Mansfield Park (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (69 page)

Audrey defends
Mansfield Park
to humorous effect. Tom calls it “a notoriously bad book,” though he has never read it, and notes that even Lionel Trilling, one of Austen’s biggest supporters, condemns as “simply absurd” the “novel’s premise—that there’s something immoral in a group of young people putting on a play.” But Audrey dismisses Trilling’s opinion as “very strange”: “He says that ‘nobody’ could like the heroine of
Mansfield Park.
I like her. Then he goes on and on about how ‘we’ modem people, today, with ‘our’ modem attitudes ‘bitterly resent’
Mansfield Park
because its heroine is virtuous. What’s wrong with a novel having a virtuous heroine?” Tom responds that “everything Jane Austen wrote seems ridiculous from today’s perspective,” but Audrey keeps the upper hand: “Has it ever occurred to you that today, looked at from Jane Austen’s perspective, would look much worse?”

Metropolitan
was nominated for an Academy Award in 1991 for Best Original Screenplay. In interviews Stillman often speaks of his admiration for Jane Austen, whose influence can also be seen in his
Barcelona
(1994) and
The Last Days of Disco
(1998).

 

 

Patricia Rozema reinterpreted Austen’s novel in an ambitious film adaptation,
Mansfield Park
(1999), that bewildered some critics and delighted others. In this version Fanny, played by Frances O‘Connor, aspires to be a writer. She reads her work—adapted from the juvenilia of Austen—directly to the camera. The film takes on a life of its own, glossing over the fact that Austen was fiercely private about her writing and published it anonymously. Playwright Harold Pinter is Sir Thomas Bertram and Jonny Lee Miller
(Trainspotting)
plays Edmund Bertram.

Rozema’s
Mansfield Park
also expands on topics to which Austen only alludes, such as the slave trade. At one point a book of graphic illustrations depicting the atrocities of slavery in Antigua horrifies the characters, although in the novel Austen’s characters never discuss such social issues. While some critics have complained that these alterations spoil the true spirit of Austen, others believe they add another degree of complexity to her work.

While O’Connor’s Fanny is ostentatious in a manner unimaginable in her novelistic counterpart, the decor and staging of the film are marvelously understated.
Mansfield Park
looks properly noble in its austerity: Rooms have little decoration and bare floors, avoiding the garishness of some costume dramas. The slow-dance scene is filmed in slow-motion with thoughtful close-ups, adding a graceful choreographic touch. With vivid, likable acting, Rozema’s
Mansfield Park
pays homage to one extraordinary writer by creating another out of one of her immortal characters.

Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second. But among the writers who, in the point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings. There are, for example, four clergymen, none of whom we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom—Mr. Edward Ferrars, Mr. Henry Tilney, Mr. Edmund Bertram, and Mr. Elton. They are all specimens of the upper part of the middle class. They have all been liberally educated. They all lie under the restraints of the same sacred profession. They are all young. They are all in love. Not one of them has any hobby-horse, to use the phrase of Sterne. Not one has a ruling passion, such as we read of in Pope. Who would not have expected them to be insipid likenesses of each other? No such thing. Harpagon is not more unlike to Jourdain, Joseph Surface is not more unlike to Sir Lucius O’Trigger, than every one of Miss Austen’s young divines to all his reverend brethren. And almost all this is done by touches so delicate that they elude analysis, that they defy the powers of description, and that we know them to exist only by the general effect to which they have contributed.

—
Edinburgh Review
(January 1843)

[Jane Austen] was great and [her novels] were beautiful, because she and they were honest, and dealt with nature nearly a hundred years ago as realism deals with it to-day. Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material, and Jane Austen was the first and last of the English novelists to treat material with entire truthfulness. Because she did this, she remains the most artistic of the English novelists.

—My Literary
Passions (1895)

‘Sense and Sensibility’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice’ are the gay offsprings of youth. Very different is the tone of ‘Mansfield Park,’ justly considered its author’s most finished production. But in reading we are conscious that half our wonder is gone. The result may be, and in some ways is, more considerable than anything achieved bv the earlier efforts. In ‘Mansfield Park,’ Miss Austen’s art is seen in its most delicate form, her style is quieter, the effects she produces with it are even subtler than before. Nevertheless it is the mature fruit of a mature tree. What delights incomparably in the books of the first period, is the union of girlish freshness, of youthful zest, with the admirable mental balance which only experience can give. “Is it possible,” asks Mr. Jowett in his diary, “for youth to have the experience and observation and moderation of age, or for age to retain the force of youth?” Miss Austen’s powers grew and deepened, but in her first books we find the sense and discrimination of her last, and it is this which taken together with their gaiety gives to them their peculiar charm. It is as if it were possible to be at once old and young, as if a girl were to go to a ball, dance it out, and enjoy everything as much as any one there, with the full unreflecting reception essential for perfect enjoyment, and yet immediately after see the matter with the eyes of one who had gone to judge of the characters. This union of youth and age then, of things hardly ever found together, gives a mark even more distinguishing than excellence to such a novel as ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ ‘Mansfield Park’ is altogether an old book, perfect perhaps if we leave out of account the melodrama of the conclusion, and the occasional flapping of an extremely white white choker, but still old, with all its merit with none of the merit of youth.

‘Pride and Prejudice’ is gay, ‘Mansfield Park’ is almost sombre.

 

—
Essays on the Novel
(1897)

How well I recall the greatest literary pleasure of my life, its time and place! A dreary winter’s day without, within a generous heat and glow from the flaming grate, and I reclining at my ease on the library lounge,
Mansfield Park
in hand. Then succeed four solid hours of literary bliss, and an absorption so great that when I mechanically close the book at the last page it is only by the severest effort that I come back to the real world of pleasant indoors and bleak outdoors. I was amazed that I, a hardened fiction reader, should be so transported by this gentle tale of Miss Austen’s, and yet I enjoyed to the full the aftertaste of her perfect realistic art....

In Fanny Price we find no flaw of artistic presentment. Here comes before our eyes a real, a free, a complex human being, in whose veins, as Gautier remarks of Balzac’s characters, “runs a true red blood, instead of ink, which common authors pour into their creations.” Further, I am acquainted with no more charming figure in fiction than Fanny; she is so completely, perfectly, deliciously feminine in instinct, feeling, manner, and intelligence, and in every way a most engaging revelation of a budding womanliness. This womanliness, slightly
bourgeoise,
perhaps, but never vulgar or gross, depicted so surely and delicately, is, I think, the element in Miss Austen’s work which chiefly attracts the masculine mind, and which delighted Macaulay, Scott, Guizot, Whately, and Coleridge. Masson reports that he had known the most hard-headed men in ecstasies with it, and that the only objection as brought against it by ladies is that it reveals too many of their secrets. Jane Austen certainly accomplishes the delineation of the character of Fanny with a fascinating, unobtrusive fidelity to feminine nature, and with a clearness and wholeness in the creation, miniaturely Shakespearean.

I cannot resist the impression that in Fanny Miss Austen has in large measure written down herself. Certain it is that both show the same gentle and true femininity, the same domestic kindliness, the same delicacy of perception, and the same sensitiveness. Both are fond of dancing, and the ball episode in
Mansfield Park,
a masterpiece of quiet realism, takes, no doubt, much of its colouring from Miss Austen’s own disposition and experience. Both likewise delight in the drama, and are keenly sensitive to natural beauty.

—
Essays on Literary
Art (1897)

Lord Tennyson liked
Mansfield Park
best of all Jane Austen’s novels, and though that would not be the general verdict, it remains, as one critic says, ‘the finest example of her power of sustaining the interest throughout a long and quiet narrative.’ Fanny Price is one of her best delineations of character, and the studies of the two Bertram girls and Miss Crawford are fine pieces of work

—July 1922

[Jane Austen is] the most perfect artist among women.

—
The Common Reader
(1925)

1. William Dean Howells, a realist himself, wrote that “Jane Austen was the first and last of the English novelists to treat material with entire truthfulness.” How is Austen true to her material? Are there any ways in which she is not?

2. Hiram M. Stanley wrote that he was “acquainted with no more charming figure in fiction than Fanny; she is so completely, perfectly, deliciously feminine in instinct, feeling, manner, and intelligence, and in every way a most engaging revelation of a budding womanliness.” Lionel Trilling, on the other hand, says that “nobody” could like the heroine of
Mansfield Park.
Who’s right?

3. Jane Austen is famous for her wit, but she is not witty in general; her wit, like that of Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain, is at the
expense
of something or someone. What are the objects of Austen’s wit? Can you draw up a list of characteristics or a general structure of her wit?

4. In the introduction to this volume, Amanda Claybaugh describes the tension, even conflict, in the novel between stability, as represented by the “country house,” and “improvement.” With only a bit of stretching, these two tropes can be translated into conservatism and liberalism. Does the tension in
Mansfield Park
in any way illuminate our current political situation?

Austen, Jane.
Emma.
1816. Vol. 4 of
The Novels of Jane Austen.
Edited by R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923.