“If I had known you were going out, I should have got you just to go as far as my house with some orders for Nanny,” said she, “which I have since, to my very great inconvenience, been obliged to go and carry myself. I could very ill spare the time, and you might have saved me the trouble, if you would only have been so good as to let us know you were going out. It would have made no difference to you, I suppose, whether you had walked in the shrubbery or gone to my house.”
“I recommended the shrubbery to Fanny as the driest place,” said Sir Thomas.
“Oh!” said Mrs. Norris, with a moment’s check, “that was very kind of you, Sir Thomas; but you do not know how dry the path is to my house. Fanny would have had quite as good a walk there, I assure you, with the advantage of being of some use, and obliging her aunt: it is all her fault. If she would but have let us know she was going out but there is a something about Fanny, I have often observed it before—she likes to go her own way to work; she does not like to be dictated to; she takes her own independent walk whenever she can; she certainly has a little spirit of secrecy, and independence, and nonsense, about her, which I would advise her to get the better of.”
As a general reflection on Fanny, Sir Thomas thought nothing could be more unjust, though he had been so lately expressing the same sentiments himself, and he tried to turn the conversation: tried repeatedly before he could succeed; for Mrs. Norris had not discernment enough to perceive, either now, or at any other time, to what degree he thought well of his niece, or how very far he was from wishing to have his own children’s merits set off by the depreciation of hers. She was talking at Fanny, and resenting this private walk half through the dinner. (III.I)
In trying to understand the ethical scheme of Austen’s novels it as well to pay attention to the parents and stock villains—and they often overlap. In Pride and Prejudice we find Mrs Bennett rash and unbearably vulgar and Mr Bennett’s cynical stand-offish philosophy ultimately culpable. Austen is careful to give us every opportunity to join with her favourite heroine in general disdain—the celebrated wit of the novel being quite caught up in its presence in the heroine.
“How despicably I have acted!” she cried; “I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity in useless or blameable mistrust! How humiliating is this discovery! Yet, how just a humiliation! Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind! But vanity, not love, has been my folly. Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment I never knew myself.”
Pride and Prejudice (II.XIII)
The sharp reader will realise that the author has been encouraging the reader to take Elizabeth’s side in all of this, in which case they can share in the epiphany, in their own tendency to court ‘prepossession and ignorance’ and drive ‘reason away’. (And anyone who does not come to a solid appreciation of Jane Bennett’s ‘generous candour’ may have missed some of Austen’s meaning.) The point of the comedy is to get us to laugh at some figures—Mr and Mrs Bennett—all the while encouraging us to replicate some of their tendencies.
We see the same pattern in Emma with, as Marvin Mudrick observed, many of the most unattractive attributes of the very vulgar Mrs Elton being found in Emma Woodhouse, and, as we know, it is very far from the case that Emma Woodhouse’s admirers were confined to her author.
With the discovery novels, Pride and Prejudice and Emma, in which the heroine corrects distorted perceptions, it is a relatively straightforward problem for a novelist to replicate the ethical ‘discoveries’ the heroine is making the novelist need only succeed in putting the reader in the place of the heroine and the rest will follow naturally, the basic structure following the classic design of a modern novel.
For the ‘trial’ novels, like Sense and Sensibility,Mansfield Park the setup is more delicate, the very idea of replicating the heroine’s trials in the reading flagging the danger. In these novels the heroine often gets subtly neglected, undervalued and isolated by a parent figure, and to complete this tragic design we have to be tempted into this neglect. The heroine’s principles are on trial, and the reader is encouraged to join in. In the comedic discovery novels, the reader and the heroine’s hearts are naturally in sympathy but endeavouring to see things clearly; in the tragic trial novels the reader is tempted to neglect the heroine, and so having their principles tested along with the heroine, often in sympathy with the negligent parent. We are invited to condemn characters that abuse the heroine (which we do, of course), but if we repeat the misjudgements in the reading—so neglecting the heroine—then we implicitly end up victims of our own criticism.
And so we come to Sir Thomas and Mrs Norris. When Sir Thomas says of Mrs Norris ‘nothing could be more unjust, though he had been so lately expressing the same sentiments himself’ (where he accuses Fanny of ‘wilfulness of temper, self-conceit, and every tendency to that independence of spirit which prevails so much in modern days’ [III.I]), we should perhaps not be too hard on Sir Thomas.
“Me!” cried Fanny, sitting down again with a most frightened look. “Indeed you must excuse me. I could not act anything if you were to give me the world. No, indeed, I cannot act.”
“Indeed, but you must, for we cannot excuse you. It need not frighten you: it is a nothing of a part, a mere nothing, not above half a dozen speeches altogether, and it will not much signify if nobody hears a word you say; so you may be as creep-mouse as you like, but we must have you to look at.”
“If you are afraid of half a dozen speeches,” cried Mr. Rushworth, “what would you do with such a part as mine? I have forty-two to learn.”
“It is not that I am afraid of learning by heart,” said Fanny, shocked to find herself at that moment the only speaker in the room, and to feel that almost every eye was upon her; “but I really cannot act.”
“Yes, yes, you can act well enough for us. Learn your part, and we will teach you all the rest. You have only two scenes, and as I shall be Cottager, I’ll put you in and push you about, and you will do it very well, I’ll answer for it.”
“No, indeed, Mr. Bertram, you must excuse me. You cannot have an idea. It would be absolutely impossible for me. If I were to undertake it, I should only disappoint you.”
“Phoo! Phoo! Do not be so shamefaced. You’ll do it very well. Every allowance will be made for you. We do not expect perfection. You must get a brown gown, and a white apron, and a mob cap, and we must make you a few wrinkles, and a little of the crowsfoot at the corner of your eyes, and you will be a very proper, little old woman.”
“You must excuse me, indeed you must excuse me,” cried Fanny, growing more and more red from excessive agitation, and looking distressfully at Edmund, who was kindly observing her; but unwilling to exasperate his brother by interference, gave her only an encouraging smile. Her entreaty had no effect on Tom: he only said again what he had said before; and it was not merely Tom, for the requisition was now backed by Maria, and Mr. Crawford, and Mr. Yates, with an urgency which differed from his but in being more gentle or more ceremonious, and which altogether was quite overpowering to Fanny; and before she could breathe after it, Mrs. Norris completed the whole by thus addressing her in a whisper at once angry and audible—”What a piece of work here is about nothing: I am quite ashamed of you, Fanny, to make such a difficulty of obliging your cousins in a trifle of this sort—so kind as they are to you! Take the part with a good grace, and let us hear no more of the matter, I entreat.”
“Do not urge her, madam,” said Edmund. “It is not fair to urge her in this manner. You see she does not like to act. Let her chuse for herself, as well as the rest of us. Her judgment may be quite as safely trusted. Do not urge her any more.”
“I am not going to urge her,” replied Mrs. Norris sharply; “but I shall think her a very obstinate, ungrateful girl, if she does not do what her aunt and cousins wish her— very ungrateful, indeed, considering who and what she is.” (I.XV)
The way the theatrical company bullies the ‘frightened’ and ‘creep-mouse’ Fanny is well drawn and Mrs Norris’s ‘hauntingly horribleness’, founded on her persecution of Fanny, is here at its most horrible. Yet when we condemn Fanny as ‘a monster of complacency and pride’ (Amis) and as the ‘most terrible incarnation of the female prig-pharisee’ (Farrer) we are at risk of agreeing with Mrs Norris’s ugly sentiment in every point. (The criticism was not confined to Farrer and Amis, of course; these are just two of the truth-tellers.)
The critical trajectory of a Fanny depreciation can plausibly follow Mrs Norris’s response to her, as we see in Mrs Norris’s reaction to finding that Henry has proposed to Fanny.
Angry she was: bitterly angry; but she was more angry with Fanny for having received such an offer than for refusing it. It was an injury and affront to Julia, who ought to have been Mr. Crawford’s choice; and, independently of that, she disliked Fanny, because she had neglected her; and she would have grudged such an elevation to one whom she had been always trying to depress. (III.II)
As Lionel Trilling says, no small part of the interest of Mansfield Park lies in it ‘seems to controvert everything [Pride and Prejudice] tells us about life.’ Whereas Pride and Prejudice celebrated ‘the traits of spiritedness, vivacity, celerity, and lightness,’ Mansfield Parktakes full notice of these ‘only to reject them as having nothing to do with virtue and happiness.’ As Trilling goes on to say, the ‘great charm, the charming greatness, of Pride and Prejudice is that it permits us to conceive of morality as style.’
That people would think that ‘morality as style’ was what the author of Pride and Prejudice was driving at was a problem. Austen had to bring the hammer down on this ‘light and bright and sparkling’ conceit and introduce some shade, and Mansfield Park was the result. Where almost all surfaces are concerned it is the anti-thesis of Pride and Prejudice: the poor-relation, dull, physically weak, timid, idealistic and bookish heroine; the clever, accomplished and confident older sisters; the loving, brotherly mentor-suitor, reliant as he is on his clerical vocation; the witty and sparkling Crawfords, miles away from Caroline Bingley and Mr Collins; and of course the inert mother and authoritarian father presenting the opposite problems to familial happiness that the Bennett parents provided. The conceit that all of this was the product of an authorial funk, whether the misguided advice of moralistic relatives as Farrer speculated, or that it reflected the author’s ‘moral and religious preferences at this moment of her life’ as Trilling suggested, especially given the novel’s known 19th century popularity, is difficult to rationally defend.
Better to analyse our own reactions. At the start of the novel, in its Cinderella phase, when the author presents her timid and almost-sickly, childish heroine, we are inclined to take a patronising attitude towards her as Mrs Norris and Sir Thomas do, the issue being whether we are going to be a ‘real and consistent patron’ of Austen’s experimental heroine or not. If we do then our reading will probably take on a trajectory more like Sir Thomas’s with a more satisfying conclusion, otherwise our reading may not be so satisfactory. Mrs Norris’s champions her clever and accomplished nieces, neglects Fanny and tries to repress her when she starts to show any signs of independence and threaten their pre-eminence. The reader was never intended to follow Mrs Norris in this but the author has something else in mind for the reader. While Mary Crawford’s ‘lively dark eye, clear brown complexion, and general prettiness’ may not be a trial for the Maria and Julia Bertram it can become one for the reader. When Fanny declines to take part in the theatrics, wishing to respect parental authority she is, in the readers and Mrs Norris’s eyes, calling into question her more accomplished, prettier and wittier betters—indeed she is making a direct assault on the whole ‘morality as style’ idea, as disturbing to the reader as it is to Mrs Norris. On Sir Thomas’s return Fanny becomes at 18 a ‘pretty woman’ (II.III), and intelligent in her own way, though Sir Thomas’s earlier assessment that William Price’s ‘sister at sixteen [is] in some respects too much like his sister at ten’ (I.III) still has truth in it. (Fanny is indeed in need of Sir Thomas’s ‘medicinal project upon his niece’s understanding’ [III.VI], with a return to her family in Portsmouth to complete her education.)
Fanny’s rejection of the Crawfords in volume III, against the advice of everyone, even standing up to the bullying lapse of Austen’s most powerful and sympathetic patriarch, represents a central attack on ‘morality as style’. When it leads to Maria’s and the Crawford’s disgrace, the author is careful to step in and deflect the flak for Maria’s banishment from Sir Thomas to herself for—as the truth-tellers Farrer and Amis make clear—the author and her heroine—my Fanny (III.XVII)—have become complicit in this monstrous attack on our modern pieties. A reader who failed to recognise Fanny’s qualities, whose heart remains with the Crawfords, will feel as short-changed as Mrs Norris feels over Maria’s treatment at the close. When Lionel Trilling says ‘Henry Crawford has more sincerity than his sister’ …
He is conscious of his charm, of the winningness of his personal style, which has in it – as he knows – a large element of natural goodness and generosity.
Trilling illustrates what a power grip the idea of ‘morality as style’ has on our imagination. Crawford shows throughout that he is, as Austen herself said, ‘a clever pleasant Man’, but almost every action for the length of the novel provides a study in selfishness, even, and especially in his courtship of Fanny.
It was with reluctance that he suffered her to go; but there was no look of despair in parting to belie his words, or give her hopes of his being less unreasonable than he professed himself.
Now she was angry. Some resentment did arise at a perseverance so selfish and ungenerous. Here was again a want of delicacy and regard for others which had formerly so struck and disgusted her. Here was again a something of the same Mr. Crawford whom she had so reprobated before. How evidently was there a gross want of feeling and humanity where his own pleasure was concerned; and alas! how always known no principle to supply as a duty what the heart was deficient in! (III.II)
From his refusal to provide a home for his sister (‘he could not accommodate his sister in an article of such importance’) through to his destruction of Maria, all of actions are grounded on selfishness. Trilling himself noticed that the ‘triumph of Jane Austen’s art’ in the way the insincerity of Mary’s speeches become apparent on rereading the novel, but it is perhaps equally impressive that Henry Crawford never shows any capacity for acting selflessly and that this should remain so well hidden from the reader. Being able to construct a character with the appearance of goodness, yet totally corrupted (having ‘indulged in the freaks of a cold-blooded vanity a little too long’ [III.XVII]) was an impressive feat, one the mind may have difficulty comprehending, even after many readings.
Mrs Norris
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments.
Mansfield Park
Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price
3.5 Mrs Norris
In trying to understand the ethical scheme of Austen’s novels it as well to pay attention to the parents and stock villains—and they often overlap. In Pride and Prejudice we find Mrs Bennett rash and unbearably vulgar and Mr Bennett’s cynical stand-offish philosophy ultimately culpable. Austen is careful to give us every opportunity to join with her favourite heroine in general disdain—the celebrated wit of the novel being quite caught up in its presence in the heroine.
The sharp reader will realise that the author has been encouraging the reader to take Elizabeth’s side in all of this, in which case they can share in the epiphany, in their own tendency to court ‘prepossession and ignorance’ and drive ‘reason away’. (And anyone who does not come to a solid appreciation of Jane Bennett’s ‘generous candour’ may have missed some of Austen’s meaning.) The point of the comedy is to get us to laugh at some figures—Mr and Mrs Bennett—all the while encouraging us to replicate some of their tendencies.
We see the same pattern in Emma with, as Marvin Mudrick observed, many of the most unattractive attributes of the very vulgar Mrs Elton being found in Emma Woodhouse, and, as we know, it is very far from the case that Emma Woodhouse’s admirers were confined to her author.
With the discovery novels, Pride and Prejudice and Emma, in which the heroine corrects distorted perceptions, it is a relatively straightforward problem for a novelist to replicate the ethical ‘discoveries’ the heroine is making the novelist need only succeed in putting the reader in the place of the heroine and the rest will follow naturally, the basic structure following the classic design of a modern novel.
For the ‘trial’ novels, like Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park the setup is more delicate, the very idea of replicating the heroine’s trials in the reading flagging the danger. In these novels the heroine often gets subtly neglected, undervalued and isolated by a parent figure, and to complete this tragic design we have to be tempted into this neglect. The heroine’s principles are on trial, and the reader is encouraged to join in. In the comedic discovery novels, the reader and the heroine’s hearts are naturally in sympathy but endeavouring to see things clearly; in the tragic trial novels the reader is tempted to neglect the heroine, and so having their principles tested along with the heroine, often in sympathy with the negligent parent. We are invited to condemn characters that abuse the heroine (which we do, of course), but if we repeat the misjudgements in the reading—so neglecting the heroine—then we implicitly end up victims of our own criticism.
And so we come to Sir Thomas and Mrs Norris. When Sir Thomas says of Mrs Norris ‘nothing could be more unjust, though he had been so lately expressing the same sentiments himself’ (where he accuses Fanny of ‘wilfulness of temper, self-conceit, and every tendency to that independence of spirit which prevails so much in modern days’ [III.I]), we should perhaps not be too hard on Sir Thomas.
The way the theatrical company bullies the ‘frightened’ and ‘creep-mouse’ Fanny is well drawn and Mrs Norris’s ‘hauntingly horribleness’, founded on her persecution of Fanny, is here at its most horrible. Yet when we condemn Fanny as ‘a monster of complacency and pride’ (Amis) and as the ‘most terrible incarnation of the female prig-pharisee’ (Farrer) we are at risk of agreeing with Mrs Norris’s ugly sentiment in every point. (The criticism was not confined to Farrer and Amis, of course; these are just two of the truth-tellers.)
The critical trajectory of a Fanny depreciation can plausibly follow Mrs Norris’s response to her, as we see in Mrs Norris’s reaction to finding that Henry has proposed to Fanny.
As Lionel Trilling says, no small part of the interest of Mansfield Park lies in it ‘seems to controvert everything [Pride and Prejudice] tells us about life.’ Whereas Pride and Prejudice celebrated ‘the traits of spiritedness, vivacity, celerity, and lightness,’ Mansfield Park takes full notice of these ‘only to reject them as having nothing to do with virtue and happiness.’ As Trilling goes on to say, the ‘great charm, the charming greatness, of Pride and Prejudice is that it permits us to conceive of morality as style.’
That people would think that ‘morality as style’ was what the author of Pride and Prejudice was driving at was a problem. Austen had to bring the hammer down on this ‘light and bright and sparkling’ conceit and introduce some shade, and Mansfield Park was the result. Where almost all surfaces are concerned it is the anti-thesis of Pride and Prejudice: the poor-relation, dull, physically weak, timid, idealistic and bookish heroine; the clever, accomplished and confident older sisters; the loving, brotherly mentor-suitor, reliant as he is on his clerical vocation; the witty and sparkling Crawfords, miles away from Caroline Bingley and Mr Collins; and of course the inert mother and authoritarian father presenting the opposite problems to familial happiness that the Bennett parents provided. The conceit that all of this was the product of an authorial funk, whether the misguided advice of moralistic relatives as Farrer speculated, or that it reflected the author’s ‘moral and religious preferences at this moment of her life’ as Trilling suggested, especially given the novel’s known 19th century popularity, is difficult to rationally defend.
Better to analyse our own reactions. At the start of the novel, in its Cinderella phase, when the author presents her timid and almost-sickly, childish heroine, we are inclined to take a patronising attitude towards her as Mrs Norris and Sir Thomas do, the issue being whether we are going to be a ‘real and consistent patron’ of Austen’s experimental heroine or not. If we do then our reading will probably take on a trajectory more like Sir Thomas’s with a more satisfying conclusion, otherwise our reading may not be so satisfactory. Mrs Norris’s champions her clever and accomplished nieces, neglects Fanny and tries to repress her when she starts to show any signs of independence and threaten their pre-eminence. The reader was never intended to follow Mrs Norris in this but the author has something else in mind for the reader. While Mary Crawford’s ‘lively dark eye, clear brown complexion, and general prettiness’ may not be a trial for the Maria and Julia Bertram it can become one for the reader. When Fanny declines to take part in the theatrics, wishing to respect parental authority she is, in the readers and Mrs Norris’s eyes, calling into question her more accomplished, prettier and wittier betters—indeed she is making a direct assault on the whole ‘morality as style’ idea, as disturbing to the reader as it is to Mrs Norris. On Sir Thomas’s return Fanny becomes at 18 a ‘pretty woman’ (II.III), and intelligent in her own way, though Sir Thomas’s earlier assessment that William Price’s ‘sister at sixteen [is] in some respects too much like his sister at ten’ (I.III) still has truth in it. (Fanny is indeed in need of Sir Thomas’s ‘medicinal project upon his niece’s understanding’ [III.VI], with a return to her family in Portsmouth to complete her education.)
Fanny’s rejection of the Crawfords in volume III, against the advice of everyone, even standing up to the bullying lapse of Austen’s most powerful and sympathetic patriarch, represents a central attack on ‘morality as style’. When it leads to Maria’s and the Crawford’s disgrace, the author is careful to step in and deflect the flak for Maria’s banishment from Sir Thomas to herself for—as the truth-tellers Farrer and Amis make clear—the author and her heroine—my Fanny (III.XVII)—have become complicit in this monstrous attack on our modern pieties. A reader who failed to recognise Fanny’s qualities, whose heart remains with the Crawfords, will feel as short-changed as Mrs Norris feels over Maria’s treatment at the close. When Lionel Trilling says ‘Henry Crawford has more sincerity than his sister’ …
Trilling illustrates what a power grip the idea of ‘morality as style’ has on our imagination. Crawford shows throughout that he is, as Austen herself said, ‘a clever pleasant Man’, but almost every action for the length of the novel provides a study in selfishness, even, and especially in his courtship of Fanny.
From his refusal to provide a home for his sister (‘he could not accommodate his sister in an article of such importance’) through to his destruction of Maria, all of actions are grounded on selfishness. Trilling himself noticed that the ‘triumph of Jane Austen’s art’ in the way the insincerity of Mary’s speeches become apparent on rereading the novel, but it is perhaps equally impressive that Henry Crawford never shows any capacity for acting selflessly and that this should remain so well hidden from the reader. Being able to construct a character with the appearance of goodness, yet totally corrupted (having ‘indulged in the freaks of a cold-blooded vanity a little too long’ [III.XVII]) was an impressive feat, one the mind may have difficulty comprehending, even after many readings.
Next: The Quiet Thing