The list of resemblances is a formidable one, and quite sufficient to justify the ordinary reader in thinking that Mary Crawford "was"
Eliza de Feuillide; yet if we examine the only one of the aspects common to both of which we have a knowledge in either--namely, their connection with theatricals--we see how very differently Mary and Eliza played their parts. Madame de Feuillide was, by common
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consent, the inspirer and organizer of the theatricals at Steventon.
The plays chosen were those that she had seen; she took the principal female parts, and we may be convinced that real ability went to her direction of all the matters in hand. None of this was true of Mary Crawford. She is brought in by her brother as an "under-strapper"; she accepts the post of the lively Amelia when it is found that Julia Bertram is not suited to it; she is alarmed at the nature of some of the speeches, and really uneasy until the part of Anhalt is cast and she may know to whom she is to say them. Lively and impudent as she is, her feelings for Edmund are such that she really shrinks from the awkwardness of proposing to him in the guise of Amelia and tries to harden herself by practicing the scene on Fanny. One cannot imagine Eliza de Feuillide taking another girl aside and reading a scene with her until she should have the countenance to deliver it to a man.
Private theatricals would never materialize if the people who got them up were affected with such interesting reluctance. Mary's embarrassment is of course chiefly caused by her extreme
consciousness of Edmund; but even before he had consented to take the part, and she thought she was to be opposite to the unknown Mr.
Madox, she was somewhat nervous, and said she should shorten a good many of his speeches and her own. There was something
cooler, one fancies, in the original.
In spite of the gaiety of the character, we feel that it is a doomed one almost from the start; partly because we so often have to dislike the form taken by her wit, and because so often Mary is shown, in small ways, to be subtly in the wrong. The coup de grâce is administered to her, not at the end of the book, when her callousness has lost her the one man she truly cares about, but at a simple evening party in the course of which they sit down to cards. Mary secured
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William Price's knave "at an exorbitant rate," saying: "'If I lose the game, it shall not be from not striving for it.' The game was hers, and only did not pay her for what she had given to secure it."
The poignant interest attaching to Mary Crawford arises from her capacity to appreciate, though she cannot imitate, a much better nature than her own; and it is precisely this touch of moral tragedy about her which makes one believe, independently of probability and of the evidence of Henry Austen himself, that Mary Crawford could never have been supposed to be an actual portrait of Eliza de
Feuillide by people who were acquainted with the latter. What
obviously suggested Eliza, beside the personal appearance, was the brilliant vivacity that seized upon the imagination of everybody whether they approved of it or not; the fact that when Mary
Crawford was in the room, she was the central point of interest and animation, and that, in addition to her natural powers, she had the air of sophistication and fashion which made her seem as of another world in the eyes of her friends and relations in the country.
To say that it is the war of good and evil in Mary Crawford and her brother that invests them with their interest is to attempt a definition in black and white of what Jane Austen has accomplished in the infinitely subtle gradations of human character; but Henry Crawford, like his sister, is attracted by someone who, he feels, offers him a more solid chance of happiness than any woman of his own circle with whom he has previously been acquainted. It is another instance of Jane Austen's complete freedom from any romantic falsity that she explains the attraction Fanny Price has for Henry Crawford as she does. There have been many novels, of which Jane Eyre was perhaps the first, in which an insignificant heroine captivates a man against what are
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apparently great odds; but to Jane Austen's mind that was not the normal course of events, and she most carefully smooths away the improbabilities inherent in the situation of a handsome, experienced and wealthy man's falling in love with a girl of very moderate attractions and who is almost always seen under a disadvantage before she allows that situation to arise. * The strongest weapon in the hand of the unconscious Fanny is her genuine indifference to Mr.
Crawford's charms and her actual dislike of him as a man. Most men do not discover a charm in indifference and dislike, but the majority of men are not unusually attractive to women and accustomed to being run after by them from their earliest years. That such men do exist, however infrequently, and that they find a unique challenge in a woman's lack of response, had been amply demonstrated in those years immediately prior to the publication of Mansfield Park. Lord Byron's marriage proves once and for all that Jane Austen was
correct in her view of the man, blasé with female attention, when he meets a woman who does not like him. The only intelligent action of Lady Caroline Lamb in her connection with him was her refusal, when they first met, to allow him to be introduced to her.
But the charm of Fanny's coldness is not allowed to operate on Henry Crawford until her beautiful cousins are out of the way, and he is left at Mansfield with no other female society besides his sister and Mrs. Grant. He had already been described as feeling the want of something to do, and he undertook to make Fanny fall in love with him merely as the diversion of an idle fortnight. It was her totally unexpected
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* See also Jane Austen's handling of Edmund's falling in love with Fanny:
"I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary very much as to time in different people." Ch. 48.
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resistance which made him examine her with such attention, fancy that she was grown taller and see for the first time how beautiful her delicate complexion was. Once his attention was truly concentrated upon her, he was able to perceive the charm of her moral qualities, and "that sweetness which makes so essential a part of every woman's worth in the judgment of man, that though he sometimes loves where it is not, he can never believe it absent." When the time comes, we feel that it is perfectly natural that he should be able to see so much; but a less conscientious realist than Jane Austen would, to increase the heroine's triumph, have made him out as able to see it far too soon.
Another aspect of the honesty with which the emotional interest of Mansfield Park is handled lies in the author's candid admission that had Henry Crawford but refrained from entangling himself again with Mrs. Rushworth, he would certainly have overcome Fanny's
resistance in the end. The marriage of Edmund and Mary, which was on the point of being brought about when Maria's elopement caused the general upheaval, would, Jane Austen says, have been of great assistance to Crawford, because it would have given Fanny the most urgent incentive to overcome her passion for her cousin; and with that obstacle removed, Crawford's assiduity and tact and his very great powers of pleasing would not have been permanently
withstood by an inexperienced girl of eighteen. She had, in fact, begun to like him already.
Mrs. Norris is the most strongly disagreeable of all Jane Austen's creations, yet the character is a subtle one. She exhibited the very curious state of mind which made her go out of her way to get Fanny adopted by the Bertram family, and then watch with ferret-like eagerness to see that she was never treated as anything but an inferior dependent;
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the opportunity for her activities being provided by the passive, uncomplaining nature of Fanny, the sloth of Lady Bertram and the fact that Sir Thomas, dignified and aloof, knew very little of the domestic details of Mansfield. The reconciliation of two such
d
ifferent lines of conduct lies, of course, in Mrs. Norris' passion for gratifying her sense of power. She was moderately well off herself, but she could not bear to spend her own money, but only that of other people; "nobody knew better how to dictate liberality to others." "'Well, and if they were ten,' she cried, when Mr. Rushworth mentioned that Repton's terms were five guineas a day, 'I am sure you need not regard it. The expense need not be any impediment. If I were you, I should not think of the expense. I would have everything done in the best style and made as nice as possible. For my own part, if I had anything within the fiftieth part of the size of Sotherton, I should be always planting and improving, for, naturally, I am
excessively fond of it. It would be too ridiculous for me to attempt anything where I am now, with my little halfacre. It would be quite a burlesque.'"
The avid anxiety to connect herself with the wealth and luxury of Mansfield Park and to behave almost as if she owned it, which is rendered possible by the torpor of Lady Bertram, is shown in small ways: she was in agony, on the evening of Sir Thomas' return,
because "It had left her nothing to do." "Would Sir Thomas have consented to eat, she might have gone to the housekeeper with
troublesome directions, and insulted the footmen with injunctions of despatch; but Sir Thomas resolutely declined all dinner; he would take nothing, nothing till tea came--he would rather wait for tea.
Still, Mrs. Norris was at intervals urging something different; and in the most interesting moment of his passage to England, when the alarm of a French privateer
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was at the height she burst through his recital with the proposal of soup."
Her anxiety that no one should infringe upon the prerogatives she has acquired for herself makes her resentful of Susan's arrival with Fanny when the latter returns from Portsmouth. "She felt her as a spy, and an intruder, and an indigent niece, and everything most odious." And her desire that no one but herself outside the immediate family of Mansfield should receive anything that might be going, as well as her eagerness to domineer, are shown with extraordinary imaginative power in the scene when she talks to Fanny when it has been decided that the latter shall accompany Edmund to the Grants' dinner party.
Of the good side of her nature, which, however small, could not, in so convincing a portrait of a human being, be altogether absent, Jane Austen has indicated an aspect when she says that though Mrs. Price would have done as well in a situation of ease as Lady Bertram, Mrs.
Norris would have made much better work of bringing up nine
children on a small income. Another is her affection for the Bertram nephews and nieces. This is so inextricably mingled with her desire to associate herself with the family of Mansfield Park, and her base and selfish desire bears fruit in something so natural and good, the complexity gives the reader a sensation of uneasiness and pain. One does not despise her because, when catastrophe overwhelms the
family, she is reduced to impotence; her appearance, stupefied by shock, is much more respectable than her practical and overbearing behavior throughout the previous part of the book; and her blind championing of Maria, though it may be ascribed to a desire to vindicate herself, is something so nearly approaching what is
lovable, that though everybody, including Jane Austen, is delighted to see the last of her, one feels
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as she makes her exit that here is something profounder than
comedy, even in its deepest interpretation.
Mansfield Park contains more of those fragments which we can recognize as of Jane Austen's own biography than any of the other novels. There is the amber cross given by William to Fanny; the tradition that William Price's character, in its boldness, its love of dancing, and its brotherly affection, contained many elements of that of Charles Austen; the likeness of Mary Crawford to Madame de
Feuillide which has already been touched upon; and the interest of a house party in private theatricals.
Jane Austen's treatment of the episode of Lover's Vows is an
illustration of how true her material is to the unvarying essence of human nature even where the medium in which it is presented has gone out of fashion. Edmund Bertram's principal objection to the Mansfield theatricals --that there was something intrinsically improper in undertaking them at all--seems at first sight groundless not only by our standards, but by those of his own time.
The frankness of the present day and its lack of prejudice are much nearer to the spirit of the early nineteenth century than to that of the Victorian era. At the same time, the ideas regulating ordinary behavior in country districts were altogether different from our own.
It is true that in London, the Duchess of Devonshire, canvassing for Fox, beguiled votes from butchers and chimney-sweeps with kisses; that Lady Caroline Lamb visited Lord Byron's rooms at night
dressed as a boy; that men emblazoned with stars and orders
crammed into Harriet Wilson's modest opera box, while their
duchesses bridled in haughty isolation on the opposite tiers. All this was a commonplace in the world of Mary Crawford. But when Mary came to Mansfield, she felt the difference with a vengeance. There, as in the remote country
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it still does, propriety ruled unchallenged; and interminable
rehearsals with people, four of whom were very conscious though unacknowledged lovers, and two of whom were making love under
the jealous and resentful eye of the man to whom the lady was
engaged, provided something to which a well-bred man of
conventional views such as Edmund Bertram might very reasonably object. Of more importance to the fundamental reality of the novel, the situation was one which, quite apart from any question of
propriety, was bound to cause very strong feelings of excitement and unrest in the different characters.
With regard to the condemnation of the play, chiefly conveyed to us through Fanny's opinion of it, one is at first surprised at its being considered "totally unfit" for home presentation. The language of Mrs. Inchbald's translation is so decorous that it is difficult at first sight to see why it should not have been pronounced by anybody; but such an opinion is the result of a failure in imagination. Mrs.
Inchbald called her translation Lover's Vows, but Kotzebue had called the original Das Liebes Kind--in plain English, The Bastard.
The sub-plot, which was to have been supported by Edmund and
Mary, concerns the wooing by Baron Wildenheim's daughter of her tutor Anhalt, who loves her but feels it out of the question to say so; but the main theme concerns the rescue of Agatha by her illegitimate son, the latter's recognition by his father, Baron Wildenheim, and the Baron's belated reparation in marrying the waiting-maid he had seduced twenty years before. There is nothing in this of a startling character, and none of the Mansfield party, not Edmund, not even Fanny, would have objected to seeing Lover's Vows in the
professional theatre. But Edmund put his finger on the genuine objection to the business when he drew the distinction between
"good, hardened acting"
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and the efforts of ladies and gentlemen. Anyone who has seen an amateur company attempt such a play as Rain before an audience of their fellow townsmen who punctuate the performance with loud
guffaws in the wrong place, can realize at once the real force of Edmund Bertram's, or indeed Jane Austen's, objection to the party's choice of Das Liebes Kind. In the Mansfield production of the play Agatha and Frederic faded out of the picture: it was Maria Bertram who clasped Henry Crawford to her bosom and hailed him as her
illegitimate son, and Mr. Yates who repented of having seduced her and offered to make the position good.
It is characteristic of Jane Austen that though she presents the theatricals in a wonderfully varied light, using the episode as a touchstone to bring out the essential attributes of every single person in any way connected with them, yet her final rounding-off of t
he situation is one of brilliant comedy. Sir Thomas, having arrived at Mansfield and exchanged greetings with his family, finds he cannot settle down to his first evening at home without having one look at his own dear room, and walks away to it before anyone has time to warn him of the rehearsal his sudden appearance has broken off.
"Sir Thomas had been a good deal surprised to find candles burning in his room: and on casting his eye round it, to see other symptoms of recent habitation and a general air of confusion in the furniture.
The removal of the bookcase from before the billiard-room door struck him especially, but he had scarcely more than time to feel astonished at all this before there were sounds from the billiard-room to astonish him still further. Someone was talking there in a very loud accent; he did not know the voice--more than talking--almost hallooing. He stepped to the door, rejoicing
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at that moment in having the means of immediate communication, and opening it, found himself on the stage of a theatre, and opposed to a ranting young man, who appeared likely to knock him down
backwards. At the very moment of Yates perceiving Sir Thomas, and giving perhaps the very best start he had ever given in the whole course of his rehearsals, Tom Bertram entered at the other end of the room; and never had he found greater difficulty in keeping his countenance. His father's looks of solemnity and amazement on this, his first appearance on any stage, and the gradual metamorphosis of the impassioned Baron Wildenheim into the well-bred and easy Mr.
Yates, making his bow and apology to Sir Thomas Bertram, was
such an exhibition, such a piece of true acting as he would not have lost upon any account."
The portion of the story which takes Fanny to her home in
Portsmouth is Jane Austen's only excursion into the rough and
sordid, but is accomplished with such force as dispels the illusion that her range was restricted to the narrow circle of the well-to-do.
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