This post is 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
3.4 Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram
Mr. Yates was beginning now to understand Sir Thomas’s intentions, though as far as ever from understanding their source. He and his friend had been out with their guns the chief of the morning, and Tom had taken the opportunity of explaining, with proper apologies for his father’s particularity, what was to be expected. Mr. Yates felt it as acutely as might be supposed. To be a second time disappointed in the same way was an instance of very severe ill-luck; and his indignation was such, that had it not been for delicacy towards his friend, and his friend’s youngest sister, he believed he should certainly attack the baronet on the absurdity of his proceedings, and argue him into a little more rationality. He believed this very stoutly while he was in Mansfield Wood, and all the way home; but there was a something in Sir Thomas, when they sat round the same table, which made Mr. Yates think it wiser to let him pursue his own way, and feel the folly of it without opposition. He had known many disagreeable fathers before, and often been struck with the inconveniences they occasioned, but never, in the whole course of his life, had he seen one of that class so unintelligibly moral, so infamously tyrannical as Sir Thomas. He was not a man to be endured but for his children’s sake, and he might be thankful to his fair daughter Julia that Mr. Yates did yet mean to stay a few days longer under his roof. (II.II)
Austen’s fools often provide the clearest insights, and there is hardly a more reliable paragraph to be found in Mansfield Park. Tanner [Tanner, 1968, p. 153] seems to suggest that Austen was literally warning against theatrics because of the dangers of dissipation of the self but this can hardly be right, as the Austen household staged plays.
Maria and Julia were as unprepared for the theatre as they were for to deal with the Crawfords and the world because of the defects in their education. All Sir Thomas’s cares, reflecting in good part his own values, preoccupied as they are with ‘ambitious and mercenary connexions’, had been directed at ‘understanding and manners,’ while neglecting ‘principle, active principle’ (III.XVII). We see this clearly on his return. It is worth quoting at length being really the pivotal point that sets up the catastrophe.
Sir Thomas saw all the impropriety of such a scheme among such a party, and at such a time, as strongly as his son had ever supposed he must; he felt it too much, indeed, for many words; and having shaken hands with Edmund, meant to try to lose the disagreeable impression, and forget how much he had been forgotten himself as soon as he could, after the house had been cleared of every object enforcing the remembrance, and restored to its proper state. He did not enter into any remonstrance with his other children: he was more willing to believe they felt their error than to run the risk of investigation. The reproof of an immediate conclusion of everything, the sweep of every preparation, would be sufficient. […]
It was a busy morning with him. Conversation with any of them occupied but a small part of it. He had to reinstate himself in all the wonted concerns of his Mansfield life: to see his steward and his bailiff; to examine and compute, and, in the intervals of business, to walk into his stables and his gardens, and nearest plantations; but active and methodical, he had not only done all this before he resumed his seat as master of the house at dinner, he had also set the carpenter to work in pulling down what had been so lately put up in the billiard-room, and given the scene-painter his dismissal long enough to justify the pleasing belief of his being then at least as far off as Northampton. The scene-painter was gone, having spoilt only the floor of one room, ruined all the coachman’s sponges, and made five of the under-servants idle and dissatisfied; and Sir Thomas was in hopes that another day or two would suffice to wipe away every outward memento of what had been, even to the destruction of every unbound copy of Lovers’ Vows in the house, for he was burning all that met his eye.
Vol. II, Ch. II
‘Whatever failings Sir Thomas will reveal in other acts during the novel,’ Alastair Duckworth [Duckworth, 1971, p. 57] tells us, ‘his response on discovering the theatre is exemplary. He immediately sets about returning Mansfield to its “proper state.”’ It is a telling tribute of Austen’s powers that she induces in us the same obtuseness and lack of self-knowledge as Sir Thomas, the relief when he restores the house to its proper order on his return being palpable. The outsiders seem to see this most clearly with Henry later admitting to Fanny that during the theatricals ‘We were getting too noisy’ (II.VI) and Mrs Grant explaining to Mary:
“You will find his consequence very just and reasonable when you see him in his family, I assure you. I do not think we do so well without him. He has a fine dignified manner, which suits the head of such a house, and keeps everybody in their place. Lady Bertram seems more of a cipher now than when he is at home; and nobody else can keep Mrs. Norris in order. […]” (I.XVII)
And Mary does indeed find his consequence very just. (‘He is just what the head of such a family should be.’ [III.V]). The grants and the Crawfords with their ‘popular manners and more diffused intimacies’ (II.X) appreciate the value of such a figure to give the law, and this seems to be equally true of the modern reader, judging by the critical record, being quite kind to Sir Thomas (for example, according to [Trilling, 1954, p. 231], ‘Of all the fathers in Jane Austen’s novels Sir Thomas is the only one to whom admiration is given.’
But what does he do on coming home to find that he doesn’t understand his own children? He ‘examines and computes’, spends all his time with the only child he understands ‘more willing to believe [the others] felt their error than to run the risk of investigation’, relies on the ‘reproof of an immediate conclusion of everything, the sweep of every preparation’ and sets about ‘wiping away every outward memento of what had been’ (II.I). Sir Thomas is as preoccupied with surfaces and appearances and as negligent of principle as Henry that he doesn’t recognise the true threats to his house.
Sir Thomas had been quite indifferent to Mr. Crawford’s going or staying: but his good wishes for Mr. Yates’s having a pleasant journey, as he walked with him to the hall-door, were given with genuine satisfaction. Mr. Yates had staid to see the destruction of every theatrical preparation at Mansfield, the removal of everything appertaining to the play: he left the house in all the soberness of its general character; and Sir Thomas hoped, in seeing him out of it, to be rid of the worst object connected with the scheme, and the last that must be inevitably reminding him of its existence. (II.II)
On Sir Thomas’s surprise return the Crawfords melt away, leaving Sir Thomas to encounter Mr Yeats rehearsing the ranting Baron Wildenhaim in the theatre. Marilyn Butler [Butler, 1975, p. 285] caught the scene well. ‘The head of the house, upholder in the novel of family, rank, and of the existing order, is confronted at the heart of his own terrain by a mouthing puppet who represents a grotesque inversion of himself: the dignified baronet meets the ‘Baron’ whose play function is to abandon his own dignity and to legitimize his mistress’. Henry of course has been corrupted by his uncle and step-father whose ‘vicious conduct’ (I.IV) has led him to legitimize the admiral’s own mistress, depriving Mary of a home and bringing the Crawfords to the parsonage. Sir Thomas will try to force Fanny to marry Henry, who will later delegitimize Maria, his own daughter, yet Sir Thomas remains entirely fixated with ‘the worst object connected with the scheme’, Mr Yeats. While not everyone may agree with Claudia Johnson’s conclusion [Johnson, 1988, p. 462] that Sir Thomas is the ‘most assiduous actor’ at Mansfield Park, he seems to be as caught up in appearances as the Crawfords and, as a parent, as negligent of deeper truths.
Like King Lear, Sir Thomas has abdicated his responsibilities, mere external authority not being adequate to maintain the health of a person, a family or a community, inner qualities needing attention too. Sir Thomas, infatuated with his own authority—absolute power (II.X)—that he is perpetually ‘disarmed by [the] flattery’ (II.II) of Mrs Norris, his daughters and Henry, allowing the heart of Maria, especially, to be first corrupted by Mrs Norris’s flattery, and then broken by Henry’s.
Austen’s choice of the name Mansfield Park was possibly an ironic nod to the Mansfield judgement in the Somersett case where it was argued that ‘The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe’. Sir Thomas ‘was master at Mansfield Park.’ Just as Fanny is the only one to take up Sir Thomas on the slave trade (II.III) so ‘creep-mouse’ (I.XV) Fanny is also the only one to challenge Sir Thomas in his own home when he tries to force her into a mercenary marriage with Henry. It was Tom who mocked Fanny’s timidity, of course, and Tom took responsibility for the Theatre project, yet he abjectly avoids his father on his return, in contrast to Edmund who meets him, giving ‘a fair statement of the whole acting scheme’ (II.XX).
‘Although Lady Bertram is teased, she is loved’, according to Trilling [Trilling, 1954, p. 233], a fair reflection of modern criticism, she not being held responsible for Maria’s disgrace, though a careful reading of her handling of Tom’s illness finds a less than complaisant narrator.
There was hardly 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. (III.XIV)
Generally speaking, critical censure and condemnation is reserved for Fanny, Edmund and/or the author for the whole and especially Maria’s downfall. The manifestly corrupt and treacherous Crawfords are rarely made accountable for the trail of wreckage that Henry leaves in his wake, with his sisters help (as we saw with the necklace)— varying from a full defence by Farrer [Farrer, 1917] to Trilling’s [Trilling, 1954, p. 227] acknowledgement of Henry’s personal style, which nonsensically has in it ‘a large element of natural goodness and generosity.’ Likewise, Tom’s dishonest, irresponsible and spineless behaviour over the theatricals is passed over as is the theatrical board’s efforts to bully Fanny into doing something that she so plainly doesn’t want to do out of respect for Sir Thomas—Fanny is a prig. Fanny further gets condemned by the modern romantics for standing up to Sir Thomas’s attempt to bully her into a mercenary marriage to someone she neither likes nor respects, whereas when Maria voluntarily contracts such a marriage and brings about her own disgrace, she is seen as the ‘scapegoat’ (Butler [Butler, 1990, p. xxviii]), readers frequently objecting to the ‘brutal seventeenth chapter of the third volume, in which life sentences are handed down to Maria and Mrs Norris’ (Butler [Butler, 1975, p. 245]).
Yet the bullying, mercenary, (almost certainly) slave-owning Sir Thomas, who has abdicated his responsibility as a parent in his education of Maria, in the people he has appointed to care for her in his absence, in authorising a marriage to someone he knows Maria doesn’t respect—the person who has been comprehensively implicated in her catastrophe—is the one who hands down this life sentence. And yet Amis (for example) says:
We have in Mrs. Norris the most hauntingly horrible of the author’s horrible characters, and in Sir Thomas the most fully and firmly drawn and – but for the final obduracy towards elder daughter – most sympathetic of her patriarchs.
Kingsley Amis [Amis, 1957, p. 243]
but describes Fanny as a ‘monster of complacency and pride’ without making clear who has been hurt. Who are Fanny’s victims—Amis himself?
Everyone, however, can agree with Amis on the horribleness of Mrs Norris.
Next: Mrs Norris
Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments.
Mansfield Park
Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price
3.4 Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram
Austen’s fools often provide the clearest insights, and there is hardly a more reliable paragraph to be found in Mansfield Park. Tanner [Tanner, 1968, p. 153] seems to suggest that Austen was literally warning against theatrics because of the dangers of dissipation of the self but this can hardly be right, as the Austen household staged plays.
Maria and Julia were as unprepared for the theatre as they were for to deal with the Crawfords and the world because of the defects in their education. All Sir Thomas’s cares, reflecting in good part his own values, preoccupied as they are with ‘ambitious and mercenary connexions’, had been directed at ‘understanding and manners,’ while neglecting ‘principle, active principle’ (III.XVII). We see this clearly on his return. It is worth quoting at length being really the pivotal point that sets up the catastrophe.
‘Whatever failings Sir Thomas will reveal in other acts during the novel,’ Alastair Duckworth [Duckworth, 1971, p. 57] tells us, ‘his response on discovering the theatre is exemplary. He immediately sets about returning Mansfield to its “proper state.”’ It is a telling tribute of Austen’s powers that she induces in us the same obtuseness and lack of self-knowledge as Sir Thomas, the relief when he restores the house to its proper order on his return being palpable. The outsiders seem to see this most clearly with Henry later admitting to Fanny that during the theatricals ‘We were getting too noisy’ (II.VI) and Mrs Grant explaining to Mary:
And Mary does indeed find his consequence very just. (‘He is just what the head of such a family should be.’ [III.V]). The grants and the Crawfords with their ‘popular manners and more diffused intimacies’ (II.X) appreciate the value of such a figure to give the law, and this seems to be equally true of the modern reader, judging by the critical record, being quite kind to Sir Thomas (for example, according to [Trilling, 1954, p. 231], ‘Of all the fathers in Jane Austen’s novels Sir Thomas is the only one to whom admiration is given.’
But what does he do on coming home to find that he doesn’t understand his own children? He ‘examines and computes’, spends all his time with the only child he understands ‘more willing to believe [the others] felt their error than to run the risk of investigation’, relies on the ‘reproof of an immediate conclusion of everything, the sweep of every preparation’ and sets about ‘wiping away every outward memento of what had been’ (II.I). Sir Thomas is as preoccupied with surfaces and appearances and as negligent of principle as Henry that he doesn’t recognise the true threats to his house.
On Sir Thomas’s surprise return the Crawfords melt away, leaving Sir Thomas to encounter Mr Yeats rehearsing the ranting Baron Wildenhaim in the theatre. Marilyn Butler [Butler, 1975, p. 285] caught the scene well. ‘The head of the house, upholder in the novel of family, rank, and of the existing order, is confronted at the heart of his own terrain by a mouthing puppet who represents a grotesque inversion of himself: the dignified baronet meets the ‘Baron’ whose play function is to abandon his own dignity and to legitimize his mistress’. Henry of course has been corrupted by his uncle and step-father whose ‘vicious conduct’ (I.IV) has led him to legitimize the admiral’s own mistress, depriving Mary of a home and bringing the Crawfords to the parsonage. Sir Thomas will try to force Fanny to marry Henry, who will later delegitimize Maria, his own daughter, yet Sir Thomas remains entirely fixated with ‘the worst object connected with the scheme’, Mr Yeats. While not everyone may agree with Claudia Johnson’s conclusion [Johnson, 1988, p. 462] that Sir Thomas is the ‘most assiduous actor’ at Mansfield Park, he seems to be as caught up in appearances as the Crawfords and, as a parent, as negligent of deeper truths.
Like King Lear, Sir Thomas has abdicated his responsibilities, mere external authority not being adequate to maintain the health of a person, a family or a community, inner qualities needing attention too. Sir Thomas, infatuated with his own authority—absolute power (II.X)—that he is perpetually ‘disarmed by [the] flattery’ (II.II) of Mrs Norris, his daughters and Henry, allowing the heart of Maria, especially, to be first corrupted by Mrs Norris’s flattery, and then broken by Henry’s.
Austen’s choice of the name Mansfield Park was possibly an ironic nod to the Mansfield judgement in the Somersett case where it was argued that ‘The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe’. Sir Thomas ‘was master at Mansfield Park.’ Just as Fanny is the only one to take up Sir Thomas on the slave trade (II.III) so ‘creep-mouse’ (I.XV) Fanny is also the only one to challenge Sir Thomas in his own home when he tries to force her into a mercenary marriage with Henry. It was Tom who mocked Fanny’s timidity, of course, and Tom took responsibility for the Theatre project, yet he abjectly avoids his father on his return, in contrast to Edmund who meets him, giving ‘a fair statement of the whole acting scheme’ (II.XX).
‘Although Lady Bertram is teased, she is loved’, according to Trilling [Trilling, 1954, p. 233], a fair reflection of modern criticism, she not being held responsible for Maria’s disgrace, though a careful reading of her handling of Tom’s illness finds a less than complaisant narrator.
Generally speaking, critical censure and condemnation is reserved for Fanny, Edmund and/or the author for the whole and especially Maria’s downfall. The manifestly corrupt and treacherous Crawfords are rarely made accountable for the trail of wreckage that Henry leaves in his wake, with his sisters help (as we saw with the necklace)— varying from a full defence by Farrer [Farrer, 1917] to Trilling’s [Trilling, 1954, p. 227] acknowledgement of Henry’s personal style, which nonsensically has in it ‘a large element of natural goodness and generosity.’ Likewise, Tom’s dishonest, irresponsible and spineless behaviour over the theatricals is passed over as is the theatrical board’s efforts to bully Fanny into doing something that she so plainly doesn’t want to do out of respect for Sir Thomas—Fanny is a prig. Fanny further gets condemned by the modern romantics for standing up to Sir Thomas’s attempt to bully her into a mercenary marriage to someone she neither likes nor respects, whereas when Maria voluntarily contracts such a marriage and brings about her own disgrace, she is seen as the ‘scapegoat’ (Butler [Butler, 1990, p. xxviii]), readers frequently objecting to the ‘brutal seventeenth chapter of the third volume, in which life sentences are handed down to Maria and Mrs Norris’ (Butler [Butler, 1975, p. 245]).
Yet the bullying, mercenary, (almost certainly) slave-owning Sir Thomas, who has abdicated his responsibility as a parent in his education of Maria, in the people he has appointed to care for her in his absence, in authorising a marriage to someone he knows Maria doesn’t respect—the person who has been comprehensively implicated in her catastrophe—is the one who hands down this life sentence. And yet Amis (for example) says:
but describes Fanny as a ‘monster of complacency and pride’ without making clear who has been hurt. Who are Fanny’s victims—Amis himself?
Everyone, however, can agree with Amis on the horribleness of Mrs Norris.
Next: Mrs Norris