But from the beginning there were other readers who reacted differently, among them the two most intelligent women (after Jane herself) in the Austen family. Rather than praising the high moral tone, her mother found the virtuous heroine “insipid.” Anna also declared she “could not bear Fanny.” Edward’s son George disliked Fanny too, and much preferred Mary Crawford. Lord Holland’s family considered the book inferior to the two earlier ones. Alethea Bigg thought Mansfield Park lacked the spirit of its predecessor, and Miss Sharp praised its characterization, “but as you beg me to be perfectly honest, I must confess I prefer P&P.” 7 As for Cassandra, although she was “fond of Fanny,” she also, according to one of her nieces, tried to persuade Jane to let her marry Henry Crawford; which suggests that the “moral tendency” so much admired by other readers did not impress her much. 8
Henry’s reaction appears in something like a running commentary in Jane’s letters, and very interesting it is. As he read Volume I he expressed his liking for Henry Crawford: “he admires H. Crawford—I mean properly—as a clever, pleasant Man.” He said he could guess how the story would end; but then found himself growing baffled as he read on. After finishing the book, he appears to have confined himself to more general praise: “his approbation has not lessened,” reported Jane. “He found the last half of the last volume extremely interesting.” This is a remark so noncommittal that you suspect him too of reservations about the way she chose to end the story.
Mansfield Park has remained extremely interesting to readers ever since, and has generated more debate than any of Austen’s other books. In 1917 Reginald Farrer, while praising the brilliance of many passages, accused Austen of a “radical dishonesty,” of “weighting the balance” against the Crawfords, “who obviously have her artist’s affection as well as her moralist’s disapproval.” He found Fanny repellent: cold, self-righteous, rigid with prejudice, “the most terrible incarnation we have of the female prig-pharisee” (and more). He also called the conclusion of the story a “fraud on the reader” and an artistic failure. Twenty years after Farrer, Queenie Leavis supported his view, saying she found the book, for all its brilliance, “contradictory and confusing” and undermined by Austen’s “determination to sponsor the conventional moral outlook.”9 Farrer’s line was taken up again vigorously by Kingsley Amis in the 1950s: “to invite Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Bertram round for the evening would not be lightly undertaken.” Not only were they not fun, while the Crawfords were; they were also humourless, pompous and morally detestable. Fanny lacked “self-knowledge, generosity or humility.” Amis concluded that Jane Austen’s own judgement and moral sense had gone seriously astray.10
The defence of Fanny and the “moral tendency” was mounted by Lionel Trilling. He began by praising Mary Crawford, conceding that she “is conceived—is calculated—to win the charmed admiration of almost any reader . . . She is downright, open, intelligent, impatient. Irony is her natural mode, and we are drawn to think of her voice as being as nearly the author’s own as Elizabeth Bennet’s is.” This is so well put that you wait eagerly for Trilling’s elaboration on why we should admire Fanny rather than Mary; when it comes it is disappointing. He says that Austen asks us to withhold admiration from Mary’s lively mind because it “compounds, by very reason of its liveliness, with the world, the flesh, and the devil”; and that Fanny is a Christian heroine, who supports Edmund’s wish to become a clergyman and do his duty in society, because the “hygiene of the self” demands it. In the light of this hygiene, the theatricals are condemned because they involve adopting false selves; and Trilling claims that, although a first reading of the book gives us the intensely attractive Mary he has described, a second reveals her as insincere, a person for whom style is more important than real character.11 Tony Tanner followed Trilling in praising Fanny for her “stillness, quietness, weakness and self-retraction” as opposed to the Crawfords, with their taste for play-acting, “movement untrammelled by morals, their world-darkened minds and their insincere hearts.”12
The trouble with these arguments is that they lose their force as soon as you turn back to the book and come face to face with the characters on the page. As Roger Gard put it, “The fact is that most readers love the Crawfords, which is why some critics have to work with such nit-picking assiduity to find, or even create, retrospective faults in them.” 13 To claim that acting is bad for the character makes no sense, least of all in the context of Austen’s delight in it. As to why Jane Austen used it as she did: perhaps Eliza and she had laughed together over memories of Which is the Man? and Bon Ton, both rather daring plays, and this led Jane to see the possibilities of using theatricals in a novel. There is no need to believe that she condemned them outside the context of Mansfield Park, and indeed every reason for thinking otherwise.
Yet Tanner is right in pointing out how Austen gives Fanny, quiet and still as she is, enough moral power to overcome all the bright, lively, divided characters who threaten her peace. Timid and uncomplaining under cruel and thoughtless treatment, she is one for whom “the advantages of early hardship and discipline, and the consciousness of being born to struggle and endure” bring great rewards. In fact she is both heroic, and a prig.
If Austen used memories of being a shy, unhappy schoolgirl observing a world she could not yet understand in creating “my Fanny,” the displaced child who will in the end triumph over everyone, it made a good starting point for a novel. But if it was the starting point, something happened along the way which changed the nature of the story she set out to tell, rather as it did in Sense and Sensibility; and this change of direction, intention or emphasis is exactly what gives the book its strength and power to continue to interest readers after many rereadings. Like The Merchant of Venice, it goes on being open to different and opposing interpretations. You can make the case for Mary Crawford and the case against her, as you can for Shylock; and the same for Fanny Price. Shakespeare’s play and Austen’s book are both so alive and flexible as works of art that they can be interpreted now one way, now another.14
Fanny’s experience at Mansfield Park is bitter as no other childhood is in Austen’s work. Her aunt, Lady Bertram, is virtually an imbecile; she may be a comic character, and not ill-tempered, but the effects of her extreme placidity are not comic. Although her “tone of calm langour . . . was always heard and attended to” she is wholly ineffectual as the mistress of house and family, and her dignity is largely preserved by the good manners of her husband and her sons. (Her husband’s good manners have extended to limiting the number of their children to four.) Her complacent belief that beauty deserves money derives from her own success as a good-looking girl who made a better marriage than was expected, and the only advice she offers Fanny in eight years is “that it is every young woman’s duty to accept such a very unexceptionable offer” as the proposal of marriage made by a man Fanny dislikes. She sends her maid Chapman to help Fanny dress for her ball, too late to be of any use, and is pleased to take credit for Fanny’s success. Her generosity extends to giving her nephew William £10 but not to noticing how Fanny is ill-treated under her own roof. Lady Bertram’s pug dog and her “work”—meaning needlework, much of it done by Fanny—are her chief concerns: interests would be too strong a word. She barely notices her children for much of the time, and hardly misses her husband in his absence. Sleeping on the sofa is one of her great resources, and she sleeps so reliably that people can conduct private conversations in her presence. She hardly goes out. She only “expects to be agitated” at her daughter’s wedding; and when reporting the illness of her elder son, her letter is so feebly written that it reads like “a sort of playing at being frightened.” She and her sister Mrs. Price, both tranquil in their tempers, have lost interest in one another over the years of separation to the point that “Three or four Prices might have been swept away, any or all, except Fanny and William, and Lady Bertram would have thought little about it; or perhaps might have caught from Mrs. Norris’s lips the cant of its
being a very happy thing, and a great blessing to their poor dear sister Price to have them so well provided for.” The suggestion that poor children might be better off dead, because “well provided for” in the after-life, provides the sharpest lines in a novel that is deeply observant of the attitudes of the times.
Mrs. Norris, Lady Bertram’s elder sister, is one of the great villains of literature, almost too horrible to be comic; we laugh because Austen’s timing is so good, and we enjoy seeing the horrors coming. She is characterized by meanness, officiousness, sycophancy towards the powerful and bullying of anyone she perceives to be in her power. She is determined to be at the centre of all the activities of Mansfield Park, and is the sort of woman who feels herself strengthened and confirmed in her own position by the sufferings of others. Fanny becomes her particular victim because she is an easy target—the charity child, small, weak, timid—and, as Austen acutely writes, her aunt’s spiteful attitude towards her feeds on itself: “she disliked Fanny because she had neglected her” (my italics). Note too her implied reproof to Sir Thomas for keeping on his labourers during the winter months, and the pleasure with which she hears of two maids being turned away at Sotherton “for wearing white gowns,” and prevents one of the estate boys from being given the lunch he expects in the Mansfield kitchen.
Sir Thomas Bertram is not so much better than his wife and sister-in-law. He has the very moderate virtue of dignity, but he chose his own wife badly, and he does not know how to talk to, let alone bring up, his children, or how to control his sister-in-law’s bad behaviour in spoiling his daughters and crushing his niece. He lacks any perception of people’s characters, allowing one daughter to marry a dolt—she is of course following in his own footsteps—and trying to bully Fanny into a loveless match. Here most clearly he expresses a view Fanny considers wholly wrong, although she won’t tell him so; she expects a “good man” to see that it is unpardonably wicked to marry without affection, but he doesn’t, and she is reduced to hoping he will reconsider the matter. Instead he behaves disingenuously towards her, sending her to Portsmouth to bring her round to the advantage of marrying well, although through all the years of her childhood it has not occurred to him that she might wish to visit her parents, brothers and sisters. His self-righteousness and confidence in his own judgement are broken only by the behaviour of his daughters.
Maria and Julia Bertram are a weakness, rather like Bingley’s sisters in Pride and Prejudice. In both books we are informed that they are charming when they choose to be, without seeing the charm in action. The Bertram sisters are characterized with the broadest strokes, and they are hardly differentiated—both large, blonde and pretty in a full-blown way—almost always presented together, or spoken of together. Even at the end, when their fates diverge, we are told that Julia was saved from behaving as badly as Maria only by virtue of being the younger sister, and so less spoilt, not from any essential difference of character. But since they have never been more than sketches this last piece of perfunctoriness hardly matters.
Their failings raise the question of where Fanny gets her good principles from. Not from them or their governess, not from either of her aunts, and not from Sir Thomas, who only terrifies her as he does his daughters. Yet somehow she does arrive at a morality: it consists of modesty, selflessness and an interest in good works, not unlike the heroine of Hannah More’s Coelebs, who had hers inculcated by virtuous parents (and was not much admired by Austen).15 Obedience to parental orders is part of Hannah More’s package, but it is in rejecting obedience in favour of the higher dictate of remaining true to her own conscience that Fanny rises to her moment of heroism, as she defies Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram over the question of marriage. This is the mouse-taking-on-the-lion moment when even readers who dislike Fanny find something to admire. She also questions him about the slaves on his West Indian estates. Brian Southam has suggested that her question (“Did not you hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?”) is met with dead silence because Sir Thomas could not answer her to his own satisfaction, being necessarily a supporter of the slave trade, and that by raising the question at all, Fanny bravely makes her own abolitionist sympathies clear.16
Otherwise Fanny is cautious and censorious. Jokes make her and her cousin Edmund uneasy. She takes joy in the stars, in music and poetry and flowers, and in her brother William; but she is not a joyous person, perhaps because her childhood experiences have dried up something in her spirit. Not only is she the least joyous of all Austen’s heroines, she is the most reluctant to open her mouth; when she does she speaks in a stilted and wooden manner. This is credible, but it is one of the things that makes it hard to believe that Henry Crawford could ever fall in love with her. Crawford is supposed to admire her character, her goodness, her strict moral standards, but how does he get to know her? He first takes notice of her at a dinner at which he speaks almost a page of monologue, addressed to Fanny, while she either says nothing or tells herself silently “Oh! what a corrupted mind!” as he speaks on. Finally she ticks him off on the subject of the theatricals—“every thing had gone quite far enough”—before subsiding into trembling and blushes. The next day he tells his sister that “I never was so long in company with a girl in my life—trying to entertain her—and succeed so ill!” Not a recipe for attraction.
He then watches her listening to her brother’s account of naval life, and “had moral taste enough to value” what he saw. She becomes aware that he is “trying to cheat her of her tranquillity.” (Mary’s encouragement to her brother is, “Your wicked project upon her peace turns out a clever thought indeed. You will both find your good in it.” Then “I know that a wife you loved would be the happiest of women, and that even when you ceased to love, she would yet find in you the liberality and good-breeding of a gentleman.”) And Henry admires Fanny’s “ineffable sweetness and patience,” the neat arrangement of her hair and her “speaking at intervals to me.”
Only since we don’t hear her speaking we can’t judge for ourselves. Again, when he tells her about her brother William’s promotion, and follows this up with his proposal, she is “exceedingly distressed, and for some moments unable to speak,” and then says, “Don’t, Mr. Crawford, pray don’t. I beg you would not. This is a sort of talking which is very unpleasant to me. I must go away. I cannot bear it.” When he visits her in Portsmouth and reaches his highest point in her favour, he asks her to advise him about the management of his estate; her answer is, “We all have a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” They are almost the last of the few words she addresses to him, and they are her central statement about her moral position. They are also enough, surely, to convince him as well as us that the two of them are unlikely to achieve any satisfactory form of communication.
It is Mary Crawford who can, in Trilling’s phrase, bring a conversation to a gallop, and her sprightliness and wit are close to Austen’s. Her disrespect for the cloth is not so different from the attitude of the creator of Mr. Collins and Mr. Elton; and indeed takes some of its justification from within the book, in the shape of her brother-in-law Dr. Grant, who schemes his way to a stall at Westminster and dies of gorging on three great institutional dinners in one week. Mary’s cynical remarks resemble ones found in the letters, and her improper joke about rears and vices in the navy must have been appreciated by Jane before she gave it to her; which makes it difficult for Jane to be entirely on Edmund’s side here (he “felt grave, and only replied, ‘It is a noble profession.’ ”). And Mary is not always playing the London sophisticate; there is real sweetness and generosity in her behaviour towards Fanny, as well as thoughtlessness and occasional deviousness. Mary intervenes when Mrs. Norris is ranting against Fanny; she also opens her heart to her, letting her into her true feelings for Edmund.
The philosopher Gilbert Ryle decided that William Price, Fanny’s sailor brother, was the real hero of the book, because he makes her happy; and that their sibling love is the
standard against which all the other loves in the book are measured. By that argument the Crawfords do quite well, their mutual devotion never in question either. Readers who can accept the way the story is tied up will accept too that Fanny is in effect marrying a brother in the cousin she has loved since childhood. Their life will be lived within the orbit of Mansfield, on good terms with Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram for all their faults, unforgiving towards the other sinners. The waif turns into something like Queen Victoria; among its other achievements Mansfield Park is prophetic.
Was Jane Austen herself satisfied with her heroine and her denouement? Her own words on the subject of “Novels and Heroines;— pictures of perfection . . . make me sick & wicked” cause you to wonder. 17 The remark was written in the last year of her life, and suggests at the very least that she looked back on Fanny Price with complex and divided feelings.
She was a great enough artist to put more than one truth into a book. That Fanny rises to heroism and also hates Mary Crawford does not prevent Mary Crawford from being delightful and ready to like Fanny. There are different ways of being good, and different degrees of bad behaviour too. The fitting up of Henry Crawford with a piece of standard fictional delinquency—an off-stage seduction, like Willoughby and Wickham before him—suggests rather less commitment to this part of the story on Austen’s part than to the fully narrated chapters in which his charm, kindness and irresponsible flirting are on display. We should become suspicious of Mansfield Park not where we decide we don’t like Fanny’s priggishness, or mistrust Mary’s high spirits, but only where its art falters. It falters rarely enough for this to be a supremely absorbing and entertaining novel, more complex and more ambitious than any of the three that preceded it. Its great set-pieces—the visit to Sotherton, the whole episode of the theatricals, and the chapters set in Portsmouth—show a mastery in handling the interactions of a large cast and a complex series of events that few novelists have matched.
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