Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (44 page)

a knowingness that Fanny would rather not recognize in herself, a

mutual knowingness, moreover—a kind of epistolary nudging and

winking—that connects Fanny with one rival through its identifica-

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tion of another. By assuming that Fanny will be as interested as she is

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in Maria’s reaction to Henry Crawford’s declared love for Fanny, Mary

locates her within a network of illicit desires that makes her modesty

only a function of contrast: “Shall I tell y ou how Mrs. Rushworth

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looked when y our name was mentioned?” (267). Mary ’s gossipy

intimacy forces Fanny to acknowledge against her will first Henry’s

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desire for her, then his former flirtation with her cousin, and finally

the possibility that a married woman can continue to feel love and

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jealousy for another—a forecast of the feelings Fanny will bring to

her own half of the double marriage if Mary, Henry, and Edmund

have their way. Like Mary, Fanny becomes a mere “woman of charac-

ter” (299), whose behavior is above reproach but whose moral reason-

ing is “corrupted.”

The epistolary mode licenses this construction. We do not read

Fanny’s replies, but, were she to correct or protest against Mary’s

assumptions, the time lag written into correspondence would still

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allow Mary to have the last word on paper. In a later letter, Mary

writes to inquire about the health of Tom Bertram, whose expected

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death she hopes will free Edmund to give up the church and marry

her. After a few sentences of properly expressed yet insincere con-

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cern, she follows with an ironic commentary on her own platitudes

that incorporates Fanny in her acknowledged hypocrisy: “Fanny,

Fanny, I see you smile, and look cunning, but upon my honour, I

never bribed a physician in my life” (294). Of course Mary doesn’t

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see
anything of the sort, but she also doesn’t see Fanny frown and

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shake her head disapprovingly, as Henry does in an earlier scene.57

In the relationship constructed by her letter, that response does not

exist. Fanny is forced into conformity with her mind’s eye, forced

to become the kind of confidante Mary wants at the moment—her

horror at role-playing temporarily forestalled.58 Fanny doesn’t have

to act in this private theatrical; she has only to be the recipient of

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Mary ’s letters to become the mirror for Mary ’s desires. This is a

more revolutionary piece of casting than when Mary was typecast as

the sexually forward Amelia in
Lover’s Vows
. What she (and, in the

fiction of the letter, Fanny) desires is nothing less than the death of

one man and the apostasy of another. Like Byron in his wife’s rep-

resentation, Mary is asking Fanny to “smile” at “Vice.”59 Or, rather,

she is constructing a Fanny who, like Mary with her fondness for

puns, already smiles at vice.60 Such a revolution is possible because

conventional understandings and expressions of right and wrong

are in the end nothing but conventions, easily reversible depending

on circumstances. With characteristic fluidity of nomination, Mary

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closes her argument by assuring Fanny not only that they feel the

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same but that right is wrong, and wrong is right: “And now do not

trouble yourself to be ashamed of either my feelings or your own.

Believe me, they are not only natural, they are philanthropic and

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virtuous” (294–95).

Mary’s self-interested colonization of language—selfishness is phi-

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lanthropy; vice is virtue; shame and nature are divorced from one

another—is a version of the same sophistry that Lady Byron claimed

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her husband exercised upon her. In a statement written thirty years

after his death, she explained:

He laboured to convince me that Right & Wrong were merely

Conventional, & varying with Locality & other circumstances—he

clothed these sentiments in the most seductive language—appealing

both to the Heart and Imagination. I must have been bewildered had

I not firmly & simply believed in one Immutable Standard.61

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Christensen argues that she is turning bewilderment into a final

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proof of her husband’s madness and of the marriage’s invalidity ,

deciding that, despite what she claims, she
was
bewildered by her

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husband’s sophistry . If her convictions had alway s been firm and

simple, she would have to explain how she tolerated his “eccentrici-

ties” for as long as she did, and would have to account for her aban-

donment of the marriage as a change of taste—an approbation of his

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theory that principles vary with locality and other circumstances.62

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Instead, she offers confoundment as seduction; his opinions came

clothed “in the most seductive language.” Her justification begs

another question, however, which is also central to anxiety about

seduction in
Mansfield Park
. Is seduction the creation of a desire

where there was none, or is it the cultivation of a desire that is incipi-

ent but either unregarded or unacknowledged? To the extent that it

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R o y a l R o m a n c e s

bewilders, it must be the latter. One cannot be confounded except

by the presence of conflicting desires or categories of desire: famil-

ial, connubial, incestuous, adulterous, heterosexual, homosexual.

Mary Crawford is following this principle of seduction when she

writes, “Fanny, Fanny, I see you smile, and look cunning,” or when

she calls Edmund back at the end of their final interview with “a

saucy playful smile, seeming to invite, in order to subdue” (311).

The subtext of both modes of address—barely subtext—is, “you

know you want it.”

In Edmund’s case this is true. He wants to be subdued, and, in his

account, he nearly is: “I resisted; it was the impulse of the moment to

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resist, and still walked on. I have since—sometimes—for a moment—

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regretted that I did not go back; but I know I was right” (311–12).

His narrative inverts the expected exchange, in which the impulse

of the moment would be to accept the invitation in Mary ’s smile.

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Resistance is impulsive, however, only in the moment of tempta-

tion. It becomes durable in recollection, when regret becomes the

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momentary impulse. Mary ’s seductive smile both cry stallizes desire

and forecloses the possibility of gratification, and Edmund must

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rewrite the scene to elide his own confoundment.63 Until Maria’s

adultery forced him to give up the idea of marry ing her, Edmund,

like Fanny, had been able to mingle categories of desire, imagining

a coexistence with both women, whose “perfect friendship” he has

promoted as a way of fixing their roles as complementary halves of an

essential whole. “I would not have the shadow of a coolness,” he tells

Fanny, “between the two dearest objects I have on earth” (181). That

only one of these relationships is eroticized is a fiction designed to

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legitimize polygynous desire.64 The invitation in Mary’s smile offers

this triangular relationship as a continuing possibility, but only if he

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accepts her definition of adultery as folly. If he agreed to her re-nom-

ination, however, he would have to acknowledge that she is as much

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capable of adultery as his sister; “exposure” (309) is the only evil to

be avoided.65 His fantasy of coexistence is a dream of having Fanny

(without having her) and sharing Mary. In relinquishing this dream

he rewrites the moment of its greatest intensity. Like Lady Byron, he

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broods on the impulse until the impulse becomes naturalized and

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durable, and produces as absolute, “I know I was right,” a decision he

has already represented as relative.

Both Edmund and Lady Byron are partial readers, who claim

that access to their subjects authorizes them to interpret, but for

whom access becomes something terrifying from which they must

escape. Both equivocate: “I have since—sometimes—for a moment—

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regretted”; or raise the possibility of equivocation: “I must have

been bewildered.” But both retreat from or stif le equivocation

with an affirmation of the pure and simple belief in one Immutable

Standard of rightness. Only one, however, is a character in a novel,

and therein lies the difference. As a novelist, Austen can introduce

an equivocation that she then tames under the standard narrative

conventions of courtship fiction. However much she may render

these conventions ironic, they still remain hers to manipulate. She

alone can “restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to

tolerable comfort” (312). Lady By ron’s plot, on the other hand,

has no such neat conclusion. Because her authority for the separa-

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tion rests in what cannot be said, the answer she provides at once

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forecloses and perpetuates discussion. Her refusal to name her rea-

sons either does name them, or it doesn’t, depending upon whom

one asks.66 One may never know the truth of such stories, but,

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for some, knowing that there
are
stories is enough. In his
Letter
,

Lockhart offers the gossiping readers as an instance of what Eric

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Eisner has called the “eagerness of both male and female readers,

the
Letter
’s author included, to insist they know the real By ron”

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(41). Unlike his women, however, Lockhart is not willing to put

up with any little eccentricities. Resembling more the wife who left

than the adoring readers who wish themselves in her place, he dis-

penses unsolicited advice, adjuring Byron to “Stick to Don Juan: it

is the only sincere thing you have ever written” (82),67 and chastis-

ing him for publicizing his version of the separation narrative in the

two poems, “Fare Thee Well!” and “A Sketch from Private Life.”

“Fare Thee Well!” as Paul Elledge and Eric Eisner have shown,

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is thoroughly equivocal.68 But its shiftiness does not make it any

the less, in Lockhart’s estimation, an inexcusably public attempt to

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write the end of the story. In an inversion of Brougham’s declara-

tion to the Lords about the country’s unanimous verdict on Queen

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Caroline, Lockhart admonishes Byron, “The world had nothing

whatever to do with a quarrel between you and Lady Byron, and

you were the last man that should have set about persuading the

world that the world had or could have any thing to do with such

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a quarrel” (107).69

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For Lockhart, Byron’s complicity in the public positioning of his

poem is an attempt both to impose an ending on a story that should

have no end (a separation, unlike a divorce, does not conclude any-

thing; it is like the ceasefire that allows the combatants to go home