I bring depression into the picture partly because Jane Austen does, in one of her novels, explore the borderlands between boredom and depression: that is in Mansfield Park. The child Fanny is depressed, or something close to it. This is a very unusual thing for Jane Austen to have done.
This comment I think reveals a difficulty this novel may present for readers of an age whose leading intellects are in doubt as to whether the time involved in reading classic novels can any longer be justified (at least for adults), for as I will argue, this is about 180 degrees opposite to the point that Jane Austen was making. Fanny may have been in some respects oppressed, neglected, lacking in confidence and (as both Edmund and Sir Thomas suggest) a late developer. True, while Fanny was practising her steps in the drawing room before the ball ‘She had hardly ever been in a state so nearly approaching high spirits in her life’ (II.X). But we have to be careful about depressed and raised spirits, for they are not all the same, Fanny learning from Edmund, for example, that during Tom’s illness there were ‘nerves much affected, spirits much depressed to calm and raise’ (III.XIV). We must allow for differences in temper, and not project our depressed expectations of Fanny onto Fanny herself. Fanny may not be high spirited (she says of Henry that ‘his spirits often oppress me’ [III.IV]) but that does not mean she is bored or depressed. Indeed, compared to her lively rivals, Fanny has the least problem with depression and boredom.
We live in a time quite different from Austen’s, one in which the senses are continually bombarded. Most people presume that anyone sitting alone in a Himalayan cave for 12 years would be driven insane, yet it is the kind of thing that Tibetan Buddhists, for example, tend to do. Dianne Perry, now Tenzin Palmo, is interesting because she was one of the first westerners to do it (3 years solitary retreats being common enough), and Vicky Mackenzie’s incredulity on hearing “One thing I can tell you, I was never bored” in an interview with Tenzin Palmo can well be imagined. Now I haven’t myself carried out a Himalayan 12-year solitary retreat, but I have carried out an 11 month solitary retreat in West Cork and it is absolutely true—boredom is not an issue for people that engage in solitary retreat, assuming they have the right preparation. Yet the typical modern mind, unless encountering it through a contemplative tradition, has lost all contact with this way of being and finds it quite difficult to comprehend. Austen seems to have seen this coming, for it is anticipated in Mansfield Park.
“It is a pity,” cried Fanny, “that the custom should have been discontinued. It was a valuable part of former times. There is something in a chapel and chaplain so much in character with a great house, with one’s ideas of what such a household should be! A whole family assembling regularly for the purpose of prayer is fine!”
“Very fine indeed,” said Miss Crawford, laughing. “It must do the heads of the family a great deal of good to force all the poor housemaids and footmen to leave business and pleasure, and say their prayers here twice a day, while they are inventing excuses themselves for staying away.”
“That is hardly Fanny’s idea of a family assembling,” said Edmund. “If the master and mistress do not attend themselves, there must be more harm than good in the custom.”
“At any rate, it is safer to leave people to their own devices on such subjects. Everybody likes to go their own way—to chuse their own time and manner of devotion. The obligation of attendance, the formality, the restraint, the length of time—altogether it is a formidable thing, and what nobody likes; and if the good people who used to kneel and gape in that gallery could have foreseen that the time would ever come when men and women might lie another ten minutes in bed, when they woke with a headache, without danger of reprobation, because chapel was missed, they would have jumped with joy and envy. Cannot you imagine with what unwilling feelings the former belles of the house of Rushworth did many a time repair to this chapel? The young Mrs. Eleanors and Mrs. Bridgets— starched up into seeming piety, but with heads full of something very different—especially if the poor chaplain were not worth looking at—and, in those days, I fancy parsons were very inferior even to what they are now.”
For a few moments she was unanswered. Fanny coloured and looked at Edmund, but felt too angry for speech; and he needed a little recollection before he could say, “Your lively mind can hardly be serious even on serious subjects. You have given us an amusing sketch, and human nature cannot say it was not so. We must all feel attimes the difficulty of fixing our thoughts as we could wish; but if you are supposing it a frequent thing, that is to say, a weakness grown into a habit from neglect, what could be expected from the private devotions of such persons? Do you think the minds which are suffered, which are indulged in wanderings in a chapel, would be more collected in a closet?”
“Yes, very likely. They would have two chances at least in their favour. There would be less to distract the attention from without, and it would not be tried so long.”
“The mind which does not struggle against itself under one circumstance, would find objects to distract it in the other, I believe; and the influence of the place and of example may often rouse better feelings than are begun with. The greater length of the service, however, I admit to be sometimes too hard a stretch upon the mind. One wishes it were not so; but I have not yet left Oxford long enough to forget what chapel prayers are.” (I.IX)
Those who incorporate spiritual practice into their daily routine understand the benefits, and the value of a community doing so is considerable. (This account of a Buddhist retreat from a secular perspective catches it quite well; the same principle really applies generally to authentic spiritual practice, which, to get continuous benefit, is best integrated into a daily routine.) Clearly Mary doesn’t understand any of this, and it is almost impossible for Edmund and Fanny to explain.
The week which passed so quietly and peaceably at the great house in Mansfield had a very different character at the Parsonage. To the young lady, at least, in each family, it brought very different feelings. What was tranquillity and comfort to Fanny was tediousness and vexation to Mary. Something arose from difference of disposition and habit: one so easily satisfied, the other so unused to endure; but still more might be imputed to difference of circumstances. In some points of interest they were exactly opposed to each other. To Fanny’s mind, Edmund’s absence was really, in its cause and its tendency, a relief. To Mary it was every way painful. She felt the want of his society every day, almost every hour, and was too much in want of it to derive anything but irritation from considering the object for which he went. (II.XI)
For sure, Fanny wants Edmund to get ordained, but she is also trying for ‘rational tranquillity’ (I.XVII), which Mary is not. As Edmund says, the mind that does not struggle against itself under one circumstance will find objects to distract itself in the other.
Fanny had no share in the festivities of the season; but she enjoyed being avowedly useful as her aunt’s companion when they called away the rest of the family; and, as Miss Lee had left Mansfield, she naturally became everything to Lady Bertram during the night of a ball or a party. She talked to her, listened to her, read to her; and the tranquillity of such evenings, her perfect security in such a tete-a-tete from any sound of unkindness, was unspeakably welcome to a mind which had seldom known a pause in its alarms or embarrassments. As to her cousins’ gaieties, she loved to hear an account of them, especially of the balls, and whom Edmund had danced with; but thought too lowly of her own situation to imagine she should ever be admitted to the same, and listened, therefore, without an idea of any nearer concern in them. Upon the whole, it was a comfortable winter to her; for though it brought no William to England, the never-failing hope of his arrival was worth much. (I.IV)
The contrast between Mary’s restlessness when she doesn’t have objects to distract her and Fanny’s natural tranquillity is marked. Though Fanny does have to struggle for equanimity watching Edmund making love to Mary, Mary, despite her ambivalent feelings, becomes almost demented once Edmund leaves, and quite irrationally so.
As Henry Austen said, ‘Her favourite moral writers were Johnson in prose and Cowper in verse’ and Richard Simpson in his 1870 review of the Memoir turned to Fanny Price’s favourite poet, picking out these verses from Book III of the The Task:
He that attends to his interior self,
That has a heart and keeps it; has a mind
That hungers and supplies it; and who seeks
A social, not a dissipated life,
Has business; feels himself engaged to achieve
No unimportant, though a silent task.
A life all turbulence and noise may seem,
To him that leads it, wise and to be praised;
But wisdom is a pearl with most success
Sought in still water, and beneath clear skies.
He that is ever occupied in storms,
Or dives not for it or brings up instead,
Vainly industrious, a disgraceful prize.
William Cowper, The Task (Book III: The Garden)
Simpson stopped at ‘business’, but by carrying on to the end of the stanza a remarkable summary of Mansfield Park emerges (and no doubt Tenzin Palmo would recognise Cowper’s source of wisdom). Though Cowper talks of ‘turbulence and noise’ Austen unites them in ‘bustle’.
“It is the same sort of thing,” said Fanny, after a short pause, “as for the son of an admiral to go into the navy, or the son of a general to be in the army, and nobody sees anything wrong in that. Nobody wonders that they should prefer the line where their friends can serve them best, or suspects them to be less in earnest in it than they appear.”
“No, my dear Miss Price, and for reasons good. The profession, either navy or army, is its own justification. It has everything in its favour: heroism, danger, bustle, fashion. Soldiers and sailors are always acceptable in society. Nobody can wonder that men are soldiers and sailors.” (I.XI)
From the start with Mrs Grant’s worry that ‘Mansfield should not satisfy’ Mary’s cosmopolitan habits (I.IV) we see Mary’s constant efforts to seek refuge in ‘bustle’, and her ultimately unsuccessful efforts to take Edmund with her. The living embodiment of bustle is, of course, Mrs Norris.
Mrs. Norris felt herself defrauded of an office on which she had always depended, whether his arrival or his death were to be the thing unfolded; and was now trying to be in a bustle without having anything to bustle about, and labouring to be important where nothing was wanted but tranquillity and silence. (II.I)
Indeed, nothing was wanted but tranquillity and silence. Marilyn Butler noted how central ‘tranquillity was to the novel and it is interesting to see where the 19 references to the word end up. The first reference is in the second chapter is ascribed to Mansfield Park itself. Thereafter we see it used eight times with Fanny, either in achieving it or in valuing it (I.IV,II.V*2,VIII,X,XI*2,III.III), all of those being at Mansfield Park. Once in Portsmouth we see the tranquillity of Mansfield Park referred to (III.VIII), otherwise it is only mentioned negatively, twice (III.VII,IX). Apart from this Lady Bertram, the ‘picture of health, wealth, ease, and tranquillity, was just falling into a gentle doze’ (I.XIII) puncturing Tom’s dishonest attempts to use his mother as a cover for his theatricals, and Sir Thomas reminding everyone of his ‘value for domestic tranquillity’ on discovering the theatrical project. Apart from this Mrs Grant warns Henry ‘not to risk his tranquillity’ with Maria (I.XVII) and a reference to the ‘rational tranquillity of her ways’ (III.XVIII) at the close.
Some of those instances of ‘tranquillity’ that I have ascribed to Fanny could also be ascribed to Lady Bertram.
In the evening a few circumstances occurred which he thought more promising. When he and Crawford walked into the drawing-room, his mother and Fanny were sitting as intently and silently at work as if there were nothing else to care for. Edmund could not help noticing their apparently deep tranquillity. (III.III)
But Lady Bertram as we know from the Southerton visit is entirely dependent upon Fanny for her comfort, her inertness neither disrupting nor capable of supplying it. Tellingly, the only tranquillity Edmund gets is the ‘sober tranquillity’ he shares with Fanny in the dance at the ball.
All the other references are negative, once each for Mrs Norris, Julia and Maria and Mary. The references for Mrs Norris and Mary we have already seen (Mrs Norris when she is ‘defrauded of an office’ (II.I) of announcing Sir Thomas’s arrival or death), and Mary’s ‘tediousness and vexation’ while Edmund is being ordained). The negative references for Julia and Maria are when they finally realise Henry has been trifling with them.
Henry Crawford had trifled with her feelings; but she had very long allowed and even sought his attentions, with a jealousy of her sister so reasonable as ought to have been their cure; and now that the conviction of his preference for Maria had been forced on her, she submitted to it without any alarm for Maria’s situation, or any endeavour at rational tranquillity for herself. She either sat in gloomy silence, wrapt in such gravity as nothing could subdue, no curiosity touch, no wit amuse; or allowing the attentions of Mr. Yates, was talking with forced gaiety to him alone, and ridiculing the acting of the others. (I.XVII)
To such feelings delay, even the delay of much preparation, would have been an evil, and Mr. Rushworth could hardly be more impatient for the marriage than herself. In all the important preparations of the mind she was complete: being prepared for matrimony by an hatred of home, restraint, and tranquillity; by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry. The rest might wait. The preparations of new carriages and furniture might wait for London and spring, when her own taste could have fairer play. (II.I)
In each instance we get an insight into not only their estrangement from tranquillity, but also their ultimate fate.
So Richard Jenkyns is right when he says that Mansfield Park explores ‘the borderlands between boredom and depression’. But boredom is an active fidgety state, the opposite of tranquillity. While Fanny is in some ways a late developer, Edmund recognising that there were ‘too many whom [she] can hide behind’, the ‘advantages of early hardship and discipline’ help her to develop the qualities that make Fanny the least susceptible to boredom.
Perhaps it is Tony Tanner that has best caught Fanny’s stoic qualities.
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.
The Quiet Thing
This post is part of an essay on Mansfield Park, being posted in instalments.
Mansfield Park
Epilogue: Diminutive Greatness & Fanny Price
3.6 The Quiet Thing
This comment I think reveals a difficulty this novel may present for readers of an age whose leading intellects are in doubt as to whether the time involved in reading classic novels can any longer be justified (at least for adults), for as I will argue, this is about 180 degrees opposite to the point that Jane Austen was making. Fanny may have been in some respects oppressed, neglected, lacking in confidence and (as both Edmund and Sir Thomas suggest) a late developer. True, while Fanny was practising her steps in the drawing room before the ball ‘She had hardly ever been in a state so nearly approaching high spirits in her life’ (II.X). But we have to be careful about depressed and raised spirits, for they are not all the same, Fanny learning from Edmund, for example, that during Tom’s illness there were ‘nerves much affected, spirits much depressed to calm and raise’ (III.XIV). We must allow for differences in temper, and not project our depressed expectations of Fanny onto Fanny herself. Fanny may not be high spirited (she says of Henry that ‘his spirits often oppress me’ [III.IV]) but that does not mean she is bored or depressed. Indeed, compared to her lively rivals, Fanny has the least problem with depression and boredom.
We live in a time quite different from Austen’s, one in which the senses are continually bombarded. Most people presume that anyone sitting alone in a Himalayan cave for 12 years would be driven insane, yet it is the kind of thing that Tibetan Buddhists, for example, tend to do. Dianne Perry, now Tenzin Palmo, is interesting because she was one of the first westerners to do it (3 years solitary retreats being common enough), and Vicky Mackenzie’s incredulity on hearing “One thing I can tell you, I was never bored” in an interview with Tenzin Palmo can well be imagined. Now I haven’t myself carried out a Himalayan 12-year solitary retreat, but I have carried out an 11 month solitary retreat in West Cork and it is absolutely true—boredom is not an issue for people that engage in solitary retreat, assuming they have the right preparation. Yet the typical modern mind, unless encountering it through a contemplative tradition, has lost all contact with this way of being and finds it quite difficult to comprehend. Austen seems to have seen this coming, for it is anticipated in Mansfield Park.
Those who incorporate spiritual practice into their daily routine understand the benefits, and the value of a community doing so is considerable. (This account of a Buddhist retreat from a secular perspective catches it quite well; the same principle really applies generally to authentic spiritual practice, which, to get continuous benefit, is best integrated into a daily routine.) Clearly Mary doesn’t understand any of this, and it is almost impossible for Edmund and Fanny to explain.
For sure, Fanny wants Edmund to get ordained, but she is also trying for ‘rational tranquillity’ (I.XVII), which Mary is not. As Edmund says, the mind that does not struggle against itself under one circumstance will find objects to distract itself in the other.
The contrast between Mary’s restlessness when she doesn’t have objects to distract her and Fanny’s natural tranquillity is marked. Though Fanny does have to struggle for equanimity watching Edmund making love to Mary, Mary, despite her ambivalent feelings, becomes almost demented once Edmund leaves, and quite irrationally so.
As Henry Austen said, ‘Her favourite moral writers were Johnson in prose and Cowper in verse’ and Richard Simpson in his 1870 review of the Memoir turned to Fanny Price’s favourite poet, picking out these verses from Book III of the The Task:
Simpson stopped at ‘business’, but by carrying on to the end of the stanza a remarkable summary of Mansfield Park emerges (and no doubt Tenzin Palmo would recognise Cowper’s source of wisdom). Though Cowper talks of ‘turbulence and noise’ Austen unites them in ‘bustle’.
From the start with Mrs Grant’s worry that ‘Mansfield should not satisfy’ Mary’s cosmopolitan habits (I.IV) we see Mary’s constant efforts to seek refuge in ‘bustle’, and her ultimately unsuccessful efforts to take Edmund with her. The living embodiment of bustle is, of course, Mrs Norris.
Mrs. Norris felt herself defrauded of an office on which she had always depended, whether his arrival or his death were to be the thing unfolded; and was now trying to be in a bustle without having anything to bustle about, and labouring to be important where nothing was wanted but tranquillity and silence. (II.I)
Indeed, nothing was wanted but tranquillity and silence. Marilyn Butler noted how central ‘tranquillity was to the novel and it is interesting to see where the 19 references to the word end up. The first reference is in the second chapter is ascribed to Mansfield Park itself. Thereafter we see it used eight times with Fanny, either in achieving it or in valuing it (I.IV,II.V*2,VIII,X,XI*2,III.III), all of those being at Mansfield Park. Once in Portsmouth we see the tranquillity of Mansfield Park referred to (III.VIII), otherwise it is only mentioned negatively, twice (III.VII,IX). Apart from this Lady Bertram, the ‘picture of health, wealth, ease, and tranquillity, was just falling into a gentle doze’ (I.XIII) puncturing Tom’s dishonest attempts to use his mother as a cover for his theatricals, and Sir Thomas reminding everyone of his ‘value for domestic tranquillity’ on discovering the theatrical project. Apart from this Mrs Grant warns Henry ‘not to risk his tranquillity’ with Maria (I.XVII) and a reference to the ‘rational tranquillity of her ways’ (III.XVIII) at the close.
Some of those instances of ‘tranquillity’ that I have ascribed to Fanny could also be ascribed to Lady Bertram.
But Lady Bertram as we know from the Southerton visit is entirely dependent upon Fanny for her comfort, her inertness neither disrupting nor capable of supplying it. Tellingly, the only tranquillity Edmund gets is the ‘sober tranquillity’ he shares with Fanny in the dance at the ball.
All the other references are negative, once each for Mrs Norris, Julia and Maria and Mary. The references for Mrs Norris and Mary we have already seen (Mrs Norris when she is ‘defrauded of an office’ (II.I) of announcing Sir Thomas’s arrival or death), and Mary’s ‘tediousness and vexation’ while Edmund is being ordained). The negative references for Julia and Maria are when they finally realise Henry has been trifling with them.
In each instance we get an insight into not only their estrangement from tranquillity, but also their ultimate fate.
So Richard Jenkyns is right when he says that Mansfield Park explores ‘the borderlands between boredom and depression’. But boredom is an active fidgety state, the opposite of tranquillity. While Fanny is in some ways a late developer, Edmund recognising that there were ‘too many whom [she] can hide behind’, the ‘advantages of early hardship and discipline’ help her to develop the qualities that make Fanny the least susceptible to boredom.
Perhaps it is Tony Tanner that has best caught Fanny’s stoic qualities.
Next: Enlightenment