Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen

Vladimir Nabokov was wrong in calling Mansfield Park “a fairy tale” in his Lectures on Literature. That designation would be suitable for Pride and Prejudice, but not for this least-loved of Jane Austen’s six novels, as Mansfield Park is by far the most realistic and dark novel Austen wrote, and for once it doesn’t end in a riot of marriages. That is exactly why I prefer it to her other work.

Of course, Mansfield Park is just as much about love and courtship as all Jane Austen’s novels – making a good and safe marriage was a life task for a woman like Austen who came from the lower gentry and didn’t have her own income or possibility to work. (Between brackets: this focus on income coupled with a very rational approach to romance makes Jane Austen somewhat of a philistine, like Daniel Defoe – or should we rather call it “English common sense”?). The happy ending has clearly been tacked on this time and is not at all so happy: after all the dark deeds – passion, eroticism, illicit love – that are continually boiling over in the novel, it is rather unconvincing that things could end so tepid. I like Mansfield Park because it is the most consciously literary of all Austen’s novels, with a well-balanced composition. And there are delicious characters in the “badder than bad” Henry and Mary Crawford, or that super-hypocrite, Mrs Norris. Wonderful scenes are the visit of the young people to an estate where a few of them climb over a rather Freudian fence to wander into the wilderness; as well as the rehearsals for a “dirty” play, where the eroticism drips off the pages.

[Jane Austen drawn by her sister Cassandra]

What makes Mansfield Park rather unpopular with the average Jane Austen fan is the character of its protagonist, Fanny Price. Fanny is an adopted child, an impecunious niece, indeed a Cinderella-figure. She is demure, to say it in neutral terms; critical readers have called her “mousy, shy, nervous, and pathologically virtuous.” She is the opposite from the popular, assertive Lizzy Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Interestingly, in Mansfield Park Jane Austen has given Lizzy Bennet’s qualities to the anti-heroine, Mary Crawford, turning the heroine-centered courtship romance on its head. As the proverbial “poor relation” (she reminded me of the “poor aunt” from a famous story by Haruki Murakami), Fanny is forced to live in a cold and gloomy attic, ignored by her female cousins Maria and Julia (only her kind cousin Edmund pays attention to her) and bullied into quiet submission by a stern uncle and aunt – not to speak of the grotesquely hypocritical Mrs Norris, herself a hanger-on and therefore extra cruel to other hangers-on. Fanny has to know her place in this hierarchical society and that means keeping her mouth shut and suffering in silence.

In other words, Austen shows us how it is position and class rather than character that forces Fanny into her subdued role. Austen has often been criticized for writing romances that were unconnected to larger society. At least in Mansfield Park (and to a lesser degree in Persuasion) she writes on a wider canvas and shows the ills of a strictly class-determined society.

Mansfield Park, by the way, is a new country house. Fanny’s uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, has become rich thanks to the sugar trade; he has large estates in the colonies (still worked by slaves at the time the novel was written) and has to travel there because of “poor returns.” His double absenteeism causes damage not only in his plantations but also on his estate in England. When he travels to Antigua, taking his profligate son Tom with him, he leaves the house under the guardianship of the bullying Mrs Norris. One of the ironies of the novel is that Sir Thomas goes to Antigua to sort out his problems, only for his own house to be thrown into moral chaos by his absence.

The plot is set into motion by the arrival of brother and sister Crawford, the mesmerizing and seductive relatives of a new parson in the village. They come from London and bring corruption with them, but they are of course at the same time delicious figures. I have already mentioned Mary Crawford – her brother Henry is just as sadistic and sexy as Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, but with infinitely more charisma than that rather charmless man. Like exotic birds of prey Henry and Mary bring the necessary sparkle to the novel – and who minds that they are the anti-heroes and not the “good ones”? Identify yourself with the god-like position of the author (and not the protagonist) and look from above with an ironic smile at the silly goings-on among those small human ants.

The chaos which ensues when the Crawfords are taken up into the company of the Bertrams is shown in two major scenes: an outing to a neighboring estate, and the putting on of an erotic play, turning the big house into a theater.

[Stoneleigh Abbey, on which Austen's fictional Sotherton was partly based]

The Byronian Henry Crawford creates havoc and rivalry between the Bertram sisters, Fanny’s cousins. And the kind Edmund, Fanny’s secret flame, falls in love with Mary Crawford, although she is a bit shocked to hear he is destined for the church (being the second son). Maria Bertram is betrothed to the weak aristocrat James Rushworth; a day trip to his estate, Sotherton Court, predicts her ruin. She leaves the estate through some grimly Freudian iron railings into the wild countryside beyond in the company of Henry – leaving her fiancé behind. The flirting couple doesn’t even have the patience to wait for the key to the gate, but climbs over the spikes.

Mary Crawford – who like a siren plays the harp – takes the role of a coquette in the play the young people rehearse in a later event. The highlight is an inflammatory scene in which Mary’s character seduces a pious clergyman played by Edmund. Fanny, of course, is watching and despairing, consumed with sexual jealousy. But in an interesting twist, Henry later decides to try to seduce Fanny – when Fanny keeps refusing him, her uncle (who by now has returned to the chaos of his house) punishes her by sending her temporarily back to her own family in Portsmouth: she is to experience the reality of life without servants who clean up after you. So she sees her grog-drinking father again, her slattern mother and the flock of unruly brothers and sisters.

But Austen also emphasizes the claims of innate merit and talent over social position and inherited wealth. Fanny’s brothers, who have been educated in the hard school of the Portsmouth family and who have to work to get ahead, will be successful in life, in contrast to Sir Thomas’s children, who are profligate through lack of self-discipline. At the beginning of the novel, Sir Thomas was keen that Fanny should know her social place, as she is different from the “Miss Bertrams.” But at the end he recognizes “the advantages of early hardship and discipline, and the consciousness of being born to struggle and endure.” Jane Austen makes abundantly clear that Fanny’s noisy and messy lower-middle class family is a better breeding ground for success in life than the pampered existence at Mansfield Park.

In that sense, Mansfield Park is Austen's most modern and pioneering novel. And it is very contemporary in demonstrating the value of meritocracy above the worthless lives of the landed gentry, the Bertrams and their friends - whose idleness is made possible by income derived from England's Caribbean colonies - from the work of slaves.