by Lona Manning
Referring to Mansfield Park in a letter to her sister Cassandra, Jane Austen wrote, “Now I will try to write of something else; —it shall be a complete change of subject—Ordination.” We should bear in mind that Edmund’s choice to become a clergyman is a central conflict in the plot, and he deserves our sympathy for the sacrifice he must make to become a clergyman—he will lose the woman he loves. He does not give free rein to his emotions—he is like buttoned-down Elinor Dashwood in that respect, but he has feelings, nonetheless. Mary Crawford is discerning enough to recognize him as good husband material.
One barrier that prevents some modern readers from appreciating Mansfield Park is that the manners of today are very different from those in Austen’s time, so the things that Fanny and Edmund object to as being improper make them seem prudish and priggish. They criticize Mary Crawford for making a light, passing, disrespectful reference to her uncle in company. Fanny is “quite astonished.” Who would be shocked today by a young person making disparaging remarks about their elders? Possibly where I now live and work, mainland China, where Confucian mores still prevail to a great degree, but not in the Western world!
In another episode, the young people are on a pleasure excursion to Sotherton, the stately home of Maria Bertram’s fiancé. Julia, the younger Bertram daughter, winds up lagging behind the other young people and she’s stuck with Mrs. Rushworth, (the fiancé’s mother) as her walking companion. Austen scolds her for chafing at this.
The remaining three, Mrs. Rushworth, Mrs. Norris, and Julia, were still far behind; for Julia… was obliged to keep by the side of Mrs. Rushworth, and restrain her impatient feet to that lady's slow pace, while her aunt, having fallen in with the housekeeper, who was come out to feed the pheasants, was lingering behind in gossip with her. Poor Julia, the only one out of the nine not tolerably satisfied with their lot, was now in a state of complete penance….. The politeness which she had been brought up to practise as a duty made it impossible for her to escape; while the want of that higher species of self-command, that just consideration of others, that knowledge of her own heart, that principle of right, which had not formed any essential part of her education, made her miserable under it.
Wouldn’t most young people today just walk away and join the other young people without a backward glance, regardless of the fact that Mrs. Rushworth is their hostess and she’s just fed them a nice meal and taken them on a tour of the house?
It would still be shocking today for a newlywed woman to run away with her lover, but it would not ordinarily result in her exile from society and her own family for the rest of her life, as is Maria’s fate in Mansfield Park.
By modern standards, virtually nothing Mary Crawford says is objectionable—whether she is making a joke about sodomy in the Royal Navy, insulting the clergy, or complaining about her uncle or Dr. Grant, her brother-in-law. One exception which may be more disturbing today than when Mansfield Park was first published, is that Mary jokes about being suspected of trying to murder Tom Bertram, so that Edmund can become the heir: “Fanny, Fanny, I see you smile and look cunning, but, upon my honour, I never bribed a physician in my life.” To joke about this to Fanny, to imply that Fanny would laugh along with her, while Tom is struggling for his life! And to do this in a letter which, after all, Fanny could show to anybody. The passage effectually illustrates Mary Crawford’s moral blindness, her artificiality and the hollowness of her professed friendship for Fanny, whom she doesn’t begin to understand. “[A] mind led astray and bewildered, and without any suspicion of being so; darkened, yet fancying itself light.”
Regardless, many readers of Mansfield Park prefer the lively, witty Mary Crawford to the more stolid, timid, humourless Fanny. Some Mansfield Park fan fiction has been written in which the Crawfords are redeemed and take their supposedly rightful place at centre stage as the hero and heroine. In my variation, I have “amped up” their sociopathic qualities to make it clear that they are dangerous people who don’t care what havoc they create in other people’s lives.
The central example of how modern manners and morals have changed since 1809, is the private theatricals which the young people stage at Mansfield Park, a key part of the plot. Many readers can’t understand, as Lionel Trilling put it, “why it is so very wrong for young people in a dull country house to put on a play.” In my variation, I have explained more about the play, Lovers' Vows, and have included some of the actual dialogue, which should help the reader understand why Sir Thomas, the absent father of the house, would have objected to it. (While reading the actual play, Lovers' Vows, I realized that Mrs. Norris is actually paraphrasing the entry line of the character of Cottager’s Wife when she scolds Fanny for refusing to take the part: “What a piece of work here is about nothing!”)
In addition, modern readers might miss how cleverly Austen chose this play and cast the characters in her novel in the various parts. The dullard Mr. Rushworth plays a Don Juan type, while Mansfield Park’s real Don Juan, Henry Crawford, is busy seducing his fiancée. Edmund is cast as an earnest young clergyman who shaped and formed the mind of his protégée, Amelia, who falls in love with him, just as, in real life, he guided Fanny’s tastes and she secretly loves him. Finally, Maria plays a fallen woman, and becomes one herself when she runs away with Henry Crawford.
* * * * * *
While some of the morals and manners of the Regency era were stricter than ours, there are other aspects of their life which we find incongruous and unjust—slavery for one! Here Sir Thomas scolds his oldest son for going heavily into debt, which obliges him to give a “living”—that is, the income attached to the local parsonage—to someone else, instead of holding it for his second son:
You have robbed Edmund for ten, twenty, thirty years, perhaps for life, of more than half the income which ought to be his. It may hereafter be in my power, or in yours (I hope it will), to procure him better preferment; but it must not be forgotten that no benefit of that sort would have been beyond his natural claims on us, and that nothing can, in fact, be an equivalent for the certain advantage which he is now obliged to forego through the urgency of your debts.
If one brother drank and gambled away half of another brother’s “income for life,” wouldn’t this create a serious breach in most modern families? We never hear Edmund or anyone else drop a word on the subject.
Internal evidence in the novel suggests that the chief events of Mansfield Park take place in 1808, the year after the British Parliament outlawed the slave trade (that is, transporting and selling slaves, not slavery itself). Here is the reference to it in Mansfield Park:
“Did not you hear me ask [Sir Thomas] about the slave-trade last night?” [Fanny asks Edmund].
“I did—and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.”
Austen does not reveal what the question was, or how Sir Thomas answered. It’s frequently remarked of Jane Austen that she ignored dramatic real-life events such as the Napoleonic Wars, in favour of domestic affairs. This was obviously her conscious choice, so I think it’s faintly ridiculous that the merest passing reference to slavery in Mansfield Park has led some to claim that the book is an anti-slavery tract. I agree with the suggestion that Sir Thomas Bertram’s extended absence in Antigua is simply a plot device to get him out of the way, not a means of introducing the topic of chattel slavery into the book. Because of Napoleon, Europe was closed off to English people at that time, so there were comparatively few distant places to which Austen could dispatch Sir Thomas, to enable her to advance her storyline of the Maria, Rushworth and Henry Crawford triangle.
However, the fact of Sir Thomas and his plantations means that modern readers of the Mansfield Park must inevitably grapple with this issue.
Some modern readers may find it impossible not to dwell upon the fact that slavery supports the elegant, civilized lifestyle of the family. The critical appreciation of many of our great works of art has b
een challenged by changing sensibilities about racial stereotypes, cultural appropriation, and sexism. The Merchant of Venice has for its comic villain a grasping Jew who gets his comeuppance. Turandot, the Chinese princess of Puccini’s opera, has three court officials named Ping, Pang and Pong. Even my beloved Astaire and Rogers movies depict Fred Astaire behaving in a fashion which would get him arrested for stalking today. If we’re going to continue to enjoy these great masterpieces, we have to calmly and rationally understand the times and mores in which they were created. To do otherwise is to deprive yourself of the enjoyment of our cultural heritage, and to subject everyone around you to the irritation of listening to your virtue-signaling. (Oh, you’re against slavery, are you? How courageous of you to speak up.)
Because of the difficulty of dealing with the slavery issue, because of the grim reality underlying the world of Mansfield Park, I frankly wanted to avert my eyes from it; but the more I researched the period in which the main action of the novel is set, the more fascinated I became with the true story of the campaign to abolish the slave trade.
So the abolitionist movement does play a part in A Contrary Wind, with consequences for many of the characters, including some new characters I’ve invented (Mrs. Butters, her lady’s maid, and Mr. Thompson) and some real historical people who make an appearance in this variation (Hannah More and James Stephen).
I have also included some of the real arguments made by people who defended the slave trade at the time. To attempt to understand is not to endorse, of course. And because I prefer to think well of Sir Thomas, I gave him a troubled conscience. The 1999 movie which portrayed Sir Thomas as a brutal slave owner skews the novel completely out of shape.
Now, finally, to the central problem with Mansfield Park: the heroine, Fanny Price. Why is Fanny Price so unlikeable, that in modern film and television adaptations of the book, Austen’s timid, long-suffering Fanny Price is excised completely and replaced by a feisty, spunky, rebellious Fanny Price v. 2.0?
Tony Tanner pointed out that the things that irritate us about Fanny Price—her physical frailty, her passivity, her humility, her tendency to cry at the drop of a hat—are presented in the book as virtues. Here are some descriptions of her from some literary critics: “She is never, ever, wrong,” (Tony Tanner) she is a “monster of complacency and pride…. morally detestable,” (Kingsley Amis), “a dreary, debilitated, priggish, goody-goody,” (W.G. Harding), “fiction holds no heroine more repulsive in her cast-iron self-righteousness,” (Reginald Ferrar). Author Robert Rodi points out that Fanny “evades possibility, declines to decide, makes no move, lifts no finger to alter her destiny in any way, good or bad; takes no risk, assumes no responsibility, [and] rebuffs all affection.” Pretty harsh words about an 18-year-old girl! And I’ll pile on by agreeing with Rodi that she is helpless to help herself, whether she has been forgotten and left to sit on a bench, or is waiting for someone to bring her a cup of tea. Her only power is the power of refusal—significantly, refusing to accept Henry Crawford’s marriage proposal, despite the enormous pressures brought to bear on her.
In Mansfield Park, Austen skilfully describes the inner life, emotions and thoughts of Fanny Price—sometimes even moment to moment, as for example here:
Dr. Grant was in the vestibule, and as they stopt to speak to him she found, from Edmund's manner, that he did mean to go with her. He too was taking leave. She could not but be thankful. In the moment of parting, Edmund was invited by Dr. Grant to eat his mutton with him the next day; and Fanny had barely time for an unpleasant feeling on the occasion, when Mrs. Grant, with sudden recollection, turned to her and asked for the pleasure of her company too. This was so new an attention, so perfectly new a circumstance in the events of Fanny's life, that she was all surprise and embarrassment; and while stammering out her great obligation, and her “but she did not suppose it would be in her power,” was looking at Edmund for his opinion and help.
In less than a minute, Fanny goes from a thrill of pleasure that Edmund is not staying at the parsonage with Mary Crawford, and will actually be walking home at her side, then, she feels rejected and left out because Edmund is invited to dinner right in front of her (she feels alarmed and jealous as well because it means he’ll be spending an evening in Mary Crawford’s company,) but when, a second later, the invitation is extended to her, she is so overcome and nervous that she plunges into her most unbecoming trait—everyone must stand around and wait while Fanny Price wallows in humility. The momentous question: “Should Fanny eat dinner with the neighbours?” is finally referred to Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram to decide on her behalf.
Alas, when Fanny Price does actually speak, as opposed to stammering, I don’t like her any better. Her soliloquies in praise of nature sound faintly ridiculous and pompous to me, [The evergreen! How beautiful, how welcome, how wonderful the evergreen!].
I can only view her with sympathy by considering that she grew up in a very isolated setting and doesn’t understand how to make ordinary small talk. Who else, when asked, “You have been here a month, I think?” would answer: “No, not quite a month. It is only four weeks tomorrow since I left Mansfield.”
“You are a most accurate and honest reckoner,” (responds Henry Crawford.) “I should call that a month.”
“I did not arrive here till Tuesday evening.”
And what lover would persist in the face of this, if this is a foretaste of the domestic conversation he’ll be enduring for the rest of his life?
Podcaster Kristen (of the Jane Austen fandom podcast “First Impressions”) who has boldly declared Mansfield Park “the best novel ever published,” points out that Fanny Price clearly suffers from social anxiety disorder, a common and surely a forgivable problem. She prefers to sit and listen and in fact has a dread of being the centre of attention, which places her at a disadvantage in being the heroine of a novel.
Although I don’t loathe Fanny Price as many others do, my beef with her as a heroine is that she is never tempted to do other than what she does.* A person who is never tempted to get drunk is not more virtuous than the alcoholic who must resist the urge to drink. A person who is never tempted to gluttony is not more virtuous than the plump person turning away from the buffet table. Fanny has no inner struggle to overcome. She must withstand the outside pressures upon her, especially the pressure to marry Henry Crawford, to stay true to her own beliefs.
And so, in re-reading Mansfield Park over the years, I have been tempted to “tweak” Fanny just a bit. This book came about because I was unexpectedly and suddenly inspired by two particular passages; firstly, when Henry Crawford wishes that “a steady contrary wind” across the Atlantic had prevented Sir Thomas Bertram from returning home so that the young people could have continued staging Lovers' Vows, and secondly, a truly shocking moment when Aunt Norris (“one of the most plausibly odious characters in fiction,” Tony Tanner calls her) insults Fanny in front of everyone: “I shall think her a very obstinate, ungrateful, girl... considering who and what she is.”
I asked myself, what if Fanny broke away from the truly—to use the modern phrase—dysfunctional situation she’s living in? What if Aunt Norris’s remark was the straw that broke the camel’s back? And what if Sir Thomas had been held back by a contrary wind? And finally, what if Fanny was tempted, truly tempted, to do something that was against her strict moral code? What would tempt her? How would the story have unfolded differently?
In A Contrary Wind, I started out with making those three variations, placed the characters in motion, and let their actions and interactions play out.
*There is a suggestion that in time, she might relent and marry Henry Crawford, but I for one, feel Crawford was kidding himself; he was in love, briefly, with the idea of being in love, and Fanny is right—they are too dissimilar to ever work as a couple. One can’t imagine the high-spirited Henry Crawford being happy with Fanny.
Acknowledgements and References
I wish to thank Jane Austen! What mo
re can be said of her, and of her genius?
A big thank you to my son Joseph Manning for acting as my editor. To switch back to 18th century mode for a moment—his keen eye and his helpful interjections, uniting as they did intelligence, sympathy and wit, rendered an otherwise tedious task more than supportable even though my toleration for lengthy sentences and plentiful commas somewhat exceeds his.
Thanks also to my sister Cara Elrod for reading an early draft and providing helpful comments on the plot and characters.
Thanks to Tim Barber of Dissect Designs for designing my new cover. Tim, you were a pleasure to work with.
I established a calendar for A Contrary Wind with the help of Ellen Moody’s calendar for Mansfield Park.
The following books were very helpful to my research of the period:
Jack Tar: Life in Nelson's Navy by Roy & Lesley Adkins, 2009
Eavesdropping on Jane Austen's England: How our ancestors lived two centuries ago, Roy & Lesley Adkins, 2014.
His Majesty’s Ship, by Alaric Bond, 2013
Royal Navy versus the Slave Traders: Enforcing Abolition at Sea, 1808—1898, by Bernard Edwards, 2007
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, by Adam Hochschild, 2006
Young Edward’s shouted commands to his little toy ship are lifted directly from: A Middy of the Slave Squadron, by Harry Collingwood (1910).
I’m indebted to Professor John Mullan, author of What Matters in Jane Austen: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved, (2014) for daring to ask the question, “Can we think that Colonel Brandon, Mr. Knightley or Captain Wentworth are indeed virgins before their marriage?” That question would also apply to Edmund Bertram; prig though he is, he’s only human. And of course, Mullan is also insightful on many other aspects of Jane Austen’s art, as well!
