The Mansfield Theatricals

Mansfield Park. Jane Austen. 1814.

Mansfield Park is Austen’s second greatest novel (after Emma) and my personal favorite, and I am aware that this is my most autistic-coded opinion. I’m still right, but as I keep failing to make other people love this one, I think it’s worth working through why I love it so much and other people don’t, as much as I’m able to.

Because most people don’t like it, and in my experience they tend to really, really dislike it. I understand why. The good characters are good according to a moral code that is so alien from ours that they might as well be…aliens. The fun characters, the ones who you’d actually want to spend time with, are clearly not good, or not meant to be seen as good as much as you can judge that. The love story isn’t especially satisfying. It’s not that the two lovers are badly matched, but they don’t challenge each other, or excite each other, or change each other. If you come to Jane Austen wanting the romance you get in P&P or Persuasion you can’t possibly be satisfied.

Jane Austen’s other novels can just as easily be placed in the coming-of-age category, but Mansfield Park doesn’t really fit there either. Emma and Catherine and Marianne all get married, but their marriages aren’t really the point - it’s more like those marriages are the reward for their growth and development. Does Fanny grow or change in MP? Not really - it’s more that other people either catch up to her in time to change their own lives, or they don’t. Fanny doesn’t learn anything, really, in her novel; she is always right, from the start, about everything and everyone, and everyone else learns to listen to her. She ends the novel getting what she wants - Edmund, a comfortable home that she loves, respect from her family - but has she earned it? It’s hard to say. She suffers, but she’s a suffering sort; ordinary stresses of life seem to weigh more heavily on her than they do on someone like Elizabeth Bennet (or Mary Crawford for that matter). Fanny grows stronger, for sure - her firm refusal to marry Henry Crawford is one she likely would not have been able to make early in the novel - but that growth is so internal and unremarked on that it’s hard to say whether it’s a result of any development other than getting a bit older.

And Austen, ever a satirist, continually undercuts Fanny’s strength in the narrative. We are told that though Fanny’s opposition to the Crawfords is borne out of genuine principle, it is equally a result of jealousy and stubbornness. We are told in so many words that if Edmund had married Mary, Fanny would soon have given way to Henry, and not unhappily. Where would her principle be then? While Fanny strongly condemns Mary for her happiness at Tom’s illness, only a few pages later Fanny is herself overjoyed when his illness worsens and she is called home - where is her principle then? Reading passages like that, (and there are many) you can’t help put picture Austen saying to you “I know, she’s full of shit. She’s as selfish as any of the rest of these awful people.” But then Fanny, alone of the characters really, gets everything she wants.

So it’s tempting, when you’re reading this novel and expecting a certain thing from Jane Austen, to consider this novel a failure - it’s not a good romance, it’s not an effective bildungsroman. The most appealing character, whose voice is most like Austen’s own, is probably Mary - bad girl Mary, who isn’t evil but who doesn’t have any principles either, and who doesn’t get any of what she wants. But maybe we can step back a bit, and consider whether the novel is trying to do something else? Maybe Austen wasn’t a purely didactic novelist, and this is a book about asking questions, not offering answers. Maybe she didn’t have the answers to those questions.

The question of Mansfield Park is “what does it mean to be a good person?” Does it mean being kind to everyone? Surely Mary qualifies, in that case - she cares about everyone being comfortable, and everyone getting along, and about the people she loves being happy. But she doesn’t especially mind if people she dislikes are hurt, and she doesn’t especially mind if people are betrayed behind their backs as long as nobody gets embarrassed. Does being a good person mean adhering to rigid principles? Then Sir Thomas qualifies. But his rigid principles ensure that his children don’t trust him, which ensures that he is unable to know them enough to raise them properly. He is also a slaver, and an absentee landlord, and this absenteeism is reflected in the way he leaves the rearing of his own children to others.

Does being good mean seeing the good in everyone? Edmund surely does. But that optimism is combined with his own moral rigidity, such that when he cares for someone he imagines them as conforming to his standards rather than simply seeing them clearly but without judgment. He loves Mary, but can’t see her true character. A marriage between them would have eventually turned miserable and suffocating, for both of them.

Is Fanny good? Does that matter? She tends to be correct in her judgments and decisions. She does tend to see people clearly, unless her own jealousy or fear is in the way. She does her best to be kind, though her shyness makes that difficult. She is also fussy, tentative, judgmental, and boring. She’s constantly anxious. She’s no fun. I’d imagine being her friend would be a little exhausting. Maybe that’s the answer, such as it is: maybe being good isn’t any fun, isn’t attractive, and isn’t anything we would like in practice. Maybe we’d reject goodness if we ever saw it; maybe our comforts are too important to us for that. Can we accept that?

Slavery is something mentioned only obliquely in Mansfield Park, but it’s there. It’s everywhere. It’s at every party given, in every meal eaten, and in the stitch of every dress that the Bertram sisters (and Fanny) wear. It’s in the horses Tom and Edmund and Fanny and Mary ride. It’s in the sermons given and heard. It’s in the bricks of the houses they live in. Slavery, and its brutal manifestation in what is certainly a sugar plantation in Antigua, is what allows their comfortable life to exist. It is literally what allows the plot of the novel to exist, as Sir Thomas only leaves his family to attend to his Antigua property. Can they see it? Do they want to?

No more than we do. We don’t want to like really good people, because they aren’t at all fun or enjoyable. Fanny is the only person who directly mentions the slave trade; we don’t know what she said, but we know nobody else wanted to talk about it. Fanny is no fun - she’s always doing things like that. We don’t want to like good people, any more than the Bertram family really wants to be good - it would mean giving up everything fun. They can’t do it, and readers can’t either.

Of course Austen wants you to dislike Fanny. She wants it just as much as Milton wants you to like Satan. She is cleverly making you complicit in a worldview that ignores goodness and takes comfort in evil. She’s telling you that being good means people won’t like you. Most of us aren’t ready to hear that.