The subject of improving grounds is interrupted by Mary Crawford's arch patter about her harp and her uncle the admiral. Mrs. Grant suggests that Henry Crawford has had some experience as an improver and might assist Rushworth. After, some disavowals of his abilities, he accepts Rushworth's proposal and the plan for the party is formulated at Mrs. Norris's instigation. This chapter 6 is a turning point in the structure of the novel. Henry Crawford is flirting with Rushworth's fiancee Maria Bertram. Edmund, who is the conscience of the book, heard all the plans "and said nothing." There is something vaguely sinful, from the point of view of the book, in the whole plan of all these improperly chaperoned young people going for a ramble in the park that belongs to the purblind Rushworth. All the characters have been beautifully brought out in this chapter, The Sotherton escapade is going to precede and prepare for the important chapters 13 to 20, which deal with the play that the young people rehearse.
During the discussion about improving estates, Rushworth observes that he is sure that Repton would cut down the avenue of old oaks that led from the west front of the house in order to provide a more open prospect. "Fanny, who was sitting on the other side of Edmund, exactly opposite Miss Crawford, and who had been attentively listening, now looked at him, and said in a low voice, 'Cut down an avenue! What a pity! Does it not make you think of Cowper? "Ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited." ' " We must bear in mind that in Fanny's time the reading and knowledge of poetry was much more natural, more usual, more widespread than today. Our cultural, or so-called cultural, outlets are perhaps more various and numerous than in the first decades of the last century, but when I think of the vulgarities of the radio, video, or of the incredible, trite women's magazines of today, I wonder if there is not a lot to be said for Fanny's immersion in poetry, long-winded and often pedestrian though it may have been.
"The Sofa" by William Cowper, which forms part of a long poem called The Task (1785), is a good example of the kind of thing that was familiar to the mind of a young lady of Jane's or Fanny's time and set. Cowper combines the didactic tone of an observer of morals with the romantic imagination and nature coloring so characteristic of the following decades. "The Sofa" is a very long poem. It starts with a rather racy account of the history of furniture and then goes on to describe the pleasures of nature. It will be noted that in weighing the comforts, the arts and sciences of city life and the corruption of cities against the moral influence of uncomfortable nature, forest and field, Cowper selects nature. Here is a passage from the first section of "The Sofa" in which he admires the untouched shade trees of a friend's park and deplores the contemporaneous tendency to replace old avenues by open lawns and fancy shrubbery.
Not distant far, a length of colonnade
Invites us. Monument of ancient taste,
Now scorn'd, hut worthy of a better fate.
Our fathers knew the value of a screen
From sultry suns, and in their shaded walks
And low-protracted bow'rs, enjoy'd at noon
The gloom and coolness of declining day.
We bear our shades about us; self-depriv'd
Of other screen, the thin umbrella spread,
And range an Indian waste without a tree.
That is, we cut down the trees on our country estates and then have to go about with parasols. This is what Fanny quotes when Rushworth and Crawford discuss landscaping the grounds at Sotherton:
Ye fallen avenues! once more I mourn
Your fate unmerited, once more rejoice
That yet a remnant of your race survives.
How airy and how light the graceful arch,
Yet awful as the consecrated roof
Re-echoing pious anthems! while beneath
The chequerd earth seems restless as a flood
Brush'd by the wind. So sportive is the light
Shot through the boughs, it dances as they dance,
Shadow and sunshine intermingling quick....
This is a grand passage, with delightful light effects not often met with in eighteenth-century poetry or prose.
At Sotherton Fanny's romantic conception of what a mansion's chapel should be like is disappointed by "a mere, spacious, oblong room, fitted up for the purpose of devotion—with nothing more striking or more solemn than the profusion of mahogany, and the crimson velvet cushions appearing over the ledge of the family gallery above." She is disabused, she says in a low voice to Edmund, "This is not my idea of a chapel. There is nothing awful here, nothing melancholy, nothing grand. Here are no aisles, no arches, no inscriptions, no banners. No banners, cousin, to be 'blown by the night wind of Heaven.' No signs that a 'Scottish monarch sleeps below.' " Here Fanny is quoting, though a little loosely, the description of a church from Sir Walter Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), canto 2:
10
Full many a scutcheon and banner, riven,
Shook to the cold night-wind of heaven....
And then comes the urn of the wizard:
11
The moon on the east oriel shone,
Through slender shafts of shapely stone,
By foliaged tracery combined....
Various images are painted on the windowpane and
12
The moon-beam kissed the holy pane,
And threw on the pavement a bloody stain.
They sate them down on a marble stone
A Scottish monarch slept below....
Etc. The sunlight pattern of Cowper is nicely balanced by the moonlight pattern of Scott.
More subtle than the direct quotation is the reminiscence, which has a special technical meaning when used in discussing literary technique. A literary reminiscence denotes a phrase or image or situation suggestive of an unconscious imitation on the author's part of some earlier author. An author remembers something read somewhere and uses it, recreates it in his own fashion. A good example happens in chapter 10 at Sotherton. A gate is locked, a key is missing, Rushworth goes to fetch it, Maria and Henry Crawford remain in flirtatious solitude. Maria says, " 'Yes,certainly, the sun shines and the park looks very cheerful. But unluckily that iron gate, that ha-ha, give me a feeling of restraint and hardship. I cannot get out, as the starling said.' As she spoke, and it was with expression, she walked to the gate; he followed her. Mr. Rushworth is so long fetching this key!' " Maria's quotation is from a famous passage in Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) in which the narrator, the I of the book called Yorick, hears in Paris a caged starling calling to him. The quotation is apt in expressing Maria's tension and unhappiness at her engagement to Rushworth, as she intends it to be. But there is a further point, for the quotation of the starling from A Sentimental Journey seems to have a connection with an earlier episode from Sterne, a dim reminiscence of which in the back of Austen's mind seemed to have traveled into her character's bright brain, and there evolved a definite recollection. Journeying from England to France, Yorick lands in Calais and proceeds to look for a carriage to hire or buy that will take him to Paris. The place where carriages were acquired was called a remise, and it is at the door of such a remise in Calais that the following little scene occurs. The name of the owner of the remise is Monsieur Dessein, an actual person of the day, who is also mentioned in a famous French novel of the early eighteenth century, Adolphe (1815) by Benjamin Constant de Rebecque. Dessein leads Yorick to his remise to view his collection of carriages, post chaises as they were called, four-wheel closed carriages. Yorick is attracted by a fellow traveler, a young lady, who "had a black pair of silk gloves open only at the thumb and the two fore-fingers...." He offers her his arm, and they walk to the door of the remise; however, after cursing the key fifty times, Dessein discovers that he has come out with the wrong key in his hand and, says Yorick, "I continued holding her hand almost without knowing it: so that Monsieur Dessein left us together with her hand in mine, and with our faces turned towards the door of the Remise, and said he would be back in
five minutes."
So here we have a little theme which is marked by a missing key, giving young love an opportunity to converse.
The Sotherton escapade provides not only Maria and Henry Crawford but also Mary Crawford and Edmund with the opportunity for conversing in an intimate privacy not ordinarily available to them. Both take advantage of the chance to desert the others: Maria and Henry to slip across an opening beside the locked gate and to wander unseen in the woods on the other side while Rushworth hunts for the key; Mary and Edmund to walk about, ostensibly to measure the grove, while poor Fanny sits deserted on a bench. Miss Austen has neatly landscaped her novel at this point. Moreover, the novel is going to proceed in these chapters like a play. There are three teams, as it were, who start out one after the other:
1. Edmund, Mary Crawford, and Fanny;
2. Henry Crawford, Maria Bertram, and Rushworth;
3. Julia, who outdistances Miss Norris and Mrs. Rushworth in her search for Henry Crawford.
Julia would like to wander about with Henry; Mary would like to stroll with Edmund, who would like that, too; Maria would love to walk with Henry; Henry would love to walk with Maria; at the tender back of Fanny's mind there is, of course, Edmund.
The whole thing can be divided into scenes:
1. Edmund, Mary, and Fanny enter the so-called wilderness, actually a neat little wood, and talk about clergymen. (Mary has had a shock in the chapel when she hears that Edmund expects to be ordained: she had not known that he intended to become a clergyman, a profession she could not contemplate in a future husband.) They reach a bench after Fanny asks to rest at the next opportunity.
2. Fanny remains alone on the bench while Edmund and Mary go to investigate the limits of the wilderness. She will remain on that rustic bench for a whole hour.
3. The next team walks up to her, composed of Henry, Maria, and Rushworth.
4. Rushworth leaves them to go back to fetch the key of the locked gate. Henry and Miss Bertram remain but then leave Fanny in order to explore the farther grove.
5. Miss Bertram and Henry climb around the locked gate and disappear into the park, leaving Fanny alone.
6. Julia—the avant-garde of the third group—arrives on the scene having met Rushworth returning to the house, talks to Fanny, and then climbs through the gate, "looking eagerly into the park." Crawford has been paying attention to her on the drive to Sotherton, and she is jealous of Maria.
7. Fanny is again alone until Rushworth arrives, panting, with the key of the gate, a meeting of the shed ones.
8. Rushworth lets himself into the park, and Fanny is alone again.
9. Fanny decides to go down the path taken by Mary and Edmund and meets them coming from the west side of the park where the famous avenue runs.
10. They go back towards the house and meet the remnant of the third team, Mrs. Norris and Mrs. Rushworth, about to start.
Nabokov's notes on Mansfield Park, chapter 9
November was "the black month," in the view of the Bertram sisters, fixed for the unwelcome father's return. He intended to take the September packet, so that the young people have thirteen weeks—mid-August to mid-November—before his return. (Actually, Sir Thomas returns in October on a private ship.) The father's return will be, as Miss Crawford puts it to Edmund as they stand at the twilit window of Mansfield, while the Misses Bertram, with Rushworth and Crawford, are all busy with candles at the pianoforte, "the fore-runner also of other interesting events; your sister's marriage, and your taking orders," a further introduction of the ordination theme that involves Edmund, Miss Crawford, and Fanny. There is a spirited conversation about the motives of a clergyman and the propriety of his interest in the question of income. At the end of chapter 11 Miss Crawford joins the glee club at the piano; then Edmund leaves admiring the stars with Fanny for the music, and Fanny is left alone shivering at the window, a repetition of the leaving-Fanny theme. Edmund's unconscious hesitation between the bright and elegant beauty of dapper little Mary Crawford and the delicate grace and subdued loveliness of slender Fanny is emblematically demonstrated by the various movements of the young people involved in the music-room scene.
The relaxation of Sir Thomas's standards of conduct, the getting out of hand that took place during the Sotherton expedition, encourages and directly leads to the proposal to act a play before his return. The whole play theme in Mansfield Park is an extraordinary achievement. In chapters 12 to 20 the play theme is developed on the lines of fairy-tale magic and of fate. The theme starts with a new character—first to appear and last to vanish in this connection—a young man called Yates, a friend of Tom Bertram. "He came on the wings of disappointment, and with his head full of acting, for it had been a theatrical party [that he had just left]; and the play, in which he had borne a part, was within two days of representation, when the sudden death of one of the nearest connections of the family had destroyed the scheme and dispersed the performers." In his account to the Bertram circle "from the first casting of the parts, to the epilogue, it was all bewitching" (mark the magical note). And Yates bewails the fact that humdrum life or rather casual death prevented the staging. "It is not worth complaining about, but to be sure the poor old dowager could not have died at a worse time; and it is impossible to help wishing, that the news could have been suppressed for just the three days we wanted. It was but three days; and being only a grandmother, and all happening two hundred miles off, I think there would have been no great harm, and it was suggested, I know; but Lord Ravenshaw, who I suppose is one of the most correct men in England, would not hear of it."
Nabokov's map of Sotherton Court
Tom Bertram remarks that in a way the death of the grandmother is a kind of afterpiece, that is, her funeral which the Ravenshaws will have to perform alone. (At this time it was customary to act a light, often farcical, afterpiece following the main play.) Note that here we find foreshadowed the fatal interruption that Sir Thomas Bertram, the father, will cause later on, for when Lovers' Vows is rehearsed at Mansfield, his return will be the dramatic afterpiece.
The magical account by Yates of his theatrical experience fires the imagination of the young people. Henry Crawford declares that he could be fool enough at this moment to act any character that had ever been written from Shylock or Richard III down to the singing hero of a farce, and it is he who since "it was yet an untasted pleasure," proposes that they act something, whether a scene, a half a play, anything. Tom remarks that they must have a green baize curtain; Yates casually suggests various pieces of scenery to be built. Edmund takes alarm and tries to splash cold water on the project by elaborate sarcasm: "Nay, ... Let us do nothing by halves. If we are to act, let it be in a theatre completely fitted up with pit, box, and gallery, and let us have a play entire from beginning to end; so as it be a German play, no matter what, with a good tricking, shifting afterpiece, and a figure-dance, and a hornpipe, and a song between the acts. If we do not out do Ecclesford [the scene of the aborted theatrical party], we do nothing." This allusion to the tricking, shifting afterpiece is a fateful remark, a kind of conjuration, for this is exactly what is going to happen: the father's return will be a kind of tricky sequel, a shifty afterpiece.
They proceed to find a room for the staging, and the billiard room is chosen, but they will have to remove the bookcase in Sir Thomas's study to allow the doors to open at either end. Changing the order of the furniture was a serious thing in those days, and Edmund is more and more frightened. But the indolent mother and the aunt, who dotes upon the two girls, do not object. Indeed, Mrs. Norris takes it upon herself to cut out the curtain and to supervise the props according to her practical mind. But the play is still wanting. Let us note here again a streak of magic, a conjuring trick on the part of artistic fate, for the Lovers' Vows, the play mentioned by Yates, is now seemingly forgotten but actually is lying in wait, an unnoticed treasure. They discuss the possibilities of other plays but find either too many or too few parts, and the party is divided
between acting a tragedy or a comedy. Then suddenly the charm acts. Tom Bertram, "taking up one of the many volumes of plays that lay on the table, and turning it over, suddenly exclaimed, 'Lovers' Vows! And why should not Lovers' Vows do for us as well as for the Ravenshaws? How came it never to be thought of before?' "
Nabokov's sketch of the layout at Mansfield Park
Lovers' Vows (1798) was an adaptation made by Mrs. Elisabeth Inchbald of Das Kind der Liebe by August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue. The play is very silly, but no more so perhaps than many modern hits. The plot turns on the fortunes of Frederick, the illegitimate son of Baron Wildenheim, and his mother's waiting maid, Agatha Friburg. The lovers having parted, Agatha leads a strictly virtuous life and brings up her son, while the young baron marries a wealthy lady from Alsace and goes to live on her estates. When the play opens, the baron's Alsatian wife is dead, and he has returned with his only daughter Amelia to his own castle in Germany. Meanwhile, by one of those coincidences necessary to tragic or comic situations, Agatha has also returned to her native village in the neighborhood of the castle, and there we find her being expelled from the country inn because she cannot pay her bill. By another coincidence she is found by her son Frederick, who has been absent for five years on a campaign but has now returned to seek civil employment. For this purpose a certificate of birth is wanted, and Agatha, aghast at this request, is obliged to tell him of his origin which she has hitherto concealed from him. The confession made, she collapses, and Frederick, having found shelter for her in a cottage, goes out to beg money to buy food. As luck will have it, by still another coincidence he meets in a field the baron and Count Cassel (a rich and foolish suitor of Amelia), and having been given a little but not sufficient money for his purpose, Frederick threatens his unknown father, who sends him to be imprisoned in the castle.
Lectures on Literature Page 6
