Mansfield Park (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (5 page)

Tenderness had indeed often been wanting, and Fanny’s tacit acknowledgment of this fact is the loose thread that unravels the passage as a whole. It reminds us that while other country houses in Austen compel love at first sight, Mansfield can be loved only from a distance, only through a veil of faulty memory. And the more closely we look at this passage, the more clear it becomes that Mansfield remains what it had long been: a place of “propriety” from without and invidious distinctions from within, of apparent “harmony” and actual dissent, of “good sense and good breeding,” but bad morality.

The failures of Mansfield seem to be beyond improvement, and it is in this context that we can best understand the novel’s shift in focus from country house to parsonage. Austen famously described
Mansfield Park
as “a complete change of subject—Ordination,” but the novel proves to be less of a change in subject than we might at first expect. For what interests Austen about the duties of a clergyman is their close resemblance to the duties of a landowner; what interests her about “ordination,” that is to say, is its possible implications for other forms of order. As a younger son, Edmund cannot hope to inherit Mansfield, but his understanding of what it means to be a clergyman is held up as a model for what the heir to Mansfield should and must be. And what it means to be a clergyman, for Edmund, is to settle in one’s parish. Edmund must explain to the Crawfords that he will not, as they expect him to do, visit his parish church on Sundays and spend the rest of the week at Mansfield. For he understands that “‘a parish has wants and claims which can be known only by a clergyman constantly resident.... that if he does not live among his parishioners, and prove himself by constant attention their well-wisher and friend, he does very little either for their good or his own’” (pp. 214-215). With this passage, Austen joins the contemporary chorus attacking the rampant abuses in the Church of England, such as the relatively common practice of clergymen hiring curates to perform the duties of a parish while themselves continuing to receive its tithes. But the passage also implies that residence is a virtue for landowners as well as clergymen, and it reminds us of the “very little good” that was done during Sir Thomas’s two-year absence from home. The fact that it is Sir Thomas himself who has spoken this passage, with his customary sententiousness, further emphasizes the total separation between the appearance and reality at Mansfield.

By retreating from country house to parsonage,
Mansfield Park
acknowledges that the landed elite is often incapable, or unworthy, of upholding the country-house ideal. But the novel also suggests that this ideal is more problematic than Burkean conservatives are willing to admit.

More specifically,
Mansfield Park
critiques the landed estate in much the same terms as Austen herself is now critiqued by critics in our own day. The critic Raymond Williams, for instance, in
The Country and the City,
has famously indicted Austen for failing to represent, or perhaps even failing to see, the agricultural labor on which the country house depends. She can be quite vague, he notes, about the number of acres in a particular estate, but far more precise about the number of pounds it is worth every year; in much the same way, she has a keen eye for timber, which can be cut down and sold, but a curious blindness when it comes to the woodsmen. What this means, Williams argues, is that Austen understands the estate as both a source of wealth and a repository of legible social signs, but not as a site of labor. Indeed, the function of the country house, he suggests, is to transform working-class labor into gentry-class gentility. Williams makes this argument most elegantly through a play on the double meaning of cultivation: The cultivation of land is converted into money, which must then be converted once more into the cultivation of manners and accomplishments. What the country house does, Austen’s country-house novels do as well—namely, blind us to the working classes and to the crucial labor that they do.

The critic Edward Said, in
Culture and Imperialism,
has more recently commented on an odd blindness of Williams’s own, a failure to see the slave labor on the Bertram’s plantations in Antigua. The fact that the novel refers to Antigua so obliquely is, in Said’s account, both a sign of Austen’s reluctance to acknowledge the brutal facts of imperialism and proof that the imperial project has already been achieved. For what the novel’s scattered references to Antigua demonstrate most powerfully is that the colonies, and their relation to the metropolitan centers of England can be taken entirely for granted. Said goes on to argue that this presumed relation of center to periphery not only organized economic and political realities in the nineteenth century, but also underwrote the very form of the nineteenth-century novel. In
Mansfield Park,
we see the beginning of a novelistic tradition that locates value in fixity, immobility, and, above all else, centrality and that sees the periphery as “resources to be visited, talked about, described, or appreciated for domestic reason, for local metropolitan benefit.”

Williams and Said are persuasive in arguing that
Mansfield Park
does not merely reflect the contemporary realities of labor and empire, but indeed helps to create structures that erase working-class and marginalize imperial subjects. What I want to emphasize, however, are the moments when Austen points to the gaps where those subjects should be. One such moment comes when Henry Crawford and Edmund debate the improvements that might be made to Edmund’s parsonage. Henry’s proposals are typically extravagant, involving the turning around of the house, the exchanging of meadow and garden, and the purchasing of nearby stands of timber. Edmund, by contrast, presents his own plans as properly modest. “‘I must be satisfied with rather less ornament and beauty, ”’ he says, and further hopes only to give the parsonage “‘the air of a gentleman’s residence’” (p. 210). In the conversation that follows, however, it soon becomes clear that what the “air of a gentleman’s residence” requires is the total removal of the farmyard and all its works, including the blacksmith’s shop. Austen, here, makes precisely the point that Williams will make more than a hundred and fifty years later, by cataloguing the various forms of necessary labor that her own country-house vision requires her to erase. Elsewhere, too, Austen draws our attention to otherwise forgotten forms of labor. The moment of Fanny’s great ascendancy at Mansfield, the proposal of marriage she receives, is marked by Baddeley, the butler, calling her into Sir Thomas’s study, the only time in the entire novel that any servant speaks. The most famous gap in
Mansfield Park,
however, is the “‘dead silence’” that follows Fanny’s questions about the slave trade (p. 171). Critics debate whether this silence would be filled by a condemnation or a defense of slavery, but surely the significance of the silence is that it could never be filled in a novel like this—and that it thus registers all that the novel cannot accommodate.

The critic D. A. Miller helps us to see that Austen understood the costs of conservatism to be finally as much formal as political. And here we return to where we began, to the opposition between Fanny and Mary. Miller begins with the claim that marriage, in an Austen novel, enacts what he calls the “ideology of settlement”
(Narrative and Its Discontents,
p. 50), an ideology that resembles Burkean conservatism in crucial ways. Not only does marriage settle characters socially, by fixing them in their proper sphere, but it can be brought about only, he argues, by a prior settling of other domains: the cognitive, the moral, and the linguistic. A man and a woman can marry only after each has come properly to know the other, has come properly to judge the other, and, what is nearly the same thing in Austen, has found the proper language in which to speak of and to the other. It is this search for knowledge, judgment, and conversation that Austen’s courtship plots narrate. But because the search must be a search, it requires that her heroines be taken in by lying suitors, be tempted by glamorous wrongs, even speak intemperately or injudiciously—all on their way to finding a proper mate. In making this argument, Miller articulates a crucial distinction between narrative and closure, between the forces that drive a story forward and the forces that bring it to an end; moreover, he draws attention to the paradoxical relationship between the two. The requirements of narrative are at odds with the requirements of closure, and Austen’s novels, as a result, must contain many elements, many errors and confusions that their endings cannot endorse.

In
Mansfield Park,
Austen subjects this paradox to intense and painful scrutiny. She does so, Miller argues, by creating two possible heroines—one, Fanny, who is the embodiment of closure, and the other, Mary, who is the embodiment of narrative itself. Miller is helpful not only in making sense of our otherwise perplexing dislike of Fanny, but also in suggesting that this dislike might have been felt most strongly by Austen herself. For just as readers find themselves loving Mary despite her faults and disliking Fanny because of her virtues, so Austen must have recognized that while Fanny would have made an excellent model for a conduct book, she could never have been the author of
Mansfield Park.
It is Mary, with her energy and vivacity, her sharp eye and keen wit, who most resembles Austen, and Mary who signals Austen’s lingering attraction to the mobile and the changing, perhaps, even, to the revolutionary.
Mansfield Park
may be the most obviously ideological of Austen’s novels, but it is by no means unaware of the consequences, indeed the costs, of its own ideology.

 

Amanda Claybaugh
is Assistant Professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. She is currently at work on a project that considers the relation between social reform and the literary marketplace in the nineteenth-century British and American novel.

A
bout thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of a handsome house and large income. All Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the match; and her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim to it. She had two sisters to be benefited by her elevation; and such of their acquaintance as thought Miss Ward and Miss Frances quite as handsome as Miss Maria, did not scruple to predict their marrying with almost equal advantage. But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them. Miss Ward, at the end of half a dozen years, found herself obliged to be attached to the Rev. Mr. Norris, a friend of her brother-in-law, with scarcely any private fortune, and Miss Frances fared yet worse. Miss Ward’s match, indeed, when it came to the point, was not contemptible, Sir Thomas being happily able to give his friend an income in the living of Mansfield; and Mr. and Mrs. Norris began their career of conjugal felicity with very little less than a thousand a year. But Miss Frances married, in the common phrase, to disoblige her family, and by fixing on a Lieutenant of Marines, without education, fortune, or connections, did it very thoroughly. She could hardly have made a more untoward choice. Sir Thomas Bertram had interest, which, from principle as well as pride, from a general wish of doing right, and a desire of seeing all that were connected with him in situations of respectability, he would have been glad to exert for the advantage of Lady Bertram’s sister: but her husband’s profession was such as no interest could reach; and before he had time to devise any other method of assisting them, an absolute breach between the sisters had taken place. It was the natural result of the conduct of each party, and such as a very imprudent marriage almost always produces. To save herself from useless remonstrance, Mrs. Price never wrote to her family on the subject till actually married. Lady Bertram, who was a woman of very tranquil feelings, and a temper remarkably easy and indolent, would have contented herself with merely giving up her sister, and thinking no more of the matter: but Mrs. Norris had a spirit of activity, which could not be satisfied till she had written a long and angry letter to Fanny, to point out the folly of her conduct, and threaten her with all its possible ill consequences. Mrs. Price, in her turn, was injured and angry; and an answer, which comprehended each sister in its bitterness, and bestowed such very disrespectful reflections on the pride of Sir Thomas as Mrs. Norris could not possibly keep to herself, put an end to all intercourse between them for a considerable period.