for he has inherited Everingham, the Crawford family estate. He has not settled there, however, because he is, as Fanny describes him, “‘so very fond of change and moving about’” (p. 102). As a result, his lands have been put in the hands of an agent, who later proves to have been the cause of much suffering among the tenant farmers and hired laborers whom Henry has not troubled himself to know. Neither Mary nor Henry is prepared, then, to be the inheritor and preserver of the country house.

The theater poses the second threat. The amateur theatricals are the novel’s most famous set piece because they so seamlessly join the figurative and the literal: The play itself predicts much of what will happen in the novel, while the characters’ struggles over the staging of the play present each of them in a revealing light. The play,
Das Kind der Liebe,
was written in 1791 by the German August von Kotzebue; it was translated into English, as
Lovers’ Vows,
by Elizabeth Inchbald in 1798 and was frequently performed throughout England for several years after that. Austen could therefore presume that her readers would know the basic outlines of the plot. The play begins twenty years after a seduction, when a peasant girl, Agatha, encounters Frederick, the illegitimate son she had long ago abandoned; the Baron Wildenhaim, now a great landowner with a daughter by a now-dead wife, had seduced Agatha. In a subplot, the Baron arranges a marriage between his daughter and a dissolute rich man, even though his daughter is already in love with a humble, but virtuous, clergyman. Frederick, driven to beg in order to support himself and his mother, at last threatens the Baron and is imprisoned. His true identity is finally revealed, however, and the Baron responds to the news by marrying Agatha and restoring Frederick to his patrimony. Having thus learned to renounce the concerns of rank, the Baron also permits his daughter to marry the man she loves. As even this brief summary suggests, the staging of
Lovers’ Vows
gives rise to many ironic parallels, with the thick-headed and self-satisfied Mr. Rushworth all too pleased to be playing a man valued only for his money and the fawning Mr. Yates all too eager to play at being an aristocrat of more exalted rank. More troubling is Tom Bertram’s readiness to “‘descend a little”’ and play a comic butler (p. 116), and most troubling of all, of course, is the readiness of Maria and Julia to descend even further and play the part of the fallen Agatha.

Character is revealed through these parallels, and it is further revealed through the many debates over whether the play should be staged at all. Tom, Maria, and Julia defend the theatricals as a fashionable diversion, while Fanny, and later Sir Thomas, condemn them as a grievous wrong. Austen clearly sides with Fanny and Sir Thomas. Such anti-theatricalism is remarkable enough to the present-day reader, for whom nothing could be more innocent than a group of young people amusing themselves by putting on a play. What makes it even more remarkable, however, is the fact that Austen herself had avidly participated in theatricals during her youth, writing the prologues to plays that her neighbors and siblings would perform. To be sure, social mores had changed somewhat in the years between Austen’s youth and the writing of
Mansfield Park,
as a growing evangelical movement began to condemn activities that had formerly been seen as innocent, and there is reason to believe that Austen had come to view evangelicals with some sympathy. But the evangelicals condemned novels along with the theater, and this fact alone is enough to remind us that
Mansfield Park
is no evangelical tract. All this is to say that the judgments Austen will pass on the theater are quite particular: They are not the unthinking expression of custom or belief, but rather the self-conscious exploration of political ideology.

It is worth emphasizing that both the author of
Lovers’ Vows
and the translator were notorious in England for being political radicals. Moreover, the play itself was taken to be a Jacobin text. Its explicit theme, after all, was the irrelevance of rank, and its implicit theme was the priority of individual desire over custom and law. The play ends, in defiance of Burke, with the inheritance going to an illegitimate son. Austen suggests, however, that it is not merely this particular play, but acting in general, that poses a radical threat. For the conservative conception of authority is organized around stable identities or repertories of identities: the lords, laborers, and tenant farmers of “To Penshurst,” or the “brother, landlord, master” of
Pride and Prejudice.
The theater, by contrast, imagines protean selves, whose various identities are assumed and cast off at will. Henry Crawford, who proves to be by far the best actor in the novel, captures the theater’s dangerous possibilities when he announces himself ready to play “any character that ever was written, from Shylock or Richard III, down to the singing hero of a farce” (p. 109)—any character, that is to say, other than the one he has been given by birth, the owner of the Everingham estate. The theater thus functions in this novel as the art form of unbridled ambitions and abrogated duties, as the art form of revolution.

To put this another way, the theatricals are a threat because they transform the country house into a theater. Returning from his travels unexpectedly, Sir Thomas discovers that his study has been made into a dressing room; worse, he finds himself standing face-to-face with a feckless young man who plays baron to his own baronet. This is “‘taking liberties with [the] father’s house’” (p. 112), indeed. In response to such liberties, Sir Thomas orders that the stage be disassembled and the scene painter dispatched, and he himself burns all copies of the play. The “infection” of the theater cannot, however, be so easily contained (p. 159). The stage curtains find their way into Mrs. Norris’s house, and Henry Crawford is permitted to stay. With this, we come to the second, more insidious danger posed by the theatricals: They reveal that the country house has been a theater all along. The critic Joseph Litvak, in
Caught in the Act,
has argued that with the return of Sir Thomas the novel shifts its attention from theatricals to theatricality, from a discrete instance of acting to those forms of acting that pervade, indeed constitute, social and political life. We will later see Sir Thomas staging little theaters of power, as when he commands Fanny to leave a ball early in order to display to potential suitors her remarkable tractability. Nor does the novel, in Litvak’s view, imagine any alternative to theatricality. The word “appearance,” first associated with the Crawfords, soon takes over the narrator’s own discourse, until it is difficult for us to distinguish the seeming from the real. Not even Fanny can escape. Her famous resistance to the theater is articulated in the theater’s own language. “‘No, indeed, I cannot act... I really cannot act’” (pp. 128), she says again and again, like a latter-day Cordelia in a novelistic
King Lear.

The first volume of
Mansfield Park
thus demonstrates that Mansfield is a country house in need of improvement, seduced as it is by the glamour of mercantile London and hollowed-out by the blurring of appearance and reality. The second and third volumes of the novel will explore what improvement should entail. Austen draws our attention to this question by using the word “improvement” again and again, until it pervades the discourse of the narrator, as well as the characters. Edmund works toward the “improvement” of Fanny’s mind (p. 20), while Sir Thomas commends her “improvement” in beauty and in health (p. 154). Sir Thomas hopes that his son-in-law Rushworth will “improve” in knowledge and wit (p. 174), and Edmund hopes for Mary Crawford’s “improvement” in piety and morality (p. 318). At Portsmouth, Fanny seeks the “improvement” of her sister Susan’s conduct (p. 346), and Henry Crawford effects some “improvement” in the way their father treats Susan and Fanny both (p.351). Henry and Edmund approve of the “spirit of improvement” that has taken over the clergy (p. 294), while Mary, upon hearing that the custom of family chapel has been abandoned by the Rushworths, slyly remarks, “‘Every generation has its improvements’” (p. 76).

The problem of improvement is thus raised by the novel’s discourse, but it is more fully explored in the novel’s other great set piece, the day at Sotherton, the Rushworth family estate. Having visited a friend whose estate has just been “improved” by a landscape gardener (p. 46), Mr. Rushworth is suddenly filled with a desire to have his own estate be similarly improved; he invites the Bertrams and Crawfords to come to Sotherton and give him advice. Landscape gardening provides Austen with the perfect opportunity to explore what improvement requires; for not only is it the most concrete instance of making changes to the country house, but it was also an activity that was understood at the time in explicitly political terms. A generation before Austen’s birth, Capability Brown had developed a gardening style whose natural forms were said to exemplify a specifically English liberty, as opposed to the rigid patternings said to exemplify the absolute monarchy in France. In Austen’s lifetime, Humphry Repton (1752-1818) had taken Brown’s place as the most influential landscape gardener of the day, but the politics of his gardening style are more difficult to characterize. On the one hand, Repton warned, in
An Enquiry into the Changes of Taste in Landscape Gardening
(1806), against “moderniz [ing] old places... and [then] alter[ing] them again on the morrow” (p. 27), a recognizably Burkean caution against excessive change; on the other hand, his actual designs tended toward rather radical “innovations.” As the critic Alistair Duckworth has demonstrated in
The Improvement of the Estate,
Austen knew both sides of Repton, for she not only read widely in theories of landscape and the picturesque, but she also saw, at first hand, the changes Repton had made to Stoneleigh Abbey, the estate of her mother’s cousin. Repton had, as was his wont, opened new vistas by tearing down trees and walls, even going so far as to redirect the nearby river Avon, and there is reason to believe that Austen felt that these changes had gone too far.

In the episode at Sotherton, however, Austen is less interested in judging either Repton’s theories or his practices than she is in condemning those landowners who choose to hire an improver, any improver, to do work that would better be done by themselves. Sotherton, that is to say, dramatizes both the need for the country house to be renovated if it is to remain vital and the imperative that the responsibilities of authority be borne by those who exercise its powers. In Sotherton, we see a country house that has fossilized from lack of change: The furniture is fifty years out of date, and its portraits no longer mean anything to anyone; the family chapel has fallen into disuse and the laborers’ cottages into total disrepair. And in Rushworth, we see a landowner totally unequipped to make the necessary changes. His plans for Sotherton begin and end with the idea of calling in Repton, and his wish to consult with others rather than making plans himself is merely the first sign of a thoroughgoing abrogation of authority. For the failures at Sotherton can all be attributed to absent or inadequate guardians: The death of the elder Mr. Rushworth has forced his widow to turn to the family housekeeper for knowledge of the family traditions; the younger Mr. Rushworth is ready to chop down that familiar Austen trope for continuity, a flourishing stand of trees; and his future wife, Maria Bertram, rejoices that the church is far enough away from the manor house that she will not be troubled by its bells. The inheritance of the past, the requirements of the future, and the moral and religious duties of the present—all are betrayed at Sotherton. And the betrayals at Sotherton throw into relief that far subtler betrayal the Crawfords threaten at Mansfield. The day at Sotherton gives rise to much talk about improvements, and it quickly becomes clear that improving is, for Mary, something that one hires others to do, while it is for Henry a kind of hobby worth indulging until the pleasure begins to pall: The sister would have improvements undertaken only when she is away from home, and the brother would undertake them for the sheer love of “‘doing’” (pp. 50-51). Edmund, on the other hand, would “‘rather have an inferior degree of beauty, of [his] own choice, and acquired progressively’” (p. 50), but he alone speaks for the Burkean values of familial responsibility and incremental change.

These, then, are the values that will come under attack as the Crawfords begin seducing first one than another of the residents of Mansfield. And this is the struggle that the rest of the novel will unfold: the struggle to preserve the local, the reciprocal, and the continuous in an increasingly cosmopolitan, cash-mad, fashion-driven world; the struggle to find a stable place in a world of restlessness. This is a struggle over the fate of the country house, but Mansfield Park suggests that the country house might have already been lost. For only once is Mansfield celebrated as Donwell and Pemberley are celebrated—and then only with significant qualifications. Toward the end of the novel, Fanny returns to Portsmouth to visit her family, and the contrast between their home and the Bertrams’ prompts Fanny to recognize Mansfield’s virtues at last: