William Deresiewicz
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Edmund and William together, “the two most beloved of her heart,” Henry pointedly excluded.27 Fanny is playing with puppets again, voodoo dolls, passing an emotional fiction on herself, making happen in her little playworld of objects what she cannot make happen in the real world. That “seen and felt” is also worth pausing over: thinking of Wordsworth’s mad mother and other women unbalanced by unfulfillable longing, we might almost begin to fear for Fanny’s sanity, as her very senses now participate in her willed subjectivization of the exterior world. The novel’s final fetish, the silver knife, is less emotionally loaded than those connected to the ball but participates in a uniquely complex system of substitutes, as the novel becomes increasingly selfconscious about the theme of substitution as it draws to a close. Portsmouth as a whole is indeed for Fanny a swirl of substitutions and memories and memories-assubstitutions, beginning even before she gets there, as “[t]he remembrances of all her earliest pleasures, and of what she had suffered in being torn from them, came over her with renewed strength, and it seemed as if to be at home again, would heal every pain that had since grown out of the separation” (306). Her experience of William’s return to Mansfield, when the solacing substitutions of long-cherished memories had been destroyed in an instant by contact with the altered shape of the present, has done nothing to teach her to anticipate a less paradisal reunion. Nor does she recognize, surprisingly, that a return to her family implies another separation, that she will soon be struggling with the loss of Mansfield, the substitute home for which her original home must now serve as a substitute. We saw in the previous chapter how the self-protections of memory go to work as soon as Fanny gets to Portsmouth, prompting her to love her mother’s face the more because it reminds her of her Aunt Bertram’s. How interesting it is that neither face ever reminds her of her Aunt Norris’s, and if we needed any further evidence of the necessary selectivity of Fanny’s memory, we have this reaction to the chaos in her father’s house: “At Mansfield, no sounds of contention, no raised voices, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence was ever heard; … every body had their due importance; every body’s feelings were consulted” (325).28 Her anticipatory memories of Portsmouth had undoubtedly been as accurate a picture of that happy family as is this recollection of Mansfield. Meanwhile, another recollected similarity of feature has already surprised her, that of Betsey, her mother’s youngest daughter, to Mary Price, Fanny’s favorite sister before her removal to Mansfield. Mary, “very pretty” and “remarkably amiable,” had died a few years after Fanny’s departure,
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“and when the news of her death had at last reached Mansfield, [Fanny] had for a short time been quite afflicted” (320). Now, in a kind of delayed substitution, “[t]he sight of Betsey brought the image of little Mary back again.” But as Fanny contemplates the resemblance, Betsey, unaware of what is going through her sister’s mind, is “holding out something to catch her eyes.” It is the silver knife, given by that same Mary, on her deathbed, to Susan, the eldest of the sisters still in Portsmouth, and cherished by her ever since. Another substitution, this one undoubtedly all the more urgent in that Susan, like her sisters, “never had been much” to Mrs. Price, and thus has had yet another deprivation for which to compensate herself (323). So a substitute for Mary is holding a substitute for Mary—the narrative almost seems to be free-associating here—and we next learn that the silver knife had functioned as a fetish for Mary herself, the cherished token of old Mrs. Admiral Maxwell, the godmother who had given it to her a few weeks before her death. We might think here of that other Mary, and not only because a secret wish for her death might well be a part of what lies behind Fanny’s sudden recollection of Mary Price. Mary Crawford, with her pile of necklaces so high that no single one matters much, helps us understand why, in a family with so little to spend on “trinkets and luxuries,” one piece of silver must perform multiple duty, passing from hand to hand as the subject of successive investments of desire and feeling and meaning. In other words, we see here again the inverse relationship between privilege and the need for substitution. It is no coincidence that Fanny—who might well understand how important the knife must be for Susan—puts a stop to the contention over ownership by buying a new knife for Betsey—the first time, we are told, she has ever bought anything for any one. Wealth steps in to terminate the substitutional chain. And if we have any doubt that Austen is holding out the theme of substitution here in such a way as to catch our eyes, we might recognize that the entire episode—knife, Betsey, Mary Price, Mrs. Admiral Maxwell—is irrelevant to the plot, something otherwise almost unexampled in her work. Finally, not only do memories and objects substitute for missing individuals, so, most importantly and most disturbingly, do other individuals. This is dark doctrine: we are commodities for one another, Austen tells us.29 We love whom we have because we cannot have whom we love. This final form of substitution, too, she would have found in Wordsworth. The title characters of “The Mad Mother” (“Her Eyes are Wild”) and “The Emigrant Mother”—the first of whom clings to her baby boy as a replacement for the
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husband who has abandoned her (” `Thy father cares not for my breast … But thou wilt live with me in love’ ” [ll. 6167]), the second of whom replaces her lost child with the child of another—are obvious examples. But Wordsworth’s most moving portraits of this form of substitution involve its refusal. As Hartman notes (his terminology coinciding here with mine), “[t]wo Matthew poems suggest there are things the heart cannot replace. Substitution (in contemporary terms, sublimation) is questioned.“30 Frances Ferguson draws a similar conclusion about “The Brothers,” noting that Leonard’s loss of the object of his affections leads to a loss of the affections altogether, as he essentially writes his own epitaph and turns his back on the human world.31 But Austen’s characters do not turn their back on the human world; either they are not as strong as Wordsworth’s, or her view of human nature is less flattering, or the world of Mansfield Park, in which possession is the highest value, makes greater demands for accommodation and adjustment than does Wordsworth’s. This final substitutional pattern begins insidiously, almost unobtrusively, after Sir Thomas’s departure for Antigua, with Lady Bertram “astonished to find how very well they did” without him, “how well Edmund could supply his place in carving, talking to the steward, writing to the attorney, settling with the servants, and equally saving her from all possible fatigue or exertion” (30). But then, Lady Bertram is an extreme case. Passionless; anesthetized; morally speaking, virtually dead—she is the novel’s most devastating portrait of the effects of the marriage-market economy on the individual’s capacity for feeling, its tendency not just to make people see each other in terms of utility, but to fool them into thinking that what they are feeling is love. A more complex set of instances, one that involves Fanny herself, begins to take shape during the rehearsal of Lover’s Vows. The period of the theatricals, as we noted before, proves to be a time of discontent and envy for nearly everyone, as an atmosphere of erotic frustration descends on the group. Maria and Julia struggle over Henry, Rushworth sulks, Fanny pines, Mary frets over Edmund’s career plans, Edmund frets over her fretting. The various would-be lovers use the rehearsals, of course, as a way of expressing feelings they cannot openly avow—the deeper meaning of the chosen play’s title. This is a kind of substitution, too—an odd kind, a displacement of desire that involves shifts in both the desired object and the desiring subject. But even this is as yet, for Mary and Edmund, too frank, so each looks to Fanny to provide an alternative to the alternative. “You must rehearse it with me,” Mary tells her “that I may fancy you him,” and Edmund too, possessed
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by the same idea, shows up in the East room himself a few minutes later (140; emphasis in the original).32 This strange triangular episode is not yet the substitution of one person for another, but it prepares the way for it, for
Mary’s plea to Fanny—“You must rehearse it with me, that I may fancy you him”—foretells the future of the two women’s relationship. Enamored of the same man, they begin to use each other as his surrogate, a form of substitution that becomes the basis of the rather ambiguous friendship they develop.33 It begins the day that Fanny, forced by a rainstorm to take refuge in the Parsonage, ends up listening while Mary plays the harp. Soon Mary insists on playing her “Edmund’s prime favorite,” and as she does so, Fanny “fancied him sitting in that room again and again … listening with constant delight to the favorite air” (173). Each woman is clearly using the other to dream herself into proximity to the man she loves—a man each has good reason to think she will never really be able to have—Mary again fancying one cousin to be the other, Fanny undertaking a more complex emotional operation, compounded of self-torment, voyeurism, and a strange sort of vicarious pleasure, but one that apparently gratifies her even against her will. Despite rushing home immediately after the air is over, and despite feeling neither love for Mary nor pleasure in her company, from that day she begins compulsively to pursue a closer intimacy with her: “Fanny went to her every two or three days; it seemed a kind of fascination; she could not be easy without going” (173). Mary, for the time being, is the closest Fanny can get to Edmund. Her obsession with her cousin’s beloved—virtually erotic, in some critical accounts—is a displaced version of her erotic obsession with her cousin himself. Once again—as with the initial scene in the East room, as with Fanny’s manipulation of her fetishes, as with much else in this darkly complex book—Austen’s exploration of substitution sends her groping along dim byways of feeling, apparently as uncertain about where she will come out as her characters are themselves. One of the dimmest of those byways, and the one the exploration of which has lately proven most disturbing to Austen’s readers, concerns what is finally the most difficult and momentous process of substitution Fanny undergoes, the replacement in her affections of William by Edmund. Much has been written about the novel’s incestuous ending, including how Fanny’s quasi-incest with Edmund becomes her best available alternative to incestuous (if nonphysical) union with William.34 But while both the marriage and the impulse it substitutes for have been rightly criticized as narcissistic, they are driven by a thoroughly Wordsworthian logic.35 This is a novel in which
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authentic personhood is rooted in memory, and the narrator’s conspicuously Wordsworthian paean to fraternal love occasioned by William and Fanny’s reunion praises that love in precisely those terms. The love between brothers and sisters, we are told, will in one important respect always trump conjugal love, being grounded in “the same first associations and habits” (195). What prompts that paean, in fact, is an act of joint recollection strikingly reminiscent of the “Tintern Abbey” scene in its Wordsworthian redemption of painful experiences through the harmonizing power of memory. Now that William and Fanny are at last reunited, “all the evil and good of their earliest years could be gone over again, and every former united pain and pleasure retraced with the fondest recollection” (195). Next to this, her love for Edmund can never be more than second best. But Fanny’s predicament is more complicated still, for by the time of William’s return it is clear that, whatever she might think, even her regressive fantasy of “the little cottage” in which she and William are “to pass all their middle and latter life together” would not satisfy her (311). Having spent seven years displacing her fraternal feelings for William onto Edmund, and at least a couple of years developing sexual feelings for the latter, she now finds herself caught between the two men. Her divided childhood has left her with divided desires, and her adolescence has complicated those desires still further. The only thing that could really satisfy her would be a fusion of brother and beloved cousin—in the light of which fact it is worth looking again at the passage in which she combines William and Edmund’s two gifts. The passage reads, “having with delightful feelings joined the chain and the cross … and put them around her neck, and seen and felt how full of William and Edmund they were,” not ” … and seen and felt how full of William was the one and of Edmund was the other” (224). The syntax captures the necessary blurring of feeling.36 We can now see that the joining of the cross and chain signified for Fanny more than the exclusion of Henry in favor of “the two most beloved of her heart”; it signified the imaginary—we might even say, the mystical—union of that pair, the creation of an ideal object of desire we would have to call William-Edmund. Fanny’s acceptance of Edmund is thus finally a strange kind of second-order substitution—Edmund halfsubstituting for William during the years after her arrival in Mansfield, Edmund substituting again—once the realm of private fantasy gives way, as it must, to daylight possibility—for the hybrid creature thus created. But Fanny’s acceptance of Edmund is also and more obviously a refusal of substitution, that of Edmund himself by Henry. Only twice do we see Fanny
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making such a refusal, but those two instances are the great mileposts on her path to adulthood. The first, again, is the occasion of Fanny’s retreat to the East room. The nature of that occasion constitutes yet another parallel between that scene and “Tintern Abbey,” for if “Tintern Abbey” is a poem of crisis, this is a scene of crisis every bit as momentous, if very different in kind.37 It concerns Fanny’s relationship with the Bertrams, the benefactors to whom she feels herself so indebted as to be beyond repayment and to whom her customary relationship is that of a well-treated servant. But now she is refusing to set aside her own desire to avoid exposure in favor of their imperious demands that she serve their pleasure. “I shall think her a very obstinate, ungrateful girl,” Mrs. Norris has said, “considering who and what she is” (123). But who and what she is are exactly the questions this moment thrusts upon her. The “friends” with which she has surrounded herself, as we have seen, now come to accuse her, just as the sight of his beloved valley reminds Wordsworth all the more of what he has lost since first beholding it. For both, the very constancy of the scene allows for the measurement of alterations in the self. But while Wordsworth recognizes that he is “changed, no doubt, from what I was when first / I came among these hills” (ll. 6667), her own alteration Fanny does not see. But we see it: she is crossing into adulthood. She is no longer who and what she was. Out of the conflict between dependence and desire, a new self is being dragged painfully into life. The difficulty of the process continues through its major phase, the struggle with Sir Thomas—and with Edmund and Lady Bertram and everyone else—over Henry’s courtship. As always, Fanny’s first impulse is to regress. As Sir Thomas approaches the East room for the confrontation I glanced at above, “[t]he terror of his former occasional visits to that room seemed all renewed, and [Fanny] felt as if he were going to examine her again in French and English” (257258). (Interestingly, it is precisely when he sends her back to the scene of her earliest childhood that she at last begins to feel like an adult.) The last thing she ever wants to do is stand up for what she wants to do. But though she has learned that it is better for someone like her not to have desires at all, there is one desire she will not give up, for she has vested it with all her hopes for the future, and even though circumstances are about to tear it from her anyway, she refuses to assent to her fate. At the last moment, her creator rescues her—but what then becomes of the ethic of substitution? Is it just because Fanny has substituted so many times that she is finally allowed one relief from substitution? Or is her triumph Austen’s one gesture of defiance against a world that makes substitution necessary in the first place?
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If so, it is a solitary gesture, for the novel’s final events enforce the substitutional imperative more massively than anything that has come before. But before turning to these events it is worth considering one last scene in the East room, one final layer added to the semantic archaeology of this, a space of uniquely complex significance in Austen’s work. It is also
a scene of recollection, one that illuminates Austen’s handling not only of memory, but also of personal change and the way it complicates questions of moral worth. As such, as we will see, it bears crucially on the novel’s final substitutions. The East room has already been the site not only of the “Tintern Abbey” scene and of Fanny’s confrontation with Sir Thomas, but also of Mary and Edmund’s rehearsal and of Edmund’s note-writing. The final episode in that by-now very resonant place brings Mary up to rebuke Fanny for having refused Henry’s offer. But before she can launch in, she is brought up short by a spontaneous outpouring of recollection. Yes, Mary—one of those unfixed, heartless, amnesiac Crawfords. “[A]m I here again? The East room. Only once was I in this room before! … Only once before. Do you remember it? I came to rehearse … A delightful rehearsal. I shall never forget it … Oh! why will such things ever pass away?” (296). The rhythms are those of genuine feeling, and the effusion ends with Mary falling silent “in a reverie of sweet remembrances.” Memory, sorrow, attachment: she sounds like Fanny Price. What has happened in the ten chapters since the trick with the necklace? What has happened is that she has begun to change. The love of Edmund, the friendship of Fanny, the examples of both, and no doubt also her failure to bend Edmund to her will (only those can feel who know what it means to do without)—all this and perhaps more have opened her to new emotions, new values, less giddy desires. As she confides to Fanny just after this, regarding her plans to leave Mansfield, “Mrs. Fraser has been my intimate friend for years. But I have not the least inclination to go near her. I can think only of the friends I’m leaving; my excellent sister, yourself, and the Bertrams in general. You have all so much more heart among you, than one finds in the world at large” (297298; emphasis in the original). Mary has discovered what it means to have a heart, and her brother, who had sought only to make a hole in Fanny’s, has discovered it too. At his leavetaking, Fanny notes, he “really seemed to feel.—Quite unlike his usual self, he scarcely said any thing. He was evidently oppressed” (302). The Crawfords initially deserve all the censure criticism has traditionally heaped on them, but they also exhibit a moral growth from those very unpromising beginnings that makes the conversion of a Marianne or Elizabeth look merely notional by comparison.38 This is the start of the