Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 33

Is Edmund Bertram right about anything?

Twelfth in a series of posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. For more details, open Your Invitation to Mansfield Park.

I lived in Edmonton near the University of Alberta in the 1970s, but I was too young to attend the conference Juliet McMaster organized at the university to mark the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Fortunately, Juliet edited a collection of the papers presented at the conference, Jane Austen’s Achievement, and thus when I grew up I was able to read this wonderful book. If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you already know that I think very highly of the paper George Whalley presented, “Jane Austen: Poet,” which inspired me to explore the idea that Mansfield Park is a tragedy. (He suggests it’s a tragedy, but doesn’t follow up on the idea, so I wrote “The Tragic Action of Mansfield Park” as my attempt to show why it makes sense to think of this “problem novel” as a tragedy, rather than as a failed comedy.)

Fortunately, too, I’ve been able to read and reread Juliet’s many books and essays on Jane Austen over the years (including, a couple of weeks ago, her excellent essay “Sex and the Senses” in Persuasions 34), to hear her present at many other conferences, and to benefit from her advice about my dissertation on Austen and the classical and theological virtues (she was the external examiner for my Ph.D.). I was delighted that she accepted the invitation to contribute a guest post for this series celebrating Mansfield Park.

Juliet is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Alberta, and a frequent speaker at JASNA occasions. Author of books on Thackeray, Trollope, and Dickens, and of Jane Austen on Love and Jane Austen the Novelist, she is also the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen and illustrator-editor of Austen’s The Beautifull Cassandra. I adore The Beautifull Cassandra, and Juliet’s edition, with its playful illustrations and helpful introduction to Jane Austen’s life and works, is at the top of my list of Jane Austen books for kids. I often give copies of this book and the Cozy Classics Pride and Prejudice to the young people in my life.

Juliet is giving a talk on “Female Difficulties: Austen’s Fanny and Burney’s Juliet” at the JASNA AGM in Montreal this fall, and I hear she will also be performing in “A Dangerous Intimacy,” the play by Diana Birchall and Syrie James that was commissioned for the AGM.

Fanny was the only one of the party who found any thing to dislike [in the return of Henry Crawford after only two weeks away]; but since the day at Sotherton, she could never see Mr. Crawford with either sister without observation, and seldom without wonder or censure; and had her confidence in her own judgment been equal to her exercise of it in every other respect, had she been sure that she was seeing clearly, and judging candidly, she would probably have made some important communications to her usual confidant. As it was, however, she only hazarded a hint, and the hint was lost. “I am rather surprised,” said she, “that Mr. Crawford should come back again so soon, after being here so long before, full seven weeks; for I had understood he was so very fond of change and moving about, that I thought something would certainly occur when he was gone, to take him elsewhere. He is used to much gayer places than Mansfield.”

“It is to his credit,” was Edmund’s answer, “and I dare say it gives his sister pleasure. She does not like his unsettled habits.”

“What a favourite he is with my cousins!”

“Yes, his manners to women are such as must please. Mrs. Grant, I believe, suspects him of a preference for Julia; I have never seen much symptom of it, but I wish it may be so. He has no faults but what a serious attachment would remove.”

“If Miss Bertram were not engaged,” said Fanny, cautiously, “I could sometimes almost think that he admired her more than Julia.”

“Which is, perhaps, more in favour of his liking Julia best, than you, Fanny, may be aware: for I believe it often happens, that a man, before he has quite made up his own mind, will distinguish the sister or intimate friend of the woman he is really thinking of, more than the woman herself. Crawford has too much sense to stay here if he found himself in any danger from Maria; and I am not at all afraid for her, after such proof as she has given, that her feelings are not strong.”

Fanny supposed she must have been mistaken, and meant to think differently in future; but with all that submission to Edmund could do, and all the help of the coinciding looks and hints which she occasionally noticed in some of the others and which seemed to say that Julia was Mr. Crawford’s choice, she knew not always what to think.

– From Mansfield Park, Chapter 12 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)

This brief exchange between Edmund and Fanny occurs after Henry Crawford has returned to Mansfield after only two weeks’ absence at his own estate of Everingham. And it is interesting in showing how Fanny, the pupil, with strong powers of observation and judgement, is desperately short of confidence in her own judgement; whereas Edmund, the tutor – (and their relation has been very much that of pupil and teacher) has full confidence in his own judgement, but with much less reason.

Fanny has had the benefit of observing Henry’s flirtatious behaviour with Julia and especially Maria during the trip to Sotherton. Edmund was there too, but he didn’t see what Fanny observed, and his powers of observation are clearly inferior to hers. He is pretty thoroughly wrong about several things:

* For instance, that Henry Crawford “has too much sense to stay here if he found himself in danger from Maria” – Wrong! In fact we know that Henry finds Maria more attractive for her engagement, presumably on the “forbidden fruit” principle.

* He considers Maria quite free of attachment to Crawford, since by engaging herself to Rushworth she has proved “her feelings are not strong.” Wrong! Her feelings are in fact so strong that that despite her engagement to Rushworth (for mercenary reasons, of course) she is ready to upset the whole applecart for Crawford, as eventually she does.

Is Edmund right about anything? His comment that Crawford “has no faults but what a serious attachment will remove” could be right – and Mary Crawford too believes that if he had married Fanny he would have settled down to being a good husband and landlord. That belief is pretty questionable, of course, but it is never tested, and since it is only a might-have-been, the answer must depend on the individual judgements of readers.

Then what about his general comment on human behaviour, that “it often happens that a man, before he has quite made up his own mind, will distinguish the sister or intimate friend of the woman he is really thinking of more than the woman herself”? Wrong again, so far as Julia and Maria are concerned! From this bit of general wisdom he intends to prove that Crawford’s attentions to Maria are really because he prefers Julia – which again is arrant nonsense (as Fanny knows, but daren’t say, because of her disastrous lack of confidence in her own judgment).

But what interests me is the extent to which Edmund’s piece of wisdom may actually apply to himself. I have long believed that Edmund, even while he consciously courts Mary Crawford, is equally in love with Fanny – or indeed even more so. (Note: I argued this in Jane Austen on Love, back in 1978, but I have sometimes been challenged on it.) Certainly Edmund believes himself in love with Mary, and – through his ignorance of Fanny’s feelings – he often puts Fanny through the pain of being his confidante in his courtship of Mary. But there are many signs of his equal love for Fanny. He calls her “Dearest Fanny!” (note the superlative!), and kisses her hand “with almost as much warmth as if it had been Mary Crawford’s” (269). “Almost”? But that is Fanny’s perception more than the narrator’s pronouncement, isn’t it? He tells Fanny fervently, “I have no pleasure in the world superior to that of contributing to yours … no pleasure so complete, so unalloyed” (262).

I should concede the points against me. I have to admit that Edmund’s encouraging Fanny to accept Henry Crawford, as he certainly does, is not very lover-like. After all, the most visible sign that Mr. Knightley is in love with Emma is his jealousy of Frank Churchill. Indeed, it seems he doesn’t wake up to his own love himself until he understands his own jealousy (and the same applies to Emma, who doesn’t know she loves Knightley until she thinks he may marry Harriet). But then Mr. Knightley is certainly more knowledgeable about himself and his feelings than Edmund is about his. Edmund thinks he is in love with Mary, says he could never marry anyone else. But then why doesn’t he get on and propose to her? Should he propose in person, he wonders, or in a letter? (422). He is forever dithering. Even Fanny gets impatient at his prolonged shilly-shallying, and exclaims, “There is no good in this delay … Why is it not settled?” (424).

But to return to Edmund and my chosen passage: “A man … will distinguish the sister or intimate friend of the woman he is really thinking of, more than the woman herself.” As a general rule, this is one more place where Edmund is wrong. But as applying to himself – the rule is true and correct. Edmund does distinguish Mary, the intimate friend (as he thinks) of Fanny, more than Fanny herself. But whom does he really mean to marry, even if he doesn’t know it himself? Right! Fanny!

Dare I conclude, Q.E.D.?!

To read more about all the posts in this series, visit An Invitation to Mansfield Park. Coming soon: guest posts by Lynn Festa, David Monaghan, Diana Birchall, and Deborah Barnum. Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the Mansfield Park party!

Dr. Grant’s Green Goose

Before I introduce today’s guest post, I want to note that this is the anniversary of Jane Austen’s death. She died in Winchester on July 18, 1817, at the age of 41. Here’s the link to a post I wrote two years ago to commemorate the anniversary of her death: “Never was human being more sincerely mourned.” Deborah Yaffe wrote a lovely blog post yesterday to mark the occasion: “The sun of our lives.”

This guest post is the eleventh in a series of posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. For more details, open Your Invitation to Mansfield Park.

Today’s contributor to “An Invitation to Mansfield Park” is Dr. Julie Strong, a member of JASNA Nova Scotia who has practised medicine in Nova Scotia for thirty years. She has an MD from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland and a BA in Classics from Dalhousie University. Julie has had several articles appear in medical publications. Her queer tragic-comedy “Athena in Love” won the Best Playwright’s Award in the 2012 Atlantic Fringe Festival. She has presented in the United States and Europe on “Madness in Ancient Greece” and “The Shamanic Roots of Western Medicine.”

In Chapter 11, Mary Crawford visits Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price at Mansfield Park. Mary has become increasingly attached to Edmund, and, much to Fanny’s consternation, he has become increasingly attached to her. However, Mary wishes to marry a man of ambition and, dismayed at Edmund’s intention to take holy orders, hopes to dissuade him by describing the petty veniality of a clergyman’s life.

“I have been so little addicted to take my own opinions from my uncle,” said Miss Crawford, “that I can hardly suppose; – and since you push me so hard, I must observe, that I am not entirely without the means of seeing what clergymen are, being at this time the guest of my own brother, Dr Grant. And though Dr Grant is most kind and obliging to me, and though he is really a gentleman, and I dare say a good scholar and clever, and often preaches good sermons, and is very respectable, I see him to be an indolent, selfish bon vivant, who must have his palate consulted in every thing, who will not stir a finger for the convenience of any one, and who, moreover, if the cook makes a blunder, is out of humour with his excellent wife. To own the truth, Henry and I were partly driven out this very evening, by a disappointment about a green goose which he could not get the better of. My poor sister was forced to stay and bear it.”

– From Mansfield Park, Chapter 11 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003)

Jane Stabler, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel, explains that “a green goose” is one “killed at three or four months old, as opposed to one fattened on stubble for eating at Michaelmas. Green goose was traditionally eaten around Whitsuntide, which may explain why Dr. Grant finds it less than satisfactory in late summer. It also indicates that for him the observance of the calendar of church festivals is less important than the possibility of a gourmet treat.”

Edmund agrees with Mary that Dr. Grant should not indulge in bad humour merely for being denied a succulent roast; however, he insists that it is insufficient cause for condemning the entire profession.

Fanny suggests that it is just as well Dr. Grant became a clergyman. She reasons that an army or navy position would only have increased his power to injure his inferiors. This would be Austen’s fine sense of irony at play: a profession whose manifest aim is the elevation of the human soul is reduced to a means of defanging an unpleasant man.

Nevertheless, there is a brief episode in Chapter 22 in which Dr. Grant rouses himself. He takes an umbrella to Fanny who is sheltering from a downpour under a tree just near the parsonage grounds. She has already refused a servant with an umbrella, but unable to withstand Dr. Grant, accompanies him back to the parsonage where she changes into dry clothes. The rector thus saves our heroine from a good chance of contracting consumption, albeit against her will.

However, this lapse into civility passes and Dr. Grant soon returns to form. Edmund and Fanny are visiting the Grants and Dr. Grant invites Edmund, alone, to dinner the following day. It no more occurs to him to include Fanny than to include his housemaid. However, “Fanny had barely time for an unpleasant feeling on the occasion,” because Mrs. Grant quickly invites her, and so mitigates her husband’s rudeness. When Mrs. Grant informs him that it will be a fine turkey for dinner, he feigns lack of interest or even annoyance: “A friendly meeting and not a fine dinner is all we have in view. A Goose or a leg of mutton or whatever you and cook chuse to give us.” He affects that indifference to matters of the flesh becoming to a clergyman and so adds hypocrisy to his existing list of vices.

Dr. Grant is a grouchy gourmand whom Austen summarily dispatches at the close of the novel. He dies, having “brought on apoplexy and death, by three great institutionary dinners in one week” (Chapter 48). As Cheryl Kinney discussed in her post for “An Invitation to Mansfield Park,” Tom Bertram was right that Dr. Grant would “soon pop off.” The living of Mansfield then falls to Edmund, when he and Fanny “had been married just long enough to begin to feel a want an increase of income.” And so Dr. Grant redeems, through death, some part of his life of vice, by contributing to the happiness of the novel’s hero and heroine.

To read more about all the posts in this series, visit An Invitation to Mansfield Park. Coming soon: guest posts by Juliet McMaster, Lynn Festa, David Monaghan, and Diana Birchall. Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the Mansfield Park party!

The Fatal Mistake

Tenth in a series of posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. For more details, open Your Invitation to Mansfield Park.

Deborah Yaffe, an award-winning newspaper journalist and author, has been a passionate Jane Austen fan since first reading Pride and Prejudice at age ten. Her second book, Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom, was published in August 2013. I was fascinated by the book and reviewed it here last fall, and then in January I interviewed Deborah about the series of blog posts she wrote on continuations of Austen’s unfinished novel The Watsons.

Deborah holds a bachelor’s degree in humanities from Yale University and a master’s degree in politics, philosophy, and economics from Oxford University in England, which she attended on a Marshall Scholarship. She works as a freelance writer and lives in central New Jersey with her husband, her two children, and her Jane Austen action figure. I hope you enjoy reading her post on the well-known scene at Sotherton in which Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford slip past the locked iron gate.

[Henry to Maria:] “Your prospects, however, are too fair to justify want of spirits. You have a very smiling scene before you.”

“Do you mean literally or figuratively? Literally I conclude. Yes, certainly, the sun shines and the park looks very cheerful. But unluckily that iron gate, that ha-ha, gives me a feeling of restraint and hardship. ‘I cannot get out,’ as the starling said.” As she spoke, and it was with expression, she walked to the gate; he followed her. “Mr. Rushworth is so long fetching this key!”

“And for the world you would not get out without the key and without Mr. Rushworth’s authority and protection, or I think you might with little difficulty pass round the edge of the gate, here, with my assistance; I think it might be done, if you really wished to be more at large, and could allow yourself to think it not prohibited.”

“Prohibited! nonsense! I certainly can get out that way, and I will. Mr. Rushworth will be here in a moment, you know; we shall not be out of sight.”

“Or if we are, Miss Price will be so good as to tell him that he will find us near that knoll: the grove of oak on the knoll.”

Fanny, feeling all this to be wrong, could not help making an effort to prevent it. “You will hurt yourself, Miss Bertram,” she cried, “you will certainly hurt yourself against those spikes – you will tear your gown – you will be in danger of slipping into the ha-ha. You had better not go.”

Her cousin was safe on the other side, while these words were spoken, and smiling with all the good-humour of success, she said, “Thank you, my dear Fanny, but I and my gown are alive and well, and so good-bye.”

– From Mansfield Park, Chapter 10 (London: Penguin, 1985)

In every Jane Austen novel, a young woman successfully navigates the perilous journey from the home of her parents to the home of a loving and responsible husband. We know this journey is perilous because, in every Austen novel, this ultimately happy story has its shadowy, minor-key counterpart: the story of a young woman who makes a terrible mistake about men, marriage and sex, and pays the price.

Sometimes this counter-story exists largely in the heroine’s fantasies, like Mrs. Tilney’s Gothic imprisonment in Northanger Abbey or Jane Fairfax’s guilty love for Mr. Dixon in Emma. Sometimes it is real but wholly offstage, like the tragedy of the two Elizas in Sense and Sensibility or the unlucky marriage of Mrs. Smith in Persuasion. And sometimes it remains largely offstage but still plays an important role in the plot, like Wickham’s seduction of Lydia in Pride and Prejudice.

Only in Mansfield Park does Jane Austen allow us to watch the counter-story – the seduction, the fatal mistake, the fall – unfolding in real time. And the scene from Chapter 10 quoted above, in which Henry Crawford persuades Maria Bertram to slip past the locked gate at Sotherton, is the epicenter of the counter-story, the emblematic moment that contains and anticipates the whole.

As Henry, snake-like, tempts Maria into leaving her fiancé behind and accompanying him out of the Edenic wilderness, we know that this literal transgression of geographic boundaries foreshadows the transgression of social boundaries they will soon commit together. We know that Fanny’s alarmed warning – “You will certainly hurt yourself against those spikes; you will tear your gown; you will be in danger of slipping into the ha–ha” – is a coded reference to the illicit sexual penetration, and the accompanying social calamity, that will eventually occur.

And yet nothing really illicit happens here. We don’t overhear an explicit sexual proposition, witness a stolen kiss, or even notice a semi-accidental brushing of fingertips. All we see is a man and a woman slipping past an iron gate.

How, then, do we know that the stakes are so high? How do we know that Maria’s unwillingness to wait for Rushworth to bring her the key to the gate prefigures her unwillingness to remain faithful to him within the fenced wilderness of marriage?

Partly, of course, we know all this because we are post-Freudian readers, primed to see keys and spikes and tears as sexual codes. How, then, do we know that the pre-Freudian Jane Austen had this metaphorical reading in mind?

We know because she tells us. “You have a very smiling scene before you,” Henry tells Maria. “Do you mean literally or figuratively?” Maria replies. “Literally, I conclude.” But even as Maria insists, disingenuously, on a literal reading of Henry’s flirtatious commonplace, she – or, rather, her creator – is putting us on notice that everything that follows can be read in two ways. Literally? It’s a woman discourteously slipping through a gate. Figuratively? It’s a woman making the mistake about men, marriage and sex that will ultimately destroy her life.

To read more about all the posts in this series, visit An Invitation to Mansfield Park. Coming soon: guest posts by Julie Strong, Juliet McMaster, David Monaghan, and Diana Birchall. Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the Mansfield Park party!

Something from Nothing

Ninth in a series of posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. For more details, open Your Invitation to Mansfield Park.

Mary Lu Roffey Redden is the director of Halifax Humanities 101, a program that offers non-credit, university-level Humanities studies (philosophy and literature) to adults living below the poverty line. It’s wonderful that Halifax has a program like this, and I’ve been very interested to learn from Mary Lu about similar organizations across Canada and elsewhere in the world.

Inspired by the Clemente Course in the Humanities founded in Manhattan in 1995 by Earl Shorris, Halifax Humanities 101 is “based on the premise that the insights and skills offered by study of the traditional Humanities disciplines can provide people with crucial tools for gaining control over their lives.” In Shorris’s words, “the Humanities provide the most practical education. The Humanities teach us to think reflectively, to deign to deal with the new as it occurs to us, to dare.” Among the many faculty from universities in the Halifax area who have taught in the Halifax Humanities 101 program are two contributors to “An Invitation to Mansfield Park”: Judith Thompson and John Baxter.

Last year, when so many of us were celebrating the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, there was a Pride and Prejudice-themed fundraiser for Halifax Humanities 101 hosted by the Weldon Literary Moot Society at the University of King’s College: Mr. Darcy sued Mr. Wickham for defamation of character. I missed it because I was in Boston that week, but I hear it was both hilarious and successful.

Our Regional Coordinator for JASNA Nova Scotia, Anne Thompson, attended. Here’s what she had to say about the event:

The P&P Moot Court fundraiser was extremely clever, with Mr. Wickham on trial for making slanderous remarks about Mr. Darcy. Presiding over the case was an actual NS Judge, the Honourable Jamie Campbell. We knew the perfidious Wickham was winning when his mother-in-law tried to bribe the Judge with cookies – at the expense of her other son-in-law – and the Judge asked Wickham for his autograph (for his kids, of course!). Oh dear! No surprise, the defendant, Wickham, actually did win the case.

Mary Lu has a BA (Hons) in Philosophy from Huron College, University of Western Ontario and an MA in Philosophy of Religion from McMaster University, and she was a Ph.D. Candidate in the same field. She has taught community college courses in Business Communications and university courses in Comparative Religion. You can follow her on Twitter @HalHum101.

For the past twenty-five years, Mary Lu’s husband has been an Anglican rector in both city and rural parishes. Being raised Roman Catholic and thus unaccustomed to the position of “clergy wife,” she says, she has done a fair bit of study and writing on the topic of the clergy wife in English history, and her interest in the topic prompted her to examine the passage in Mansfield Park in which Mary Crawford learns that Edmund Bertram is going to be a clergyman.

[Mary to Edmund] “But why are you to be a clergyman? I thought that was always the lot of the youngest, where there were many to choose before him.”

“Do you think the church itself never chosen, then?”

“Never is a black word. But yes, in the never of conversation, which means not very often, I do think it. For what is to be done in the church? Men love to distinguish themselves, and in either of the other lines distinction may be gained, but not in the church. A clergyman is nothing.”

“The nothing of conversation has its gradations, I hope, as well as the never. A clergyman cannot be high in state or fashion. He must not head mobs, or set the ton in dress. But I cannot call that situation nothing which has the charge of all that is of the first importance to mankind, individually or collectively considered, temporally and eternally, which has the guardianship of religion and morals, and consequently of the manners which result from their influence. No one here can call the office nothing. If the man who holds it is so, it is by the neglect of his duty, by foregoing its just importance, and stepping out of his place to appear what he ought not to appear.”

– From Mansfield Park, Chapter 9 (London: Penguin, 1985)

Mary Crawford’s reply to Edmund’s planned ordination may be cynical about the church – “A clergyman is nothing” – but she is also surprisingly insightful about issues that still resonate for clergy: what is the difference between a vocation that may mean relative poverty and social obscurity and a profession in which one seeks advancement, a good salary and some social standing? Mary’s challenge to Edmund becomes an opportunity for him to think through his own sense of vocation, in a time when being a clergyman often was the “last resort” position for a second or third son. Edmund takes on the idea of the “nothing” of being a clergyman head on. His comments have a history in English literature.

In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer depicts two kinds of clergy: “the Parson of Good Renown” who is both learned and devoted to his parishioners, visiting them all, rich and poor, with equal concern and able to live with a modest income. In contrast, Chaucer describes the absent cleric who “runs off to London to earn easy bread / By singing masses for the wealthy dead.” In the Prologue, Chaucer has this wonderful line about the ministry: “And shame it is to see – let priests take stock – / A shitten shepherd and a snowy flock” (quoted from Nevill Coghill’s translation).

The poet George Herbert wrote a lengthy treatise on the ministry in the 1630’s entitled The Country Parson in which he lays out exactly this contrast: the clergy person is to live modestly, without any sense of shallow social importance, so that by his example (and that of his family) he will be the community guide in matters of morals. One of his most famous lines: “In the house of a Preacher, all are Preachers.”

The “nothingness” of a clergyman is nothingness by worldly standards, seemingly the only standards Mary Crawford understands. A clergyman, replies Edmund, is nothing in terms of “state or fashion.” But in his “nothing,” Edmund hopes that the clergyman will find his “something”: “the guardianship of religions and morals.” Just as Chaucer and George Herbert claim, the clergyman takes on a profound responsibility: “the cure of souls.” Mary’s challenge to Edward becomes the opportunity for him to think through this rather daunting “something” of a clerical vocation. Mr. Collins – take note!

To read more about all the posts in this series, visit An Invitation to Mansfield Park. Coming soon: guest posts by Deborah Yaffe, Julie Strong, Juliet McMaster, and David Monaghan. Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the Mansfield Park party!

“A world where it is always June”

“What would it be like to live in a world where it is always June?” asks L.M. Montgomery in a journal entry on June 30, 1902. “Would we get tired of it? I daresay we would, but just now I feel that I could stand a good deal of it if it were as charming as today.” She had had a terrible night of sleeplessness and worry, and had recovered by walking in Lover’s Lane, one of her favourite places in Cavendish.

Forget-me-nots in Lover’s Lane

“This evening I went for a walk in Lover’s Lane to exorcise my evil spirit,” she writes. “It was efficacious as usual. Somewhere in me the soul of me rose up and said, ‘No matter for those troubles and problems that looked so big and black in the night. They are mortal and will pass. I am immortal and will remain.” Nature always had a powerful effect on her spirits, and while the woods and fields of Prince Edward Island were her favourite cure, even a city park, like Point Pleasant Park in Halifax, could work wonders.

When I reread Anne of the Island a few months ago, I discovered that Anne Shirley echoes these words from Montgomery’s journal, saying to Marilla and Mrs. Rachel Lynde, “I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.” It’s Marilla who replies, “You’d get tired of it,” and Anne concedes that she would, “but just now I feel that it would take me a long time to get tired of it, if it were all as charming as today. Everything loves June.”

Montgomery often drew on her journals for her fiction, and I’m always delighted to find these connections. The June 30th entry was omitted from The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery – one more reason to be glad that The Complete Journals are now being published. In the novel, it’s ten-year-old Davy Keith, not Anne, who is sad despite the beautiful weather. Anne asks why he has a “melancholy November face in blossomtime,” and he answers, “I’m just sick and tired of living.” While it sounds as if he too needs to exorcise an “evil spirit,” it turns out he’s simply discouraged about having too much homework (“ten sums”) that weekend.

In the midst of all the Mansfield Park celebrations here on my blog, I’ve been rereading some of Montgomery’s novels and journals, and last week I spent a few glorious days in Prince Edward Island with my family. I finally bought my own copy of Elizabeth Rollins Epperly’s beautiful book Imagining Anne, which I’ve had from the library many times, and you may hear more about it here soon.

In the meantime, here are a few of my other posts about L.M. Montgomery:

Anne of Green Gables Loves Point Pleasant Park

Point Pleasant Park as a Cure for Homesickness

L.M. Montgomery’s Literary Pilgrimage to Concord, Mass.

Quotations are from The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1901-1911, ed. Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston (Oxford University Press, 2013), and from Anne of the Island, first published in 1915 (Bantam, 1976).

Rears and Vices

Eighth in a series of posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. For more details, open Your Invitation to Mansfield Park.

I first met Devoney Looser at the 2005 JASNA AGM in Milwaukee on “Jane Austen’s Letters in Fact and Fiction,” where she and her husband, George Justice, gave a wonderful plenary lecture entitled “Burn This Letter: Personal Correspondence and the Secrets of the Soul.” Today, I’m delighted to share with you her contribution to “An Invitation to Mansfield Park.” Mary Crawford’s joke about “Rears” and “Vices” has inspired many debates over the years, and I’m curious to hear what you think of Devoney’s analysis of this controversial passage.

Devoney is Professor of English at Arizona State University and the author of Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850, and British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820, both published by Johns Hopkins University Press. She’s the editor of the essay collection Jane Austen and Discourses of Feminism. Her recent publications include a foreword to a special issue on Teaching Jane Austen Among Her Contemporaries (Persuasions On-Line, 2014) and a short piece on Austen as a feminist icon in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

When not reading, writing about, or teaching Jane Austen, Devoney plays roller derby as Stone Cold Jane Austen, an alter ego that landed her a place in Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites (2013) and won her a theme song (“In the classroom it’s theory / On the track it’s pain”). Follow her on Twitter @devoneylooser and @stonecoldjane.

“Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.”

– From Mansfield Park, Chapter 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006)

To suggest that there is sex in Mansfield Park – at least in the way that recent film and television adaptations tend to – is rubbish. Austen’s Fanny Price is no bosomy sexpot, à la Billie Piper in the 2007 BBC adaptation. The lurid book cover on the print edition of the novel sold as a tie-in with Patricia Rozema’s 1999 film might lead a first-time reader to mistakenly expect passionate kisses narrated on every other page.

That said, there is sexuality (even dangerous, illicit sex) in Mansfield Park, albeit between the lines. The rehearsals for Lovers’ Vows lead to flirtation and forbidden physical contact, both on and off stage. At the visit to Sotherton, couples flout conventional propriety to sneak off together. By the time Maria Bertram Rushworth runs off temporarily with her lover, becoming fodder for newspaper gossip, we’ve had many hints that it could come to this.

Critics have written eloquently on Austen’s treatment of sex and sexuality, most notably Jillian Heydt-Stevenson and Jan Fergus. Disagreements abound, but one crucial line from Mansfield Park tends to get critics the most hot and bothered. The line is Mary Crawford’s, spoken in Chapter 6, in the hearing of many. It’s especially troubling to her suitor, Edmund Bertram.

Edmund, knowing that Mary formerly lived with her admiral uncle, asks about her knowledge of the British Navy. Mary answers him with jocularity, “Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.” Her attempt at wit isn’t met with laughter; we’re told that Edmund “felt grave” after she spoke.

There’s no doubt that she’s making fun of powerful naval men here. She’s already said that in her uncle’s home, she socialized only with highest-ranking of them. It’s clear by this point in the text that she’s willing to pillory these men for their faults. Just prior to this line, she describes them as invariably bickering and jealous.

It also seems obvious that Mary is indeed making a pun. She does not reference “Rear Admirals” and “Vice Admirals,” as she could have. She says “Rears and Vices,” with the italics serving to emphasize her punctuated, droll delivery and the double meaning of the words. Mary coyly invites her audience of listeners (just as Austen invites her audience of readers) to conclude precisely what she says she doesn’t want to be suspected of – that she’s uttering a pun.

The question for us as readers today is, “Precisely how off-color is her pun?” Is Mary making a joke about powerful old men’s big bums and bad habits (gambling, drinking, gluttony, avarice, and adultery), or is she making a ribald joke about the Navy’s associations with sodomy?

Some argue that it’s unthinkable that Austen could ever have thought about – much less have any character joke about – sodomy. Others see Mary’s lines as unquestionably referencing sexual vices having to do with rear ends. They read them as a dirty joke about anal sex and as proof that Austen’s bawdy, wicked sense of humor – like Mary’s – roils beneath the surface of Mansfield Park. Critics have tried out all positions in between, where Mary’s lines are concerned. Most of us have our own strong opinions about how we ought, and ought not to, read this line. In forming our opinions, we must continue to investigate the larger textual and cultural contexts of Mary’s words.

As readers familiar with the hierarchy of the British Royal Navy in Austen’s era know well, vice admirals and rear admirals were the two ranks that fell just below admiral. Together, these were the three highest titles a naval officer could hold, the rest below consisting of various kinds of commodores, captains, and lieutenants. Rear admiral was usually a title belonging to an older man, often reserved to recognize a naval officer previously passed over for promotion, upon his retirement.

The crucial piece of textual information that we ought to remember in reading Mary’s line is what brings her to Mansfield Park in the first place: her admiral-uncle’s taking a mistress into his London home. His very public act – visible to family, servants, and friends, and therefore fodder for rumor-mongering among all parties beyond – means that Mary can no longer live under his roof. To stay there would be read as her tacit acceptance of his debauched choice. It would make her reputation morally besmirched.

In offering her irreverent pun, then, Mary expresses a jaunty skepticism about the Admiral’s profession, but she’s also taking a jab at his unconventional sexual (and romantic?) choices. She demonstrates a lack of filial piety toward Admiral Crawford that readers might forgive her for, given what we know about his dissolute ways. The Admiral is described by Austen’s narrator as “a man of vicious conduct,” one of the most cutting insults used in all of her novels. Vicious in this context means that he is depraved, immoral, and bad. He is vicious both for his open adultery and for his effectively washing his hands of the care of his unmarried, unprotected niece. He chooses to live in sin with his mistress over dutifully guiding Mary in polite society until she’s safely married off.

Wealthy, powerful men at this time certainly had plenty of adulterous affairs, but they were expected to hide their liaisons. The Admiral could easily have installed his mistress in a separate private residence and visited her there almost as often as he liked, without raising many eyebrows. Later in the novel, he’s described as a man who “hated marriage” and “thought it never pardonable in a young man of independent fortune” (Ch. 30). He flouts convention in relationships out of principle and inclination. Henry Crawford means to be different from his uncle, but he doesn’t manage to hold firm. It’s important to remember that Henry, too, could have carried on a secret affair with Maria, under the nose of her oblivious husband Rushworth. Henry and Maria are unwilling to let it stop there. The viciousness in the Crawford family tended toward the spectacular. This might seem to support a reading in which Mary’s joke should be read in the most outrageous way possible.

But there is one further piece of evidence we ought to consider in reading the “rears and vices” line. The word “vicious” is, of course, from the same etymological root as vice. That connection would probably not have been lost on Austen in writing the novel, using both of these words as she did at such crucial textual moments. The Admiral’s most visible and recent viciousness – that most centrally related to way the plot unfolds – is his illicit heterosexual activities.

The vices that Mary is most likely to have seen under her uncle’s roof (if we are really to believe that she’s seen them at all!) have to do with men’s and women’s sex acts. Men’s copulating with wanton women is the vice that anyone who knew her story – and knew the Admiral’s publicly preferred forms of viciousness – would assume she meant. It’s what Edmund would have believed Mary meant. It’s a dirty joke at the expense of her uncle that simultaneously reveals her own sexual knowingness, by association. Acknowledging that association in polite company would be more than enough to have Edmund feeling grave.

We’ll never know the extent to which Austen associated sodomy with the Navy men, but it seems to me very unlikely that she would have lost an opportunity in these lines to have Mary impugn the full range of vices in which the admiral and his peers indulged, while also making fun of their aging, and perhaps ungainly, rears. Given what the novel reveals – the adultery of the uncle and the attempted reform and adulterous repetition in the nephew – it seems clear that Mary (and Austen, in giving her voice) was making the most pointed reference in her pun to the heterosexual vices of powerful old Naval men, not to the illegal, punishable, same-sex vices of men’s rears. Even if it’s not about sodomy, Mary’s unsuccessful joke is a shocking moment of how forbidden sex undergirds this novel.

To read more about all the posts in this series, visit An Invitation to Mansfield Park. Coming soon: guest posts by Mary Lu Redden, Deborah Yaffe, Julie Strong, and Juliet McMaster. Subscribe by email or follow the blog so you don’t miss these fabulous contributions to the Mansfield Park party!

A Gentleman’s Improvements: Mr. Rushworth, Humphry Repton, Fanny Price and Fashionable Landscaping

Seventh in a series of posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. For more details, open Your Invitation to Mansfield Park.

Maria Edgeworth, Image from Novels 1780-1920, Rare Books and Special Collections, University Library, University of Sydney

If you’ve been following “An Invitation to Mansfield Park” since the series began, you’ll remember that Jacqui Grainger contributed a post last month in which she reported on the fascinating symposium that explored “The Great Novels of 1814: Austen, Burney, Edgeworth and Scott.” Next month, she’ll tell us more about the Austen aspect of the exhibition on the “Great Novels of 1814” that she curated at the University of Sydney, where she is currently Manager of Rare Books and Special Collections. And today, I’m very pleased to share with you her analysis of the discussion in Chapter 6 of Mansfield Park about the proposed fate of the trees at Sotherton. Thank you, Jacqui, for all these contributions to the Mansfield Park celebrations!

Here’s Jacqui’s account of what inspired her to focus on this particular passage:

In the last few years I have found myself continually circling back to the section of Mansfield Park where Mr. Rushworth talks of his plans for ‘improvements’ at Sotherton. Whilst Librarian at Chawton House Library I curated an exhibition that complemented a talk I gave to the members of the Hampshire Gardens Trust; this became an article for one of their magazines. A version can be found here and I began with: ‘But the woods are fine, and there is a stream.’ In exploring the depth of materials on estates and gardens in both the Knight and the Main Collections at Chawton it seemed somewhat inevitable that I should begin with the first edition of Mansfield Park. Five years later in curating an exhibition on the ‘Great Novels of 1814: Austen, Burney, Edgeworth and Scott’ I seemed to be in very familiar territory because the collections here in Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Sydney are predominantly those of eighteenth-century gentlemen: colonial legislators, officers of the navy and marines, naturalists, explorers, settlers and the more affluent transportees. There are sets of county antiquaries with ‘views of gentlemen’s seats,’ books by Humphrey Repton, John Loudon, Richard Payne Knight and William Cowper. This passage became central to the Austen section of the exhibition and led to a theme of place and identity throughout the exhibition.

Mr. Rushworth, however, though not usually a great talker, had still more to say on the subject next his heart. “Smith has not much above a hundred acres altogether in his grounds, which is little enough, and makes it more surprising that the place can have been so improved. Now at Sotherton, we have a good seven hundred, without reckoning the water meadows; so that I think, if so much can be done at Compton, we need not despair. There have been two or three fine old trees cut down, that grew too near the house, and it opens the prospect amazingly, which makes me think that Repton, or any body of that sort, would certainly have the avenue at Sotherton down; the avenue that leads from the west front to the top of the hill you know,” turning to Miss Bertram particularly as he spoke. But Miss Bertram thought it most becoming to reply:

“The avenue! Oh! I do not recollect it. I really know very little of Sotherton.”

Fanny, who was sitting on the other side of Edmund, exactly opposite Miss Crawford, and who had been attentively listening, now looked at him, and said in a low voice,

“Cut down an avenue! What a pity! Does it not make you think of Cowper? ‘Ye fallen avenues, once more I mourn your fate unmerited.’”

He smiled as he answered, “I am afraid the avenue stands a bad chance, Fanny.”

“I should like to see Sotherton before it is cut down, to see the place as it is now, in its old state; but I do not suppose I shall.”

“Have you never been there? No, you never can; and unluckily it is out of distance for a ride. I wish we could contrive it.”

“Oh! it does not signify. Whenever I do see it, you will tell me how it has been altered.”

“I collect,” said Miss Crawford, “that Sotherton is an old place, and a place of some grandeur. In any particular style of building?”

– From Mansfield Park, Chapter 6 (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2001)

Photo of the first edition of Mansfield Park held at the University of Sydney, taken by the conservators. As you can see the volumes require some tender loving care and in the next few weeks conservation work will begin on them. The Jane Austen Society of Australia has pledged a contribution to their conservation along with the Friends of the Library and several individual donors. Image courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Sydney Libraries.

Wealth and status, power and the responsible use of money are persistent themes in the work of Jane Austen. Austen uses the idea of improvement to reflect varying attitudes to money and its appropriate disposal.

Mr. Rushworth illustrates an extravagant readiness to dispose of his money in a demonstration of his wealth and status. A most fashionable young man, he plans to “improve” his estate according to the latest obsession in landscape design and the employment of Mr. Repton. Humphry Repton (1752-1818) refashioned the estates of the wealthy with dramatic scenic improvements like the example Rushworth gives: “two or three fine old trees cut down . . . and it opens up the prospect amazingly.”

As Rushworth’s estate is so much larger than the friend’s he is describing his expectation seems to be that anything Repton could do at Sotherton will be even more impressive. Simultaneously he displays his ignorance of Repton’s writing on the principles of landscape design in his treatises, Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening (1794), Observation on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1803), and An Inquiry into the Changes of Taste in Landscape Gardening (1806). Repton’s ideas were more subtle than Rushworth’s speculations and dealt with locations’ unique character.

In Rushworth’s speculations Austen ironically presents us with some of the criticism Repton had faced from Richard Payne Knight in The Landscape: a Didactic Poem (1794) and Uvedale Price in Essay on the Picturesque (1794). Both Knight and Price had opposed the ideas of Capability Brown (1716-1783) and other landscape designers, such as Repton, for being standardized and erasing the picturesque qualities of parks and gardens.

Fanny’s whispered exclamation, “Cut down an avenue!”, mirrors the contemporary controversy on the picturesque and it is Cowper Fanny refers to, not Repton. Fanny’s concerns are Romantic – she longs to see it “in its old state.” She quotes from The Task: a Poem, in Six Books published by William Cowper in 1785; a poem in blank verse, The Task was extremely influential on Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb, as well as Austen, with its writing of every day English life and the consolations of nature.

Miss Crawford’s interjection into the conversation brings it back from Fanny’s meagre consolations to the “grandeur” of Sotherton, Rushworth’s status as a wealthy landowner and what his plans to dispose of his money say about his character.

First edition of Mansfield Park. Image courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of Sydney Libraries.

Further reading:

Brooke, Christopher. Jane Austen: Illusion and Reality. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999.

Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

Duckworth, Alistair. The Improvement of the Estate: a study of Jane Austen’s Novels. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins, 1971.

To read more about all the posts in this series, visit  An Invitation to Mansfield Park .

Scattering Seeds of Kindness

Sixth in a series of posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. For more details, open Your Invitation to Mansfield Park.

Mary C.M. Phillips writes about works by her favourite authors, Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, at Caffeine Epiphanies, and she recently co-hosted a discussion of Wharton’s life and works – including my own favourite, The Custom of the Country – at the Malverne Public Library in Malverne, New York. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies, such as Chicken Soup for the Soul, A Cup of Comfort, and Bad Austen: The Worst Stories Jane Never Wrote. Follow her on Twitter @MarycmPhil. I met Mary at the 2012 JASNA AGM in New York and have enjoyed many conversations with her about both Austen and Wharton since then. I’m very happy to introduce her guest post on Mary Crawford’s famous question about Fanny Price, “Pray, is she out, or is she not?”

“I begin now to understand you all, except Miss Price,” said Miss Crawford, as she was walking with the Mr. Bertrams. “Pray, is she out, or is she not? – I am puzzled. – She dined at the Parsonage, with the rest of you, which seemed like being out; and yet she says so little, that I can hardly suppose she is.”

Edmund, to whom this was chiefly addressed, replied, “I believe I know what you mean – but I will not undertake to answer the question. My cousin is grown up. She has the age and sense of a woman, but the outs and not outs are beyond me.”

“And yet, in general, nothing can be more easily ascertained. The distinction is so broad. Manners as well as appearance are, generally speaking, so totally different. Till now, I could not have supposed it possible to be mistaken as to a girl’s being out or not. A girl not out has always the same sort of dress; a close bonnet, for instance, looks very demure, and never says a word. You may smile – but it is so I assure you – and except that it is sometimes carried a little too far, it is all very proper. Girls should be quiet and modest. The most objectionable part is, that the alteration of manners on being introduced into company is frequently too sudden. They sometimes pass in such very little time from reserve to quite the opposite – to confidence! That is the faulty part of the present system. One does not like to see a girl of eighteen or nineteen so immediately up to every thing – and perhaps when one has seen her hardly able to speak the year before. Mr. Bertram, I dare say you have sometimes met with such changes.”

– From Mansfield Park, Chapter 5 (London: Penguin, 1985)

Let us gather up the sunbeams,

Lying all around our path;

Let us keep the wheat and roses,

Casting out the thorns and chaff;

Let us find our sweetest comfort

In the blessings of today,

With a patient hand removing

All the briers from the way.

 

Then scatter seeds of kindness,

Then scatter seeds of kindness,

For our reaping by and by.

– May Riley Smith

Random acts of kindness may often come from the most unlikely of characters. An ambitious social climber might have a better eye for injustice than even the most sincere clergyman. To some, Mary Crawford, the charming antagonist of Mansfield Park, is considered shallow, immoral and unprincipled. But not to me. In my opinion, Mary Crawford is the radiant beacon that the Bertram family so desperately needs, shining a light on the character of Fanny Price.

“Pray, is she out, or is she not?” asks Mary in Chapter 5. “I am puzzled. She dined at the Parsonage, with the rest of you, which seemed like being out; and yet she says so little, that I can hardly suppose she is.”

Oh those heavenly words! I vividly remember my reaction to Mary’s words when I first read Mansfield Park. “Finally,” I rejoiced. “Someone has at long last taken notice of our poor Fanny. Someone has cast a warm light onto our pathetic heroine who continues to endure in an environment of insensitive frost.” Because, truth-be-told, that entire lot of Bertrams have blinded themselves to their own acts of injustice (and one has to wonder if Sir Thomas’s mysterious Antigua connection has somehow infected the entire family psyche).

Mary’s curious (and innocent) question plants a seed that will one day bear much fruit. Random acts of kindness are rooted in love and love is not meant to wither but to grow and spread and multiply. Mary’s act is one of compassion, like Miss Temple in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, giving the poor orphan Jane Eyre a meal after a long trip. Miss Temple, unlike others, distinctly recognizes Jane’s suffering and takes immediate action. Just as Jesus cleanses the blind beggar’s eyes (Mark 10:46-52), Mary’s Crawford’s words have a profound cleansing effect on Edmund’s eyes. Until this moment, Edmund has not been able to see clearly. He has seen Fanny as a child. He has seen her as a quasi-family member. He has not, however, seen Fanny as a woman.

Mary’s question, “Pray, is she out, or is she not?”, results in Edmund’s acknowledgment that Fanny must be treated differently. As an adult. With compassion and kindness. Soon after this revelation, Edmund announces that Fanny must also be included in the visit to Sotherton – even if it means he will have to stay behind.

He then helps to arrange Fanny’s coming-out ball – a ball her dearly-loved brother attends, and at which this heroic brother puts all the other men in attendance to shame. This shame, I believe, is what leads Henry Crawford to feel his first pang of inferiority – a feeling that only Fanny’s respect and adoration would be able to cure.

From Mary’s one small seed of kindness (even if planted unintentionally), she awakens an entire family (excluding Mrs. Norris, of course, who is pure evil) and allows Fanny Price to grow into the woman she was always meant to be.

To read more about all the posts in this series, visit  An Invitation to Mansfield Park .

Mary Crawford and the Mansfield “cure”

Fifth in a series of posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. For more details, open Your Invitation to Mansfield Park.

In Volume 3 of Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas decides to try a “medicinal project upon his niece’s understanding, which he must consider as at present diseased.” Living at Mansfield has, he believes, “disordered” Fanny Price’s “powers of comparing and judging,” and he sends her “home” to Portsmouth to be cured. This fall, Sara Malton is going to write about that passage – but today, Katie Davis explores a different “medicinal project” earlier in the novel, when Mrs. Grant proposes to Mary Crawford that Mansfield Park is the “cure,” rather than the cause of disease.

Katie is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Western Heritage at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. She earned her Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Dallas in 2013, where she wrote a dissertation on Jane Austen’s Persuasion under the direction of Theresa Kenney (who’s writing about Tom and Edmund for my “Invitation to Mansfield Park” series). Katie is looking forward to celebrating the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mansfield Park with fellow Janeites at the JASNA AGM in Montreal this coming October, and I am, too. Registration opened yesterday, and Elaine Bander says more than 500 people have registered so far! Katie’s conference paper is entitled “Charles Pasley’s Essay and the ‘Governing Winds’ of Mansfield Park.” If you’re a JASNA member, you may have seen her essay on “Austen’s ‘Providence’ in Persuasion” in Persuasions 35, which arrived in my mailbox last week.

[Mrs. Grant to Mary Crawford] “You are as bad as your brother, Mary; but we will cure you both. Mansfield shall cure you both – and without any taking in. Stay with us and we will cure you.”

– From Mansfield Park, Chapter 5 (New York: Norton, 1998)

Arthur Barbosa’s cover image for The Unknown Ajax, by Georgette Heyer, reminds Katie of Edmund Bertram and Mary Crawford http://www.lesleyannemcleod.com/rw_art.html#barbosa

When Mrs. Grant tells Mary and Henry Crawford that Mansfield might cure them, she suggests that their view of marriage is faulty. Mary has argued that all marriages involve one or the other of the spouses being “taken in.” Mrs. Grant rightly identifies the problem with Mary’s point of view: she has a corrupt imagination, and this imagination is leading her to form a one-sided, “evil” (meaning something like cynical in this case) opinion about marriage.

Mrs. Grant’s suggestion that Henry might be “cured” ultimately by marrying Julia Bertram (Chapter 4) shows that she does not know as much as we do – thanks to the narrator – about the imperfections of the Mansfield Park family. Julia is not as bad as Maria, but neither sister is equipped to bring about the “cure” Mrs. Grant hopes for.

More importantly, neither Mary nor Henry is interested in what Mrs. Grant proposes: “The Crawfords, without wanting to be cured, were very willing to stay. Mary was satisfied with the parsonage as a present home, and Henry equally ready to lengthen his visit” (Chapter 5).

This brief passage in Chapter 5 calls our attention to a few of the central questions of Austen’s novel: to what extent can the opinions and habits of fully-formed adults be changed – or “cured” – by entering into community with people whose opinions and habits are, in crucial ways, totally different? What is required for such a transformation? Through this little exchange between Mrs. Grant and the Crawfords, Austen proposes that the will – corrupt or wholesome – is very real and extremely powerful. If Henry and Mary do not wish to be moved by their new friends, no amount of hoping on Mrs. Grant’s part will bring about the “cure.”

In the end, Mansfield does for Mary what Mrs. Grant wanted it to do: Mary’s time there does eventually “cure” her, but not in the way that Mrs. Grant had expected:

Arthur Barbosa, “A Riding Habit,” from Georgette Heyer’s Regency England, by Teresa Chris (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989).

Mrs. Grant, with a temper to love and be loved, must have gone [from Mansfield to London for Dr. Grant’s new position] with some regret, from the scenes and people she had been used to; but the same happiness of disposition must in any place and any society, secure her a great deal to enjoy, and she had again a home to offer Mary; and Mary had had enough of her own friends, enough of vanity, ambition, love, and disappointment in the course of the last half year, to be in need of the true kindness of her sister’s heart, and the rational tranquility of her ways. . . . Mary, though perfectly resolved against ever attaching herself to a younger brother again, was long in finding . . . any one who could satisfy the better taste she had acquired at Mansfield, whose character and manners could authorise a hope of the domestic happiness she had there learnt to estimate, or put Edmund Bertram sufficiently out of her head. (Chapter 48; Vol. 3, Ch. 17)

“[L]ong in finding” is better than the turn Persuasion’s narrator gives Elizabeth Elliot, to whom “no one of proper condition has since presented himself” (Vol. II, Ch. 24). Ultimately, it is love – Mrs. Grant’s enduring love and affection for Mary, and belatedly, Edmund’s good-hearted, thorny, thwarted love for Mary – that effects the change in Mary. Mary will never be satisfied with anything less once she has encountered this type of love at Mansfield. Austen enacts the theme of felix culpa here: Mary’s “evil” imagination could only be transformed by something as powerful as a broken heart, but thanks to that heartache, she has hope, eventually, of the “domestic happiness” that Mrs. Grant wanted for her all along.

To read more about all the posts in this series, visit  An Invitation to Mansfield Park .

Why Tom Bertram is right that Dr. Grant will “soon pop off”

Fourth in a series of posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. For more details, open Your Invitation to Mansfield Park.

Tom Bertram predicts the death of Dr. Grant in the third chapter of Mansfield Park. His death would be convenient in that it would allow Edmund Bertram to become the clergyman at Mansfield, but how does Tom know that this “hearty man of forty-five” won’t live long – and how does Jane Austen know? Dr. Cheryl Kinney, who is one of the “Best Doctors in America” (she’s made the list annually since 2001) and a Board Member of the Jane Austen Society of North America, answers this question in today’s guest post.

Dr. Kinney is a gynecologist in Dallas, Texas, and she was one of the coordinators of the 2011 JASNA AGM in Fort Worth, “200 Years of Sense and Sensibility.” In addition to her private practice, she has volunteered with Project Access, providing care to uninsured and financially marginalized women throughout the Dallas area. She’s been named by the Consumers’ Research Council as one of “America’s Top Obstetricians and Gynecologists” yearly since 2002, and has been named a “Texas Super Doctor” by her peers for the last ten years. Cheryl has lectured extensively to various groups in the Dallas/Fort Worth area on issues relating to gynaecology, including menopause, sexual dysfunction, endometriosis, and pelvic surgery, and she has also lectured all over the United States, Canada, and England on women’s health in the novels of Jane Austen and other 18th and 19th century British authors. It’s my pleasure to introduce her post on Dr. Grant and the risk factors for sudden death.

Tom listened with some shame and some sorrow; but escaping as quickly as possible, could soon with cheerful selfishness reflect, firstly, that he had not been half so much in debt as some of his friends; secondly, that his father had made a most tiresome piece of work of it; and, thirdly, that the future incumbent, whoever he might be, would, in all probability, die very soon.

On Mr. Norris’s death the presentation became the right of a Dr. Grant, who came consequently to reside at Mansfield; and on proving to be a hearty man of forty-five, seemed likely to disappoint Mr. Bertram’s calculations. But “no, he was a short-necked, apoplectic sort of fellow, and, plied well with good things, would soon pop off.”

– From Mansfield Park, Chapter 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005)

The English Parsonage in the Early Nineteenth Century, by Timothy Brittain-Catlin

In Jane Austen’s time sickness and suffering were part of everyday life and because Jane Austen wrote about everyday life, illness and injury permeate her novels. Perhaps better than anyone, she made use of these bodily events to develop her characters and drive her plots. In Chapter 3 of Mansfield Park, Austen uses Mr. Norris’ death to not only move Mrs. Norris to Mansfield proper, but to move the Grants into Mansfield Parsonage, to position the Crawfords to their advantage, and to disclose Tom’s culpability (and lack of remorse) in robbing Edmund of a portion of his living.

But to regard Jane Austen’s use of illness, injury, and death as mere plot mechanics is to deny the extraordinary precision with which she constructed her stories. She brilliantly used fictive ills metaphorically to expose strengths and weaknesses of human nature, as well as thematically to reinforce the maxim that permeates all of her novels: if we do not behave ourselves properly, something bad is bound to happen. Allowing her to accomplish these artistic goals was a remarkable understanding of the human body.

When Tom Bertram is confronted with his responsibility in the loss of the parsonage living for Edmund, he responds that Dr. Grant “plied well with good things, would soon pop off.” Despite being “a hearty man of forty-five,” Dr. Grant does indeed die a sudden death from gluttony.

Today, we are all aware of the association between a high fat diet and heart attack and stroke. In Regency England, however, most doctors had no idea what caused sudden death. Review of the medical literature from 1708 until 1919 reveals suspected etiologies that included cold weather, a thick neck, tight clothing, constipation, long stooping, warm baths, debauchery and “the venereal act.” A high fat diet was rarely included on the list of possible causes.

One of Dr. Quain’s drawings of a fatty heart

Although Hippocrates stated that very fat persons were apt to die earlier than those who were slender, it wasn’t until 1850, when Sir Richard Quain described the possible association between deposition of fat around the heart and sudden death, that high fat diets were seriously implicated. Quain’s fatty heart became a commonplace diagnosis in Victorian England – in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, young Dr. Lydgate diagnoses fatty degeneration of the heart in a patient who becomes short of breath – and firmly established Dr. Quain’s reputation as the leading authority on heart disease.

Dr. Quain’s paper is still consider a major milestone in the study of heart and blood vessel pathology, but is recognized as having a serious error in that it failed to identify the essential causes of the condition. In the entire paper (seventy-five pages) there is only one paragraph that remarks on the part a high fat diet might play on the formation of the disorder. The paragraph ends with the disclaimer “Beyond these general principles I fear we cannot go, and even to these there are exceptions.”

Another of Dr. Quain’s drawings of a fatty heart

It would not be until the next century that the association between diet and sudden death was firmly and scientifically established. Jane Austen, without formal medical training, required no such length of time to come to the correct medical conclusion – that people who must have their “palate consulted in everything” (Chapter 11) and who indulge in “three great institutionary dinners in one week” (Chapter 48) would be at risk to suffer apoplexy and death.

In the ending paragraphs of the novel, Jane Austen uses Dr. Grant’s death to expose Sir Thomas’ and Edmund’s hypocritical defense of the clergy with their stance on multiple incumbencies. The death also reveals that both Fanny and Edmund could fall prey to the very mercenary motives that they found so reprehensible in Mary Crawford: a larger income and a bigger house – “. . . the acquisition of Mansfield living, by the death of Dr. Grant, occurred just after they had been married long enough to begin to want an increase of income, and feel their distance from the paternal abode an inconvenience.” There is the genius of Jane Austen.

It is a testament to her greatness that Jane Austen was able to accomplish so many artistic and thematic goals while remaining faithful to the properties of an actual disease process that would not be clearly understood until the next century.

References:

Barie, E (1912) Traie Pratique des Maladies du Coeur et de l’Aorte, 3rd edition, p. 1125, Paris, Vigot frères.

Bedford, E (1972) The story of fatty heart: A disease of Victorian times, British Heart Journal, 34: 23-28.

Buchan, W (1772) Domestic Medicine: or, a Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Disease by Regimen and Simple Medicines, London.

Cheyne, J (1812) Causes of Apoplexy and Lethargy: with observations upon the comatose disease, London, Thomas Underwood.

Corvisart, J (1806) Essai sur les Maladies et les Lesions Organiques du Coeur et des Gros Vaisseaux, Paris, Migneret.

Fothergill, J (1879) The Heart and its Diseases, 2nd edition, London, Lewis.

Hayden, T (1875) The Diseases of the Heart and Aorta, Dublin, Fannin & Company.

Herrick, J (1919) Thrombosis of the coronary arteries, Journal of the American Medical Association, 72: 387.

Ljunggren B, Fodstad H (1991) History of stroke, Neurosurgery, 28: 482.

Morgan, A. (1968) Some forms of undiagnosed coronary disease in nineteenth-century England, Medical History, 12: 344-356.

Paget, J (1847) Lectures on nutrition, hypertrophy, and atrophy, London Medical Gazette, 5: 227.

Porter, R and D (1988) In Sickness and in Health: The British Experience 1650-1850, London, Fourth Estate.

Pound P, Bury M, Ebrahim S (1997) From apoplexy to stroke, Age and Aging, 26: 331-337.

Quain, R (1850) Fatty diseases of the heart, Medico-Chirurgical Transactions, 33: 121-196.

Robinson, N (1732), A Discourse upon the Nature and Cause of Sudden Death, London, T. Warner.

Sprengell, C (1708) The Aphorisms of Hippocrates and the Sentences of Celsus, London, R. Botwick.

To read more about all the posts in this series, visit  An Invitation to Mansfield Park .