30 Great Myths about Jane Austen by Claudia L. Johnson & Clara Tuite

Author:Claudia L. Johnson & Clara Tuite [Johnson, Claudia L. & Tuite, Clara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119146889
Published: 2020-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

Not so long ago, this passage was read as Jane Austen’s credo, an affirmation of the ideology of the Great House. But the free indirect discourse gives us Fanny’s thoughts, not those of Austen or her narrator. To be sure, Fanny thinks of Mansfield Park as a Great Good Place, where everyone and everything is harmoniously and responsibly ordered, where all the contention and conflict that inevitably arise in family life are, if not excluded, at least minimized by fairness and politeness, by benevolent, caring, and effectual authority. In short, Fanny sees Mansfield Park as another Pemberley. But, ever since the first chapter of this novel, we have been shown that this is emphatically not the case. Sir Thomas authorizes Mrs. Norris’s nastiness; the Bertram sisters fight as intensely over Henry Crawford as Fanny’s Portsmouth sisters fight over a knife; Sir Thomas approves Maria’s loveless marriage to a rich and well‐connected dolt; Tom Bertram has depleted Mansfield Park’s coffers with his gambling debts. Indeed, the “tread of violence” and the “sounds of contention” – all loud and clear at Portsmouth – are not heard, but that’s only because no one – least of all Sir Thomas – is listening. There is a class difference between Portsmouth and Mansfield Park, to be sure, and this is nothing to sneeze at, but there is not really a moral difference. And then, of course, there is the issue of Antigua, where Sir Thomas must repair to fill the coffers his son has drained, and of the slavery on which it subsists. If nothing else, Pemberley shows us that Jane Austen knew how to make the great estate look good, and Pride and Prejudice comedically fosters and indulges this effort of idealization. Fanny’s idealization, by contrast, is so wishful as to verge on delusional, as her own presence in Portsmouth proves.

Mansfield Park explores not only failures of authority but also, relatedly, failures of basic lucidity. While Austen’s other novels prize discernment and contrive scenes of enlightenment or self‐understanding, in Mansfield Park the language of pathological intellection seems to jump out of every page. Characters are always pronouncing other people’s minds as “diseased,” as “vitiated,” as “disordered,” or “tainted;” Mansfield is supposed to act as “a cure,” much as Fanny’s exile to Portsmouth is a “medicinal project” upon Fanny’s “understanding” designed to heal her “powers of comparing and judging.” Indeed, all of the characters in this novel, Fanny not excepted, seem to shut their eyes while they look, or their understandings while they reason, as the narrator says specifically of Julia Bertram. The kinds of figures in whom we are accustomed to repose trust are in this novel all worrisomely benighted. On whom can we rely? Not the dignified paternal figure, who while always making a pompous pose of rectitude is really interested in money and influence. Not the serious young clergyman who, befuddled by his own desires, is seduced by Mary Crawford’s dodginess and blind to his own inconstancy. Not the lively heroine, who is always calculating and blundering.

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