[Sorry for the drought in posts: I have been busy with other things on Peace and Wisdom.]
I had been meaning to respond to a post by Arnie on Austen-L about PJM Scott’s assessment of Mansfield Park.
Scott shows a good instinct for the deeper mysteries of MP when he spends a good amount of time in his chapter on MP raising questions regarding the following narration about Fanny Price’s thoughts about the home theatricals at Mansfield Park:
“For her own gratification she could have wished that something might be acted, for she had never seen even half a play, but everything of higher consequence was against it.”
Scott asks: “Are [Fanny's] reactions hysterical, are Austen’s out of scale? Is the author advocating a supremely punctilious decorum for young people of the upper middle class such as hardly existed in her own life? and if so, why with such a passion?”
I agree with Trilling in fingering parental authority, as Edmund explains in this exchange with Tom.
“And I am convinced to the contrary. Nobody is fonder of the exercise of talent in young people, or promotes it more, than my father, and for anything of the acting, spouting, reciting kind, I think he has always a decided taste. I am sure he encouraged it in us as boys. How many a time have we mourned over the dead body of Julius Caesar, and to be’d and not to be’d, in this very room, for his amusement? And I am sure, my name was Norval, every evening of my life through one Christmas holidays.”
“It was a very different thing. You must see the difference yourself. My father wished us, as schoolboys, to speak well, but he would never wish his grown-up daughters to be acting plays. His sense of decorum is strict.” (13.25-6)
It is part of Austen’s genius that she managed represent the awful parental authority of the absent Sir Thomas through the drama around the theatricals. I think this is important for a few of reasons.
- Tom is shown to be spineless in proceeding with the theatre and then refusing to stand up for the project on his father’s return. His defence of his actions to Edmund is dishonest and he is shown to be weak.
- Edmund is guilty of the same but more subtly so, hence Fanny’s wretchedness when ‘His sturdy spirit [bends] as it did’ (36.9) to Mary’s charms. It shows his integrity being compromised as he comes under Mary’s influence.
- All of this is contrasted with Fanny refusing to cave in to peer pressure take part in what she has judged to be wrong and later to allow her integrity to be compromised in accepting Crawford’s hand at a point when she could neither love nor respect him, despite coming feeling the full force of that parental power and peer pressure to cave-in to the worldly logic and the pressures of other people’s conveniences.
There are some interesting comparisons and contrasts with King Lear with Fanny remaining loyal to the institution of parental authority while standing up the parent when their judgment fails.
To my mind there is no question but that Fanny’s approach to the theatre is just. To proceed with it, knowing that their father wouldn’t authorise it was wrong, having no good grounds to challenge that judgement (entertaining their worried mother?) and the subsequent disorder once the parental authority disregarded is palpable—as Henry said himself, “It was more pleasant than prudent. We were getting too noisy” (23.59) and Mrs Grant:
“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. [...]” (17.20)
Fanny’s desire to respect her uncle’s wishes are hardly contemptible, unlike the peer pressure that is exerted on her by her cousins, and of course her Aunt Norris:
“I am not going to urge her,” replied Mrs. Norris sharply; “but I shall think her a very obstinate, ungrateful girl, if she does not do what her aunt and cousins wish her—very ungrateful, indeed, considering who and what she is.”
As unpleasant as this sentiment is we are manoeuvred into assenting to it, maybe without realising it.
Instead it is a monster of complacency and pride who, under a cloak of cringing self-abasement, dominates and gives meaning to the novel. What became of that Jane Austen (if she ever existed) who set out bravely to correct conventional notions of the desirable and virtuous? From being their critic (if she ever was) she became their slave. That is another way of saying that her judgement and her moral sense were corrupted. Mansfield Park is the witness of that corruption.
Kingsley Amis, What Became of Jane Austen?, p. 144
There is irony in Sir Thomas disapproving of his sons and daughters engaging in theatrics while forcing them into the social theatrics of ’strict decorum’ while ignoring everything behind the facade. On returning from Antigua he wipes ‘away every outward memento of what had been’ (20.9) without attending to its causes and and sets about marrying Maria to man he knew she held in contempt.
Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting; that they had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers by that sense of duty which can alone suffice. They had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice. To be distinguished for elegance and accomplishments, the authorised object of their youth, could have had no useful influence that way, no moral effect on the mind. He had meant them to be good, but his cares had been directed to the understanding and manners, not the disposition; and of the necessity of self-denial and humility, he feared they had never heard from any lips that could profit them.
By getting the reader to assent to all of this, to take sides with Aunt Norris on Fanny’s participation in the theatre project, and with Sir Thomas in contracting a love-less, mercenary marriage to Henry Crawford, Austen shows how neither Hume’s sentiments nor Kant’s duties can be exclusively relied upon in making life judgments, with the judgments and misjudgments inside the novel get reflected in the readings and misreadings of it. (David Hume thought ethics should be based on sentiment while Immanuel Kant favoured a deontological ethics founded on duties.)
Sir Thomas’s conservative fixation on rules are just as theatrical and hollow as the Crawford’s more progressive fixation on sentiment. Despite their lack of sparkle, Fanny and Edmund point the way towards a more substantial as well as a more balanced future.
