Mansfield Park
Exploring the Expanded Boundaries of Jane Austen’s Genius
I wrote the following essay as an undergraduate in a Jane Austen seminar at the Louisiana Scholars’ College (Northwestern State University) in Natchitoches. My previous article in this newsletter was about my September trip to London & Paris. I left off at my last day in London just prior to beginning the Paris leg of the trip. It will be difficult for me to write about Paris; my emotional connection to the city makes it more laborious. Add to that the difficulties of the last several weeks, post-election, the shock and the trauma of a second Trump normalization cycle. Instead of facing consequences unavoidable by anyone else, he is rewarded with greatest power, inversely proportionate to the responsibility, or rather lack thereof, demanded of him. It is a perverse distortion of what democratic leadership ought to be. And yet because our society is so broken, because the channels of communicating truth are so distorted and twisted, and we live in a dimension where misinformation spreads like cancer, we find that the misinformed, as well as the uninformed, gravitate to the shiniest object, attracted by the glistening of its gilded surface. In this terrifying, uncertain world, the Strong Man has a certain charm. He knows all. He promises protection. He is fierce, moneyed, all-powerful, and almost god-like in the way he becomes larger than life. Thus, while I delay the articulation of my love affair with Paris, I give you this almost ten-year-old essay about a certain Regency-era writer’s experimentation with conservative values and the allure of despots. Mansfield Park is often considered her most complex novel. It might also be her most serious novel, as it touches on themes of colonization and harsh economic realities in a way quite different from her other novels.
Jane Austen began to write as a way of expression as well as from a sense of fun. She had an extraordinary sense of the ridiculous. Combined with a lively imagination, she was compelled to write stories for her own amusement, but above all for the amusement of her family circle. The Juvenalia is filled with delightful humor. The stories in it were written to amuse rather than teach, although there were strong satirical overtones and undertones. The satire is simultaneously entertaining and instructive as it relates to human nature. Jane Austen was masterful in the craft of satire. Her characters and plots display her keen abilities of observation and her understanding of human nature. Pride and Prejudice was an instant hit for her because of its lively characters and plot. In almost every respect, its immediate successor in the timeline of her novel writing, Mansfield Park, was the reverse of the same coin. Its plot is static. We are stuck in the mind of inactive, waiting, boring Fanny Price. Its only truly likable characters are either condemned to misery in the end, as in the case of the Crawfords, or are so peripheral as to be insignificant to the plot, as in the case of Susan Price.
Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility were the earliest attempts to write for an audience beyond her immediate circle. Yet these novels reflected that immediate sphere and all of its concerns—money, survival, marriage, propriety, and education. It was not until Mansfield Park that she began to flex her muscles as an author. What might a clergyman's spinster daughter know about the concerns of a slave-owning1 baronet, a man at the pinnacle of the property class and the politics of power? Some literary critics have speculated that her knowledge of colonial commerce came, not only from her two brothers who were admirals in the Royal Navy and served in the West Indies, but from their father as well. George Austen belonged to a trusteeship of an estate in Antigua.2
Claudia Johnson insists that Mansfield Park was Austen's attempt at writing the "conservative novel," or a response to the genre led by Edmund Burke. There is a serious question, however, as to whether it is a criticism or a vindication of eighteenth-century conservative values. The heroine of the novel, Fanny Price, is a bastion of anti-feminism from start to finish. She is the one character in the novel who never changes her mind. She is steady throughout. No one in the novel exemplifies or champions the ideals of Edmund Burke to the extreme degree that Fanny Price does, except perhaps Lady Bertram. While Lady Bertram's submission to the tyranny of Sir Thomas Bertram seems passive and more an act of laziness than loyalty or love, it is hard to be sure. There is such a lack of substance or activity in the character of Lady Bertram, one feels the danger of projecting onto her character qualities unintended by the author.
There is an argument to be made for the character of Lady Bertram being a slightly recycled version of Lady Middleton in Sense and Sensibility. By subtracting Lady Middleton's activity as an overindulgent mother and social hostess, and by keeping the complete lack of any other interests or hobbies (Lady Middleton gave up music upon marriage) we have Lady Bertram sitting on the couch with her pugs. The two characters are the same in being wholly disinterested from the main action. One is obsessed with maintaining the appearance of elegance and propriety; the other is merely interested in her own comfort. Lady Bertram's obedience to the order at Mansfield Park is, therefore, based on silence and non-resistance. “Middle-aged, stupid, maternal persons are favorite butts for Jane Austen.”3 Although Lady Middleton was far from middle-aged, she was maternal and stupid; and one can doubtless assume that in writing that, Claudia Johnson might have had the middle-aged, and older married women and widows of Austen’s other novels all in mind.
Lady Bertram and Fanny Price are rewarded handsomely in the conclusion of the novel. This fact certainly enforces the idea that Austen meant to praise and idealize the conservative woman. Lady Bertram is rewarded with a permanent companion and reader in Susan Price. Fanny is rewarded for her piety and righteous behavior with marriage to the man of her dreams. Thus, it does not matter if you are stupid like Lady Bertram or intelligent and well-read like Fanny. If you are a good girl who sticks to moral principles and obeys the patriarchal authority, you will be rewarded.
The sinners Mrs. Rushworth and Mrs. Norris rebel against male tyranny and they are accordingly punished. Even poor Dr. Grant cannot be allowed to stay in the pure haven of Mansfield Park, for he drinks and eats too much; death could, therefore, be the only natural consequence for such overindulgence and lack of discipline.
It is troubling to think of Jane Austen, confirmed spinster with the audacity to write novels in the first place, wishing to reinforce female submission with her own version of the conservative novel. In her previous novels, she allowed sinners the benefit of second chances. In Pride and Prejudice, Wickham's gambling debts were paid by Darcy and he obtained a commission in the regular Army. Instead of being banished from all polite society, Lydia was allowed the cover of marriage and a new start in Newcastle. The entire plot of Pride and Prejudice is, indeed, “animated by an impulse to forgiveness.”4 In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne was forgiven for all her improper behavior and rewarded with the patronage of a village! Austen even toyed with the notion of filial disobedience in Northanger Abbey, although she teasingly ended the novel with a hanging question of whether the object of the novel was to encourage filial disobedience or condemn parental tyranny.
Austen liked to toy with antitheses. The tyranny of Sir Thomas is condemned and punished for teaching his children only the appearance of propriety. Three out of four of his children grow up only fearing to be caught doing wrong, not the wrong itself. While they put on convincing performances as dutiful children, there is internal rebellion. Their performances even fall apart in the absence of Sir Thomas. When he absents himself to deal with issues at his other, farther dominion, three of his four children collude with strangers in a scheme of scandalous theatrics. Thus, as Claudia Johnson writes, Sir Thomas is deluded and his “dignity is undercut by the ignorance it gives rise to and further diminished by the pity it inspires in the perceptive but powerless Fanny.”
Yet Austen was far from encouraging filial disobedience in Mansfield Park. Maria's rebellion results in her being banished from society and shut up in a two-bedroom house with Mrs. Norris. Julia only regains favor by being “more controllable.”5 By removing herself from the house of sin, Julia sensibly separates herself from it. Over time, by being a good girl, she is rewarded with a proposal from Mr. Yates, who has also gained favor by learning to respect the authority and ostensibly superior sense of Sir Thomas. We learn, of course, that Sir Thomas’ sense is deeply flawed and that, as Johnson points out, he is acting the part of the all-knowing despot. Thus, we have two opposite things being condemned: tyranny without respect or even affection, and blatant filial disrespect. Perhaps Austen's objective was to honor moderation. Sense without sensibility produces the cold-hearted Sir Thomas, whom everyone obeys but without affection. Likewise, sensibility without sense produces the recklessness we see in Maria Rushworth.
Lionel Trilling disagrees that there is any such praise of moderation in the novel. On the contrary, Trilling asserts that the entire novel “demonstrates that there are no two ways about anything.”6 Trilling says absolutely that the impulse in Mansfield Park is to condemn anything that violates female virtue. Fanny represents excellent virtue, while Mary Crawford is her antithesis. Mary’s playfulness, according to Trilling, is ultimately condemned by the author for being “of the world, the flesh, and the devil.” This is no halfway adherence to Burkean principles!
Trilling does make an excellent point that Mansfield Park turns the usual style of Austen on its head. For instance, there is a parallel between Mary Crawford and Elizabeth Bennet. One might easily imagine Elizabeth uttering Mary’s joke about “rears and vices” in the Royal Navy. Mary is no less likable for her flaws than Elizabeth. Yet, in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth has movement. Her character changes. Mary does not change. At the end of the novel Mary is as contemptuous toward conservative values as ever. If there is any change, it is that Mary has become more resentful of righteousness and piety. We are told that she blames Fanny for her brother’s temptation back to the devil’s lair. Unlike with Elizabeth, there is no marital reward for Mary Crawford, for she has not learned to see the error of her judgement.
The fact that Mansfield Park stands alone among all the works of Jane Austen, alone in its conservative genre, with its sad, unmoving, unforgiving characters, proves that it was against her personal nature. It was, indeed, a kind of academic experiment. She wanted to see how far she could go and test her limits as an author. It may be her least popular work, but the fact that it is still being hotly debated among scholars in the twenty-first century is a testament to her genius as a versatile and complicated writer.
Works Cited
Lew, Joseph. “‘That Abominable Traffic’: Mansfield Park and the Dynamics of Slavery.” History, Gender & Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994. 271-300.
Lew, Joseph. “‘That Abominable Traffic’: Mansfield Park and the Dynamics of Slavery.” History, Gender & Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994. 271-300.
Johnson, Claudia. “Mansfield Park: Confusions of Guilt and Revolutions of Mind.” Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. 96-120.
Trilling, Lionel. “Mansfield Park.” The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism. New York: Viking, 1955. 208-30.
Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. New York: Norton, 1998. 5-321. (See page 316.)
Trilling, Lionel. “Mansfield Park.” The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism. New York: Viking, 1955. 208-30.