Gotham Diary:
Best Self
29 April 2013
In his Introduction to the 1966 edition of Penguin Classics Mansfield Park, Tony Tanner says something very beautiful about why Mansfield is necessarily inhospitable to amateur theatricals.
For Mansfield Park is a place where you must be true to your best self: the theatre is a place where you can explore and experiment with other selves. A person cannot live in both.
Over the weekend, I read Richard Jenkyns long, admiring essay on Mansfield Park, in which he struggles manfully to rescue Fanny Price from the charge of priggishness. This is a battle that, once joined, can’t be won, because it assumes that comic fun is the ideal objective. If Mansfield Park is supposed to be a comedy, then Fanny Price is a prig, and that’s all there is to it. However, notwithstanding Austen’s sharply comic writing (almost stand-up at times), Mansfield Park is not a comedy. It is a transcendent meditation on English Christianity, on Milton and Bunyan and Johnson, to name only three of the pillars on which it stands. I am tempted to call it an allegory — but I resist. Fanny Price is not a prig; she is a pilgrim. She is on a journey, and her only defenses are modesty and integrity. Austen takes the nature of Fanny’s spiritual development for granted, as may we all, and pays it no more attention than she does Fanny’s feelings for Edmund, which we are allowed to see only where they are crimped by the behavior of others. What interests Austen as a novelist is the secular manifestation of the pilgrimage, which is presented entirely in terms of Fanny’s occupation of her uncle’s house.
At first, Fanny is in the background. We are encouraged to believe that we are paying much more attention to her than any of the characters in the book can be bothered to do. Fanny is a passive witness to the rush of developments that crowd the first half-dozen chapters, after which the remainder of Volume I is devoted to two highly-wrought adventures, both parables of a sort. The first is the visit to Sotherton, a locus of amazingly transparent symbolism. At Sotherton, with its walled garden, wilderness, locked gate and “free” open park land, the English religious tradition is realized in the physical landscape. Maria Bertram rehearses the fall from grace that, at the climax of the novel, will validate all of Fanny’s “priggish” concern for her well-being. The second adventure, the production of Lovers’ Vows that is aborted at the eleventh hour by Sir Thomas Bertram’s unexpected return from Antigua, pits Fanny somewhat more actively against various displays of worldly bad faith.
In the novel’s second and third volumes, Fanny is advanced, rather against her will, to the foreground. Maria marries Mr Rushworth, Julia joins the wedding trip (not an unusual thing at the time), and the Bertram sisters disappear forever into the novel’s background; we hear of them, but we never again see them. Suddenly, Fanny is the only young lady in the house, and, as Sir Thomas’s warm greeting to her upon his return indicates, she is discovered to be an appealing young lady. She has grown pretty and, for most purposes, self-assured. She is no longer the puny transplant from Portsmouth: Mansfield Park has nourished her, even without a fire in the East Room.
But there is a failure of harmony, because Fanny’s virtue is mistaken for mere good judgment, a more pliable quantity. The novel slows down to a series of conversations, in which people say things to Fanny that make her uncomfortable because she is not pliable. The novel registers her discomforts approvingly. She is right to be pained by Edmund’s talk of Mary Crawford, and right to be horrified by Henry Crawford’s proposal of marriage. By the middle of Volume III, she has shown what she is made of, but Sir Thomas and Edmund are still too enchanted by the spell of meretricious worldliness cast by the Crawfords, which Fanny alone resists, to like what they see. So Fanny is banished to Portsmouth.
Being Fanny, she does not perceive the painful aspect of this removal until she has spent some time under her father’s relatively wretched roof. Setting out from Mansfield with her brother, William, she looks forward to “going home,” and it is only when she gets there that she realizes that Mansfield Park is her home now. This is something that anyone not engaged on a spiritual journey would have foreseen, but Fanny’s piety requires the kind of material challenge that genuinely risks undermining her. An ever-apparently self-improving Henry Crawford pays a surprise visit, and Austen allows us to savor for a moment a future in which, Edmund’s having married Mary, Fanny finally capitulates to Henry, and perhaps does indeed “fix him,” as Mary sighs. But this scenario belongs to a different novel, one in which the Fall plays a slighter role, and no dissatisfied Maria Rushworth smoulders menacingly. When Maria duly erupts, Fanny, not without pangs of guilt at the good fortune that befalls her in the wake of the misery of others, triumphs. She returns to Mansfield Park, her best self intact, as a model guiding the others who remain there toward their best selves. Tellingly, Aunt Norris expels herself from the general transfiguration.
I read Mansfield Park as the record of a spiritual journey taken by someone besides Fanny: Jane Austen herself. This was the first book that Austen conceived in maturity. She had recently reworked, and finally published, her second and third attempts at fiction, but Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice are rooted in Austen’s high-spirited girlhood, which explains their continuing popularity with young ladies. Mansfield Park, in contrast, seeks to come to terms with the full weight of Austen’s religious and intellectual heritage. In it, she brings her deep reading in the monuments of her native tongue to bear on the opportunities and vicissitudes of gentry life in a time of pervasive commotion.
Nobody would think to call Fanny Price a prig if, instead of “Jane Austen,” the title page bore the name of Marilynne Robinson.