Fanny’s conversation with Mary in the Grants’ shrubbery—the only casual conversation between the two rivals—resonates with contrasts. As Jane Stabler’s excellent notes remind us, Fanny’s stilted conversation reflects her discomfort in the presence of her worldly-wise rival that she has tried so hard to keep at a distance.
“This is pretty, very pretty,” said Fanny, looking around her as they were thus sitting together one day; “every time I come into this shrubbery I am more struck with its growth and beauty. […] How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind!” And following the latter train of thought, she soon afterwards added: “If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.”
Miss Crawford, untouched and inattentive, had nothing to say; and Fanny, perceiving it, brought back her own mind to what she thought must interest.
“It may seem impertinent in me to praise, but I must admire the taste Mrs. Grant has shewn in all this. There is such a quiet simplicity in the plan of the walk! Not too much attempted!”
“Yes,” replied Miss Crawford carelessly, “it does very well for a place of this sort. One does not think of extent here; and between ourselves, till I came to Mansfield, I had not imagined a country parson ever aspired to a shrubbery, or anything of the kind.”
“I am so glad to see the evergreens thrive!” said Fanny, in reply. “My uncle’s gardener always says the soil here is better than his own, and so it appears from the growth of the laurels and evergreens in general. The evergreen! How beautiful, how welcome, how wonderful the evergreen! […] You will think me rhapsodising; but when I am out of doors, especially when I am sitting out of doors, I am very apt to get into this sort of wondering strain. One cannot fix one’s eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy.”
“To say the truth,” replied Miss Crawford, “I am something like the famous Doge at the court of Lewis XIV.; and may declare that I see no wonder in this shrubbery equal to seeing myself in it. If anybody had told me a year ago that this place would be my home, that I should be spending month after month here, as I have done, I certainly should not have believed them. I have now been here nearly five months; and, moreover, the quietest five months I ever passed.” (22.12-7)
While Fanny’s idealism is reflected is her reflections on the miraculousness of memory, her rhapsodies on nature and complements the Grants, inattentive Mary disdains country parsons, wonders at herself being in the country at all by way of recalling Voltaire’s Doge (from La Siècle de Louis XIV (1751)). (Note, to this day materialists cannot come up with a credible account for animal memory—see Sheldrake’s The Presence of the Past, Ch. 9).
Mary’s preoccupation with status and wealth runs throughout, quite explicitly in an exchange with her sister in Edmund and Fanny’s presence.
“The sweets of housekeeping in a country village!” said Miss Crawford archly. “Commend me to the nurseryman and the poulterer.”
“My dear child, commend Dr. Grant to the deanery of Westminster or St. Paul’s, and I should be as glad of your nurseryman and poulterer as you could be. But we have no such people in Mansfield. What would you have me do?”
“Oh! you can do nothing but what you do already: be plagued very often, and never lose your temper.”
“Thank you; but there is no escaping these little vexations, Mary, live where we may; and when you are settled in town and I come to see you, I dare say I shall find you with yours, in spite of the nurseryman and the poulterer, perhaps on their very account. Their remoteness and unpunctuality, or their exorbitant charges and frauds, will be drawing forth bitter lamentations.”
“I mean to be too rich to lament or to feel anything of the sort. A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. It certainly may secure all the myrtle and turkey part of it.” (22.33-7)
Though Mary is frustrated at Edmund’s lack of ambition (as she sees it) she exposes her consumerist philosophy, and this preoccupation with wealth and status drives her resentment of Edmund’s vocation. Edmund’s wilful refusal to look beyond pleasing appearances to address uncomfortable realities reflects his father’s failings; and Mary is doing likewise, perhaps assuming she will be able to ‘bend’ his ‘sturdy spirit’ (36.9). The capacity for the upright and principled Sir Thomas and Edmund to delude themselves in the pursuit of pleasing narratives is a persistent theme of the novel, their most egregious mistake being their complete failure to comprehend Fanny’s rejection of Henry Crawford until his elopement with Maria.
