Notes on Completing Mansfield Park

This is a last of a sporadic series of posts logging my thoughts as I reread Mansfield Park (spurred by the writing of the essay).

Critics often think that Austen was easy on Lady Bertram, but the Portsmouth section really isn’t very kind to her. Her ‘a very creditable, common-place, amplifying style’ of letter writing is standard enough teasing, but Lady Bertram’s response to Tom’s illness is damning, from her ‘playing at being frightened’ to there ‘hardly [being] any one in the house who might not have described, from personal observation, better than herself; not one who was not more useful at times to her son.’ And of course ‘Sir Thomas knew not how to bring down his conversation or his voice to the level of irritation and feebleness’.

The other highlight was that marvellous descriptive passage when Maria’s and Henry’s affair breaks in on Fanny.  It starts with an objective descriptive passage pretty unique to the Austen novels, finishing with the impact on Fanny’s mind, with Mr Price’s speech in between.

She was deep in other musing.  The remembrance of her first evening in that room, of her father and his newspaper, came across her.  No candle was now wanted. The sun was yet an hour and half above the horizon. She felt that she had, indeed, been three months there; and the sun’s rays falling strongly into the parlour, instead of cheering, made her still more melancholy, for sunshine appeared to her a totally different thing in a town and in the country.  Here, its power was only a glare:  a stifling, sickly glare, serving but to bring forward stains and dirt that might otherwise have slept. There was neither health nor gaiety in sunshine in a town. She sat in a blaze of oppressive heat, in a cloud of moving dust, and her eyes could only wander from the walls, marked by her father’s head, to the table cut and notched by her brothers, where stood the tea-board never thoroughly cleaned, the cups and saucers wiped in streaks, the milk a mixture of motes floating in thin blue, and the bread and butter growing every minute more greasy than even Rebecca’s hands had first produced it. Her father read his newspaper, and her mother lamented over the ragged carpet as usual, while the tea was in preparation, and wished Rebecca would mend it; and Fanny was first roused by his calling out to her, after humphing and considering over a particular paragraph: “What’s the name of your great cousins in town, Fan?”

A moment’s recollection enabled her to say, “Rushworth, sir.”

“And don’t they live in Wimpole Street?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then, there’s the devil to pay among them, that’s all! There” (holding out the paper to her); “much good may such fine relations do you.  I don’t know what Sir Thomas may think of such matters; he may be too much of the courtier and fine gentleman to like his daughter the less.  But, by G—! if she belonged to me, I’d give her the rope’s end as long as I could stand over her.  A little flogging for man and woman too would be the best way of preventing such things.”

Fanny read to herself that “it was with infinite concern the newspaper had to announce to the world a matrimonial fracas in the family of Mr. R. of Wimpole Street; the beautiful Mrs. R., whose name had not long been enrolled in the lists of Hymen, and who had promised to become so brilliant a leader in the fashionable world, having quitted her husband’s roof in company with the well-known and captivating Mr. C., the intimate friend and associate of Mr. R., and it was not known even to the editor of the newspaper whither they were gone.”

“It is a mistake, sir,” said Fanny instantly; “it must be a mistake, it cannot be true; it must mean some other people.”

She spoke from the instinctive wish of delaying shame; she spoke with a resolution which sprung from despair, for she spoke what she did not, could not believe herself. It had been the shock of conviction as she read.  The truth rushed on her; and how she could have spoken at all, how she could even have breathed, was afterwards matter of wonder to herself.

Mr. Price cared too little about the report to make her much answer.  “It might be all a lie,” he acknowledged; “but so many fine ladies were going to the devil nowadays that way, that there was no answering for anybody.”

“Indeed, I hope it is not true,” said Mrs. Price plaintively; “it would be so very shocking!  If I have spoken once to Rebecca about that carpet, I am sure I have spoke at least a dozen times; have not I, Betsey?  And it would not be ten minutes’ work.”

The horror of a mind like Fanny’s, as it received the conviction of such guilt, and began to take in some part of the misery that must ensue, can hardly be described. At first, it was a sort of stupefaction; but every moment was quickening her perception of the horrible evil. She could not doubt, she dared not indulge a hope, of the paragraph being false.  Miss Crawford’s letter, which she had read so often as to make every line her own, was in frightful conformity with it.  Her eager defence of her brother, her hope of its being hushed up, her evident agitation, were all of a piece with something very bad; and if there was a woman of character in existence, who could treat as a trifle this sin of the first magnitude, who would try to gloss it over, and desire to have it unpunished, she could believe Miss Crawford to be the woman! Now she could see her own mistake as to who were gone, or said to be gone.  It was not Mr. and Mrs. Rushworth; it was Mrs. Rushworth and Mr. Crawford.

Fanny seemed to herself never to have been shocked before. There was no possibility of rest.  The evening passed without a pause of misery, the night was totally sleepless. She passed only from feelings of sickness to shudderings of horror; and from hot fits of fever to cold.  The event was so shocking, that there were moments even when her heart revolted from it as impossible:  when she thought it could not be.  A woman married only six months ago; a man professing himself devoted, even engaged to another; that other her near relation; the whole family, both families connected as they were by tie upon tie; all friends, all intimate together!  It was too horrible a confusion of guilt, too gross a complication of evil, for human nature, not in a state of utter barbarism, to be capable of! yet her judgment told her it was so. His unsettled affections, wavering with his vanity, Maria’s decided attachment, and no sufficient principle on either side, gave it possibility:  Miss Crawford’s letter stampt it a fact.What would be the consequence?  Whom would it not injure? Whose views might it not affect?  Whose peace would it not cut up for ever?  Miss Crawford, herself, Edmund; but it was dangerous, perhaps, to tread such ground. She confined herself, or tried to confine herself, to the simple, indubitable family misery which must envelop all, if it were indeed a matter of certified guilt and public exposure. The mother’s sufferings, the father’s; there she paused. Julia’s, Tom’s, Edmund’s; there a yet longer pause. They were the two on whom it would fall most horribly. Sir Thomas’s parental solicitude and high sense of honour and decorum, Edmund’s upright principles, unsuspicious temper, and genuine strength of feeling, made her think it scarcely possible for them to support life and reason under such disgrace; and it appeared to her that, as far as this world alone was concerned, the greatest blessing to every one of kindred with Mrs. Rushworth would be instant annihilation.

This is of course the culmination of Sir Thomas’s medicinal project, where Fanny’s somewhat romantic view of reality finally gets broken down.

There is nothing new in any of this, but I did got the strong sense on this reading that Austen’s noisy, teasing truncation of the novel at this point was very much part of its purpose. The point of the novel was getting Fanny to this point. Once that had happened the rest could follow naturally. The author seems to be doing something a little similar to the reader–if the reader has got it, like Fanny, then they should be ready forgo the usual narration of the romantic wish-fulfilling fantasy.