“Anxious Not to Appear Unhappy”; or, Why Mansfield Park Is the Austen Novel One Never Knew One Needed

So-called “classic” art and literature comes into and goes out of fashion just as do popular culture trends. For most of the twentieth century Edward Elgar was considered a fundamentally unserious composer; today he has reentered the classical concert repertoire. Johann Sebastian Bach, unbelievably, went through the same rehabilitation in the early nineteenth century. Renaissance castigation of High Medieval art has gradually over the past several centuries given way to appreciation of that art’s numinous aspects. Post-World War II horror at Victorian architecture and interior design, as seen for instance in Shirley Jackson’s novels, seems itself quaint and dated today. In literature, too, we see such long-term trends. To the end of understanding why certain books spend decades or centuries in or out of favor, I recently read the Jane Austen novel Mansfield Park. For many years Mansfield Park was considered a contender for Austen’s best novel; today it is widely seen as her worst.

            A great deal about Mansfield Park makes it immediately obvious why it is currently unfashionable. It is a didactic, relatively unfunny novel, whose passive and extremely introverted heroine, Fanny Price, comes across quite frankly as a personality-free drip to current sensibilities. Fanny drifts from one abusive situation (with her parents and siblings; her sisters sleep with knives in hand on account of her father’s drunk and handsy Royal Navy friends) to another (with her rich slaver uncle Sir Thomas Bertram, who is absent for much of the novel and whose wife and children treat her as a glorified domestic servant). She falls in with the witty and urbane Crawford siblings, Mary and Henry, then breaks from them after getting relentlessly hammered for chapter after chapter to compromise her strict Protestant morals for the sake of their social circles. Finally, she marries her cousin Edmund, an aspiring Church of England priest who is the only character to consistently treat her like a person (albeit still not one whom he seems to like very much). The book’s treatment of where the Bertram family’s wealth comes from is mostly off-page, with one exception: Fanny asks her uncle to his face at dinner what he thinks of the slave trade, only to be met with “dead silence” that she takes as her cousins being bored of discussing politics. Edward Said infamously interpreted the novel as tacitly pro-slavery due to the extremely limited explicit treatment of the subject; although, as I will argue, the novel is swarming with implicit condemnation of slavery, not spelling it out in extremely clear terms goes against current tastes in political art.

            All of this being the case, I actually liked Mansfield Park very much and am glad I read it. The lurking implications and intimations of deep evil within the novel attracted me to its moral imagination despite its over-the-top sermonizing about less serious subjects like live theatre. Indeed the way the book relegates deeper moral and social pathologies to subtext strikes me as a level of irony more characteristic of Austen than most of today’s readers seem to think. Sense and Sensibility does the same thing, has a resolution to its marriage plot that is at least as unsettling as Fanny’s marriage to Edmund, and probably only escapes being excoriated for the same reasons as Mansfield Park because it is funnier.

            It is my belief that the book becomes much harder to understand if one refuses to situate it biographically. I’m not particularly interested in set phrases like “separating art from the artist” or “death of the author.” I think it’s common sense that at least some aspects of an artist’s personality will show up in her art, at least some aspects of a work of art will reflect the artist’s or artists’ personal circumstances, and the pertinent questions are what aspects and how the reader or viewer or listener feels about them (“deciding to ignore them” is a perfectly valid answer to this). With Mansfield Park a great deal is going on that reminds one of Jane Austen’s own life and family; she was a Tory who admired anti-slavery Tory thinkers like Burke and Johnson, she had intimate family connections both to right-wing politics and to the Royal Navy, and some of these family connections would themselves eventually become anti-slavery in nature. Admiral Sir Francis Austen would, decades after his younger sister’s death, spend four years responsible for the Navy’s efforts to intercept slave ships as Commander-in-Chief of the North America and West Indies Station.

            This odd dynamic of “Toryism” (in the broadest sense) opposing itself to something far worse than Toryism is, as I keep saying, currently unfashionable. It is, however, familiar to me, both from other British literature and from the heavily Austen-influenced Japanese novel Sasameyuki. The World War II-era ultranationalist regime in Japan interdicted Sasameyuki’s publication due to the book’s antiwar and antifascist content, yet this antiwar and antifascist content takes the form mostly of depicting militarism as a modern aberration distracting the Japanese people from their real traditions, such as midsummer firefly hunts and collecting very specific types of dolls. Similarly, much of Mansfield Park’s moral criticism of the wealthy slavers in Fanny’s life takes the form of intimating that they are un-English: Mary Crawford plays the harp (seen at the time as a very Continental instrument); the theatricals are an affront to English Protestant moral piety; characters make constant reference to Mansfield’s park’s “air,” and the Earl of Mansfield’s anti-slavery opinion in the 1772 King’s Bench case Somerset v Stewart had used “English air” as a metonym for freedom.

            Mary Crawford brings us to the subject of sexuality in the book. (In fact the heroine’s name brings us to this subject, but part of what makes the name “Fanny Price” so funny is that nobody in the book remarks upon it, so I’m not going to remark upon it at any great length either.) I tend to resist reading same-sex desire into books like Mansfield Park, not because I have a bias against such readings but because I have a bias towards them and have a habit of overcorrecting for this bias when doing serious analysis of this type of novel. With Mansfield Park, however, I genuinely think that much of the deviant or proscribed sexuality hinted at in the book is being hinted at on purpose. Mary Crawford, raised in a circle of perverted admirals, makes what is either an anal sex joke or a BDSM joke in mixed company in Chapter VI; Fanny overtly says that she is physically attracted to Mary in Chapter VII (almost immediately before the narration describes Edmund’s own interest in Mary as “a line of admiration of Miss Crawford, which might lead him where Fanny could not follow”—wording that has hints of apophasis) and muses on her fascination with her in Chapter XXIII:

Fanny went to her every two or three days: it seemed a kind of fascination: she could not be easy without going, and yet it was without loving her, without ever thinking like her, without any sense of obligation for being sought after now when nobody else was to be had; and deriving no higher pleasure from her conversation than occasional amusement, and that often at the expense of her judgment, when it was raised by pleasantry on people or subjects which she wished to be respected. She went, however….

Attempts to analyze and address this attraction between Fanny and Mary in adaptations and fanfiction usually present the more brazen and transgressive Mary as the sexual or romantic pursuer, but this isn’t what we see in Mansfield Park itself. Instead it’s the pious killjoy Fanny who seems to respond to Mary in a way that she does not to anyone else in the book, including her eventual husband Edmund. Austen disposes of Fanny and Edmund’s wedding in an oddly perfunctory and unenthusiastic way, vaguely referring to it as “a hopeful undertaking” and “quite natural.” In a novel advocating values as conservative as those advocated in this one, this is not the clear damnation with faint praise that it would be in a romance novel written today, but it still raises the question of how appealing exactly this marriage actually is to Fanny, or to Edmund for that matter.

            With a book that is didactic in the very strange and archaic way that Mansfield Park is—slavery is bad, adultery is bad, flirting is bad, live theatre is bad, and all four things are the province of the same basic types of hedonistic rich people—one cannot really claim anything related to sex as “representation” in a positive or affirming sense. In terms of what’s depicted in the novel, though, whether Austen approves of it or not, the way these characters relate to and experience sexuality treats very little as beyond the pale. Here is my reading of the sexual aspects of the story, all of which I am able to cite from the text, with a focus on Mary Crawford and her problems:

            Fanny and Mary are both raised in deeply dangerous circles of depraved Navy men. Both are traumatized in ways that the reader isn’t wholly privy to, Mary probably worse than Fanny. Fanny reacts by becoming withdrawn, submissive, and morally irreproachable; Mary reacts by becoming a charismatic social butterfly who thinks life is about taking other people for the proverbial ride at all costs. They meet and get along at first; Fanny especially is taken with Mary, who sparks confusing feelings in her. Mary makes sex jokes in public and wholeheartedly embraces the Bertram family’s raunchy (for 1814) lifestyle; Fanny, pressured relentlessly to compromise her puritanical values by just about every other character, hangs on until her slaver uncle (himself probably up to no good) comes home and has a My Immortal-esque “what the hell are you doing, you motherfuckers?” reaction that takes the heat off her. When Maria Rushworth cheats on her husband with Mary’s brother later on, Mary’s antinomian reaction alienates Edmund and burns all remaining bridges with Fanny, who, Mansfield Park after all being a deeply conservative novel, drifts into a path-of-least-resistance marriage to the only male character who is as moralistic as she is. Mary, meanwhile, implicitly shakes off the psychic influence of the perverted admirals eventually, but not for a long time.

            This was the only Austen novel that Vladimir Nabokov held in high regard, and it isn’t difficult to see why once one looks at it through the “sex is tyranny is sex is tyranny is sex” lens that Nabokov perfected in Lolita. Mansfield Park might not be as interested in slavery in particular as critics like Edward Said have wished it to be, but it is very interested in abuse of power in general. The “air” references are, in this reading, part of a semantic field that also includes repeated use of lemmas like “oppress” (which occurs seven times by my count, mostly with Fanny as the person being oppressed), “tyrant” (which occurs three times, two of them referring to the slaver Sir Thomas and his family), “abuse” or “ill-use” (four times), “cruel” (twelve times), and “wicked” (four times). The book uses its vision of human evil as a hammer rather than a scalpel, and although it’s still funny and often even sweet it is not difficult to see why people who find Pride and Prejudice and Emma comforting and consoling reads might disfavor it.

            Mansfield Park’s vision of evil and tyranny is, like it or not—and I don’t like it very much myself—inseparable from its preachy Protestant piousness, something that I think derails many modern readers and makes them less able to notice or realize that the book does contain social critique. Protestantism is unlike Catholicism, the Destiel of religions, partly in that it tends to be either epicurean or censorious; even the Social Gospel progressives of the early twentieth century had tendencies towards the no-fun positions on attempted social reforms like Prohibition and, more regrettably, eugenics. The antislavery movement in Britain had strong Methodist and Evangelical contingents and included figures who were, as mentioned above, staunchly conservative even for the time on other issues. It thus should not surprise the theologically knowledgeable reader that the Austen heroine who attempts to grill her uncle about the slave trade at dinner is also the one who stubbornly insists that it is immoral to act in a play alongside her own extended family.

            People should read Mansfield Park. People who have already read Mansfield Park and disliked what they thought it had to say should read it again. The book has a fundamental stance and vision that seems alien at first but has a bracing moral clarity to it once one digs into the depths of the text. It is good and salutary to subject oneself to unfashionable classics; indeed, I would say that doing so is at least as good and salutary as is reading fashionable classics. Certainly Fanny Price herself would think so, and she would know; she is a bootlicking scold.