This post is the final part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments.
Mansfield Park
Preface
- Introduction
- Method
- Critiques
- The Moral Law Within
- Fanny and Edmund
- The Crawfords
- Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram
- Mrs Norris
- The Quiet Thing
- Enlightenment
- Kantian Deontology
- King Lear
- Romanticism
- The Satirical Inheritance
- Conclusion
Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price
Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price
We have re-read them all four times; or rather, to speak more accurately, they have been read aloud to us, one after the other; and when it is considered what a severe test that is, how the reading aloud permits no skipping, no evasion of weariness, but brings both merits and defects into stronger relief by forcing the mind to dwell on them, there is surely something significant of genuine excellence when both reader and listener finish their fourth reading with increase of admiration. […]
Such art as hers can never grow old, never be superseded. But, after all, miniatures are not frescoes, and her works are miniatures. Her place is among the Immortals; but the pedestal is erected in a quiet niche of the great temple.
G. H. Lewes, The Novels of Jane Austen, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (July 1859)
It is difficult to know whether Lewes was being ironic, playful or perfectly serious. Perhaps he was taking care not to undermine his partner, George Eliot (to my view, a perfectly understandable and respectable motivation for tempering his final assessment). Whatever the case, there is a marked contradiction between the actions and that final assessment. It is as if we are to think that the great atomic physicists should decrease in stature as they penetrated more deeply into smaller scales. But this makes no sense as Scott warns us with his ‘Big bow wow’ comment.
In Republic, Plato makes it very clear that his primary concern was with justifying morality—i.e., (personal) ethics—so, lacking the means of describing and dissecting the psyche, he adopted the extended metaphor of the city. But this hasn’t stopped most of modernity setting his explanation aside, ignoring the metaphor, and treating it primarily as a work on politics; as I have argued, this approach fits nicely with the modern anti-ethical temperament.
The other objection to a full recognition of Jane Austen’s achievements is that she never indulges sexual passion, always being shown modulated, except when it goes wrong as it does with Marianne Dashwood and Maria Bertram. This is clearly deliberate and reflecting a feature of all classic systems of ethics. I don’t mean that passion is wrong, but that it must always be under control. Think of kerosene. This is a very useful commodity. One way of using it would be to collect together a reasonable quantity and set it a light. For my part I would rather see it placed in the fuel tank of a jet liner and burned in the combustion chamber of a gas turbine. It is not that I don’t want all the benefits of kerosene being burnt—it can light my home in a power cut or propel me safely round the world, but it’s combustion needs careful and intelligent handling. Likewise, at the centre of Jane Austen’s there is plenty of sexual passion to be found fuelling the heroine—but being handled with the utmost care and intelligence—and the results are as powerful as they are captivating. Jane Austen would hardly resonate with modern readers, especially female modern readers, if it wasn’t so.
We see that sexual passion smouldering in Fanny Price throughout Mansfield Park, with Fanny having constantly to tamp out outbreaks of jealousy, lest it gets out of control and consumes here, and she more-or-less succeeds. This repressed passion colours the whole of the novel, reflected in the repression of Julia and Maria’s high before their modern, repressive, reactionary father. I am perhaps unusual in finding it far too easy to recognise and identify with Fanny’s weaknesses, but maybe I am not so isolated—we do after all live in quite priggish times.
Mansfield Park, widely appreciated in the nineteenth century, can now only be presented as a grotesque parody (it seems), so illustrating the very degenerate tendencies the novel was setting out to warn us about. Tony Tanner’s conclusion bears repetition.
But if […] Jane Austen could see that a world of frantic change was about to supplant the world of peaceful fixity she knew, why then does she allow the spirit of Mansfield, in the figure of Fanny, to triumph over the forces of change, as exemplified by the Crawfords? I think one could put it this way. To a world abandoning itself to the dangers of thoughtless restlessness, Jane Austen is holding up an image of the values of thoughtful rest. Aware that the trend was for more and more people to explore excitements of personality, she wanted to show how much there was to be said for the ‘heroism of principle’. It is a stoic book in that it speaks for stillness rather than movement, firmness rather than fluidity, arrest rather than change, endurance rather than adventure. In the figure of Fanny it elevates the mind that ‘struggles against itself’, as opposed to the ego which indulges in promiscuous potentialities. Fanny is a true heroine because in a turbulent world it is harder to refrain from action than to let energy and impulse run riot.
Tony Tanner, Jane Austen and the Quiet Thing
With a ‘world of frantic change’ the art of cultivating stability and tranquillity becomes all the more critical to successfully surfing a world of movement, fluidity, change and adventure.
The features of Jane Austen’s art that her critics tax her with are integral to its objectives, its success and it greatness. The times that it could be lazily dismissed in condescending terms must surely be behind us. It demands a more serious answer.
I will finish with a true story of my visit to the National Portrait Gallery to view Cassandra Austen’s portrait of Jane Austen. I wanted to survey the whole gallery so I thought I may as do so, looking out for the picture. Having looked over the whole gallery it was nowhere to be found, which surprised me as it is one of their most popular exhibits, and reverted to the information desk, only to be directed back to a room from which I had come. It was at this point that I noticed the floor-mounted case with Cassandra Austen’s watercolour—I had been walking around the whole gallery with my neck craned at all of the great figures on their grand oil-painted canvases, missing what I was looking for right in front of me.
[This completes the Mansfield Park essay.]
Diminutive Greatness and Fanny Price
This post is the final part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments.
Mansfield Park
Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price
Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price
It is difficult to know whether Lewes was being ironic, playful or perfectly serious. Perhaps he was taking care not to undermine his partner, George Eliot (to my view, a perfectly understandable and respectable motivation for tempering his final assessment). Whatever the case, there is a marked contradiction between the actions and that final assessment. It is as if we are to think that the great atomic physicists should decrease in stature as they penetrated more deeply into smaller scales. But this makes no sense as Scott warns us with his ‘Big bow wow’ comment.
In Republic, Plato makes it very clear that his primary concern was with justifying morality—i.e., (personal) ethics—so, lacking the means of describing and dissecting the psyche, he adopted the extended metaphor of the city. But this hasn’t stopped most of modernity setting his explanation aside, ignoring the metaphor, and treating it primarily as a work on politics; as I have argued, this approach fits nicely with the modern anti-ethical temperament.
The other objection to a full recognition of Jane Austen’s achievements is that she never indulges sexual passion, always being shown modulated, except when it goes wrong as it does with Marianne Dashwood and Maria Bertram. This is clearly deliberate and reflecting a feature of all classic systems of ethics. I don’t mean that passion is wrong, but that it must always be under control. Think of kerosene. This is a very useful commodity. One way of using it would be to collect together a reasonable quantity and set it a light. For my part I would rather see it placed in the fuel tank of a jet liner and burned in the combustion chamber of a gas turbine. It is not that I don’t want all the benefits of kerosene being burnt—it can light my home in a power cut or propel me safely round the world, but it’s combustion needs careful and intelligent handling. Likewise, at the centre of Jane Austen’s there is plenty of sexual passion to be found fuelling the heroine—but being handled with the utmost care and intelligence—and the results are as powerful as they are captivating. Jane Austen would hardly resonate with modern readers, especially female modern readers, if it wasn’t so.
We see that sexual passion smouldering in Fanny Price throughout Mansfield Park, with Fanny having constantly to tamp out outbreaks of jealousy, lest it gets out of control and consumes here, and she more-or-less succeeds. This repressed passion colours the whole of the novel, reflected in the repression of Julia and Maria’s high before their modern, repressive, reactionary father. I am perhaps unusual in finding it far too easy to recognise and identify with Fanny’s weaknesses, but maybe I am not so isolated—we do after all live in quite priggish times.
Mansfield Park, widely appreciated in the nineteenth century, can now only be presented as a grotesque parody (it seems), so illustrating the very degenerate tendencies the novel was setting out to warn us about. Tony Tanner’s conclusion bears repetition.
With a ‘world of frantic change’ the art of cultivating stability and tranquillity becomes all the more critical to successfully surfing a world of movement, fluidity, change and adventure.
The features of Jane Austen’s art that her critics tax her with are integral to its objectives, its success and it greatness. The times that it could be lazily dismissed in condescending terms must surely be behind us. It demands a more serious answer.
I will finish with a true story of my visit to the National Portrait Gallery to view Cassandra Austen’s portrait of Jane Austen. I wanted to survey the whole gallery so I thought I may as do so, looking out for the picture. Having looked over the whole gallery it was nowhere to be found, which surprised me as it is one of their most popular exhibits, and reverted to the information desk, only to be directed back to a room from which I had come. It was at this point that I noticed the floor-mounted case with Cassandra Austen’s watercolour—I had been walking around the whole gallery with my neck craned at all of the great figures on their grand oil-painted canvases, missing what I was looking for right in front of me.
[This completes the Mansfield Park essay.]