Robert Rodi's Blog, page 8

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ITEM ONE: The first volume of the collected Bitch in a Bonnet (covering the first three novels in the Austen canon) is now available for Amazon's e-reader, Kindle, and Barnes & Noble's e-reader, Nook.




You might ask what would possess you to buy a copy of a text that's already available for free on this blog. Well...it's newly edited so all the typos and grammatical lapses are finessed out...it has a snazzy new cover...and—drumroll, please—it's just 99 cents. 


That's right, 99 cents for three years and 300+ manuscript pages' worth of material. It's almost like getting it for free. Admit it, you've got more cash than that stuffed down behind your sofa cushions.


So tell your friends, tell your frenemies, tell everybody...the Bitch has gone commercial. And she's easy and she's cheap.


ITEM TWO: I'll be taking the holidays off and will resume blogging again in early 2012 with Emma. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Joyous Kwanzaa, and Happy New Year to you all. I'm glad we found each other and hope never to let go. (Which sounds vaguely frightening, but I mean it in the nicest way, honestly.)


ITEM THREE: I've had some complaints from readers who have been thwarted in their attempts to leave comments on the blog; so when I do return, it may be to a new blog server. But no worries, I'll be sure to notify you of the new location right here at the old one.


And while we're on the subject, should any of you have recommendations for where to take the blog, please let me know. (Or for that matter if any of you are strong advocates for keeping it right here on Blogger, speak up as well. I'm open to all advice, at this point.)


That's all for now. See you in 2012!

Mansfield Park, chapters 46-48

We rejoin Fanny where we left her last time—where we appear to have left her for the last geologic age; the Price clan might have been hunting mastadons when she arrived—sitting at home, doing nothing except receiving letters. But wait…apparently she's not receiving letters. After she declined the Crawfords' offer to come and steal her away from Portsmouth, she expected to be battered with exhortations to change her mind. But nope…nothing. Until after the space of a week, something does come from Mary Crawford, so skimpy a missive that Fanny is "persuaded of its having the air of a letter of haste and business"—possibly announcing Mary's arrival, with Henry, in Portsmouth to carry her off in a shackles if need be.

But no; the letter is instead a strange, cryptic thing, urging Fanny to ignore a "most scandalous, ill-natured rumour" that's just come to Mary's ear, and assuring her that "Henry is blameless, and in spite of a moment's etouderie thinks of nobody but you."
I am sure it will all be hushed up, and nothing proved but Rushworth's folly. If they are gone, I would lay my life they are only gone to Mansfield Park, and Julia with them. But why would not you let us come for you? I wish you may not repent it.
Fanny is mystified. No scandalous, ill-natured rumour has reached her; in her little Portsmouth cocoon, it's a miracle if oxygen reaches her. "She could only perceive that it must relate to Wimpole Street and Mr. Crawford, and only conjecture that something very imprudent had just occurred in that quarter to draw the notice of the world," though why she should care whether the Rushworths then beat a hasty retreat, and where they went, and whether Julia was with them, is beyond her.
As to Mr. Crawford, she hoped it might give him a knowledge of his own disposition, convince him that he was not capable of being steadily attached to any one woman in the world, and shame him from persisting any longer in addressing herself.
Yes, that would be best. Leave Fanny to her little airless existence where the taint of inconvenient human feeling needn't disturb her inertia. Think I'm being too harsh?...Here's Fanny's own POV on the situation.
She felt that she had, indeed, been three months (in Portsmouth); and the sun's rays falling into the parlour, instead of cheering, made her still more melancholy; for sun-shine appeared to her a totally different thing in a town and in the country. Here, its power was only a glare, a stifling, sickly glare, serving to bring forward stains and dirt that might otherwise have slept. There was neither health nor gaiety in sunshine in a town. She sat in a blaze of oppressive heat, in a cloud of moving dust; and her eyes could only wander from the walls marked by her father's head, to the table cut and knotched by her brothers, where stood the tea-board never thoroughly cleaned, the cups and saucers wiped in streaks, the milk a mixture of motes floating in thin blue, and the bread and butter growing every minute more greasy than even Rebecca's hands had first produced it.
Killer bit of writing there, btw.
It's in this scene of domestic oblivion that the scandalous, ill-natured rumour finally reaches Fanny's ear, by the unlikeliest source imaginable: her boozy old man and his borrowed broadsheet. He looks up from its pages and says, "What's the name of your great cousins in town, Fan?" and when she answers Rushworth, and confirms they live on Wimpole Street, he's tickled pink.
"Then, there's the devil to pay among them, that's all. There, (holding out the paper to her)—much good may such fine relations do you. I don't know what Sir Thomas may think of such matters; he may be too much of the courtier and fine gentleman to like his daughter the less. But by G— if she belonged to me, I'd give her the rope's end as long as I could stand over her."
Which might not be too long, given that standing unassisted isn't exactly one of Mr. Price's superpowers. Still, the point is made: one of Sir Thomas's daughters has been extra-special naughty. Fanny takes up the paper and reads a report of "a matrimonial fracas in the family of Mr. R. of Wimpole Street," whose beautiful young bride (whose name "had not long been enrolled in the lists of hymen"—love that turn of phrase) has "quitted her husband's roof in the company of the well known and captivating Mr. C. …and it was not known, even to the editor of the newspaper, whither they were gone." Why the editor of the newspaper should be expected to know above anyone else, I'm not quite sure. Possibly he's a Regency Perry White or something.
Fanny insists that this is all a terrible mistake, even though she knows it's not. (Scarcely the first instance of Fanny deliberate obscuring the facts.) She speaks "from the instinctive wish of delaying shame," but she might have spared herself the trouble, because her father doesn't really give a good goddamn; now that he's scored a cheap point off her, he's fine just letting the whole thing drop. As for Fanny's mother, her reaction is hilariously typical.
"Indeed, I hope it is not true," said Mrs. Price plaintively; "it would be so very shocking!—If I have spoke once to Rebecca about that carpet, I am sure I have spoke at least a dozen times; have I not, Betsey?—And it would not be ten minutes work."
Fanny meanwhile retreats to do what Fanny does best, which is languish and brood. She torments herself by going over everything again and again and again, like someone stuck in a time loop, and coming to the same inevitable (and, I'm betting, secretly satisfying) conclusions, especially with regard to Mary Crawford.
Her eager defense of her brother, her hope of its being hushed up, her evident agitation, were all of a piece with something very bad; and if there was a woman of character in existence, who could treat as a trifle this sin of the first magnitude, who could try to gloss it over, and desire to have it unpunished, she could believe Miss Crawford to be the woman!
There's a lot of anguished reflection on how horrible, horrible, horrible it all is, to the point at which you begin to feel uncomfortable, like you're witnessing a sadomasochist wallowing in the sheer pleasure of acute agony. She spends an almost pornographic amount of time speculating on who will be most injured by the scandal, and decides Sir Thomas wins that particular prize, with Edmund the silver medalist, and in minutely considering their emotional devastation she works herself into a kind of melodramatic fit.
Sir Thomas's parental solicitude, and high sense of honour and decorum, Edmund's upright principles, unsuspicious temper, and genuine strength of feeling, made her think it scarcely possible for them to support life and reason under such a disgrace; and it appeared to her, that as far as this world alone was concerned, the greatest blessing to every one of kindred with Mrs. Rushworth would be instant annihilation.
Sweet creeping jebus.
We've come to expect morbidity from Fanny, but this really jumps the shark. The kind of mind that can't accommodate a family scandal without wishing for "instant annihilation" is of the febrile, unhealthy kind that is about the last thing I'd associate with an Austen heroine. And of course the risky thing about leaping immediately to the extremity of hyperbole when things go bad, is that it leaves you nothing to reach for when things get worse. Which they now do.
Another letter arrives. (Don't worry, it's the last. I wish we could have a celebratory bonfire of all the missives Fanny has received over the past few chapters, but if the blaze got out of hand it would wipe out half of Portsmouth.) It's from Edmund, confirming that Maria and Henry have indeed run off to nobody-yet-knows-where, and adding: "You may not have heard of the last blow—Julia's elopement; she is gone to Scotland with Yates. She left London a few hours before we entered it. At any other time, this would have been felt dreadfully. Now it seems nothing, yet it is an heavy aggravation." Poor Julia, always second best, even as a black sheep.
And then—the silver lining to this double-dose of awful: Fanny is summoned home. Even better, Edmund is coming personally to fetch her. And—even more extra-super-duper—Susan is invited as well. (I guess the Bertrams figure, they're two females down, better re-stock.) Fanny is now genuinely torn, between the nihilist attractions of wishing her nearest and dearest all wiped from the face of the Earth, and the giddy excitement of knowing she is at long last escaping the grease pit she grew up in. She has to keep reminding herself that life as she knew it is now over and all who love her are forever doomed, even as she packs up her luggage with squeals of delight. Susan feels this conflict as well, though less strongly because she doesn't personally know the disgraced principals; "if she could help rejoicing from beginning to end, it was as much as ought to be expected from human virtue at fourteen."
Then the happy day arrives, and Edmund with it; and if you thought Fanny was melodramatic, get a load of this guy. He appears at the house with suffering etched into his face, and presses Fanny to his breast with the words, "My Fanny—my only sister—my only comfort now." All right, fine, it's a tad purple but arguably excusable under the circumstances; what's not excusable is that he appears to pay no compliments of any kind to the Prices. It's as though the Enormity Of His Suffering places him on a higher plane where he isn't required to engage in such bothersome niceties as Hello you must be my Aunt Price, what a pleasure to know you, and could this little pumpkin be my cousin Betsey? No, no, slumming with the Prices is good enough for a slick charmer like Henry Crawford, but not for the lofty Edmund Bertram. When he finds to his annoyance that Fanny and Susan haven't breakfasted yet, he goes off by himself till they're ready, "glad to get away even from Fanny," and spends an hour walking the ramparts, looking soulfully tormented and romantically windblown in case anyone is secretly filming him.

He returns in time to "spend a few minutes with the family, and be a witness—but that he saw nothing—of the tranquil manner in which the daughters were parted with." Then they pile into the carriage and set off. The journey is, as you can imagine, a silent one.
Edmund's deep sighs often reached Fanny. Had he been alone with her, his heart might have opened in spite of every resolution; but Susan's presence drove him quite into himself, and his attempts to talk on indifferent subjects could never be long supported.
Eventually Edmund takes actual notice of Fanny—probably when he's grown bored of staring at the scenery, or his navel—and notices how haggard she is. Having been completely in a fog during his seventy-three seconds in the Price household, he has no idea that the stress of living in such a pressure-cooker has contributed to her withered looks, and he presumes, with all the egocentric arrogance of those who account theirs the only significant suffering in all of human history, that she's just feeling a reflection of his own titanic torment:
…(He) took her hand, and said in a low, but very expressive tone, "No wonder—you must feel it—you must suffer. How a man who had once loved, could desert you! But your's—your regard was new compared with—Fanny, think of me!"
I have a standard response for people who give me this "How do you think I feel?" line. I say, "I don't have to think. You always tell me." (I wish I could report that this actually shuts them up. But anyone that self-involved is usually completely immune to subtlety.)
When they reach the environs of Mansfield, Fanny can't help her spirits rising; here again are all those hedges she so much likes to heap with hosannas. And in fact she goes on for a paragraph delightedly noting all the changes in color and volume and clapping her hands and whistling and barking out the window. Unfortunately her two companions can't share in her enjoyment; Susan is suddenly fretting about how she'll manage to keep from betraying her vulgarity, and "was meditating much on silver forks, napkins, and finger glasses," while Edmund is still sunk into profound contemplation on the tragedy of being Edmund, "with eyes closed as if the view of cheerfulness oppressed him"; oh yeah, Edmund the contented clergyman is bit of a dullard, but Edmund the self-pitying martyr could bore the paint right off the walls.
Everyone is utterly morose, and we know that once we get to Mansfield neither Sir Thomas, Lady Bertram, or Tom will be any livelier, so our only hope of relief is in Aunt Norris. But once we arrive at the house and the cast is reassembled, we can see that in many ways she's the worst off of the bunch. Maria was her particular favorite, and the match with Mr. Rushworth was one she personally arranged for her, so Maria's disgrace is her own, and she's feeling it big time. Her "active powers had been all benumbed" and she found herself "unable to direct or dictate, or even fancy herself useful." The only spark of the old Aunt Norris is the extreme vexation she feels at "the sight of the person whom, in the blindness of her anger, she could have charged as the demon of the piece. Had Fanny accepted Mr. Crawford, this could not have happened." She also works up "a few repulsive looks" for Susan, and we have hopes for more, but alas, nothing comes of it.
As for the other aunt in the house, "(t)o talk over the dreadful business with Fanny, talk and lament, was all Lady Bertram's consolation." And while she is "no very methodical narrator," it's through her that Fanny begins to piece together what exactly the hell has happened, anyway.
It seems Mr. Rushworth had gone to Twickehnham for the Eastter holidays, leaving Maria with a family of "lively, agreeable manners, and probably of morals and discretion to suit"—you know, urbanities—and "to their house Mr. Crawford had constant access at all times." Julia wasn't around to provide even the featherweight of balance she might have offered, because she'd gone off to be somebody else's houseguest. Frolics and romps apparently ensued, because eventually a friend of Sir Thomas's wrote to urge him to come to town and use "influence with his daughter, to put an end to an intimacy which was already exposing her to unpleasant remarks," without providing exactly what the unpleasant remarks were, which seems unfair to those of us who would really, really like to know.
Before Sir Thomas can load his valise onto the carriage, however, another letter arrives from the same friend—express, so you know it's some baaad nastiness—with the news that Maria has absconded with Mr. Crawford. Sir Thomas lights out for London and hunkers down, no doubt ducking his head beneath the volleys of pernicious gossip flying across town (principally lobbed by Maria's mother-in-law's servant, who really seems to deserve a spin-off of her own), and persists "in the hope of discovering, and snatching her from farther vice, though all was lost on the side of character." Hey, we're talking about Maria, here. All was lost on the side of character before she had permanent teeth.
And then, and only then, does he learn Julia has eloped with Mr. Yates.
Fanny can't but pity poor Sir Thomas, with three children now burdening him with worry (since Tom has had a setback on hearing all the bad news). He also has to endure pity for his youngest son (who would insist on being pitied, if there were any doubt) in having been so brutally disappointed by the woman of his dreams, who it now seems will never be the wee little wifey of his country parsonage.
Because it turns out the final meeting between Edmund and Mary Crawford was about as final as it could possibly be, barring one of them actually shooting the other dead. He divulges to Fanny that he had gone to see her at Lady Stornaway's house, eager to commiserate with her and "investing her with all the feelings of shame and wretchedness which Crawford's sister ought to have known," only to have her bring up the subject in a breezy, mock-exasperated manner: "Let us talk over this sad business," she says. "What can equal the folly of our two relations?" When Edmund's face registers unmistakable shock—possibly his jaw drops sixteen inches and his eyeballs sproing out of his head like in a Tex Avery cartoon—she backpedals, noting gravely, 'I do not mean to defend Henry at your sister's expence."
"So she began—but how she went on, Fanny, is not fit—is hardly to be repeated to you. I cannot recall all her words. I would not dwell upon them if I could. Their substance was great anger at the folly of each…Guess what I must have felt. To hear the woman whom—no harsher name than folly given!—So voluntarily, so freely, so coolly to canvass it!—No reluctance, no horror, no feminine—shall I say it? no modest loathings!—This is what the world does."
By which he means, "This is what the city does."
I'm not sure what Edmund wants here. Mary is putting the best face possible on things; she's stiffening her spine and striving to keep a cool head, and to patch up the mess as tidily as possible (she wants Edmund's aid in forcing Henry and Maria to marry). Her manner is practical, rational, unsentimental…English. Whereas Henry seems to want her to fall shrieking to the carpet, at which the two of them can wail and flail and pull their hair out at the roots like hysterical continentals.
Mary goes on to shock Edmund further, by laying some of the blame at Fanny's door.
"Why, would not she have him? It is all her fault. Simple girl!—I shall never forgive her. Had she accepted him as she ought, they might now have been on the point of marriage, and Henry would have been too happy and too busy to want any other object. He would have taken no pains to be on terms with Mrs. Rushworth again. It would have all ended in a regular standing flirtation, in yearly meetings at Southerton and Everingham."
This kind of sophistication just about gives Edmund renal failure. Never mind that she's absolutely right. Maybe that even makes it worse. But to us, the lightness with which Mary attempts to deal with the scandal is entirely natural; she's 250 years ahead of her time. (I've said it before, but it bears repeating: she's a Noël Coward heroine in a Jane Austen novel.) To our eyes, the great affronted show Edmund makes of being shocked, shocked by everything she says, comes across as stuffy and excessive. "I do not consider her as meaning to wound my feelings," he says. "The evil lies yet deeper; in her total ignorance, unsuspiciousness of there being such feelings, in a perversion of mind which made it natural to her to treat the subject as she did." To treat it, he means, as a problem to be solved rather than the fall of western civilization. "Her's are faults of principle, Fanny, of blunted delicacy and a corrupted, vitiated mind…Gladly would I submit to all the increased pain of losing her, rather than have to think of her as I do. I told her so." Yeah, I just bet you did.
Mary's idea is that, once married to Henry, "and properly supported by her own family, people of respectability as they are, (Maria) may recover her footing in society to a certain degree."
"In some circles, we know, she would never be admitted, but with good dinners, and large parties, there will always be those who will be glad of her acquaintance; and there is, undoubtedly, more liberality and candour on those points than formerly. What I advise is, that your father be quiet. Do not let him injure his own cause by interference…Let Sir Thomas trust to his honour and compassion, and it may all end well; but if he get his daughter away, if will be destroying the chief hold."
Honor and compassion…forgiveness and a chance at redemption…we're meant to find this despicable? Edmund says, emphatically, yes. In his view, Mary proposes nothing less than "a compromise, an acquiescence, in the continuance of the sin, on the chance of a marriage which, thinking as I now thought of her brother, should rather be prevented than sought"—and at about this moment you might want to stop and say, Fine, buddy, what's your suggested plan for the lovers, then? Because it seems to be something along the lines of stoning them to death, then driving stakes through their hearts and stuffing their mouths with garlic.
Edmund delivers a thundering denunciation that leaves Mary "exceedingly astonished—more than astonished" and reduces to sarcasm as he walks out on her; which we of course recognize as the last angry recourse of wounded pride.
"It was a sort of laugh, as she answered, 'A pretty good lecture, upon my word. Was it part of your last sermon? At this rate, you will soon reform every body at Mansfield and Thornton Lacey; and when I hear of you it may be as a celebrated preacher in some great society of Methodists, or as a missionary into foreign parts.' She tried to speak carelessly; but she was not so careless as she wanted to appear."
As Edmund heads out the door, she calls out to him; he turns around and she smiles—a "saucy playful smile"—and he keeps on going.
All right, let's not dwell on it. This is the nadir; the place Jane Austen really jumps the rails and sends the whole train careening into the jagged canyon below. But it's the only time in her entire body of work she does so—and that includes her juvenilia and unfinished novels—so we can forgive her this momentary dementia.
Mention of the juvenilia prompts an interesting thought, which is that Mansfield Park represents a more or less thorough betrayal of the young writer who produced all those wacky, anarchic, calamity-choked mini-masterpieces; her spirit of wild invention, cheeky wit and subversive hooliganism is the kind that's actively punished in the present novel. Maybe Austen exorcised her Puritan demons in the process; if so, we can only be thankful. Anyway, onward.
Now that Edmund has confessed his newfound horror of the woman he once loved, Fanny feels "at liberty to speak" and "more than justified in adding to his knowledge of her real character, by some hint of what share his brother's state of health might be supposed to have in her wish for a complete reconciliation." In other words, it's pile-on-Mary time. And it ain't pretty, believe me.
Then Austen clears the slate, proclaiming "Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest." By this time we're ready to rassle her some over her definition of "greatly at fault," but it's the last bloody chapter, so we let it go in the interest of just finishing the thing.
"My Fanny," she goes on (and yes, thanks, you can have her), "I have the satisfaction of knowing, must have been happy in spite of every thing," and here she enumerates every reason in favor of that happiness, though if anyone could sniff out a square inch of misery in an acre of paradise, it's Fanny. And given that Austen repeatedly uses the conditional tense (she "must have been" happy), I'm guessing even she isn't a hundred percent convinced of it.
But if Fanny is happy, those around her certainly aren't; Edmund has taken his consumptive-Lord-Byron act to heights undreamed of in Portsmouth, and Sir Thomas is mired in regret and self-reproach for having raised up under his own roof a pair of man-devouring succubi. But news eventually arrives that somewhat redeems Julia; it seems her elopement with Mr. Yates was prompted less by selfish lust than by a strong streak of self-preservation. After Maria ran off with Henry Crawford, she realized her family's reputation was about to seriously tank, so she'd better grab whatever suitor was closest at hand and marry him now, or she'd end up on the shelf for the rest of her life. Mr. Yates just happened to be the man within reach. Sir Thomas eventually reconciles with his daughter, who is "humble and wishing to be forgiven," and reconciles himself to his new son-in-law, who while "not very solid" is at least earnest and willing to be guided.
And then Tom's health improves, which further lessens the weight of Sir Thomas's woes, and indeed Tom is so chastened by his cha-cha-cha with death, and by his culpability in l'affaire Crawford ("he felt himself accessory by all the dangerous intimacy of his unjustifiable theatre") that he becomes "what he ought to be, useful to his father, steady and quiet, and not living merely for himself." Well, fine. Everyone has to grow up. Just tell me he could still crack his tongue like a whip, and that his dinner guests were always left gasping for breath by the cheese course.
Maria, however, remains intractable; Sir Thomas won't ever find a lessening of torment on her account.
She was not to be prevailed on to leave Mr. Crawford. She hoped to marry him, and they continued together till she was obliged to be convinced that such hope was vain, and till the disappointment and wretchedness arising from the conviction, rendered her temper so bad, and her feelings for him so like hatred, as to make them for a while each other's punishment, and then induce a voluntary separation.
She had lived with him to be reproached as the ruin of all his happiness in Fanny, and carried away no better consolation in leaving him, than that she had divided them. What can exceed the misery of such a mind in such a situation?
I'm pretty sure Maria's misery is exceeded when she learns that Fanny has married her brother on the rebound. But alas, Austen doesn't confirm this.
Mr. Rushworth has no trouble getting a quickie divorce, and Austen cautions us not to pity him: his wife "had despised him, and loved another—and he had been very much aware that it was so. The indignities of stupidity, and the disappointments of selfish passion, can excite little pity." This is harsh. Austen really is in Savonarola mode in this novel. Unfortunately, she was insufficiently able to restrict her own gifts, as to prevent herself from giving us that one moment in which Rushworth showed us his humanity—displayed a flicker of self-awareness and of suffering at Maria's open favoring of Crawford over him—so that I haven't been able to laugh at him as easily since, or to dismiss him so callously now. With a flick of her wrist she dressed him in flesh and blood, and I'm not entirely sure she even knew she did it.
The problem is, then, what to do with Maria. Aunt Norris, "whose attachment seemed to augment with the demerits of her niece," wants her to be received back home and resume her place as queen bitch of Mansfield, but Sir Thomas is basically over-my-dead-body. Which makes Aunt Norris glare daggers at Fanny, flitting around the very house Maria is now denied, and you can tell she wants to ask, What about her dead body, but doesn't dare to.
No, Sir Thomas has a pretty clear idea of what to do with Maria, which is basically, lock her up somewhere far away, protected by him and "secured in every comfort," but basically under house arrest. If the technology existed, he'd put her in an ankle monitor. And as a companion, she'll have Mrs. Norris, which is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser, because so far from being a chaperon, Aunt Norris has proven herself many times over to be Maria's biggest cheerleading enabler in every self-destructive thing she's ever done. But "shut up together, with little society, on one side no affection, on the other, no judgment, it may be reasonably supposed that their tempers became their mutual punishment."
And Sir Thomas is more than ready to boot Aunt Norris's knobby white ass out the door anyway.
His opinion of her had been sinking from the day of his return from Antigua; in every transaction together from that period, in their daily intercourse, in business, or in chat, she had been regularly losing ground in his esteem…To be relieved from her, therefore, was so great a felicity, that had she not left bitter remembrances behind her, there might have been danger of his learning almost to approve the evil which produced such a good.
And what of Henry Crawford?...He has to live with his very real regrets of Fanny. Had he only been able to win her, "there would have been every probability of success and felicity for him. His affection had already done something. Her influence over him had already given him some influence over her." In a number of places Austen confirms, or at least hints, that both Henry and Mary would have been reformed by unions with Fanny and Edmund. That we've had to witness two charming favorites shunted so brusquely aside, redemption denied them, is a pretty rum business. What is Henry Crawford's real sin, anyway?...Being human; being complex; being young.
…(B)y animated perseverance he had soon re-established the sort of familiar intercourse—of gallantry—of flirtation (with Maria) which bounded his views, but in triumphing over the discretion, which, though beginning in anger, might have saved them both, he had put himself in the power of feelings on her side, more strong than he had supposed.—She loved him; there was no withdrawing attentions, avowedly dear to her. He was entangled by his own vanity, with as little excuse of love as possible, and without the smallest inconstancy of mind towards her cousin.
This is not a cad. Austen seems to be using him as the protagonist in a cautionary tale, dooming him to "vexation that must rise sometimes to self-reproach, and regret to wretchedness—in having so requited hospitality, so injured family peace, so forfeited his best, most estimable, and endeared acquaintance, and so lost the woman whom he had rationally, as well as passionately, loved." No starched-collared Victorian could have sentenced him with more scowling prejudice.
Mary too must go on blithely twittering through life, regretting of, and pining for, Edmund; and the Grants—remember them?—have to be hustled offstage (to a new living for the rector) because their continued presence in Mansfield is now too awkward to be convenient to the story. There's a whole lot of suffering going on here and if these are the peeps Austen considers "greatly at fault" then you have to wonder what happened to her. I mean, this is the woman who basically let Lydia Bennet and George Wickham get away with metaphorical murder. And Lucy Steele and Robert Ferrars, too. Part of Austen's appeal to me has always been her serene indifference to the success of her grinning predators. As long as her heroine (and hero) ended up happy, she seemed content to leave everyone else alone—on the principle, I suppose, that the worst imaginable punishment would be allowing them to continue being themselves. (Certainly true of Lydia and Wickham.) Here, she's chosen instead to channel some Old Testament prophet, and smite the sinners with an iron fist.
I don't want cautionary tales from Austen; if she reforms the human race at all, it will be through relentless mockery of its pretensions, hypocrisies, and delusions, not through moral fables about virtues ingenues. She's strayed from her true path here, and we're left following her, stepping entirely too trustingly into stinging nettles and poison oak.
In one respect, however, she happily hasn't changed; she remains as indifferent as ever to what we moderns understand as "romance." The passage in which Edmund turns his mind from Mary to Fanny is almost plangently matter-of-fact, with him wondering whether, it being "impossible that he should ever meet with another such woman…a very different type of woman might do just as well—or a great deal better." He might be contemplating a change from planting radishes to beets. And then there's this:
I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people.—I only intreat every body to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny, as Fanny herself could desire.
You feel the earth move?...Me neither.
The novel ends on several pages of self-congratulation, but it tastes a bit stale on the tongue. Especially since our author has admitted that both Henry and Mary Crawford would have benefited from their respective matches with Fanny and Edmund; their appetites curbed, their excesses restrained, their characters inclined more to responsibility. And Fanny and Edmund would have had to learn to accommodate, forgive, and even appreciate human fallibility; to love someone else for his or her faults, not in spite of them. All that is sundered on a single youthful folly; and Mary's practical approach to limiting the damage is viewed as evidence of a damaged character—while Edmund's refusal to do anything but wallow in the wretchedness of it all, like an especially highly strung Italian peasant, is apparently the height of moral perfection. I just don't get this. I don't get why we're meant to celebrate four people missing out on the unions that would have redefined and improved them; why we're meant instead to go all gooey over Edmund finding perfect peace and contentment with Fanny, who's been his lap dog since they were juveniles—a marriage that promises no friction, no compromises, no self-sacrifice, no soul-searching…it's static; a placid pool, with nothing to disturb its smooth surface except, inevitably, the swift spread of algae. Mary and Henry are left unmoored and heartbroken…Edmund and Fanny are left retreating into the womb of their childhood…what? I'm supposed to rejoice?
Another point I must at least touch on: I've noted repeatedly how immune I remain to the Fanny-Edmund pairing. There's never, for me, even the slightest evidence of the kind of chemistry we saw between Lizzy and Darcy, or even Elinor and Edward Ferrars. I'm at least willing to admit that part of the reason—albeit a small part—is a cultural resistance to the idea of first cousins as lovers. I know things were different back in Austen's era; in a smaller population with clearly defined class boundaries, the dating pool was naturally more limited than it is for us today. But the distaste for such a pairing in our own culture isn't something we can easily set aside, and I find myself reading of Fanny and Edmund's coming together with a grimace of sexual distaste on my face that I can't seem to wipe away. Couple that with the whole undercurrent of the Antiguan slave trade, and you've got a novel with some serious handicaps all the way through. Clone a dozen Aunt Norrises and set them running through its pages like a herd of wildebeest, and you still couldn't fix it.
But the primary and ultimately decisive problem is still the empty dress at the center of it all. When she began her next novel, Austen wrote to her sister, "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." But she was wrong; Emma Woodhouse is almost universally adored. It's Fanny Price who has borne the brunt of readers' dislike and disdain over the centuries. Inert, joyless, and judgmental, she stands to one side for the entirety of Mansfield Park while its other characters strive, battle, and fall, and in the end her strategy of doing nothing wins her everything she's ever wanted. Fanny, who never takes a risk, never tells a joke, is never silly or unwise or exultant or—frankly—human, triumphs over her enemies and her rivals by virtue of her sheer indomitable passivity.
And what of those enemies and rivals? They aren't as quite numerous as in Austen's previous works, though quality nearly makes up for scarcity. There's the fatuous Mr. Rushworth; battering Aunt Norris; gabbling Mr. Yates; and the wonderfully hyena-like Price clan. But then, alas, we come to the main focuses of our intended ire: Mary Crawford and her brother Henry. They're witty, charming, incautious, unthinking…emotional and headlong and sensual and indiscreet. To our modern sensibilities, they're romantic heroes, complete with tragic flaws. Edmund, our nominal hero, is a good man, true, but he's parched soil, gasping for want of laughter and energy and magic; for the blessing of uncertainty; for life. Instead he winds up with Fanny; their union is a guarantee of spiritual and emotional barrenness. In so frictionless a pairing, nothing can alter, nothing ever change, nothing ever grow.
I've conjectured long and hard about why Austen wrote Mansfield Park; but whatever the reason, the good news is, she learned from the endeavor…and she shows as much in her next novel, which is basically Mansfield Park turned on its head. Its heroine, Emma Woodhouse, is a revisited Mary Crawford—a sly, feline charmer who's quick to judgment and carelessly glib, and is made to pay for it; but this time, crucially,  she's forgiven. Her rival, Jane Fairfax, is a new incarnation of Fanny Price—chilly, impenetrable, aloof; and like Fanny, her imperturbable stillness wins her her man in the end. But in this case it's exactly the right man for her: Frank Churchill, whose wily roguishness will force her to enlarge her own capacity for understanding; as her quiet determination will galvanize his. Because of this ingenious inversion, Emma scintillates where Mansfield Park stalls out; Emma delights where Mansfield Park frustrates; and Emma is beloved, where Mansfield Park, despite its many brilliant facets and enduring moments, seems fated to remain only tolerated.

Mansfield Park, chapters 43-45

Fanny Price, the supposed heroine of Mansfield Park, has spent pretty much the entirety of the novel standing off on the margins while the other characters provide all the plot action. Occasionally she's got in their way or underfoot, and they've had to talk over or around her, or to each other through her, but now that she's been removed to Portsmouth her essential irrelevance becomes harder to disguise. For the next several chapters, Fanny's role is reduced to no more than reading letters from (and about) home. In essence, she's fallen out of the novel and become one of us; Jane Austen, that Regency postmodernist, has gone meta. We read Mansfield Park, in which Fanny Price reads about Mansfield Park. Her text is our text; we peer at it over her shoulder.

The first letter is from Mary Crawford, and it's not exactly brimming with interest; she even says outright, "I have no news for you." By which she means, of course, no news of being engaged to Edmund; but it's true overall, as well. She actually avoids even mentioning Edmund, rattling on about her London frolics, till she can't sustain the effort anymore:
If I avoided his name entirely, it would look suspicious. I will say, then, that we have seen him two or three times, and that my friends here are very much struck with his gentleman-like appearance. Mrs. Fraser (no bad judge), declares she knows but three men in town who have so good a person, height, and air; and I must confess, when he dined here the other day, there were none to compare with him, and we were a party of sixteen. Luckily there is no distinction of dress now-a-days to tell tales, but—but—but.
She signs off, "Your's, affectionately," then plunges immediately into a postscript nearly as long as the original letter, admonishing Fanny not to stay at Portsmouth "to lose your pretty looks. Those sea-breezes are the ruin of beauty and health," as attested by her "poor aunt," the Admiral's wife, who apparently ended her life looking like filet of salt cod. Mary renews her brother's offer to ride in like the cavalry and rescue Fanny from so briny an environment:
I am at your service and Henry's, at an hour's notice. I should like the scheme, and we would make a little circuit, and shew you Everingham in our way, and perhaps you would not mind passing through London, and seeing the inside of St. George's, Hanover-Square. Only keep your cousin Edmund from me at such a time, I should not like to be tempted. What a long letter!—one word more.
The "one word more" is of course actually several dozen, to the effect that while Mary is ready at an hour's notice to sweep Fanny away from the purgatory of Portsmouth, that hour must not occur until after the 14th, because she and Henry have a party that evening—"The value of a man like Henry on such an occasion, is what you can have no conception of; so you must take it upon my word, to be inestimable"—and oh by the way, the Rushworths will be there, "which I own I am not sorry for—having a little curiosity—and so I think has he, though he will not acknowledge it." If Mary Crawford were alive today, she'd be a dedicated Real Housewives fan. If not one of its cast members.
Fanny's principal takeaway from the letter is, no surprise, that Edmund hasn't yet proposed. But she doesn't know what that means; hasn't he had the opportunity? Or has he changed his mind about her? Or has Mary's behavior in a new circle (Fanny thinks her "cooled and staggered by a return to London habits") been sufficient to give him doubts about her feelings for him? Fanny of course can't know that answer, but she's pretty sure if Edmund does ask her, Mary will say yes. "She would try to be more ambitious than her heart would allow. She would hesitate, she would teaze, she would condition, she would require a great deal, but she would finally accept." And this realization prompts Fanny's first descent into open disgust.
The prospect for her cousin grew worse and worse. The woman who could speak of him, and speak only of his appearance!—What an unworthy attachment! To be deriving support from the commendations of Mrs. Fraser! She who had known him intimately half a year! Fanny was ashamed of her.
I suppose Fanny, having been to exactly one dinner party that we know of, and that at the über-humble Parsonage, can be excused for not knowing how dinner-party conversation works, and that for Mary to try to impress upon Mrs. Fraser anything more profound than how pretty a side of beef Edmund is, would be a tad, shall we say, uncomfortable in such a setting of lightness and gaiety. But I get the impression that Fanny at a London dinner party would fit in about as happily as Cotton Mather at a Roman orgy. And besides, Fanny, who has herself known Mary intimately for half a year, might be expected to sympathize with her attempts to find any support, in any quarter, for the better part of her nature—i.e., the part that draws her to Edmund.
But there's more: "That Miss Crawford should endeavour to secure a meeting between (Henry) and Mrs. Rushworth, was all in her worst line of conduct, and grossly unkind and ill-judged"—well, fine, I agree she doesn't have to be so pert about it; but she's writing to an intimate friend (or so she thinks), so why not be honest? There is a bit of prurient curiosity engendered by the occasion; we feel it ourselves. And certainly no one can reasonably expect Henry Crawford and Maria to spend the rest of their lives avoiding each other…except Fanny, for whom avoidance is a guiding principle of life.
Fanny waits impatiently for the next letter to arrive, and we do too, because until it does we aren't going to be getting much in the way of actual novel. Austen seems to have grown bored with the Price family (or maybe is just exhausted at having handled them for so many chapters in succession; it must be like juggling cats) and lets them drop, except for Susan, who sits with Fanny up in her attic amidst all those books and learns…well, not to love learning, but to enjoy not appearing ignorant. To Fanny's dismay, she thrives more on conversation than on study. "The early habit of reading was wanting," she sighs.
But she's impressed enough by Susan's character and keenness to begin feeling real regret at the idea of leaving her behind when she returns to Mansfield. In fact, she goes so far as to fantasize about having a home of her own to invite her to—and if only she could bring herself to accept Mr. Crawford, she'd have exactly that. "She thought he was really good-tempered, and could fancy his entering into a plan of that sort, most pleasantly." This is one of those rare moments when you get a little jolt of genuine affection for Fanny; she edges into the realm of the likable. Of course, it's fleeting.
Eventually another letter arrives—a very looong one; in fact our hearts sink a little when we flip ahead and see that it runs six pages, because this time it's from Edmund instead of Mary, which means it won't be six pages of "Lady so-and-so accidentally sat on her pet ferret, I won't say Henry put it on her chair, certainly not on purpose," and will instead be six pages of, "Perhaps I might again presume so far as to press a claim on your good nature for the favor of your kind attention while I endeavor to say the following without imposing too much on your patience."
It turns out Edmund has come home from London empty-handed, i.e. without a fiancée, but he realizes Fanny must already know this from having heard it from Mary—except Fanny has heard exactly zilch from Mary (which means neither have we).
So very fond of you as Miss Crawford is, it is most natural that she should tell you enough of her own feelings, to furnish a tolerable guess at mine.—I will not be prevented, however, from making my own communication. Our confidences in you need not clash.—I ask no questions.—There is something soothing in the idea, that we have the same friend, and that whatever unhappy differences of opinion may exist between us, we are united in our love of you.—It will be a comfort to me to tell you how things now are, and what are my present plans, if plans I can be said to have.
You see what I mean? Edmund is king of the preamble. By the time he finally gets around to his point, you need a shave.
The upshot is, he found Mary so changed by London society that he scarcely recognized her. "She was in high spirits, and surrounded by those who were giving all the support of their own bad sense to her too lively mind." This conjures up images of Mary swinging gaily from a chandelier, a saucer of champagne sloshing merrily from her free hand; but we swiftly realize it takes far less acrobatic mischief to shock poor Edmund. An ill-timed cackle over dessert would do it. He especially loathes Mary's chief friend, Mrs. Fraser, for whom he just can't think up enough bad things to say: she's shallow, vain, envious, mercenary, and ambitious, and so is her sister Lady Stornaway, and with every stroke of his pen he's convincing me that these are two women I would absolutely invite to every single party I ever throw, from now till the crack of doom. His main consolation is that these harpies seem fonder of Mary than the other way around.
…I am sure she does not love them as she loves you. When I think of her great attachment too you, indeed, and the whole of her judicious, upright conduct as a sister, she appears a very different creature, capable of every thing noble, and I am ready to blame myself for a too harsh construction of a playful manner.
Well, exactly. For all her sophistication, Mary is still young—still lacks maturity; that she conforms herself to fit in whatever society she finds herself, couldn't make this more obvious. And so he won't—can't—give her up. "I have no jealousy of any individual. It is the influence of the fashionable world altogether that I am jealous of."
He's not a firecracker, but he's sharp. He sees how essentially un-molded Mary is; how the polish of her affectations conceal a character that's still being formed—and that, given the lack of guidance or counsel she had while growing up (under an uncle seems to have been part Don Giovanni and part Sweeney Todd), she's had to do the job all on her own. No wonder she grasps at the opinions and attitudes of everyone she encounters; she's trying on different personae, to see which suits her best. It's not too late to save her; to redeem her.  And there's another reason he can't give her up:
Connected, as we already are, and I hope, are to be, to give up Mary Crawford, would be to give up the society of some of those most dear to me, to banish myself from the very houses and friends whom, under any other distress, I should turn to for consolation. The loss of Mary I must consider as comprehending the loss of Crawford and of Fanny.
You have to laugh. Fanny's powers have so badly waned, that despite her still saying no, no, no, no to everyone and everything, it now falls on deaf ears—no one hears her; instead, they look at her—Henry, Mary, Sir Thomas, Lady Bertram, even Edmund who essentially created her—and all they see is, yes yes yes.
So Edmund won't give Mary up; but he doesn't know how to proceed with her. Should he go back to London after Easter, and give it another try? Or wait till she returns to Mansfield in June? Or, that being so far distant, should he write to her instead? He decides on the latter, as "I shall be able to write much that I could not say, and shall be giving her time for reflection before she resolves on her answer," but of course that's presuming he could get around to the meat of the matter before Mary grew bored, or tired, or died of old age. Or that, when he did reach the heart of the matter, somewhere around the eleventh page, it wasn't so couched in wherefores and given-the-circumstances and with-all-due-forethought-and-considerations that Mary would read it and not even realization what the hell he was talking about. Fortunately, he quickly abandons the letter plan after considering that Mary might consult Mrs. Fraser about it; and Edmund is sufficiently self-aware to realize that Mrs. Fraser going over his earnest lines one by one, giving her acid comment on all his elaborate hemming and hawing, might not be the most helpful thing for his cause.
But while he may have suffered a disappointment in Mary, he's a bigger fan of Henry than ever, being "more and more satisfied with all that I see and hear of him. There is not a shadow of wavering. He thoroughly knows his own mind, and acts up to his resolutions—an inestimable quality." He had the chance to see Henry and Maria come face-to-face at last, and "I acknowledge that they did not meet as friends. There was a marked coolness on her side. They scarcely spoke." Maria for her part seems contented, though Edmund hasn't had much opportunity to judge, having "dined only twice in Wimpole Street, and might have been there oftener, but it is mortifying to be with Rushworth as a brother."
He moves on to announce that the Grants are going to Bath; then closes the letter by reassuring Fanny of how much his mother misses her, how much he misses her, and that Sir Thomas intends to come and fetch her home himself, possibly after Easter, but if not certainly sometime before 1970.
Fanny—the meek, the humble, the accepting—now settles into a positive fit of angry impatience; Edmund's dithering has managed to provoke her to the point where she's all for God's sake ask already about it—though she has no doubts about how it will all eventually work out:
"He will marry her, and be poor and miserable. God grant that her influence do not make him cease to be respectable!"—She looked over the letter again. "'So very fond of me!' 'tis nonsense all. She loves nobody but herself and her brother. 'Her friends leading her astray for years!' She is quite as likely to have led them astray…'The loss of Mary, I must consider as comprehending the loss of Crawford and Fanny.' Edmund, you do not know me. The families would never be connected, if you did not connect them."
There's something a bit thrilling in hearing Fanny finally get down to some trash-talking; but you can't really enjoy it, because at its core there's such a strain of cringeworthy hypocrisy. Fanny is spewing venom about people to whom she pretends friendship—and of whose friendship she's plainly availed herself of the benefits more than once. This isn't healthy, heads-together-over-the-fence social snark; this is crazy-old-lady-on-the-street bilious muttering.
She eventually softens, at least towards Edmund, with whom she is still, we're told, in love (haven't yet been able to bring myself to believe it). "His warm regard, his kind expressions, his confidential treatment touched her strongly…It was a letter, in short, which she would not but have had for the world, and which could never be valued enough. This was the end of it."
We then, thank the sweet lord Jesus and all the saints and angels, get back to some much-needed comedy. Lady Bertram is very put out when she learns that Edmund has told Fanny about the Grants going to Bath, because she'd been hoping to tell Fanny herself. And she'd been meaning to make quite a meal of it, so that it was "very mortifying to her to see it fall to the share of her thankless son, and treated as concisely as possible at the end of a long letter, instead of having it to spread over the largest part of a page of her own."
For though Lady Bertram rather shone in the epistolary line, having early in her marriage, from the want of employment, and in the circumstance of Sir Thomas's being in Parliament, got into the way of making and keeping correspondents, and formed for herself a very creditable, common-place, amplifying style, so that a very little matter was enough for her; she could not do entirely without any; she must have something to write about, even to her niece, and being so soon to lose all the benefit of Dr. Grant's gouty symptoms and Mrs. Grant's morning calls, it was very hard upon her to be deprived of one of the last epistolary uses she could put them to."
Welcome back, J.A.! Missed your bad self. Now, how about those Prices…?
But this tone of genial mockery can't last; and in the next paragraph, Lady Bertram gets something to write about in spades, as her son Tom falls gravely ill. Not that I dislike Tom—quite the opposite, he's one of my favorites in the novel, right up there with the Crawfords—but I have to say, for this Austen reader at least, it's a nice change of pace to see a strapping young buck hover feverishly on the brink of death, instead of another dewy ingénue. Typically, though, it takes all of London's cavalcade of dangers and debauches to knock Tom for six, rather than the usual gust of sudden chill wind that seems to topple the young ladies as effectively as a breeze from Chernobyl.
Anyway, Tom manfully resists giving in to his deteriorating state for a while, but eventually is so weakened that Edmund rushes off to town to do what he can for him. Everyone is aquiver with fear for his life, though they all convey it with that wonderful Austenian reserve, in phrases like I am quite fearful of his prospects indeed.
Fanny reads all this in letters, which we read with her, so we're still in metafictional mode; at this point, it would seem as reasonable for a message to arrive summoning us to Mansfield Park as it would for summoning her; or conversely, for her to put down her letter for a moment, get up, and go raid our fridge. It's only occasionally that we recall she's actually a character in the novel too, as when she finds "selfishness enough to wonder whether Edmund had written to Miss Crawford" before all this went down, which reminds us that Fanny has a stake in that particular event (and reminds us in a way not entirely flattering to Fanny, let me add).
There's a wonderful passage—another brief sketch, this time of Lady Bertram—that once again illustrates Austen's innate grasp of character and genius for human psychology:
Her aunt did not neglect her; she wrote again and again; they were receiving frequent accounts from Edmund, and these accounts were as regularly transmitted to Fanny, in the same diffuse style, and the same medley of trusts, hopes and fears, all following and producing each other at hap-hazard. It was a sort of playing at being frightened. The sufferings which Lady Bertram did not see, had little power over her fancy; and she wrote very comfortable about agitation and anxiety, and poor invalids, till Tom was actually conveyed to Mansfield, and her own eyes had beheld his altered appearance.
Then, it seems, she turned pretty quickly into a Puccini heroine at the approximate climax of Act Three. Except she probably couldn't swoon as dramatically, being already spread out on the couch.
Tom's removal to Mansfield turns out to have been the classic bad idea; but apparently, like all suddenly stricken boy-men, he insisted on having his mommy (and probably his dog, though Austen doesn't say so). At any rate, he's very much the worse for wear. The journey hasn't quite killed him, but he's close enough to the pearly gates not to have to hail a cab, if you get my drift. In fact a fever now claims him, and they are all "very seriously frightened." And Fanny…?
Without any particular affection for her eldest cousin, her tenderness of heart made her feel that she could not spare him; and the purity of her principles added yet a keener solicitude, when she considered how little useful, how little self-denying his life had (apparently) been.
Wow. Sorry to say it. Bitch is cold.
We finally get another glimpse at the Price family, and find that they're all as unmoved by their cousin's suffering as can be expected.
Susan was always ready to hear and to sympathize. Nobody else could be interested in so remote an evil as illness, in a family above an hundred miles off—not even Mrs. Price, beyond a brief question or two if she saw her daughter with a letter in her hand, and now and then the quiet observation of "My poor sister Bertram must be in a great deal of trouble."
Call me crazy, but I more honestly respect that momentary flicker of compassion, than the "purity" of Fanny's "principles" that can only approximate human feeling in the abstract…and even then, not without passing judgment.
But it seems Tom might be spared the horror of dying under the burden of Fanny's disapproval; the fever abates, his immediate danger is over, and he has a second chance to become a humorless, joyless automaton and earn his cousin's high esteem.
Or…does he? Fanny receives a new letter from Edmund, written "to acquaint her with the apprehensions which he and his father had imbibed from the physician…They judged it best that Lady Bertram should not be harassed by alarms…but there was no reason why Fanny should not know the truth. They were apprehensive for his lungs."
Further correspondence paints a picture of Edmund continually at his brother's bedside, the invalid's only real comfort given Lady Bertram's nervous twitterings and Sir Thomas's inability to "bring down his conversation or his voice to the level of irritation and feebleness." Aunt Norris isn't mentioned, which seems odd at first, because you expect her to be right in there, ordering clean linen every ninety-four seconds and personally shoving Tom's bed across the room to keep him in sunlight. But though Austen doesn't give us a reason for her absence, it takes us no time at all to supply one ourselves: she's afraid of infection. Not only will she not come near the house while Tom's in danger, she's probably busy packing up a trunk with the idea of visiting her sister Price after all, or maybe seeing the Great Wall of China.
So Edmund's really the beginning and end of Tom's support system, and Fanny's "estimation of him was higher than ever when he appeared as the attendant, supporter, cheerer of a suffering brother."
There was not only the debility of recent illness to assist; there was also, as she now learnt, nerves much affected, spirits much depressed to calm and raise; and her own imagination added that there must be a mind to be properly guided.
Jesus, can't she just lay the hell off for once?
Fanny "was more inclined to hope than fear for her cousin—except when she thought of Miss Crawford—but Miss Crawford gave her the idea of being the child of good luck, and to her selfishness and vanity it would be good luck to have Edmund the only son."
Nope. She really can't lay off, can she? She's like a little wind-up monkey, endlessly beating her drum of judgment.
While Tom languishes, Easter comes and goes, and there's no word of anyone coming to fetch Fanny from Portsmouth. It's almost three months instead of two that she's been gone, and she's crawling the walls to get back. (She's probably not the only thing crawling the walls in that house, either.) She moons over Mansfield for several pages, realizing that there, not here, lies her true home; and it astonishes her that Julia and Maria, who have the means of going back any time they choose, are still lingering in town as if there were no family crisis of any kind. "It appeared from one of (Lady Bertram's) letters, that Julia had offered to return if wanted—but this was all.—It was evident that she would rather remain where she was." I don't know why this astonishes Fanny; she grew up with those girls, she knows full well how contemptuous they are of anyone beyond themselves. Imagine a jury filled with Marias and Julias; you could find yourself hanged for a parking ticket.
Fanny decides, in the manner of rednecks and yokels since time immemorial, that city life is to blame.
Fanny was disposed to think the influence of London very much at war with all respectable attachments. She saw the proof of it in Miss Crawford, as well as in her cousins; her attachment to Edmund had been respectable, the most respectable part of her character, her friendship for herself, had at least been blameless. Where was either sentiment now?
The submarine is in range and the torpedo triggered. The long-foreshadowed sinking of Mary Crawford is at hand.
It comes by way of—what else?—another letter. (By this time the postman should have made an appearance or two in the story. He's at least as much an agent of the narrative as Fanny.) The letter is from Mary, and it's long, and the tone of it is so agitated with confused emotion that I imagine when Fanny sets it aside, the pages flutter against the tabletop like bird wings.
Mary begins by asking forgiveness for her long silence, then demands that Fanny fill her in on the news from Mansfield, meaning in this case, the current estimation of Tom Bertram pulling through. "I thought little of his illness at first," she confesses. "I looked upon him as the sort of person to be made a fuss with, and to make a fuss of himself in any trifling disorder, and was chiefly concerned for those who had to nurse him;" not the most promising start, and we can imagine Fanny's sneer of derision, despite her own self-confession of no real affection for Tom, and her continued harping on the unflattering intersection of his illness with his character. Mary is more truly aggrieved, and "cannot help trembling. To have such a fine young man cut off in the flower of his days, is most melancholy." But then she doubles back:
Fanny, Fanny, I see you smile, and look cunning, but upon my honour I never bribed a physician in my life. Poor young man!—If he is to die, there will be two poor young men less in the world; and with a fearless face and bold voice would I say to any one, that wealth and consequence could fall into no hands more deserving of them...I put it to your conscience, whether 'Sir Edmund' would not do more good with all the Bertram property, than any other possible 'Sir.'
Her assessment is unarguable; her expression of it, though, is in terrible taste. Mary's habit, which is to joke about everything, can be defended; is anything sacred, or isn't it? And if she's decided it isn't, then mortal illness shouldn't be either—and in fact her acerbic, cynical view is more in line with our modern way of behaving, in which gallows humor plays so valuable a role. My mother died two years ago, after a long and grueling illness that ended up consuming much of the time and energy of my five siblings and me; our principal way of dealing with the anguish and the stress, was through black humor. An outsider who heard us would have been shocked; but the greater the adversary, the bolder the joke required to disarm it. And death is sort of the big Kahuna in that respect. Mary Crawford's mistake—strategic more than anything else—is to take this line of attack in an instance in which death doesn't threaten her with loss, but tempts her with triumph.
But Fanny, who's cracked maybe a dozen smiles in her entire life and probably regrets upwards to eight of them, can't possibly see this; doesn't want to see it; ultimately won't see it. What she sees instead is the Mary she requires to salve her feelings. What she sees is an unfeeling monster…worse, a voracious one.
Mary goes on to explain that she's appealing to Fanny for the scoop on Tom because Maria and Julia are no use to her; Maria in particular isn't even in town, she's staying with friends at Twickenham, having sent Mr. Rushworth down to Bath to fetch his mother. In a postscript, she reports that Maria is in fact now back in town—Henry has just seen her, and can confirm that she knows of her brother's probable decline.
She then concludes by renewing the offer, at this most urgent moment, of coming with Henry to fetch her home to Mansfield. "He and I can go to the Parsonage, you know, and be no trouble to our friends a Mansfield Park…you must feel yourself to be so wanted there, that you cannot in conscience (conscientious as you are) keep away, when you have the means of returning." In this, Fanny sees only an attempt by Mary to use her to get near Edmund again. And it's entirely possible—even probable—that this is in Mary's mind. But we know enough of her to know it isn't her only motive; she's made the offer before, for one thing, and she's also spent the entire novel showing genuine affection and solicitude for the Bertrams. She's a complex woman, and a contradictory one, and as I noted earlier, in many ways not fully certain of herself; but complexity is not something Fanny Price will allow for, in her view of the world. There is black. There is white. And it's her job to assign all of humanity to one or the other.
Fanny then shows us her priorities by refusing to consider returning to Mansfield in the company of "persons in whose feelings and conduct, at the present moment, she saw so much to condemn; the sister's feelings—the brother's conduct—her cold-hearted ambition—his thoughtless vanity. To have him still the acquaintance, the flirt, perhaps, of Mrs. Rushworth!—She was mortified. She had thought better of him." Yes, she had; for all the good that did either of them.
Anyway, it's clear the life-and-death situation at Mansfield weighs less with her than the icky idea of indebtedness to the Crawfords. She excuses herself from the offer of transport by claiming she couldn't possibly take the decision to return upon herself; it would be an abrogation of Sir Thomas's authority. If she's needed, he'll send for her. Which sounds perfectly rational, until we remember how she's been perfectly willing to abrogate Sir Thomas's authority before.
So she stays where she is. She evades possibility, declines to decide, makes no move, lifts no finger to alter her destiny in any way, good or bad; takes no risk, assumes no responsibility, rebuffs all affection. We know she barely eats; we can guess she scarcely moves. The air about her might be still as a vacuum. And very soon, when the walls come tumbling down, and everyone who's gone about the business of life with zeal and appetite, if not quite wisdom or restraint, is caught beneath the rubble, bloodied and bowed, Fanny will still be standing; Fanny will have won.
Absolutely goddamn crazy-making.

Mansfield Park, chapters 40-42

In each of her first three novels, Austen shakes up the status quo by implementing major shifts in locale. In Sense and Sensibility, it was from Devonshire to London; in Pride and Prejudice, from Hertfordshire to Derbyshire. She's recently moved Mansfield Park to the noisy, bustling, seemingly anarchic city of Portsmouth, which is exactly the kind of blast furnace of humanity in which a delicate flower like Fanny Price can't long survive. And in fact we now witness Fanny's systematic humbling. It does seem odd, even to me, to speak of "humbling" Fanny, since she's very pointedly worn a cloak of humility throughout the entirety of the novel; but by this time we've more than twigged to the steely, iron-willed pride that cloak conceals.

Now, however, the cloak has unraveled and spooled uselessly about her feet. She's so exposed, so powerless, so reduced from her former state of inflexible disapprobation, that she actually regrets being right about Mary Crawford's correspondence tapering off now that she's no longer at Mansfield. In fact, when a letter from Mary does arrive from London, Fanny pounces on it like some ravenous alley cat. "In her present exile from good society, and distance from every thing that had been wont to interest her, a letter from one belonging to the set where her heart lived, written with affection, and some degree of elegance, was thoroughly acceptable." You read that right, she's grooving on Mary's affection now, after having so often sneered at her easy familiarity.
But even with this "strange revolution of mind," Fanny still can't be half as happy to hear from Mary as we are. And Mary doesn't disappoint; her letter sparkles with wit and energy. Take this passage, about her first encounter with the Bertram sisters after the news of Fanny's offer from their favorite boy-toy, Henry, has become public:
"I have seen your cousins, 'dear Julia and dearest Mrs. Rushworth'; they found me at home yesterday, and we were glad to see each other again. We seemed very glad to see each other, and I do really think we were a little.—We had a vast deal to say.—Shall I tell you how Mrs. Rushworth looked when your name was mentioned? I did not use to think her wanting in self possession, but she had not quite enough for the demands of yesterday."
As for the other Bertram sister, it seems she has an extra cushion of distraction against such high emotion:
"From all that I hear and guess, Baron Wildenhaim's attentions to Julia continue, but I do not know that he has any serious encouragement. She ought to do better. A poor honourable is no catch, and I cannot imagine any liking in the case, for take away his rants, and the poor Baron has nothing. What a difference a vowel makes!—if his rents were but equal to his rants!"
This is almost exactly the tone you find in Austen's own letters. Once again, you can't help wondering what game she thinks she's playing here—setting up her own doppelgänger as the bad girl, and heaping all her praises on a joyless little Pharisee instead.
Mary's letter continues: "Your cousin Edmund moves slowly; detained, perchance, by parish duties. There may be some old woman at Thornton Lacey to be converted. I am unwilling to fancy myself neglected for a young one." Fanny, who dreads the inevitable news of Edmund and Mary's engagement, finds both comfort and discomfort in this (though, being Fanny, chiefly the latter). Even so, she "would have been glad to have been sure of such a letter every week"—oh yes, Fanny's humbled, all right. The question is…how far?
Not very, as we quickly learn. Her judgments on her new family and their circle are typically harsh—"she saw nobody in whose favour she could wish to overcome her own shyness and reserve"—and as a result she quickly gains the reputation of a snob…and, worse, a poseur.
The young ladies who approached her at first with some respect in consideration of her coming from a Baronet's family, were soon offended by what they termed "airs"—for as she neither played on the piano-forte nor wore fine pelisses, they could, on farther observation, admit no right of superiority.
Does anyone have the slightest doubt that if Mary Crawford were dropped into this exact same circle, they'd all be tripping over themselves in adoration of her before the first week was up? Hell, the first meal?
Fanny does find one ray of hope in this land of the lost: her young sister. Though Susan's combativeness and pride have shocked her up to now, she begins to see that the girl has simply been using what limited resources she has—her sense of justice and the force of her own personality—to try to improve her lot, and her family's. "That a girl of fourteen, acting only on her own unassisted reason, should err in the method of reform was not wonderful; and Fanny soon became more disposed to admire the natural light of the mind which could so early distinguish justly, than to censure severely the faults of conduct to which it led." And amazingly, Fanny perceives that Susan's noisy flailings have made things better, by checking the worst abuses of her careless parents.
And why shouldn't she act as she does? She has nothing to lose. For, poignantly, it turns out Susan is unloved. "The blind fondness which was for ever producing evil around her, she had never known. There was no gratitude for affection past or present, to make her better bear with its excesses to the others." Another one of those miraculous character sketches, so brief and so incisive and startling, that catapult Austen to comparison with Shakespeare.
So Fanny begins to view her sister "as an object of mingled compassion and respect", and "new as it was to imagine herself capable of guiding or informing anyone," she resolves to start dropping hints as to how properly to behave, which based on what we know of Fanny, means teaching Susan to be passive-aggressive instead of aggressive-aggressive. She even resolves to make up for the lack of affection in Susan's life by replacing the goddamn silver knife everyone keeps tussling over, though Fanny is "so wholly unused to confer favours, except on the very poor, so unpractised in removing evils, or bestowing kindnesses among her equals, and so fearful of appearing to elevate herself as a great lady at home," that she's almost mummified by her own interal red tape before she can make it to the silversmith. But eventually the gift is bestowed and Susan is appropriately gratified and newly attuned to Fanny's favor.
Fanny thus begins re-shaping her sister into Fanny Mk II. Since books play such a significant role in that transformation, Fanny amends the household's lack of improving literature—hell, of any reading matter (even Mr. Price's borrowed newspaper has to be returned)—by means of a circulating library. "She became a subscriber—amazed at being any thing in propria persona, amazed at her doings in every way; to be a renter, a chuser of books!" What she's feeling, in short, is the heady rush that comes with activity—with doing something as opposed to nothing. It's her first tentative step out of the stasis field in which she's not only lived till now, but into which she's tried her darnedest to drag everyone else within a ten-mile radius. This ought to be cause for rejoicing, but for God's sake, we're on page 414. Too little, too late. This should've happened on page 75.
Time passes, and Fanny hears no news about Edmund and Mary, despite his having had plenty of time to arrive in town; which can either mean "his going had been again delayed, or he had yet procured no opportunity of seeing Miss Crawford alone—or, he was too happy for letter writing!" But her uncertainty on the subject doesn't need to torment her further, because someone actually arrives on her doorstep who can tell her everything she wants to know. Austen, with absolutely rock-solid theatrical instincts, wastes not a word in bringing him onstage:
It was a gentleman's voice; it was a voice that Fanny was just turning pale about, when Mr. Crawford walked into the room.
He thus takes us by surprise as surely as he does Fanny. A lesser writer would have tried to load the moment with suspense—put off the reveal while prolonging the anxiety, teasing the consequences—but these are cheap tricks; kitsch; soft-core porn. None of that for Austen; she's the real deal.
Fanny's "good sense" gets her through the introduction to her parents, even to the point of remembering to refer to him as "William's friend," but once everyone is seated she plunges quickly into Fanny-ness and "fancied herself on the point of fainting away," though for all the times Fanny has felt so inclined, I can't recall a single instance when she's ever actually done so. Frankly, it's time to put up or shut up, chiquita; I will no longer believe how close to swooning you are, till I see you hit the floor at least once.
As for Henry…remember a few 'grafs ago when I said, imagine Mary with this crowd, they'd be putty in her hands?...Well, her brother Henry sorta kinda proves my point. Yes, he's male and therefore immediately of more consequence than any mere woman, and yes, he enters the house already beatified by virtue of his favors to William…but even so, it takes him approximately ninety seconds before every member of the Price family is on his or her back, offering their tummies for him to rub. He does this—as Mary would as well—as any person of breeding would—by simply not seeing, or pretending not to see, that he has in fact entered the primate house and is surrounded by shrieking gibbons for whom his sudden appearance is just barely sufficient cause to interrupt them flinging their feces at each other. Where Fanny, in this situation, cringed and winced and frowned and withdrew, Henry smiles and bows and charms and flatters.
And whaddaya know, it doesn't just win over his audience…it inspires them to meet him at his own level. "Warmed by the sight of such a friend to her son, and regulated by the wish of appearing to advantage before him, (Mrs. Price) was overflowing with gratitude, artless, maternal gratitude, which could not be unpleasing." Her husband is out, which she regrets very much, but Fanny doesn't regret it, not one bit; "for to her many other sources of uneasiness was added the severe one of shame for the home in which he found her…and she would have been yet more ashamed of her father, than of all the rest."
After a certain interval, "it was not unreasonable to suppose, that Fanny might be looked at and spoken to," and Henry now does so, giving her the rundown on his recent whereabouts; which chatter—amiable, breezy, and (he thinks) inconsequential—includes the riveting intel that he hasn't seen Edmund, but knows him now to be in town. Which makes Fanny think, "then by this time it is all settled," and we don't need to be told what that means.
Henry starts dropping hints about what a beautiful day it is and what a lovely thing it would be to go out for a walk, but since subtlety is a thing unknown in the Price household—Henry might as well write his desire on a slip of paper, in French, then tear it up and blow the pieces in Mrs. Price's face for all the impression it makes—he's forced to do something just shy of taking Fanny under his arm and carrying her out bodily. Oh, and Susan too, because the way she's been down on all fours, sniffing at his pants leg, makes it pretty clear there's no getting rid of her.
And darn the luck, wouldn't you know they've no sooner reached the High Street than they bump into Mr. Price, who is apparently projectile-vomiting on a bush or something by the way Fanny recoils from the sight of him. And here's where we come up against some interesting and I think noteworthy female psychology; for Fanny realizes that Henry must be appalled by her father.
He must be ashamed and disgusted altogether. He must soon give her up, and cease to have the smallest inclination for the match; and yet, though she had been so much wanting his affection to be cured, this was a sort of cure that would be almost as bad as the complaint; and I believe, there is scarcely a young lady in the united kingdoms, who would not rather put up with the misfortune of being sought by a clever, agreeable man, than have him driven away by the vulgarity of her nearest relations.
Really?...This is the way women think? This?..."Please, please, anything to keep this lothario from imposing his awful attentions on me…but God forbid he should no longer want me? Let him leave me alone—but not because he's horrified by my family? I only ask that he stay far, far away from me, for the rest of his life—but still desire and long for me; let me never see him again—but let him always suffer for my lack?"  That's it? Really?
Because that is the most monumentally selfish, contemptible, outrageous feat of brazen egoism I've heard in quite some time.
When I first read Mansfield Park, this is where I had to put the book down and just walk away for a while. By which I mean, for a week or so…I needed a long, clear space of time in which to cleanse myself of the oozing, gummy, self-dramatizing, self-regarding leakage that is Fanny Price's train of thought. The idea that it might be something she shares with all females is, frankly, terrifying.
And I can't believe it is. I mean, imagine Elinor Dashwood in this same situation. I'm willing to bet her reaction would be something wry and ironic, like, I never thought to find myself grateful for my father's want of social graces. She'd be glad to have Dad scare the bozo away.
But as it happens, despite Fanny's fears, the encounter with Mr. Price goes just as swimmingly as the one with his better half. If Henry is in fact appalled by what he sees before him, he doesn't show it; and Mr. Price responds to Henry's gentlemanly bonhomie with a refinement in his own manners, which, "though not polished, were more than passable; they were grateful, animated, manly; his expressions were those of an attached father, and a sensible man;—his loud tones did very well in the open air, and there was not a single oath to be heard." In short, Henry and Mr. Price charm the pants off each other, which is a good thing, because at least in Mr. Price's case those pants could almost certainly use a good washing, if not burning at the end of a stick.
Mr. Price offers to show Henry the dockyard, and Henry accepts the favor "though he had seen the dock-yard again and again". But his acceptance is contingent on the Price sisters not being "afraid of the fatigue; and as it was somehow or other ascertained, or inferred, or at least acted upon, that they were not at all afraid, to the dock-yard they were all to go"—this being one of those quietly hilarious, unmistakably English passages that make me sorry for people who read Austen in translation; there's no way for its proto-absurdist charm to survive conversion to, say, Swedish.
Mr. Price is wonderfully neglectful of his daughters, who it seems have a certain pace they just can't exceed, as though simple locomotion is something they've only added to their physical repertoire yesterday. He strides swiftly ahead, leaving them to struggle on behind; occasionally he looks over his shoulder and bellows down the lane to hurry them, but in vain. Never mind, Henry Crawford gallantly stays with them, strolling at their side and pointedly not asking excuse me, but by chance do you have turtles strapped to your feet instead of shoes? Really, the man is a pillar of courtesy.
At the dockyard they run into a "brother lounger" of Mr. Price's (and dang do I love that term), and the two go off together to discuss "matters of equal and never-failing interest," which leaves the young people to stop and rest for a moment or two or forty-six.
Crawford could not have wished (Fanny) more fatigued or more ready to sit down; but he could have wished her sister away. A quick looking girl of Susan's age was the very worst third in the world—totally different from Lady Bertram—all eyes and ears; and there was no introducing the main point before her.
Henry is overlooking—or perhaps is too much a gentleman to take advantage of—how easy it would be to have Susan out of the way with just one surreptitious shove off the pier. But never mind, he makes himself as agreeable as possible, only speaking about general subjects, which has the benefit of entertaining Susan "in a way quite new to her." He talks about how he's been getting to know the tenants on his estate, which "was aimed, and well aimed, at Fanny," who's pleased "to hear him speak so properly"—but then, of course, he ruins it with his Henry thing of going too far, and hinting broadly at how much easier such good works will be when he has sommmmeone at this side to help, someone who maaaaybe might be quite nearby and whose name begins with F and what are you looking at, oh clever you, you guessed!
Fanny then does her Fanny thing of folding up like a bat and hiding; but even so, a little of his efforts has begun to work on her, for she admits to herself that he might turn out better than she ever supposed. This helps limit the damage when he doubles his original mistake by not only dropping another big hint about his super-faboo future with her, but twinning it with a sly reference to Edmund's coming bed of roses with Mary. And then, on the walk home, he manages to get Fanny alone long enough to make it clear that his visit to Portsmouth is for one purpose only: to see her. And while she wishes he'd just lay off that kinda talk already, it doesn't actually feel quite as annoying as it usually does.
…(S)he had never seen him so agreeable—so near being agreeable; his behaviour to her father could not offend, and there was something particularly kind and proper in the notice he took of Susan. He was decidedly improved. She wished the next day over, she wished he had come only for one day—but it was not so very bad as she would have expected; the pleasure of talking of Mansfield was so very great!
There's one dicey moment, which comes as they part: her father asks Henry to stay to dinner, and Fanny experiences "a thrill of horror" at the idea of him sitting down to a meal with them. You'd think Mr. Price was going to bring down a zebra with a club, and the entire family then go tearing at it with their bare teeth. But not to worry, Henry claims a prior engagement—which he doesn't actually have, he's just trying to avoid mortifying Fanny. Wait, wait…this is our cad? This guy? This considerate little love-bug? This pussycat? This mensch?
The next morning Henry intersects the Price family en route to church, which gratifies Fanny because this is the one day each week when they manage to pull themselves together and give the impression of not at all being a band of marauding Huns. "Her poor mother now did not look so very unworthy of being Lady Bertram's sister as she was but too apt to look," though how anyone can look like Lady Bertram's sister without a couch squeezed beneath her is beyond me. Henry attends the services with them, and afterwards accepts their invitation to walk on the ramparts, where Mrs. Price always bolts immediately after church to hook up with her friends for an orgy of good Christian gossip.
Thither they now went; Mr. Crawford most happy to consider the Miss Prices as his peculiar charge; and before they had been there long—somehow or other—there was no saying how—Fanny could not have believed it—but he was walking between them with an arm of each under his, and she did not know how to prevent or put an end to it. It made her uncomfortable for a time—but yet there were enjoyments in the day and in the view which would be felt.
In fact, the weather's so fine and the prospect so pretty that despite the absence of a hedge of any kind, Fanny's soon in raptures. They saunter on in this way for two hours, during which time Henry scores some pretty serious points.
They often stop with the same sentiment and taste, leaning against the wall, some minutes, to look and admire; and considering he was not Edmund, Fanny could not but allow that he was sufficiently open to the charms of nature, and very well able to express his admiration.
But one of the views on hand isn't quite so pleasing to Henry's eye: that of Fanny's face, which "was less blooming than it ought to be." Gosh, y'think? A single exposure to the assembled Price clan would wilt every bloom in Kew Gardens as effectively as Agent Orange. And Fanny's been here a month, not to mention that she's also been working extra special hard to disapprove of everything. It's taken its toll.
Henry asks when she's to return to Mansfield, and Fanny tells him she's not sure; another month, but possibly more if it's not convenient for Sir Thomas to send for her. This causes him something like consternation—the first we've seen of anything in that nature from him. It makes an impression. He say, "I know Mansfield, I knows its way, I know its faults toward you. I know the danger of your being so far forgotten, as to have your comforts give way to the imaginary convenience of any single being in the family. I am aware that you may be left here week after week." And he insists that at the end of the two months, if no one's available to come for her, she's to send him word and he and Mary will fetch her home themselves. "You know the ease, and the pleasure with which this would be done. You know all that would be felt on the occasion." Fanny, we're told, "thanked him, but tried to laugh it off." And Henry—who's spent the entire novel up to now laughing—won't have it. He's serious, dammit. Just look at the set of his jaw! And that little vein in the middle of his forehead! Never saw that before, didja?
Austen is being very near reckless here; she's building up Henry so high—Mary too—that when she ultimately tears him down, there won't be any way to contain the fall; the plummeting wreckage might just (and in fact will) take the entire novel with it. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: I admire Austen's ambition, her desire to challenge herself, to take on the task of creating both a cad and a rival of greater shade and complexity than the more broadly sketched dastardliness of George Wickham and Lucy Steele. But ultimately she's gone too far, and lost herself along the way. Our sympathies aren't where she means them—needs them—to be; and I have a strong suspicion that on some level, hers aren't either.
Finally, they say goodbye; Henry is leaving Portsmouth, perhaps for Norfolk, where he's thinking of reining in an errant estate manager who's thwarting him on the matter of a new tenant; but he's uncertain whether he should intervene. What does Fanny advise?
"I advise?—you know very well what is right."
"Yes. When you give me your opinion, I always know what is right. Your judgment is my rule of right."
"Oh, no!—do not say so. We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be. Good bye; I wish you a pleasant journey tomorrow."
She deflects every compliment as deftly as though she were wearing a personal force field. And the tone of that goodbye…she might be seeing off an insurance salesman, or someone who's just installed a new roof. 
And then she goes on in to dinner, or rather, not to dinner, because "she was so little equal to Rebecca's puddings, and Rebecca's hashes, brought to table as they all were, with such accompaniments of half-cleaned plates, and not half-cleaned knives and forks, that she was very often constrained to defer her heartiest meal, till she could send her brothers in the evening for biscuits and buns." Clearly she has no idea what little boys might think to do with biscuits and buns between the kitchen and her room. Believe me, those half-cleaned plates would be safer.
After being nursed up at Mansfield, it was too late in the day to be hardened at Portsmouth; and though Sir Thomas, had he known all, might have thought his niece in the most promising way of being starved, both mind and body, into a much juster value for Mr. Crawford's good company and good fortune, he would probably have feared to push his experiment farther, lest she might die under the cure.
Fanny, of course, is as unlikely to die as she is to faint: her sheer, dogged pride will see to that. And as for this "cure"…well, just look at her now, huddled in her dim-lit corner, cold and hungry and weary and bereft, and thinking—what about Henry Crawford?
…(S)he was quite persuaded of his being astonishingly more gentle, and regardful of others, than formerly. And if in little things, must it not be so in great? So anxious for her health and comfort, so very feeling as he now expressed himself, and really seemed, might it not be fairly supposed, that he would not much longer persevere in a suit so distressing to her?
Sorry, Sir Thomas. Can you say "epic fail"?

A brief pause for comment

I've been converting the blog to manuscript form, with the idea of eventually publishing it (probably as a digital e-book). And it's interesting to note that I spent:
- Four months writing 50 manuscript pages on Sense & Sensibility;
- Seven months writing 100 manuscript pages on Pride & Prejudice; and
- One year writing 150 manuscript pages on Mansfield Park (which I haven't even finished yet).
Infer from that what you will. But at this rate I may keel over daid before I wrap up Persuasion.

Thank you, that is all. Back to your regularly scheduled blog posts.

Mansfield Park, chapters 37-39

With the removal of the Crawfords, Austen has cleared her stage of virtually all its vital, percolating characters, leaving only the tepid quartet of Fanny, Edmund, Sir Thomas, and Lady Bertram. Aunt Norris is still lurking on the perimeter but only occasionally intrudes on the narrative, like a sudden but temporary rash; and the Grants are technically still in residence at the parsonage, but Austen seems to have utterly forgotten them. They might as well have fallen down a well, or been eaten by wolverines.

In other words, the novel desperately needs an injection of comic energy. And wouldn't you know it, Austen is about to mainline some high-grade mama smack. 
But first we've got to get through some introspective dithering among our somnambulant foursome. This involves Sir Thomas watching Fanny in the days following Henry Crawford's departure, looking for signs that she may be missing him. Mm-hmm. Luck with that.
He watched her with this idea—but he could hardly tell with what success. He hardly knew whether there were any difference in her spirits or not. She was always so gentle and retiring, that her emotions were beyond his discrimination.
I like to picture Sir Thomas surreptitiously slipping a mirror under her nose, and checking it for fog to confirm that she is, in fact, breathing.
Sir Thomas asks Edmund what he thinks on the matter, given his better knowledge of Fanny's mysterious ways, but Edmund "did not discern any symptoms of regret, and thought his father a little unreasonable in supposing the first three or four days could produce any." Three or four decades, maybe. Or three or four geologic ages, if you want to be absolutely safe. But what does strike Edmund is that Fanny shows no sign of missing Mary Crawford either, which is inconceivable to him, now that he's back on his Mary Rules 4 Ever kick.
Fanny of course is only too aware of the rekindled urge to merge between Edmund and Mary.
On his side, the inclination was stronger, on hers less equivocal. His objections, the scruples of his integrity, seemed all done away—nobody could tell how; and the doubts and hesitations of her ambition were equally got over—and equally without apparent reason.
Austen may have been a provincial spinster, but she understood that powerful attraction often—always?—trumps common sense. It's just that in this novel, she'll ultimately try to fix that—implement a course correction, and steer Like towards Like, shunting Unlike aside. She's laying the groundwork even now, as witness Fanny reflecting on Mary's essential unworthiness:
In their very last conversation, Miss Crawford, in spite of some amiable sensations, and much personal kindness, had still been Miss Crawford, still shewn a mind led astray and bewildered, and without any suspicion of being so; darkened, yet fancying itself light. She might love, but she did not deserve Edmund by any other sentiment.
I might rewrite that to read, "In their last conversation, Miss Price, in spite of some tender sensations, and much personal forbearance, had still been Miss Price, still shewn a mind unyielding and judgmental, and without any suspicion of being so; cold, yet fancying itself warmth. She might love, but she did not deserve Edmund by any other sentiment."
Anyway, that's where we stand at Mansfield—checkmate all around—when Austen decides to mix things up a bit by bringing William Price back into the picture. William still strikes me as more a plot device than an actual character…we never really feel we know him very well; he's a standup guy, sure, but never anything more than a standup guy. In any case, he's got ten days' leave of absence and has come to spend them with his sister—his only regret being that he can't show off his naval uniform to her, because "cruel custom prohibited its appearance except on duty."
This prompts a minor brainstorm on Sir Thomas's part. "This scheme was that (Fanny) should accompany her brother back to Portsmouth, and spend a little time with her own family"—which would not only allow her to see William all pimped out in his lieutenant's duds, but reconnect her with the parents and siblings she's been so long removed from. Though the impulse for the plan, we soon learn, isn't quite so nakedly charitable.
(Sir Thomas's) prime motive in sending her away, had very little to do with the propriety of seeing her parents again, and nothing at all with any idea of making her happy. He certainly wished her to go willingly, but he as certainly wished her to be heartily sick of home before her visit ended; and that a little abstinence from the elegancies and luxuries of Mansfield Park, would bring her mind into a sober state, and incline her to a juster estimate of the value of that home of greater permanence, and equal comfort, of which she had the offer.
In other words, give her a few weeks in Portsmouth, and she'll crawl across broken glass to be Mrs. Henry Crawford.
The subject of this experiment, unaware of how she's being manipulated, approves the idea. In fact, "Had Fanny been at all addicted to raptures, she must have had a strong attack of them, when she first understood what was intended"—though if Fanny were at all addicted to raptures, this novel would have taken an entirely different course starting at about page 40.
She's eager to see her family again and wallows a bit in uncharacteristic nostalgia; but just a bit. She also appreciates that two months away from Edmund "(and perhaps she might be allowed to make her absence three)" will help her get over her moony-eyed crush on him, and face up to his imminent engagement to Mary. "What might have been hard to bear at Mansfield, was to become a slight evil at Portsmouth."
The only impediment to the plan is that Fanny's absence will leave no one to sit with Lady Bertram and watch her nod off every four-and-a-half minutes, a service her ladyship simply cannot do without. Enter Aunt Norris, as always eager to be of service—and equally eager to prove that nobody really needs Fanny anyway. She almost vaults onto the scene, waving her arms and crying, I can do it! I can do it! Me! Me! Over here!
That seems settled, then; and Fanny and William began looking ahead to their big adventure. But then Mrs. Norris changes her mind, after realizing that all her arguments for economy to the contrary, Sir Thomas means to send his niece and nephew to Porstmouth by post.
(W)hen she saw Sir Thomas actually give William notes for the purpose, she was struck with the idea of there being room for a third in the carriage, and suddenly seized with a strong inclination to go with them…it would be such an indulgence to her; she had not seen her poor dear sister Price for more than twenty years; and it would be a help to the young people in their journey to have her older head to manage for them; and she could not help thinking her poor dear sister Price would feel it very unkind of her not to come by such an opportunity.
William and Fanny "were horror-struck at the idea," as can easily be imagined. Stuck in a coach with Mrs. Norris is the kind of punishment Dante might have inflicted on the damned in the sixth or seventh circle of Hell, if he weren't such an old softie. But never mind, the youngsters don't have to live long in dread, for it soon occurs to their would-be tormentor that "though taken to Portsmouth for nothing, it would be hardly possible for her to avoid paying her own expenses back again. So, her poor dear sister Price was left to all the disappointment of her missing such an opportunity; and another twenty years' absence, perhaps, begun."
Edmund had intended to go to London at about this time, but has changed his plans so as not to leave his parents completely devoid of younger company; he has "delayed for a week or two longer a journey which he was looking forward to, with the hope of its fixing his happiness for ever." He tells Fanny as much, and she "was the more affected from feeling it to be the last time in which Miss Crawford's name would ever be mentioned between them with any remains of liberty." He promises to write to her when he has (wink, wink) news, and Fanny immediately starts dreading the day she receives that letter, and at this point all the passive emotional undercurrents are starting to make us feel tired and cranky, like we've been sitting in the bath too long and can we just get out now, please.
And then…relief. We find ourselves on the open road with the Price siblings. "Every thing supplied an amusement to the high glee of William's mind, and he was full of frolic and joke, in the intervals of their higher-toned subjects, all of which ended, if they did not begin, in praise of the Thrush," so obviously they weren't all that high-toned. We get a small hint of William's capacity for snark when he describes for Fanny "schemes for an action with some superior force…(supposing the first lieutenant out of the way—and William was not very merciful to the first lieutenant)" which is the first time I've actually wanted to hear more of what William had to say.
What they very much do not discuss is Henry Crawford. That's a touchy subject, given that William owes basically everything plus change to Henry, while Fanny has treated this paragon like last week's tekka maki. Mary Crawford isn't discussed either, though she's very much on Fanny's mind. We're told that Fanny has heard "repeatedly" from Mary in the three weeks since her departure from Mansfield. "It was a correspondence which Fanny found quite as unpleasant as she had feared. Miss Crawford's style of writing, lively and affectionate, was itself an evil"; presumably Mary never bothers to wax rhapsodic on the miracle of shrubbery. But even worse, from Fanny's point of view, is the addition of several adoring lines from Henry in each missive…not to mention that Edmund has insisted on having all of Mary's letters read to him, after which Fanny "had to listen to his admiration of her language, and the warm of her attachments."
In fact, there's so much in the letters that seems designed for Edmund's ears rather than hers, that Fanny begins to suspect she's being used as a kind of epistolary go-between. She takes consolation in thinking that, once she's in Portsmouth and far from Edmund, Mary will have no reason to write to her anymore, and "their correspondence would dwindle into nothing." 
But Fanny is forced to abandon her fantasies of a perfect Fanny world in which her only friend never writes to her, because she and William have arrived in Portsmouth and now draw up before the door of a small house on a narrow street, the very abode in which Fanny once lived. "The moment they stopt, a trollopy-looking maidservant, seemingly in wait for them at the door, stept forward, and more intent on telling the news, than giving any help," begins to inform them that the Thrush has gone out of harbor and that William is wanted, before she's shoved aside by a boy who's launched himself out of the house like a sock monkey from a cannon, intent on delivering this vital news himself. Both the trollopy maid and the slingshot boy come as shocks to our system after so many pages of furtive glances, hushed asides, and arched eyebrows. One or the other of these newcomers would have been welcome on his own, but to have them both in one scene, colliding off each other like billiard balls, is Austen's way of telling us the status quo has just gone ass-over-teakettle. We're off-balance, and she means us to stay that way.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Prices are in the building!
William—now agitated by the news of the Thrush's movement—hustles Fanny to the threshold, where she's greeted by her mother and about forty more brothers and sisters, all of whom can barely be bothered to do more than spend a few seconds sizing her up. "She was then taken into a parlour, so small that her first conviction was of its being only a passage-room to something better, and she stood for a moment expecting to be invited on"—and right about here, you have to pause between snorts of laughter to wonder if maybe Sir Thomas hasn't got this thing nailed up tight after all.
And then comes the wonderful moment Fanny's mother opens her mouth. In the space of two pages she manages to fill the narrative with more sheer talk than has taken place at Mansfield in the space of two hundred. On and on she goes, blathering away while the Price children cavort behind her, like a cross between circus acrobats and a demolition crew. Occasionally she turns to fling some watery orders at them, only to have defiance flung back at her—to Fanny's great shock and dismay.
It's true: at long last, Austen has decided to bestow on us one of her epic talkers…my personal favorites in her arsenal of character types. But, wait—wait—can it be? Is Austen rewarding us for having endured the almost Ingmar Bergmanesque astringency of the novel up to now, by heaping upon us more sheer revivifying vulgarity than we can possibly stand?...Because Fanny's father now enters, and—overlooking her the way he'd ignore a stray cat who wandered into the house—begins bawling out a monologue that makes his wife's elaborate bleatings appear as concise as Rousseauvian aphorisms.
"…But by G—, you lost a fine sight by not being here in the morning to see the Thrush go out of harbour. I would not have been out of the way for a thousand pounds. Old Scholey ran in at breakfast time, to say that she had slipped her moorings and was coming out. I jumped up, and made but two steps to the platform. If ever there was a perfect beauty afloat, she is one; and there she lays at Spithead, and anybody in England would take her for an eight-and-twenty. I was upon the platform two hours this afternoon, looking at her. She lays close to the Endymion, between her and the Cleopatra, just to the eastward of the sheer hulk."
This salty gush is all addressed to William, who for Mr. Price's purposes is the only person of interest in the room. When he finally runs out of breath, Fanny intrudes on the corner of his eye like a fleck of ash, and he suddenly remembers her; "and, having given her a cordial hug, and observed that she was grown into a woman, and he supposed would be wanting a husband soon, seemed very much inclined to forget her again."
Fanny "shrunk back to her seat, with feelings sadly pained by his language and his smell of spirits"; in all likelihood she then tries to cloak the house with her disapproval until everyone in it is trapped like butterflies beneath a net, after which everything will be nice and still and inert the way Fanny likes it. But she's met her match this time. She may be an abyss, but even an abyss has limits on how much it can swallow, and the Price family produce enough sheer clanging chaos to clog up any void as swiftly as a double cheeseburger in the arteries of a lifelong vegan. Fanny can't even manage to cast her torpid spell over the youngest and most impressionable of the clan.
Both (boys) were kissed very tenderly, but Tom she wanted to keep by her, to try to trace the features of the baby she had loved, and talk to him of his infant preference of herself. Tom, however, had no mind for such treatment; he came home, not to stand and be talked to, but to run about and make a noise; and both boys had soon burst away from her, and slammed the parlour door till her temples ached.
This is followed by more glorious turbulence: accusations, confrontations, rows, more chasing in and out of doors than in Tex Avery cartoon—and at the center of it all, Mrs. Price, the kind of woman who spends so much time pivoting around in confusion that there's always a loose strand of hair stuck in her mouth. I could happily stay in these Portsmouth chapters forever. Again, I'm left wondering at the way Austen works at cross-purposes to herself in Mansfield Park; in her previous novels, she's shown an evident preference for noisy gabblers over taciturn stuffed-shirts, but it's clear we're meant to be appalled by the garrulous Prices, especially in comparison to the starchy Bertrams; but I feel just the opposite. I feel like I've just taken a plunge into a cold, clear pool, after having languished too long in an overheated room. 
Fanny, thwarted, sits in the parlour now, ignored by the only other person remaining there—her father, who's engrossed in his (borrowed) newspaper and hogging the only available candle—and she succumbs to "bewildered, broken, sorrowful contemplation." But even this is too much emotion for Fanny, whose preferred state of being is arid desolation, so she packs up the sloppy self-pity by deciding she doesn't warrant any special treatment from her kin, anyway. "What right had she to be of importance to her family? She could have none, so long lost sight of!" And yet she still smarts over being so completely overlooked. Really, this girl is a prime candidate for an analyst's chair.
It doesn't take too long for her to find a few consolations. Her sister Susan—at fourteen, on the impressionable cusp of womanhood—has "an open, sensible countenance; she was like William—and Fanny hoped to find her like him in disposition and good will towards herself." And speaking of William, he now enters the room (preceded by a tumble of several young Price children snarling and snapping like dogs).
He, complete in his Lieutenant's uniform, looking and moving all the taller, firmer, and more graceful for it, and with the happiest smile over his face, walked up directly to Fanny—who, rising from her seat, looked at him for a moment in speechless admiration, and then threw her arms round his neck to sob out her various emotions of pain and pleasure.
So much for keeping those sloppy emotions suppressed. Give her enough time in the bosom of her family, and we'll yet see Fanny hurling plates across the room. (I can dream, can't I?)
When William finally departs to be rowed out to the Thrush, something like quiet descends over the house (though it's really just a temporary spell of exhaustion) and Fanny's mother can finally sit and have a chat with her. But she makes only one enquiry about her relations at Mansfield—"How did her sister Bertram manage about her servants?"—before she's off on a rambling monologue about "her own domestic grievances; and the shocking character of all the Portsmouth servants, of whom she believed her own two were the very worst".
You know what I'd like to see?...A one-act play: The three sisters—Lady Bertram, Aunt Norris, Mrs. Price—trapped in an elevator for 40 minutes. It would virtually write itself.
Fanny then takes a longer look at her sister Betsey, who was born after she left Portsmouth for Northamptonshire; she's reminded of another sister, Mary, who was about the same age at that time, and who has since died—the news of which, when it reached Fanny, left her "for a short time…quite afflicted" (one of the few inklings in Austen of the period's high rate of child mortality—with that "for a short time" providing evidence of how thick-skinned society had to be about it to survive). Fanny notices that Betsey is "holding out something to catch her eyes, meaning to screen it at the same time from Susan's." Fanny asks to see it; it's revealed as a silver knife.
Up jumped Susan, claiming it as her own, and trying to get it away; but the child ran to her mother's protection, and Susan could only reproach, which she did very warmly, and evidently hoping to interest Fanny on her side…"It was very hard that she was not to have her own knife; it was her own knife; little sister Mary had left it to her on her death-bed, and she ought to have had it to keep herself long ago. But mamma kept it from her, and was always letting Betsey get hold of it…"
I'm sure this is all meant to impress us with the lack of discipline and authority in the Price house, but it just makes me wonder what in God's name a bunch of little girls are doing tussling over a knife in the first place. Let's give Austen the benefit of the doubt and assume it's a butter knife or something, and not the Regency equivalent of a switchblade. Though this is Portsmouth, so who can say.
The effect of all this on Fanny is predictable. She's "quite shocked. Every feeling of duty, honour, and tenderness was wounded by her sister's speech and her mother's reply"—which is to defend Betsey against the attack, and justify it on the basis that the knife was the gift of Mary's godmother, a certain Mrs. Admiral Maxwell, just a few weeks before her death. "My own Betsey, (fondling her), you have not the luck of such a good godmother. Aunt Norris lives too far off, to think of such little people as you." This segues into a pleasant surprise: Mrs. Norris may be left behind in Mansfield, but she can still make hilarious incursions into the narrative. To wit:
Fanny had indeed nothing to convey from aunt Norris…There had been at one moment a slight murmur in the drawing-room at Mansfield Park, about sending (Betsey) a Prayer-book; but no second sound had been heard of such a purpose. Mrs. Norris, however, had gone home and taken down two old Prayer-books of her husband, with that idea, but upon examination, the ardour of generosity went off. One was found to have too small a print for a child's eyes, and the other to be too cumbersome for her to carry about.
Fanny is installed in a room she'll share with Susan, which is apparently not quite half the size "of her own little attic at Mansfield Park, in that house reckoned too small for anyone's comfort." All this constriction, chaos, and cacophony take their toll. "Could (Sir Thomas) have seen only half that she felt before the end of a week, he would have though Mr. Crawford sure of her, and been delighted in his own sagacity." Even William is taken away from her; the Thrush has had its orders and sailed, and William's visits ashore—few and brief as they were—now cease entirely.
And so Fanny is left stranded in a home "the very reverse of what she could have wished. It was the abode of noise, disorder, and impropriety. Nobody was in their right place, nothing was done as it ought to be." She finds her father "dirty and gross…he scarcely ever noticed her, but to make her the object of a coarse joke." (Is it wrong of me that I'd like to hear one of them?)
In spite of this, Fanny's "disappointment in her mother was greater; there she had hoped much, and found almost nothing. Every flattering scheme of being of consequence to her soon fell to the ground…(Fanny) never met with greater kindness from her than the first day of her arrival…Her daughters never had been much to her. She was fond of her sons, especially of William, but Betsey was the first of her girls whom she had ever much regarded."
Her days were spent in a kind of slow bustle; always busy without getting on, always behindhand and lamenting it, without altering her ways; wishing to be an economist, without contrivance or regularity; dissatisfied with her servants, without skill to make them better, and whether helping, or reprimanding, or indulging them, without any power of engaging their respect.
Austen's humanity comes through here, damning Mrs. Price in swift, precise strokes, yet somehow managing to leaven the attack (how does she do it?) with a hint of pity. Then there's this:
(Fanny) might scruple to make use of the words, but she must and did feel that her mother was a partial, ill-judging parent, a dawdle, a slattern, who neither taught nor restrained her children, whose house was the scene of mismanagement and discomfort from beginning to end, and who had no talent, no conversation, no affection towards herself; no curiosity to know her better, no desire of her friendship, and no inclination of her company that could lessen her sense of such feelings.
Notice that when Austen switches to Fanny's point of view, that lingering whiff of sympathy evaporates entirely: only condemnation remains. I'm guessing this is because, whatever else she may be, Mrs. Price is funny; and for that reason Austen can't bring herself to vilify her entirely. Her heroine, however, has no use for humor of any kind, in any form. We never see Fanny laugh; we barely ever see her smile. And I'm betting that smile could crack a slab of concrete in two.
There's more opprobrium to be heaped: on Betsey ("a spoilt child, trained up to think the alphabet her greatest enemy, left to be with the servants at her pleasure, and then encouraged to report any evil of them"), and of Susan ("her continual disagreements with her mother, her rash squabbles with Tom and Charles, and petulance with Betsey, were at least so distressing to Fanny…she feared the disposition that could push them to such length must be far from amiable"), so that Fanny, far from putting Mansfield from her mind, now can't help thinking dreamily back on the place, with its "elegance, propriety, regularity, harmony—and most of all, the peace and tranquillity" of the house and its environs.
At Mansfield, no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence was ever heard; all proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness…and as to the little irritations, sometimes introduced by aunt Norris, they were short, they were trifling, they were as a drop of water to the ocean, compared to the ceaseless tumult of her present abode.
Alas for Fanny, ceaseless tumult makes for better comedy than cheerful orderliness, and I can't imagine any reader being eager to see her escape the snapping jaws of Portsmouth for the blissful shades of Mansfield, where the most stirring event of any given day is when Lady Bertram rises from her chaise longue and makes glacially for the settee. We'd much rather see the rest of the cast came down and join Fanny here.
And as a matter of fact, we'll get a bit of that next time. I won't spoil it by telling you which member of the cast; but here's a big hint: from Fanny's point of view? Worst. Choice. Possible.

Mansfield Park, chapters 34-36

As I write this, Hurricane Irene is hammering the east coast, providing the obvious (if rather prosaic) analogy for the state in which we find Fanny Price: deluged on all sides by encouragement, expectations, and exhortations that she marry Henry Crawford, who has, in a fit of romantic fervor bordering on (if not edging into) flat-out insanity, pledged her his troth. The newest battering ram to attempt to breach Fanny's Citadel Of No is Edmund, who has returned to Mansfield belatedly—"His absence had been extended beyond a fortnight purposely to avoid Miss Crawford"—only to find, to his surprise, that Miss Crawford is still hanging around. Which is just fine, because the closer he drew to Mansfield, the more he repented of deliberately missing her. And when he arrives and finds her not only still there but once more the vivacious and flirtatious little minx she used to be—and when he learns that the reason she's still there and suddenly so coquettish, is her brother's pursuit of Fanny's chilly hand—well, you better believe he gets on the Henry-Fanny bandwagon.

But after his first dinner at home, Sir Thomas takes him aside and gives him the whole sorry story of how that Henry-Fanny bandwagon has gotten mired in some serious mud flats. Fanny, who sees the two men go off together, deduces instantly that she's to be their object of discussion, and as usual she dies about a million deaths at the idea of being noticed by anyone, anytime, anywhere, ever.
When Edmund returns from the interview, he sits beside her and takes her hand in his and presses it kindly; and Fanny takes this as a sign that he understands her, he supports her, he's her champion, her stalwart, her BMOC.
Except…um, not so much.
He was not intending…by such action, to be conveying to her that unqualified approbation and encouragement which her hopes drew from it…He was, in fact, entirely on his father's side of the question…Sir Thomas could not regard the connection as more desirable than he did. It had every recommendation to him, and while honouring her for what she had done under the influence of her present indifference…he was most earnest in hoping, and sanguine in believing, that it would be a match at last…
Up to now Edmund has been Fanny's lodestar, whose supreme authority has directed her every move; so we can imagine his confusion when now, seemingly out of nowhere, she's suddenly all you-are-not-the-boss-of-me. And yet give him credit: while he doesn't understand it, he at least knows Fanny well enough to hit on the exact right course of action. He "saw enough of (her) embarrassment to make him scrupulously guard against exciting it a second time, by any word, or look, or movement." This is also excellent advice for training skittish animals, with the difference that skittish animals are usually worth the trouble.
Fanny, of course, is only resisting his blandishments because she's secretly in love with him; unbeknownst to him, the only thing he can't command her to do, is take another man in his place.
And yet…let me just bring this to the table. Jane Austen is no stranger to romantic and even erotic tension. We can actively feel Colonel Brandon's stabbing pangs every time Marianne Dashwood enters a room. We could cut with a butter knife the thick haze of longing, duty and grief that fills any given space between Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars. And even with their claws out (maybe especially with their claws out), we can feel the entire universe around Lizzy Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, constricting into a small, cozy cocoon of inevitability.
And yet I don't for a moment feel anything between Fanny and Edmund. Between Fanny and Mary Crawford, oh hell yes…and between Henry and Fanny—well, on Henry's part, at least, it's strong enough to lift me momentarily out of my chair, like when your car sails over a speed bump. But Fanny's professed feelings for Edmund?...Austen tells me they're there, and I'm forced to believe her for the sake of the narrative, but it's a purely intellectual exercise. It doesn't register in my chest or twinge in my thighs, or set my toes a-thrumming the way her other matches do. Fanny has always seemed, and continues to seem, like an emotional nihilist, her displays of feeling no more than involuntary muscle spasms.
To be fair, possibly the same may be said for Henry, because when he now returns to Mansfield Park to continue wooing Fanny, Edmund has his first chance to observe him in the act, and to see how Fanny rewards him…which as we all know is with the sort of enthusiasm most of us exhibit for imminent periodontal surgery.
…(Edmund) was almost ready to wonder at his friend's perseverance.—Fanny was worth it all; he held to her to be worth every effort of patience, every exertion of mind—but he did not think he could have gone on himself with any woman breathing, without something more to warm his courage than his eyes could discern in hers.
So we have to wonder whether Henry is any more genuine in his feeling than Fanny is in hers; possibly he's got one eye in a mirror, and is enjoying his performance as the ardent lover, more than he's actually feeling ardent love. I'm not saying this to disrespect him; all romantic love begins somewhere—in lust, or in laughter, or in a particularly intense shared experience—and it's only time and familiarity that galvanize it into genuine, lasting affection. Henry Crawford is absolutely capable of becoming, from these beginnings, the kind of man Fanny Price deserves. (Quite a bit better than she deserves, I'd say.) But he can't do it alone; and without Fanny's help and direction, he's bound sooner or later to come to wreck on the shoals.
Her refusal to acknowledge any good in him at all is made even more maddening by an episode immediately following, in which he and Edmund come across Fanny and Lady Bertram seated together quietly. Lady Bertram volunteers the information that Fanny has just been reading to her from a volume of Shakespeare ("she was in the middle of a very fine speech of that man's—What's his name, Fanny?—when we heard your footsteps"), but had hastily put the book down. Because, see, if they caught her reading, they would look at her, and listen to her, and just generally be aware of her presence on planet Earth. Can't have that.
Henry, being a bit of a grandstander (in the nicest possible way—and I mean, seriously, if any novel needed a grandstander, it's this one), plucks up the book and asks if anyone would mind him continuing where Fanny left off. Lady Bertram wouldn't mind at all, and as for Fanny, she doesn't even reply; she's facing the opposite direction, apparently using her telescopic vision to minutely observe the travails of a community of rice harvesters in Japan. (The girl is by far the rudest of all Austen's heroines. Possibly all Austen's villainesses, too.)
So Henry plunges in. The very fine speech, we learn, was one of Cardinal Wolsey's from Henry VIII, and when it concludes Henry just keeps on going with the rest of the play. And though Fanny does her best to pretend not to listen, burrowing her head down into her needlework so closely that she's in danger of sewing a button onto her nostril, she can't help herself.
She could not abstract her mind five minutes; she was forced to listen; his reading was capital, and her pleasure in good reading extreme. To good reading, however, she had been long used; her uncle read well—her cousins all—Edmund very well; but in Mr. Crawford's reading there was a variety of excellence beyond what she had ever met with. The King, the Queen, Buckingham, Wolsey, Cromwell, all were given in turn; for with the happiest knack, the happiest power of jumping and guessing, he could always light, at will, on the best scene, or the best speeches of each; and whether it were dignity or pride, or tenderness or remorse, or whatever were to be expressed, he could do it with equal beauty.—It was truly dramatic.
Edmund watches Fanny with interest, seeing how "she gradually slackened in her needle-work…and at last, how the eyes which had appeared so studiously to avoid him throughout the day, were turned and fixed on Crawford." Unfortunately, Henry VIII eventually comes to an end, and since neither Shakespeare nor the Tudor dynasty was sufficiently thoughtful to provide us with a Henry IX, Crawford is forced to close the book, and just like that the spell is broken. Fanny becomes self-aware again, and curls up into a ball like a chinoiserie possum.
Edmund hurriedly tries to keep Fanny's admiration from flagging by prompting it with his own. "That play must be a favorite with you," he tells Henry; "You read as if you knew it well."
"It will be a favourite I believe from this hour," replied Crawford; "—but I do not think I have had a volume of Shakespeare in my hand before, since I was fifteen—I once saw Henry the 8th acted.—Or I have heard of it from somebody who did—I am not certain which."
To hell with Fanny Price…I'll marry this guy.
There follows a page of two of praise for Shakespeare, interlaced with praise for Henry Crawford, and if you're not paying close attention you might lose track of which is being praised when. Lady Bertram, roused to dizzying heights of admiration, is moved to declare, "You have a great turn for acting, I am sure, Mr. Crawford…and I will tell you what, I think you will have a theatre, some time or other, at your house in Norfolk. I mean when you are settled there. I do, indeed. I think you will fit up a theatre at your house in Norfolk." And Henry says in response:
"No, no, that will never be. Your Ladyship is quite mistaken. No theatre at Everingham! Oh! no."—And he looked at Fanny with an expressive smile, which evidently meant, "that lady will never allow a theatre at Everingham."
Now, if he pulled that on Elinor Dashwood, she'd have given him a glare that would sink him right through the floorboards. Marianne would have snarked on him so hard, he'd topple backwards in his chair. And Lizzy Bennet would've said something so artfully devastating that it wouldn't be till later, when he tried to get up, that he saw she'd sheared his legs clean off. But Fanny? Fanny just…withdraws. I heard nothing, he said nothing, I'm not listening, I'm not here.
Henry goes on to lament the dearth of good reading in his own profession, which amazingly excites some interest from Henry (possibly he's faking it for effect; but come on, isn't that the basis of all good manners?). He peppers Edmund with questions about his ordination and his hopes of success…questions asked "with the vivacity of friendly interest and quick taste—without any touch of that spirit of banter and levity which Edmund knew to be most offensive to Fanny…"
...and when Crawford proceeded to ask his opinion and give his own as to the properest manner in which particular passages in the service should be delivered, shewing it to be a subject on which he had thought before, and thought with judgment, Edmund was still more and more pleased. This would be the way to Fanny's heart.
Fanny's heart. Send out a search party.
At one point Henry pauses in the midst of a mildly self-effacing spiel and, sensing a reaction from Fanny, turns to her and says, "Did you speak?" and when she insists she didn't, he won't let go: "Are you sure you did not speak? I saw your lips move. I fancied you might be going to tell me I ought to be more attentive, and not allow my thoughts to wander. Are you not going to tell me so?" Fanny makes the mistake of beginning a reply to the contrary—something beyond her usual monosyllabic bleat—and then she realizes, uh-oh, she's walked into his trap. She has allowed herself to engage the enemy.
She stopped, felt herself getting into a puzzle, and could not be prevailed on to add another word, not by dint of several minutes of supplication and waiting. He then returned to his former station, and went on as if there had been no such tender interruption.
So we've reached the point at which our nominal heroine is interrupting the flow of the narrative, in her own novel. And she does it again a page later, shaking her head in disapproval at something Henry says, so that he's immediately by her side asking What, what, tell me what I said to displease you, and she does everything but take up her needle and stitch her mouth shut. But eventually Henry wears down her resistance—yes, he really does it; it's a superhuman effort and anyone who's made it this far is going to need a nap afterwards, possibly preceded by a good stiff drink—but he actually pokes and prods and pesters Fanny to the point that she's provoked into honestly saying something…into admitting that yeah, it's nice Henry's such a stand-up guy now, what a shame he wasn't always that way.
Henry is delighted at having got Fanny to reveal the root of her problem with him: she still holds it very much against him that he stirred up such a sexual hornet's on his first arrival in Mansfield. And he attacks this perception with all the rhetorical ability at his command, which is, let me tell you, a lot of rhetorical ability. What it boils down to is, I've changed, and you will see that I've changed, and you will see that I am worthy of you. He's so confident, you expect him to slap a ten-pound note on the table and make it an outright wager.
Fanny has nothing left in her arsenal of denial except the weapon of last resort: flight. And she's actually considering it—she's on the point of hiking her skirt above her ankles and making a runner for the door—when Baddeley, clearly not content with his supporting role in the last chapter, comes barging in with the tea things. The spotlight immediately shifts to him (he may well seize the opportunity to execute a few soft-shoe moves and crack a joke). Fanny is saved…but even so is left gasping for air. She's in trouble now, and she knows it.
And in fact, the next assault on her defenses is soon under way. The day for the Crawfords' departure from Mansfield is fixed, and as it draws nearer, Sir Thomas decides he can't let that dreamy Henry get away without at least one last encounter with Fanny, "that all his professions and vows of unshaken attachment might have as much hope to sustain them as possible." Clearly Sir Thomas hasn't been watching Fanny too carefully, or he'd have noticed that the mere mention of Henry's name is enough for her to make like that cartoon character who hides by jumping into a hole and pulling the hoe in after him. But in another respect, he's pretty canny:
Sir Thomas was most cordially anxious for the perfection of Mr. Crawford's character in that point. He wished him to be a model of constancy; and fancied the best means of effecting it would be by not trying him too long.
This is the first laugh we've had in God knows how many pages. It reminds us of what we read Austen for in the first place, and wonder if maybe, God willing, she's finally getting back to it.
But first we have another excruciating scene between Edmund and Fanny. The former is enlisted by his father to massage Fanny's rigor-mortis grip on the word "no" sufficiently to allow for one last meeting with Henry. Edmund agrees, but being a noble sort, he undertakes it more for Fanny's sake than anyone else's, for "he must be of service to her, whom else had she to open her heart to? If she did not need counsel, she must need the comfort of communication." All right, I admit it, I do like Edmund; he'll never top my list of longed-for dinner guests, but he'd be a stand-up guy to have beside you in a pinch.
Fanny's spirits are so woefully depleted that she's skittish of Edmund when he comes upon her in the garden; he essentially has to coax her out of her wariness, like she's an untrusting dog who won't come out from under the bed. But Edmund, alas, has only words to work with, Kibble not yet having been invented.
He does the best he can, by first telling her "(Y)ou have done exactly as you ought in refusing (Henry). Can there be any disagreement between us here?" Fanny, emerging tentatively from her thicket of thorns, admits there isn't. Edmund, sensing the road to success, piles it on, adding, "How could you imagine me an advocate for marriage without love?" and "You did not love him—nothing could have justified your accepting him."
Fanny, we're told, "had not felt so comfortable for days and days." Edmund's got her on her back, wiggling to have her tummy scratched. And that's when he lowers the boom.
"Crawford's is no common attachment; he perseveres, with the hope of creating that regard which had not been created before. This, we know, must be a work of time. But (with an affectionate smile), let him succeed at last, Fanny, let him succeed at last. You have proved yourself upright and disinterested, prove yourself grateful and tender-hearted; and then you will be the perfect model of a woman, which I have always believed you born for."
And Fanny''s back up on her feet, hackles raised and snarling. "Oh! never, never, never; he will never succeed with me."
Right, I get it; she loves Edmund…so it's repugnant to have Edmund himself urge her on another man she can't (ahem, won't) esteem. But I'm reminded again of Elinor Dashwood, who stood stoically aside rather than tempt the man she loved from honoring his youthful commitment to a woman more reptile than human. The circumstances aren't analogous except in the sense that Elinor held herself to a higher standard; to an ideal. Fanny refuses to do the same. She recognizes the claims of authority, gratitude, and obedience that the Bertram family have on her; she just refuses to honor them. 
Even worse, she still insists on hiding her real reason for refusing Henry: that he isn't Edmund. Fine, maybe she can't openly admit this, but there's something cringeworthy about the way she actively tries to hide it, claiming the reason she can't love Henry is that "we are so very, very different in all our inclinations…We have not one taste in common." Which Edmund immediately calls out as bullshit—citing Shakespeare right of the top of his head.
Edmund does admit that their temperaments are different, but this, he says, is an advantage rather than the opposite. "It is your disposition to be easily dejected, and to fancy difficulties greater than they are. His cheerfulness will counteract this. He sees difficulties no where; and his pleasantness and gaiety will be a constant support to you." He goes on a bit too long in this vein, however, and Fanny soon twigs that he's speaking less of her and Henry, than of himself and Mary. So, nnnnot exactly helpful.
Fanny has only one card left to play: the one she's so nobly held to her breast till now. But she's cornered, dammit, so to hell with morality…and thus she finally throws her cousins under the bus, telling Edmund that she can never think well of Henry because of the way he willfully, improperly, and gleefully incited Maria and Julia into acting like contestants on Flavor of Love. But alas, she's waited too long, and the trump card no longer trumps. As far as Edmund is concerned, the statute of limitations has long since kicked in for that particular misadventure.
"My dear Fanny," replied Edmund, scarcely hearing her to the end, "let us not, any of us, be judged by what we appeared at that period of general folly. The time of the play is a time which I hate to recollect. Maria was wrong, Crawford was wrong, we were all wrong together; but none so wrong as myself. Compared with me, all the rest were blameless. I was playing the fool with my eyes open."
Is there anything so satisfying as having a tattle-tale put in her place…? Edmund then follows through with the logic most of us have already twigged to, which is that Henry's former bad behavior is put in the shade by his subsequent reformation and by his ability not only to recognize but to love Fanny's finer qualities:
"It does him the highest honour; it shews his proper estimation of the blessing of domestic happiness, and pure attachment. It proves him unspoilt by his uncle. It proves him, in short, everything I had been used to wish to believe him, and feared he was not."
Fanny testily counters, "I am persuaded that he does not think as he ought, on serious subjects." Which Edmund again excuses, because, hello, given the virtual brothel he grew up in, how can he be expected to have thought on serious subjects at all? But his heart's in the right place, and Fanny can help guide him to a more substantial manhood. "He will make you happy, Fanny, I know he will make you happy; but you will make him every thing."
This is a distinctly Christian appeal; but Fanny's Christianity is of the moralizing, judgmental variety, not the self-sacrificing, soul-saving kind. She begs off from rescuing Henry Crawford because it is "such an office of high responsibility"—but Edmund shoots that down too. He isn't just generally interested in Henry's happiness; he has a very specific investment in the Crawford family's felicity. You do know that, right, Fanny?...I mean, come on.
And just like that he's off on another recitation of the many, many things that make Mary Crawford just oh so superfine. And shame on Fanny for having shunted her aside, at this moment when she's just bursting with sisterly love for both Henry and Fanny. "She is hurt, as you be would be for William; but she loves and esteems you with all her heart."
And so it goes, for many pages more, with Edmund hitting Fanny with wave after wave of reason, duty, filial entreaties, and borderline exasperation, and Fanny emerging after each dousing, coughing and spitting and still saying no, no, no, no, no. Finally Edmund mortifies her by revealing that Fanny's unflinching reticence has become a kind of joke, even among the Crawfords themselves:
"Miss Crawford made us laugh by her plans of encouragement for her brother. She meant to urge him to persevere in the hope of being loved in time, and of having his addresses most kindly received at the end of about ten years' happy marriage!"
We laugh at this. (And we love Mary all the more for it, too. Girl's a Hanoverian Dorothy Parker.) But you can imagine Fanny's reaction. For someone with a morbid, almost pathological loathing of being noticed, how much worse to know she's not just being discussed behind her back, but laughed at? "…(T)o have Miss Crawford's liveliness repeated to her at such a moment, and on such a subject, was a bitter aggravation."
Seeing the look of Saharan desolation that now dims Fanny's eyes, Edmund realizes he's gone far enough: he'd better lay off before he drives her right out of Mansfield Park and into Tess of the d'Urbevilles or something. But he does confirm that the Crawfords are leaving after the weekend, so both he and Fanny will be sure to see them for a final goodbye on Sunday. "They really go on Monday!" he sighs. "(A)nd I was within a trifle of being persuaded to stay at Lessingby till that very day! I had almost promised it. What a difference it might have made. Those five or six days more at Lessingby might have been felt all my life." Yes, Edmund is once again crushing hard on Mary Crawford. Hey, I get it; my only criticism is that he ever stopped.
When Sunday arrives, Fanny predictably faces it with all the upright moral courage of a small scavenging rodent. "The promised visit from her 'friend,' as Edmund called Miss Crawford"—ahem, may I just pause here to object to those snarky quotation marks? If Mary isn't Fanny's friend, then Fanny doesn't have one—"was a formidable threat to Fanny, and she lived in continual terror of it," and sure enough we see her clinging like a barnacle to Lady Bertram lest Mary arrive and catch her alone; she all but hides herself under Lady B's voluminous petticoat.
When Mary arrives, however, she's undaunted by Lady Bertram's presence (which even on its best days is hard to distinguish from an absence), and after a few minutes of paying her respects she just comes right out and insists on seeing Fanny alone. "Denial was impossible," we're told, though I don't see why, Fanny has spent the entire novel denying far more to far greater numbers. Fanny trudges on up to the East Room—no condemned wife of Henry VIII ever went to the block dragging her heels more desolately—while behind her Mary says, "Sad, sad girl! I do not know when I shall have done scolding you."
But as soon as Mary is once again admitted to Fanny's little bolt-hole, she's taken aback by an unexpected bout of nostalgia; she hasn't been here since that day during the Lovers' Vows rehearsal, when she and Edmund both showed up separately and ended up seated in this very spot, trading suggestive lines with each other while Fanny looked on, trying to make Mary's chair collapse through telekinesis. All the anger floods out of Mary, as she luxuriates in the renewed sensations of that afternoon, and of all the days that preceded it.
"If I had the power of recalling any one week of my existence, it should that week, that acting week. Say what you would, Fanny, it should be that; for I never knew such exquisite happiness in any other. His sturdy spirit to bend as it did! Oh! it was sweet beyond expression. But alas! that very evening destroyed it all…Yet, Fanny, do not imagine I would speak disrespectfully of Sir Thomas, though I certainly did hate him for many a week. No, I do him justice now. He is just what the head of such a family should be. Nay, in sober sadness, I believe I now love you all."
So says Fanny's "friend," as Edmund calls her.
To be fair, Fanny is affected by this speech, and by those that follow, in which Mary elaborates on her unconcealed fondness for her and her regret at leaving her. But Fanny is unable to respond in kind. She merely listens, her withered, stunted, crabbed little spirit jerking spasmodically at the pricks and prods Mary's lightning storm of emotion delivers it, without being inspired to anything equally grand or forgiving; as ever, Fanny remains utterly immune to transcendence.
With her "little fit", as she merrily calls it, now concluded, Mary eases back into the kind of breezy, cheeky, sophisticated prattle we originally loved her for, and which reminds us—and by this time, sweet creeping Jesus, we need reminding—that we're reading a Jane Austen novel. Unfortunately, one of the gossipy stories she tells—about a friend of hers, a certain Janet Fraser who married a rich man and has been regretting it ever since—doesn't do her any favors in her current company:
"Poor Janet has been sadly taken in; and yet there was nothing improper on her side; she did not run into the match inconsiderately, there was no want of foresight. She took three days to consider of his proposals; and during those three days asked the advice of every body connected with her, whose opinion was worth having…This seems as if nothing were a security for matrimonial comfort!"
You can almost feel the grim satisfaction Fanny takes from this story, and the strength it gives her to hold out against the entire goddamn world, if necessary. She won't make the same mistake as Janet Fraser. The Risen Christ could come forth and command her to marry Henry, and she'd shoot him down like a game hen.
Mary commits another tactical error by revealing that the necklace Mary had given her for William's pendant—a necklace Fanny was later horrified to learn had been Mary's gift from Henry himself—was actually intended for Fanny by both sister and brother. They'd conspired to get it around her neck. And so it ends up being Fanny who scolds Mary, rather than the reverse:
"I will not say…that I was not half afraid at the time, of its being so; for there was something in your look that frightened me—but not at first—I was as unsuspicious of it at first!—indeed, indeed I was. It is as true as that I sit here. And had I had an idea of it, nothing would have induced me to accept the necklace."
That "frightening" look in Mary's eye…possibly it was an earnest desire to give joy and happiness to her friend. Excuse me, "friend." If this is really Austen's gambit to build a case against Mary before the final shoe drops, she's just not convincing me. She's an ambitious writer, we know this, we've seen her astonishing development over a mere three novels—I can well believe she's trying to challenge herself, to make Mary vastly more complex a rival than Lucy Steele or Caroline Bingley—but there's a whiplash feeling to the whole endeavor, as when Mary suddenly admits that Fanny's right, Henry was out of line in the way he carried on with Maria.
"I do not defend him. I leave him entirely to your mercy; and when he has got you at Everingham, I do not care how much you lecture him. But this I will say, this his fault, the liking to make girls a little in love with him, is not half so dangerous to a wife's happiness, as a tendency to fall in love himself, which he has never been addicted to. And I do seriously and truly believe that he is attached to you in a way he never was to any woman before…If any man ever loved a woman for ever, I think Henry will do as much for you."
Fanny, of course, has only heard the first part of this speech; the rest is just waa waa waaah. Her moment of being affected by Mary's honest love for her and her family, is gone; she's back to being her coal-hearted self, a vengeful vessel for Old Testament intransigence.
Mary takes her leave of Fanny with more warm expressions of affection and enduring friendship, and asks only two favors of her: first that she write to her, and second that she "often call on Mrs. Grant and make her amends for my being gone."
The first, at least, of these favours Fanny would rather not have been asked; but it was impossible for her to refuse the correspondence: it was impossible for her even not to accede to it more readily than her own judgment authorized. There was no resisting so much apparent affection.
Apparent affection. Fanny just will not give Mary a break here—but when does she ever give anyone a break, ever? When Henry comes to sit with her before he too departs (that's what we're told—he "came and sat"—so I'm guessing he's already given up trying to lure her into a conversation), Fanny's heart is sufficiently softened "because he really seemed to feel…He was evidently oppressed, and Fanny must grieve for him, though hoping she might never see him again till he were the husband of some other woman." Hey, I'm with her on that one. Though for his sake, not hers.
And so the Crawfords—twin whirlwinds of laughter and chatter and joy and cheerfulness and mischief and incaution and, well, life—are swept out of the narrative, leaving Fanny Price at long last free to…what, exactly? The heroine of Mansfield Park, the central figure of this story and the supposed repository of all our hopes and fantasies…she's now free to do—exactly what?

Mansfield Park, chapters 31-33

We now come to a stretch of the narrative that's actually difficult to read without cringing. Henry Crawford—brash, impulsive, confident to the point of arrogance—launches a full-scale charm offensive against Fanny, and despite the many ways in which he missteps and offends, it's hard to feel other than pity for him; because he's a man of action—frenetic action, indiscriminate action—and in his campaign to win Fanny's heart he happily seizes on any weapon at hand and batters away at her tirelessly, talking all the while—or if not talking winking, gesturing, or clearing his throat across a crowded room at her.
And she?...Of course she does nothing. She withdraws ever further into her tortoise shell of refusal, and seems ready, willing, and able to just wait out the storm of attention. It's very much a case of irresistible force meeting immovable object, though in this instance the irresistible force is at a disadvantage, because it's fueled merely by the ardor of a young man's fancy, while Fanny Price is fueled by the universe-devouring power of entropy.
Henry starts well, arriving at Mansfield Park with a coup in his pocket. He finds Fanny with Lady Bertram in the breakfast room, but by a stroke of luck, the latter is "on the very point of quitting it as he entered."
She was almost at the door, and not chusing by any means to take so much trouble in vain, she still went out, after a civil reception, a short sentence about being waited for, and a "Let Sir Thomas know," to the servant.
Clearly, on the rare occasions when Lady Bertram is forced from her usual state of inertia to one of actual locomotion, she's not about to allow anything like good manners or hospitality interrupt her single-minded trek towards the next place she can sit down.
Henry, "overjoyed to have her go," now plops himself down next to Fanny and with barely a preamble—hell, with barely a hello—he flourishes some letters in her face and crows in triumph.
"Knowing as I do what your feelings as a sister are, I could hardly have borne that any one in the house should share with you in the first knowledge of the news I bring. He is made. Your brother is a Lieutenant. I have the infinite satisfaction of congratulating you on your brother's promotion. Here are the letters which announce it, this moment come to hand. You will, perhaps, like to see them."
He drops them into her lap, then gets up and pimp-walks around the room, pausing only to slam-dunk a few invisible hoops. Because Henry—as Fanny discovers when she reads the letters with darting, rabbity eyes—is the man responsible for her beloved brother's promotion. It turns out that this was the nature of his clandestine mission in town a few chapters back: to introduce William to his uncle, the much-maligned Admiral, and see what the old reprobate might do for him. Which, as it turns out, is quite a bit.
"I will not talk of my own happiness…great as it is, for I think only of yours," Henry says, just before launching into an almost epic-length discourse on his own happiness. "How impatient, how anxious, how wild I have been on the subject, I will not attempt to describe," he says of his endeavors on William's behalf, right before describing in explicit detail exactly how important, how anxious, and has wild he has been in pursuit of them. It's hard to blame him, as Fanny all but eggs him on, asking him repeatedly for clarification in a way that leads us to believe she might not be the sharpest pin in the cushion.
"Has this been all your doing, then?...Good Heaven! how very, very kind! Have you really—was it by your desire—I beg your pardon, but I am bewildered. Did Admiral Crawford apply?—how was it?—I am stupefied."
Henry is "most happy to make it more intelligible," and his eagerness gets the better of him because he's soon larding his narration with some heavily dropped hints—using "such strong expression…so abounding in the deepest interest, in two-fold motives, in views and wishes more than could be told, that Fanny could not have remained insensible of his drift, had she been able to attend," but alas she's too busy plucking her lower lip and staring at the letters, and asking him to wait, wait, start over again: you did this?
Eventually she twigs to the whole story (possibly the first buds of spring have made their appearance by this time), and overcome by emotion she jumps up—we think, to throw herself into Henry's arms, which come on, is what he's been angling for and no less than what he deserves—but no, she sprints immediately for the door, announcing her eagerness to tell her uncle the good news.
And here's where Henry screws the pooch; he doesn't let her go. Which is how we can tell the poor lad's really smitten. The old Henry—the Henry who played Maria and Julia Bertram like mice in a maze, getting them to turn whichever way he wanted by strategically releasing edible pellets—that Henry is gone, and in his place is this headlong creature who is too impatient to allow Fanny time to dwell on his kindness to William—to allow her heart to soften by degrees. It's like he's got every Broadway show-tune ever written clanging away in his ears, so that he's driven to stake everything on a wild throw of the dice. He blocks her escape, asking for five minutes more; and when she balks at that, he ups the ante and asks for the entire rest of her life. Not a shy one, our Henry. And of course, while Fanny is still reeling—possibly literally, like a top—he moves in for the kill. "He pressed her for an answer," Austen tells us, and you get the idea she's maybe speaking literally; like, he pins her behind a door, or under a sofa cushion, and refuses to let her loose until she says yes, yes, I'll marry you, please, I can't breathe.
Fanny responds, as Fanny always does, with a grapeshot spray of concealment, refusal, denial, and flight.
"No, no, no," she cried, hiding her face. "This is all nonsense. Do not distress me. I can hear no more of this. Your kindness to William makes me more obliged to you than words can express; but I do not want, I cannot bear, I must not listen to such—No, no, don't think of me. But you are not thinking of me. I know it is all nothing."
I could write a dissertation on this paragraph alone. It's the most archetypal of all Fanny's speeches in the book.
Henry, unfortunately, is congenitally immune to the word "no"—I doubt he even hears it; it turns to butterflies and disperses before it reaches his ear—so of course he pursues her, but has the bad luck to run into Sir Thomas, and so must stop and pay his respects—"though to part with her at a moment when her modesty alone seemed to his sanguine and pre-assured mind to stand in the way of the happiness he sought, was a cruel necessity." Meantime, Fanny squirrels herself away in the East Room and reflects on the turn of events.
It was all beyond belief! He was inexcusable, incomprehensible!—But such were his habits, that he could do nothing without a mixture of evil. He had previously made her the happiest of human beings, and now he had insulted—she knew not what to say—how to class or how to regard it. She would not have him be serious, and yet what could excuse the use of such words and offers, if they meant but to trifle?
This is about as much effort as she'll ever take towards trying to understand Henry's declaration—to considering Henry as a person at all. Granted, he made a bad first impression by the callous way he toyed with Maria and Julia; but Fanny seems unwilling to recognize any change in him—any possibility of change—even though she herself is its apparent catalyst.
This is a misstep on Austen's part…at least in our eyes. Popular culture has conditioned us—has virtually indoctrinated us—to look approvingly on rogues rehabilitated by love; in fact, to expect that bad boys will become good men through the agency of a good woman. We've learned to like this story, and to enjoy seeing it played out over and over again, in only slightly modified variations. You might argue that Austen is literature, not popular culture, and that we should allow for more complexity in her works than we find in a Lifetime Original Movie; and that's a valid point. But I'd argue that Austen is both literature and popular culture—and that with her novels she played a critical part in the invention of popular culture. Many of the genre conventions we associate with romantic comedy and social satire, stem from her; so when she herself appears to violate them, it jars. Our modern, humanist sensibilities enjoy seeing the charmingly caustic, laconically cynical Henry Crawford turn into a slobbery golden retriever in pursuit of Fanny—and we resent Fanny for not enjoying it as well, and rewarding him for it.
This brings us to a crucial point that we'll be discussing further as the plot deepens: our ethical sympathies will remain with Fanny as she's increasingly pushed toward accepting Henry against her will; after all, one of the foundations of liberal democracy is the right to self-determination, and as a society we abhor all forms of coercion. Yet at the same time we can't help being impatient with Fanny as well; like those who will try to strong-arm her into accepting Henry as a husband, we're annoyed that she won't even take a goddamn look at the guy. It's especially perverse behavior for someone whose entire life is devoted to her own self-abasement; what, now she's suddenly too good for someone?
As it happens, I've been rereading Robert Graves's Claudius The God concurrently with Mansfield Park, and there's a section early on in which Graves has Claudius define certain men as being "always true to a single extreme character," and then divide them into four categories: scoundrels with stony hearts, virtuous men with stony hearts, virtuous men with golden hearts, and—"most rarely found"—scoundrels with golden hearts. These character types (expanded to include women) tally neatly with the cast of Mansfield Park. Aunt Norris, for instance, is obviously a scoundrel with a stony heart; and Edmund, while admittedly a dry old stick, is unarguably a virtuous man with a golden heart.
More revelatory is the recognition of Fanny as a virtuous woman with a stony heart (unlike Edmund's, her heart never yields to persuasion, nor bends to supplication), which helps explain nearly all of her inherent contradictions. And then there's Henry Crawford, who provides a classic example of the scoundrel with a golden heart. There's no question that in our day we vastly prefer the golden-hearted scoundrels to the stony-hearted saints; but I've seen enough 18th Century literature to venture a guess that this was true in Austen's time as well. So again we're left a-wonderin'.
Fanny hides in the East Room all day to avoid any risk of a further encounter with Henry, but uh-oh, he's been invited to dinner, and so she's forced to go down and face him. Or rather, to not face him—to engage instead in an almost Pac-Man like game of shuttling around the room in avoidance of him, while he chugs along alternate routes trying to intersect her and, presumably, gobble her up.
To add to Fanny's discomfort, when he finally does catch her in an unguarded moment, he hands her a note from his sister that's so full of congratulations and best wishes and smiley faces and i's dotted with hearts that I'm pretty sure some of it spilled over onto the envelope. And while we can excuse Henry for not yet having twigged to Fanny's refusal (because he's never been refused before, and does not understand this strange new concept), for him to have gone ahead and filled in the blank with actual acceptance when relating the story to his sister, is more than a tad boorish. So yeah, we can spare some pity for Fanny, pummeled by all those x's and o's from Mary's machine gun of sisterly love. But worse is coming.
First, though, there's a wonderful interlude with Aunt Norris, who's been far too infrequent a presence in these recent chapters. William's promotion is not the kind of news designed to delight her, since her principal aim, with regard to her Price nieces and nephews, is to make certain that they're kept firmly in their humble place; the idea being, presumably, that she can't be the poor relation while there are poorer still to point to.
And yet she surprises us: William's promotion has her positively bubbly…because it removes him from any further claim on her generosity. Not, of course, that she begrudges him her previous endowments. "She was very glad that she had given William what she did at parting, very glad indeed that it had been in her power, without material inconvenience just at that time, to give him something rather considerable"—which leads to this side-splitting exchange:
"I am glad you gave him something considerable," said Lady Bertram, with most unsuspicious calmness—"for I gave him only 10l."
"Indeed!" cried Mrs. Norris, reddening. "Upon my word, he must have gone off with his pockets well lined! and at no expense for his journey to London either!"
"Sir Thomas told me 10l. would be enough."
Mrs. Norris being not at all inclined to question its sufficiency, began to take the matter in another point.
Fanny meanwhile is still trying to force reality to fit her preferred reading of it. Mr. Crawford "once or twice" forces a look on her "which she did not know how to class among the common meaning; in any other man at least, she would have said that it meant something very earnest, very pointed. But she still tried to believe it no more than what he might often have expressed towards her cousins and fifty other women." Faced with something, she must reduce it to nothing. Faced with a presence, she must render it an absence. After "she carefully refused him every opportunity" of speaking with her, Mr. Crawford is forced finally to ask whether she will, at the very least, reply to his sister's note…?
Breeding demands that she do at least that, and so, "wishing not to appear to think any thing really intended" between herself and Henry, she pens a few evasive lines, concluding with, "I do not know what I write, but it would be a great favour of you never to mention the subject again." Everything she expresses in these chapters is just bathed in negation. When she opens her mouth, you hear the sound of doors slamming shut, one after another, after another, after another.
Having dismissed Henry with as little actual human contact as possible—she'd have returned the note to him through an airlock, if she could've manage it—she awakens the next day with him still on her mind, though "not less sanguine," as if sanguine is a word one would ever apply to Fanny Price. You might as well call her "frisky," or "rambunctious."
If Mr. Crawford would but go away!—That was what she most earnestly desired;—go and take his sister with him, as he was to do, and as he returned to Mansfield on purpose to do. And why it was not done already, she could not devise, for Miss Crawford certainly wanted no delay.
Keep in mind that Henry and Mary Crawford are pretty much Fanny's only friends in the world—almost the only people she knows at all, outside her family circle. She's spent the entire novel sneering at their affection for her, and now fervently wishes they'd just vamoose already. See what I'm sayin'? Heart. Of. Stone.
She's certain that her note to Mary must have put the kibosh on the whole marry-me-sweetheart business, so she's gobsmacked when she spies Henry skipping up the drive again. She bravely scurries back to her bolt hole, like a rodent evading a flashlight beam, and there she hunkers down to out-wait Henry's visit—which she's sure can't possibly have anything to do with her, because—well, because. Fanny logic.
Eventually there's a tread on the stair, and Fanny, at her most devoted-canine, recognizes it as Sir Thomas's, and suddenly there he is at the door, begging permission to come in. When she admits him (all a-tremble, again, because), he notices that she has no fire in the hearth, and questions her on this rather glaring lack; because it's the dead of winter, and hello, your fingernails are blue. Surely Lady Bertram can't be aware of this alarmingly Spartan state of affairs. Fanny—being virtuous (if stony-hearted)—has no wish to play stool pigeon, "but being obliged to speak, she could not forbear, in justice to the aunt she loved best, from saying something in which the words 'my aunt Norris' were distinguishable."
Sir Thomas heaves a page-long sigh in which he basically says, in the most refined phrases imaginable, I know your aunt Norris is a screaming bitch-queen from the black pit of tarnation, but for God's sake don't hate her for it or you'll turn out the same way and one of you is quite enough, thanks. Well, really, just listen to a little sampling from his version and imagine what a world it would be if we could all express our furious annoyance so with such mellifluous civility:
"I know what her sentiments have always been. The principle was good in itself, but it may have been, and I believe has been carried too far in your case.—I am aware that there has been sometimes, in some points, a misplaced distinction; but I think too well of you, Fanny, to suppose you will ever harbour resentment on that account…and of this you may be assured, that every advantage of affluence will be doubled by the little privations and restrictions that may have been imposed."
Sir Thomas Bertram and his amazing silver tongue, ladies and gentlemen. He's here all week. Tip your waitress. Try the Chicken Kiev.
Now down to the business of his remarkable appearance in Fanny's private lair. He's just had a visit from Henry Crawford, whose "errand you may probably conjecture." Yep, he's gone ahead and applied to Sir Thomas for Fanny's hand, and "done it all so well, so openly, so liberally, so properly," that Sir Thomas, who seems a tad smitten himself by Henry's dash and gallantry (you can almost sense the hot flush in his cheeks as he describes him), "was exceedingly happy to give the particulars of their conversation—and, little aware of what was passing in his niece's mind, conceived that by such details he must be gratifying her far more than himself." He concludes by entreating her to come downstairs and give her answer to Mr. Crawford in person.
You don't need to be told Fanny's reply. Hell, you could probably write it yourself. In fact, I'm thinking of designing a smart-phone app which will supply an appropriate Fanny Price response to any conceivable question. It'll be easy. I'll just program in the following words:
IMPOSSIBLE   CANNOT   UNWORTHY   UNTHINKABLE
INCONCEIVABLE   MISTAKEN   UNBEARABLE   UNABLE   
NO   NOT   NEVER   NOTHING
You'll press a button, and the words will reshuffle themselves with a few pronouns, verbs and articles thrown in, and there you'll have it: iFanny!
In this case she uses all the negatives in her command and several more besides. For his part, Sir Thomas is astonished to the point of anger, like a Justin Bieber fan confronted with a nonbeliever.
"There is something in this which my comprehension does not reach. Here is a young man wishing to pay his addresses to you, with every thing to recommend him; not merely situation in life, fortune, and character, but with more than common agreeableness, with address and conversation pleasing to every body. And he is not an acquaintance of to-day, you have now known him some time. His sister, moreover, is your intimate friend, and he has been doing that for your brother, which I should suppose would have been almost sufficient recommendation to you, had there been no other….You must have been…some time aware of a particularity in Mr. Crawford's manners to you. This cannot have taken you by surprise. You must have observed his attentions; and though you always received them very properly, (I have no accusation to make on that head,) I never perceived them to be unpleasant to you. I am half inclined to think, Fanny, that you do not quite know your own feelings."
She replies with another reshuffling of the Fanny app…and so it goes, with Sir Thomas bearing down on her with reason, authority, and a gentle but firm claim on her gratitude and indebtedness, and Fanny replying with more CANNOT UNTHINKABLE IMPOSSIBLE NEVER, until Sir Thomas is ready to pull his hair out at the roots, and Fanny is reduced to tears. You'd cry too, if he turned his admirable vowel sounds on you with this kind of opprobrium behind them:
"I had thought you peculiarly free from willfulness of temper, self-conceit, and every tendency to that independence of spirit, which prevails so much in modern days, even in young women, and which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offense. But you have now shewn me that you can be willful and perverse, that you can and will decide for yourself, without any consideration or deference for those who have surely some right to guide you—without even asking their advice."
Fanny has a trump card, which is the disclosure of Henry's character as it revealed itself during the whole Lovers' Vows imbroglio; but we're told she doesn't dare play it, because Julia and especially Maria are "so closely implicated in Mr. Crawford's misconduct, that she could not give his character, such as she believed it, without betraying them." I can respect that; and might be more inclined to do so, did Fanny not sully her own integrity a few paragraphs earlier, by willfully misleading Sir Thomas when he inquired—in the most delicate terms imaginable—whether her refusal of Mr. Crawford stems from another affection directed elsewhere (i.e. "Are you hot to trot for my son Edmund?").  "She would rather die than own the truth, and she hoped by a little reflection to fortify herself beyond betraying it." Mm-hmmm.
Reassured on this point, Sir Thomas backs off a bit; and being a kindly, fair-minded—seriously, the trash that gets talked about him in this novel is completely alien to what we see of him; the guy's a goddamn pussycat—he decides that a strategic retreat might be the very thing to salvage this whole fiasco. 
He knew her to be very timid, and exceedingly nervous; and thought it not improbably that her mind might be in such a state, as a little time, a little pressing, a little patience, and a little impatience, a judicious mixture of all on the lover's side, might work their usual effect. If the gentleman would be persevere, if he had but love enough to persevere—Sit Thomas began to have hopes…
Not much doubt on that score, is there? Golden-hearted Henry has more the enough love to persevere…even after Fanny flatly, steadfastly, and—I think—rudely refuses Sir Thomas's reasonable request to come down and give him the bad news herself. (I have to wonder what might happen if Sir Thomas insisted; how far would Fanny resist? Would he finally realize that what he takes for timidity is actually a stasis field, a powerful column of impenetrable inertia? If he dared place a hand on her to force her, would it wither right off his arm?) Sir Thomas manfully undertakes to deliver the blow himself, then comes back to report that Henry, when told of Fanny's unwillingness even to see him, "behaved in the most gentleman-like and generous manner…Upon my representation of what you were suffering, he immediately, and with the delicacy, ceased to urge to see you for the present." For the present, mind, so don't think you're off scot-free, Chiquita.
Sir Thomas concludes by saying, "I shall make no mention below of what has passed; I shall not even tell your aunt Bertram. There is no occasion for spreading the disappointment; say nothing about it yourself." Fanny is only too happy to comply, nothing being her most favorite thing of all to say. Sir Thomas follows this kindness with another—encouraging Fanny to go out for a walk to clear her mind—and yet another—having a fire waiting for her when she returns to the East Room. Apparently, we have another Virtuous Man With a Golden Heart on our hands. Who knew?
Ah, but what of the Scoundrel With the Heart of Stone?...Well, when she hears that Fanny's been out walking, she goes into a snit, railing away about how if she'd known Fanny was going out she could have recruited her to take some orders to her household staff, since "It would have made no difference to you, I suppose, whether you had walked in the shrubbery, or gone to my house." And not even Sir Thomas's interjection that it was he who recommended the shrubbery can put Mrs. Norris's nose back in joint. It's one of her minor performances, but given the steaming mass of emotional carnage we've just been through, it's refreshing to dip into some clear, cold cruelty. And she doesn't relent, either, continuing to snark out Fanny through the rest of the evening, despite Sir Thomas's increasingly obvious attempts to change the subject.
Mrs. Norris had not discernment enough to perceive, either now, or at any other time, to what degree he thought well of his niece, or how very far he was from wishing to have his own children's merits set off by the depreciation of hers. She was talking at Fanny, and resenting this private walk half through the dinner.
Sir Thomas's kindnesses lead Fanny to conclude hopefully (and as we know, wrongfully) that he's coming to terms with her refusal of Henry's proposal. But Sir Thomas still insists that Mr. Crawford has a right to hear that refusal from her own pinched lips. So the after the next day's tea, when the butler appears to summon Fanny to her uncle's office, she knows exactly what's going down. Aunt Norris, however, doesn't, and delivers up a really wonderful symphony of self-aggrandizement and snit:
"Stay, stay, Fanny! what are you about?—where are you going?—don't be in such a hurry. Depend upon it, it is not you that are wanted; depend upon it it is me…but you are so very eager to put yourself forward. What should Sir Thomas want you for? It is me, Baddeley, you mean; I am coming this moment. You mean me, Baddeley, I am sure; Sir Thomas wants me, not Miss Price."
But Baddeley was stout. "No, Ma'am, it is Miss Price, I am certain of it being Miss Price." And there was a half smile with the words which meant, "I do not think you would answer to the purpose at all."
Suddenly—as almost never happens in Jane Austen—a servant is not only brought to the fore as an individual character, and given an actual name; but we're allowed as well a glimpse into his private thoughts, and it's a wonderful moment indeed. What I wouldn't give to hear what Baddeley and his colleagues say about Mrs. Norris below stairs. (Or about Fanny, for that matter.) There's meat for an Austen "sequel" I'd actually want to read.
And so Fanny is finally forced to face her wooer, in a "conference [that] was neither so short, nor so conclusive, as the lady had designed." Because while she may be an earthly avatar for nullity and negation, it appears that Henry Crawford is her opposite principle: the incarnation of positivity and possibility. You could make a smart-phone app for him, too, using words like CERTAINLY, INEVITABLY, UNDOUBTEDLY, INDEED, and ABSO-FRACKIN'-LUTELY-ARE-YOU-KIDDIN'? His way of thinking makes Fanny's "affection appear of greater consequence, because it was withheld, and determined him to have the glory, as well as the felicity, of forcing her to love him."
He would not despair: he would not desist. He had every well-grounded reason for solid attachment; he knew her to have all the worth that could justify the warmest hopes of lasting happiness with her…He knew not that he had a pre-engaged heart to attack. Of that, he had no suspicion. He considered her rather as one who had never thought on the subject enough to be in danger…
I suppose it could be argued, that just as I've derided Fanny for not being willing to look past her prejudices to see Henry as he really is, Henry too isn't seeing past his own idealized view of Fanny. But there's a difference; Henry is completely open and artless—even at his worst, he's never hidden his character from view—whereas Fanny is an active practitioner of every kind of concealment. Of course he can't see the kind of woman she really is. No one can; not even Edmund.
As delightful and sympathetic as we may find Henry, we can foresee trouble ahead; Austen may have made some serious miscalculations at the conceptual level in Mansfield Park, but she still shows why she's a match for Shakespeare at conveying the complexity of human psychology. Take this passage: "A little difficulty to be overcome, was not evil to Henry Crawford. He rather derived spirits from it. He had been apt to gain hearts too easily. His situation was new and animating"—we read this and we begin to suspect the sustainability of his high emotion; and that concluding statement troubles as well, as it implies that novelty may be the chief attraction of his heroic resolve. In which case, despair and aggrievement might prove "new and animating" as well. We may like Henry well enough—I'm pretty clearly crazy about him—but Austen, while failing to paint him as a despicable rogue, does convey his essential unsteadiness. Against which, I suppose, Edmund is supposed to look all the better; but alas, his plodding dependability still pales beside Henry's glamour and vivacity.
Fanny, of course, meets Henry's professions and pledges with repeated choruses of her whole NEVER UNTHINKABLE IMPOSSIBLE repertoire, to absolutely no effect.
Her manner was incurably gentle, and she was not aware how much it concealed the sternness of her purpose. Her diffidence, gratitude, and softness, made every expression of indifference seem almost an effort of self-denial; seem at least, to be giving nearly as much pain to herself as to him.
This is richly ironic; Fanny's so accustomed to concealment that she doesn't know how to appear genuine when she actually is finally speaking her mind. In fact, her performance is so unconvincing it even causes her to waffle a bit herself—to wonder whether "here were claims which could not but operate;" but no, her stony heart remains impenetrable, and she ends up angry and resentful "at a perseverance so selfish and ungenerous. Here was again a want of delicacy and regard for others which formerly so struck and disgusted her…Had her own affections been as free—as perhaps they ought to have been—he never could have engaged them." For her, then, virtue isn't an oasis to which she can gently draw those whose spirits respond to hers; rather it's a promontory from which she can look down in judgment at those who don't meet her standards. Heart. Of. Stone.
Sir Thomas is disappointed to hear of the lack of progress in the meeting, but cheered by Henry's continued enthusiasm—for the tail-wagging way he's willing to chase that Frisbee every time Fanny hurls it away. He praises him to Fanny: "He is a most extraordinary young man, and whatever be the event, you must feel that you have created an attachment of no common character," and further says if she had more experience of "the unsteady nature of love, as it generally exists," she'd be knocked on her namesake by Henry's doggedness in the face of defeat. When Fanny tries once again to explain herself by not explaining herself, he shuts her down, saying, "There is nothing more to be said or done. From this hour, the subject is never to be revived between us."
But as we know by now, anytime someone in an Austen novel says that, you can count on several more pages filled with nothing but the subject never to be revived between them. And sure enough, Sir Thomas is forced to introduce the matter again, because his earlier promise not to mention it to the rest of the family has been rendered moot by Henry himself, who has not the smallest intention of being quiet about it—as previously noted, his is not the kind of character inclined to hide anything—and whose chivalric quest to win the heart of his lady fair is already pretty much his sole topic of conversation at the Parsonage these days, and, we can guess, likewise with his barber, his tailor, his saddler, and any stray dogs whom he takes by surprise in the streets. If he had a Twitter account, the story would be global.
So Sir Thomas feels he'd better inform his wife and sister-in-law before they hear of it from other quarters, though he actively dreads telling the latter. "Sir Thomas, indeed, was, by this time, not very far from classing Mrs. Norris as one of those well-meaning people, who are always doing mistaken and very disagreeable things." Which is just more evidence in favor of Sir Thomas's heart being golden. I mean, "not very far" from classing Mrs. Norris this way?...What would she have to do to really convince him? Ritually slaughter and disembowel Fanny, and dance around a pentacle with the entrails? Also, excuse me, but Mrs. Norris is "one of those well-meaning people" only in the way that, say, Hitler was damn well meaning to invade Poland and pity anyone who got in his way.
Such is Sir Thomas's authority, however, that when he follows the delivery of the news with an injunction for "the strictest forbearance and silence" towards Fanny, Aunt Norris is compelled to obey.
She only looked her increased ill-will. Angry she was, bitterly angry; but she was more angry with Fanny for having received such an offer, than for refusing it. It was an injury and affront to Julia, who ought to have been Mr. Crawford's choice; and, independently of that, she disliked Fanny, because she had neglected her; and she would have grudged such an elevation to one whom she had been always trying to depress.
I love imagining Aunt Norris as she "only looked her increased ill-will". I picture her face as a virtual Kabuki mask of rage, contorting in quiet fury as she concentrates on stopping Fanny's heart from beating through sheer force of malevolent will, like a homicidal Uri Geller.
Lady Bertram's reaction is entirely opposite—and apposite.
She had been a beauty, and a prosperous beauty, all her life; and beauty and wealth were all that excited her respect. To know Fanny to be sought in marriage by a man of fortune, raised her, therefore, very much in her opinion. By convincing her that Fanny was very pretty, which she had been doubting about before….it made her feel a sort of credit in calling her niece.
And of course, she herself takes a large part of the credit for drawing Mr. Crawford's attentions to Fanny because—possibly you haven't heard—on the night of the ball? She sent Chapman to dress her. Never mind if you missed it, she mentions it twice more here…which effectively clinches it as the novel's newest catch-phrase. So you can retire your I HAVE TWO-AND-FORTY SPEECHES t-shirt, and replace it with one saying I SENT CHAPMAN TO DRESS HER.
I wear a Medium, if anyone's feeling generous.

Mansfield Park, chapters 28-30

And so we come to the night of the ball…and we re-settle ourselves in our seats, because we've learned by now that when Austen brings all her characters together for these great occasions, she's going to treat us to a series of riotously funny set pieces. But, alas, it doesn't work out that way this time, for a number of reasons. First, Austen has moved the majority of her most entertaining boors offstage (Tom, the Rushworths, Mr. Yates), and with the exception of Mrs. Norris—who isn't nearly up to her usual roaring awfulness for reasons we'll soon discuss—no one else can be counted on for the kind of misbehavior we require from an Austen gathering. The Crawfords frère et soeur are supposedly our villains here, but hey, we're hardly talking Wickham and Lucy Steele, are we? In fact, the Crawfords keep giving us reasons to adore rather than abjure them.

And then there's Fanny, who is the central figure here, and hence (what a surprise) the central problem. She edges nearer to being likable in this chapter than she does anywhere else in the novel—because she actually, if tentatively, embraces activity over passivity, motion over stillness—but ultimately she remains entirely inner-directed. We see the ball almost exclusively through her eyes, and her observations are nearly always of the selfish variety. With the exception of Edmund and William, after whom she stares moonily all evening, she regards no one with any curiosity or interest, only with an eye to evading their notice. Her humility is entirely reactive and self-defeating. A genuinely humble person—someone's who's actively good rather than good by default—will inspire good in others; will have, in a quiet way, influence. Think of Dickens's Little Dorrit—as I often do when reading Mansfield Park. Her effect on those who encounter her is, in the end, spiritually refreshing; Fanny has no such effect. Even Sir Thomas's sudden kindly interest in her seems inspired more by the improvement in her looks than in anything that might be called her character.
And so we pass the night of the ball stuck within her tenuous, tremulous point of view—alternately febrile and faint-hearted—and the effect is not beguiling. By the third page you're positively willing her to get drunk at the punchbowl or something—anything to drop the curtain on the frightened-rabbit act she's playing into the ground.
The evening starts promisingly enough, with an exchange between Sir Thomas and Aunt Norris in which the former remarks on how very well Fanny looks. The latter can't leave that alone any more than a stray dog could pass up a ham hock, so she leaps in with six-guns a-firin':
"Look well! Oh yes…she has good reason to look well with all her advantages: brought up this family as she has been, with all the benefit of her cousins' manners before her. Only think, my dear Sir Thomas, what extraordinary advantages you and I have been the means of giving her. The very gown you have been taking notice of, is your own present to her when dear Mrs. Rushworth married. What would she have been if we had not taken her by the hand?"
This is meat and drink to us by now, and we look forward to a whole lot more of Aunt Norris paradoxically claiming authorship of any improvement Fanny may exhibit, while simultaneously striving to discredit that improvement in the process. But instead Aunt Norris recedes quickly in the background…we only catch glimpses of her later, as when Fanny dares to practice her dance steps in the drawing room despite Mrs. Norris being there (possibly the most charming thing she's done in all 280-plus pages thus far), and Mrs. Norris ignores her because she is "entirely taken up at first in fresh arranging and injuring the noble fire which the butler had prepared." Even at her most glowingly successful, Fanny can't hold her principal antagonist's interest long enough to inspire her to undertake a sustained campaign to ruin her happiness; which you'd think would be the kind of thing that would make Mrs. Norris's whole night. But no, Fanny remains affectless…a nullity…in short, just not worth it.
Henry Crawford arrives and secures Fanny's promise of the first dance; and Fanny knows she ought to be grateful, because "she so little understood her own claims as to think, if Mr. Crawford had not asked her, she must have been the last to be sought after, and should have received a partner only through a series of inquiry, and bustle…which would have been terrible"—and yet at the same moment "there was a pointedness in his manner of asking her, which she did not like," and she ends up goddamn resenting the guy for rescuing her.
This is a thematic replay of the scene we covered last time, in which Fanny went out of her way to appeal to Mary Crawford for help in dressing for the ball, only to end up disrespecting Mary's advice and begrudging her any thanks for having so willingly supplied it. And here she is at it again—"there was a pointedness in his manner," my skinny white ass. Fanny is very, very hard to like here; where exactly does someone so supposedly abject in her humility—to the point of being unwilling to lead the first dance of the evening (because oh! oh! she should be looked at!)—dredge up this kind of lofty pomposity?...Disdaining Mary and Henry on the basis of gestures—of inflections—of style?
And while we're still reeling over this, Mary herself enters the scene, and Fanny, "anxious to get the story over, hastened to give the explanation of the second necklace"—the one Edmund gave her, on which she's hung William's cross instead of the chain Mary herself supplied.
And Mary's reaction: what do you think? Hurt? Pique? Sly remarks about Fanny's fealty as a friend? No, nothing remotely so self-regarding. Instead, she's bowled over by Edmund's generosity, "her eyes, bright as they had been before, shewing they could yet be brighter, she exclaimed with eager pleasure, 'Did he? Did Edmund? That was like himself. No other man would have thought of it. I honour him beyond expression."
Oh, but wait. There's more. The ball begins, and Fanny and Henry lead the first dance. And what is Mary's immediate inclination? To scoff, to make mock, to subvert the occasion, to head for the buffet and tuck in? Oh no. Mary makes a point of increasing everyone's enjoyment of the moment. She starts with her host:
Miss Crawford saw much of Sir Thomas's thoughts as he stood, and in spite of all his wrongs towards her, a general prevailing desire of recommending herself to him, took an opportunity of stepping aside to say something agreeable of Fanny. Her praise was warm, and he received it as she could wish, joining in it as far as discretion, and politeness, and slowness of speech would allow…
Granted, this isn't entirely selfless; there's that "prevailing desire of recommending herself to him," though what she hopes to gain by it is unclear (possibly even to herself). But she then goes and repeats the performance with Lady Bertram, whose opinion of her, for good or ill, can't possibly benefit her in any way imaginable; presuming an opinion could even be formed in a mind so entirely clouded by white noise.
Lady Bertram's reply to Mary's paean to Fanny is, by the way, the capstone to a running joke in which her ladyship has spent the entire party bragging that she sent her maid Chapman to help Fanny dress, which is funny because we've seen that Chapman arrived too late to lift a finger on the girl's behalf. And now Austen brings the joke home with rimshot-worthy brio:
"Yes, she does look very well," was Lady Bertram's placid reply. "Chapman helped her dress. I sent Chapman to her." Not but that she was really pleased to have Fanny admired; but she was so much more struck with her own kindness in sending Chapman to her, that she could not get it out of her head.
Mary then goes to Mrs. Norris—uh-huh, 's'right, Mrs. Norris—and knowing her "too well to think of gratifying her by commendation of Fanny," she instead sighs, "Ah! ma'am, how much we want dear Mrs. Rushworth and Julia to-night!" which of course just slathers the marzipan on Aunt Norris's ginger.
Now, that's pure, flat-out selflessness. But then Mary's campaign of amplifying the happiness of everyone she sees runs aground when she takes it to…guess who? Take a wild, stab-in-the-dark, jump-the-shark guess.
Miss Crawford blundered most towards Fanny herself, in her intentions to please. She meant to be giving her little heart a happy flutter, and filling her with sensations of delightful self-consequence…and misinterpreting Fanny's blushes, still thought she must be doing so.
Mary's great offense?...Implying that Fanny would know why Henry is going to town the following morning; and when Fanny protests her ignorance, concluding, "I must suppose it to be purely for the pleasure of conveying your brother and talking of you by the way." Yeah, man, what a bitch.
Similarly, Henry Crawford's attentions make Fanny "feel that she was the object of all," and "though she could not say that it was unpleasantly done…there was indelicacy or ostentation in his manner"—really, she thinks this. Who, I ask you, who is the unregenerate lout here: the woman doing her best to spread joy wherever she goes, or the one quietly deriding the only friends she has in the world for not being exactly one-hundred-percent-and-change what she thinks they ought to be?
Then Edmund comes to claim a dance with Fanny, and listen to this:
"I am worn out with civility," said he. "I have been talking incessantly all night, and with nothing to say. But with you, Fanny, there may be peace. You will not want to be talked to. Let us have the luxury of silence."
So they dance without saying a word. Right, let's just review here: Henry Crawford gets sneered at because he happens to grin a bit too knowingly as he fawns all over Fanny and treats her like the goddamn queen of Sheba…but then Edmund basically tells her, "Let's dance, sure, but for God's sake let's not talk," and she eats it up with a spoon and asks for seconds. THE. HELL.
I'd love love love for some of the self-professed Austenites out there to have their own boyfriends or spouses say something similar to them as they're being led onto the dance floor. Oh yeah, they'd comply, all right…in fact, they'd give the sons of bitches the silent treatment for about two full weeks.
Finally—thank the sweet lawd baby Jebus in his cradle—Sir Thomas decides Fanny has had enough excitement for one night and sends her on up to bed. But she has one more cringe-inducing scene to play: she begs to be allowed to get up and take breakfast with William before he sets off to rejoin his ship…then goes into a passive-aggressive snit when Henry Crawford inserts himself into the party as well. Henry Crawford, who is providing William with transportation at his own expense.
The woman is just a menace. A menace.
Luckily, the disappointment of the ball is ameliorated by the following chapter, which sneaks up and takes us by surprise; it's one of the most affecting in the novel.
William and Henry depart after breakfast, and after seeing them off Fanny returns to the breakfast room to enjoy a good wallow.
…and there her uncle kindly left her to cry in peace, conceiving perhaps that the deserted chair of each young man might exercise her tender enthusiasm, and that the remaining cold pork bones and mustard in William's plate, might but divide her feelings with the broken egg-shells in Mr. Crawford's.
Referenced just to remind us that, yes godammit, we're dealing with a writer here.
We follow Fanny through a "heavy, melancholy day" in which even the pleasure of reliving the ball is denied her, because the only other soul on hand is Lady Bertram, who might as well have passed the whole evening underwater.
"She could not recollect what it was that she had heard about one of the Miss Maddoxes, or what it was that Lady Prescott had noticed in Fanny; she was not sure whether Colonel Harrison had been talking of Mr. Crawford or of William, when he said he was the finest young man in the room; somebody had whispered something to her, she had forgot to ask Sir Thomas what it could be."
Love that detail of her needing her husband to tell her what was whispered to her. Lady Bertram has her moments; few and far between, but worth waiting for.
To make matters even more melancholy, Sir Thomas takes Fanny by surprise with a valedictory remark about Edmund, who has gone off as well, to visit a friend of his, a certain Mr. Owen; "(W)e must learn to do without him. This will be the last winter of his belonging to us, as he has done." Meaning, he'll soon take orders and assume residence at Thornton Lacey. Fanny wrestles with this for a while, but of course self-abnegation is her daily diet, so she soon comes to a calm acceptance of Edmund's departure from her life.
However, what "was tranquility and comfort to Fanny was tediousness and vexation to Mary."
To Fanny's mind, Edmund's absence was really in its cause and its tendency a relief. To Mary it was in every way painful. She felt the want of his society every day, almost every hour…Angry as she was with Edmund for adhering to his own notions and acting on them in defiance of her…she could not help thinking of him continually when absent, dwelling on his merit and affection, and longing again for the almost daily meetings they lately had.
Even more remarkably:
Then she began to blame herself. She wished she had not spoken so warmly in their last conversation. She was afraid she had used some strong—some contemptuous expressions in speaking of the clergy, and that should not have been. It was ill-bred—it was wrong. She wished such words unsaid with all her heart.
And into this roiling stew of heady emotion—anger, longing, regret—something entirely unexpected gets stirred in: jealousy. "His friend Mr. Owen had sisters—He might find them attractive." The mixture proves combustible; it launches Mary right out of her chair, as though she's been unwittingly sitting on an anti-aircraft missile.
She could not live any longer in such solitary wretchedness; and she made her way to the Park, through difficulties of walking which she had deemed unconquerable a week before, for the chance of hearing a little in addition, for the sake of at least hearing his name.
To a modern reader, this is ravishing stuff. Our sympathies are absolutely with the woman in torment, repenting of her glibness and sharp tongue and repining for the man she so casually tossed aside; to our sensibilities, she's much worthier of our pity than the passive little nonentity who's been willing to let him go with a couple of watery sighs.
When Mary gets Fanny alone, she tries to affect a casual, offhand manner, but her anguish comes spilling out with every word:
"(Edmund) is a very—a very pleasing young man himself, and I cannot help being rather concerned at not seeing him again before I go to London, as will now undoubtedly be the case.—I am looking for Henry every day, and as soon as he comes there will be nothing to detain me at Mansfield. I should like to have seen him once more, I confess. But you must give my compliments to him. Yes—I think it must be compliments. Is not there something wanted, Miss Price, in our language—a something between compliments and—and love—to suit the sort of friendly acquaintance we have had together?—So many months acquaintance!—But compliments may be sufficient here.—Was his letter a long one?—Does he give you much account of what he is doing?—Is it Christmas gaieties that he is saying for?"
This is, quite simply, heartbreaking.
Eventually Mary rallies, and her conversation regains its usual Nöel Coward brilliancy; she does a little riff on the Owens sisters that sparkles like diamond:
"…for one knows, without being told, exactly what they are—all very accomplished and pleasing, and one very pretty. There is a beauty in every family.—It is a regular thing. Two play on the piano-forte, and one on the harp—and all sing—or would sing if they were taught—or sing all the better for not being taught—or something like it."
Fanny brings this to a crashing halt by bluntly stating, "I know nothing of the Miss Owens." Once a buzzkill…
Fanny does attempt—but only because she feels "obliged to speak"—to assuage Mary's feelings to the extent of saying she'll be missed when she's gone. But Mary waves this away.
"Oh! yes, missed as every noisy evil is missed when it is taken away; that is, there is a great difference felt. But I am not fishing; don't compliment me. If I am missed, it will appear. I may be discovered by those who want to see me. I shall not be in any doubtful, or distant, or unapproachable region."


Two hundred years after these words were written, they're utterly familiar to us, because the tone and tenor of them has been repeated in more romantic comedies than can be counted on a bank of supercomputers; and in every one of those confections, the warring, wounding, ever-at-odds hero and heroine come at the end to a blissful détente—or an equally felicitous mutual defeat—and collapse into each other's arms, their defenses lying in rubble at their feet. Austen didn't invent this genre (as I've noted before, she had Beatrice and Benedick, among others, to harken back to) but she did formalize and popularize it as no one else before or since. That she to our eyes betrays the genre in Mansfield Park by violating this prime tenet, is certainly troublesome; and seeing Mary in actual torment in this chapter only increases our discomfort, since we know the relief the genre demands for her isn't coming.
But we do need to keep in mind that it wasn't yet a genre when Austen was penning this tale; and that she was clearly challenging herself to do something different than she'd done before. And that what she learned from the failed experiment of Mansfield Park, yielded dazzling benefits in what came after. Just keep telling yourself this; increasingly, you'll need it as consolation.
Especially because now, Austen really starts piling it on. The succeeding chapter is basically an extended dialogue between Henry and Mary, in which Henry—having no sooner arrived back at the Parsonage than high-tailing it to the Park to pay his respects—returns after an hour and a half virtually pinwheeling with excitement. "I am quite determined, Mary. My mind is entirely made up. Will it astonish you? No—You must be aware that I am quite determined to marry Fanny Price."
It does astonish Mary, who hadn't a clue that her brother's fancy had taken him so far; the last she'd heard of it, he'd planned only to make a play for Fanny's affections as a kind of hedge against boredom, the way another man might, say, take up gardening. That the scheme has gone so cattywampus as to make Henry's the affections that get trussed up for slow-roasting, absolutely gobsmacks Mary. What it does not do—could anything? ever?—is render her speechless.
"Lucky, lucky girl!...what a match for her! My dearest Henry, this must be my first feeling; but my second, which you shall have as sincerely, is that I approve your choice from my soul, and foresee your happiness as heartily as I wish and desire it. You will have a sweet little wife; all gratitude and devotion. Exactly what you deserve. What an amazing match for her! Mrs. Norris often talks of her luck; what will she say now? The delight of all the family indeed! And she has some true friends in it. How they will rejoice! But tell me all about it. Talk to me for ever."
Henry doesn't remark, as he might, that he can't talk forever because Mary just has; in fact he happily takes up the challenge and the two of them go riding off at a conversational gallop. What impresses us chiefly is that Henry's feeling for Fanny seems largely to have rehabilitated him, in the way that Mary's for Edmund has altered her—made her more compassionate, more selfless, less able to hide her feelings behind a mask of coy insouciance. Henry now, too, seems chiefly excited by the joy he thinks he'll be giving Fanny, rather than the happiness she'll bring to him.
There are, of course, lapses—or, rather, what Austen must mean us to see as lapses. For instance, when Mary compares Henry's match to the miserable union of their late aunt to the hideous Admiral:
"Henry, I think so highly of Fanny Price, that if I could suppose the next Mrs. Crawford would have half the reason which my poor ill used aunt had to abhor the very name, I would prevent the marriage, if possible; but I know you, I know that a wife you loved would be the happiest of women, and that even when you ceased to love, she would yet find in you the liberality and good-breeding of a gentleman."
Henry of course launches into a soliloquy on "the impossibility…of ceasing to love Fanny Price," and I suppose we're meant to feel Mary's indelicacy in even bringing up the idea; but instead it just impresses us with her maturity (if not her timing). Marital affection does sometimes ebb away; we know it as well as Mary—and furthermore Austen knows it too; she invented Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, remember?
Then, in Henry's exaltation of Fanny, he praises her at the expense of Lady Bertram, remarking on how she attended "with such ineffable sweetness and patience, to all the demands of her aunt's stupidity…then returning to her seat to finish a note which she was previously engaged in writing for that stupid woman's service". Again, I think we're meant to be shocked by Henry's excessive candor, and to disapprove it (and him); but he is talking to his sister, and I doubt Austen herself observed conversational niceties when in intimate chat with her siblings (in fact, in some of her surviving letters to her sister Cassandra, she uses terms that make Henry Crawford sound downright euphemistic).
Plus?...Hey, Lady Bertram is stupid. It's pretty much her sole defining attritbute. (Other than immobility.)
Henry is so far reformed that when Mary asks him what Mrs. Rushworth and Julia will have to say at the news, he replies, "They will be angry…Mrs. Rushworth will be very angry. It will be a bitter pill to her; that is, like other bitter pills, it will have two moments ill-flavour, and then be swallowed and forgotten; for I am not such a coxcomb as to suppose her feelings more lasting than other women's, though I was the object of them."
Yes, he has that much self-awareness. Just as Mary does, as we've seen on several occasions. Certainly every Austen novel must have a cad, to imperil the heroine's affections, and a rival, to threaten to entrap the hero. And we can appreciate that in Mansfield Park Austen is attempting to work her characters in subtler shades, presumably for a more deeply resonant and literary effect; but when the cad and the rival are allowed so much subtlety and shade that they become actually preferable to the hero and heroine—when arid, chalky Edmund and dour, po-faced Fanny come to seem like they're the cad and the rival—then the trains are all on the wrong tracks, and we're headed towards a tremendous smack-up.
Fasten your seatbelts: it's a-comin' on fast.

Mansfield Park, chapters 25-27

Last time we saw the addition of William Price to the clan at Mansfield, and the return of Henry Crawford to the pack at the Parsonage. The presence of these good-humored young bucks provides just the added sense of occasion required for Sir Thomas to lower his own personal Homeland Security Alert from orange to mellow yellow, resulting in his "more than toleration" of increasing face-time with his neighbors.



It's during his first dinner party at the Parsonage that Sir Thomas notices Henry's attentions to Fanny—or rather, he would notice them if he were the kind of man who noticed such things; but in a brilliant flourish, which tells us so much about the character in so few wonderfully deliberate strokes, Austen gives us this:
…[I]t was in the course of that very visit, that he first began to think, that any one in the habit of such idle observations would have thought that Mr. Crawford was the admirer of Fanny Price.
In other words, Sir Thomas doesn't draw inferences of his own, he anticipates what inferences other, lesser people might draw if they were confronted with the same evidence as he. He's so lofty, he might literally have his head in the clouds. A low-flying plane would shear it right off his neck.
The dinner, we're told, is "generally felt to be a pleasant one, being composed in a good proportion of those who would talk and those who would listen," which makes us think immediately, Mrs. Norris and Fanny, who are sort of the Platonic illustrations of both those states of being. But it turns out, alas, that Aunt Norris doesn't have much to say on this particular occasion, because her indignation at everything she sees at the Parsonage is so titanically great that it just stops her throat right up. All she can do is quietly sputter.
…[She] could never behold either the wide table or the number of dishes on it with patience, and…did always contrive to experience some evil from the passing of the servants behind her chair, and to bring away some fresh conviction of its being impossible among so many dishes but that some must be cold.
Afterwards the party takes up cards, with one table devoted to Whist and another to a less demanding game. Lady Bertram, in her characteristic bewilderment, can't decide between them. "What shall I do, Sir Thomas?" she asks her husband. "Whist and Speculation; which will amuse me most?" It takes him about a nanosecond to steer her towards the latter, for "He was a Whist player himself, and perhaps might feel that it would not much amuse him to have her as a partner."
So it's Speculation for her ladyship; the only remaining issue being that doesn't know how to play it, so of course "Fanny must teach me." But Fanny knows as little about it as she does. (Shocking; but too late to send her back, I suppose.) Enter Henry Crawford to the rescue; he agrees to sit between them and give them both instruction.
And so we're geared up for another of Austen's bravura set pieces, with Sir Thomas, Mrs. Norris, and Dr. and Mrs. Grant "being seated at the table of prime intellectual state and dignity," while the five younger people are off on their own, free to chatter and flirt on the pretext of playing cards, encumbered only by Lady Bertram, who's really no encumbrance at all; in fact they may have to tether her to a table leg lest she float right out the window.
Henry Crawford is of course the star of the scene. He plays both Fanny's and Lady Bertram's hands for them, as well as his own, all the while keeping up a running commentary designed to seduce the metaphorical panties off everyone else at the table. There's also a great running joke in which he continually interrupts himself with asides to Lady Bertram, forbidding her to look at her cards (because what possible good can come of that?).
Fanny, however, is annoyed by him, because it takes her all of three minutes to learn the rules, despite which he continues to flutter and cluck over her, telling her what to do with the cards she's dealt. He takes it on himself to "inspirit her play, sharpen her avarice, and harden her heart, which, especially in any competition with William, was a work of some difficulty"—because, yes, that's the kind of woman Fanny is: she will play to lose. Here's where we most clearly see the "monster of complacency and pride…under a cloak of cringing self-abasement" that Kingsley Amis declared her to be; because there's just no other way to slice it: someone who works to undermine herself so that you can win a competition, is quite clearly of the belief that if she didn't, you wouldn't. In other words, she sees victory as hers to relinquish. Look me in the eye and tell me that's not cap-A arrogance.
Henry Crawford, who's now got both Fanny and Lady Bertram comfortably in his sphere of influence, now turns his baby blues on Edmund, and says, "Bertram…I have never told you what happened to me yesterday in my ride home." Apparently the two had been out hunting together, but Henry had been obliged to give it up after his horse threw a shoe. Edmund had gone on alone, leaving Henry to find his way back as best he could, and losing his way "because I can never bear to ask" directions (apparently certain masculine traits are just plain immutable). He soon stumbled upon a small church and its attendant parsonage house, which he immediately concluded to be Thornton Lacey. Edmund isn't quite persuaded:
"You inquired then?"
"No, I never inquire. But I told a man mending a hedge that it was Thornton Lacey, and he agreed to it."
All right, fine. Big Henry fan, here. So sue me.
Austen is very nimble in the passage that follows, telling us that "Thornton Lacey was the name of [Edmund's] impending living, as Miss Crawford well knew; and her interest in a negociation for William Price's knave increased." Meanwhile, Henry Crawford launches into an appraisal of the property for his friend that begins, "You are a lucky fellow. There will be work for five summers at least before the place is livable." He continues with a detailed plan of what must be done to make the place habitable, which falls just short of disassembling the entire edifice and rebuilding it brick by brick to an entirely new blueprint. And don't let's even get into his ideas for improving the grounds. You get the feeling, if Henry had his way, Edmund would find himself plunked down in the middle of a kind of Regency-era Graceland.
When he finally runs out of steam, Edmund tells him that alas "very little of your plan for Thornton Lacey will ever be put in practice."
"...I must be satisfied with rather less ornament and beauty. I think that the house and premises may be made comfortable, and given the air of a gentleman's residence without any very heavy expense, and that must suffice me; and I hope may suffice all who care about me."
This couldn't be more obviously intended for Mary if he wrote it out on a sheet of paper, wrapped it around a stone, and lobbed it at her head; and Mary herself—after "securing [William's] knave at an exorbitant rate," exclaims:
"There, I will stake my last like a woman of spirit. No cold prudence for me. I am not born to sit still and do nothing. If I lose the game, it shall not be from not striving for it."
The way these two manage to score direct hits while still talking past each other makes for giddy, page-turning fun. How Austen could put them through all this and then wrest them apart at the end of it, is a kind of betrayal—the only significant one in her entire body of work, and as we've seen (and are seeing now), one attended by a whole caravan of other delights, so we forgive her…conditionally. The condition being that she never do it again. Which she not only honors, but even couches in the form of a sly apology in her next novel…but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Henry isn't giving up on his vision for Thornton Lacey. He waxes long and enthusiastic about its possibilities, interrupted only by an occasional aside (such as "Let me see, Mary; Lady Bertram bids a dozen for that queen; no, no, a dozen is more than it is worth. Lady Bertram does not bid a dozen. She will have nothing to say to it. Go on, go on"). His final argument is that for the mere "expenditure of a few hundreds a year," Edmund may transform it into—well, into the kind of place a man like Henry Crawford would be proud to live.
"You may raise it into a place. From being the mere gentleman's residence, it becomes, by judicious improvement, the residence of a man of education, taste, modern manners, good connections. All this may be stamped on it; and that house receive such an air as to make its owner be set down as the great land-holder of the parish; especially as there is no real squire's house to dispute the point…"
He then whirls unexpectedly on Fanny, and asks whether she doesn't see it exactly as he does; which is a bit of a risk—I mean, taking Fanny by surprise, especially at such close quarters. If he startles her sufficiently he really could end up losing a finger, or the tip of his nose.
Fortunately Henry's appendages are saved by the interjection of Mary, who—perhaps sensing that Edmund must surely be weakening now that Henry's been browbeating him without pause for what seems like a month and change—now leaps in to add the weight of her own opinion, which is that Edmund, rather than dismissing her brother out of hand, ought to remember all the wonderful ideas he had for improving Sotherton.
And here's where we learn that Henry isn't so self-involved that he can't see beyond his own irresistible charm. He's learned enough about Fanny—discerned enough about her, from having observed and considered and listened to her, which is more than Edmund's ever done—to know that by bringing up that day at Sotherton, Mary hasn't done him any favors in her eyes. So, "in a low voice directed solely at Fanny," he says, "I should be sorry to have my powers of planning judged of by the day at Sotherton. I see things very differently now. Do not think of me as I appeared then."
Fanny is spared the trouble of replying, because Aunt Norris has overheard the word "Sotherton" and—"being just then in the happy leisure which followed securing the odd trick by Sir Thomas's capital play and her own," she takes great, luxurious relish in assuring William what a rare, once-in-a-lifetime treat he missed by not having been on hand for the day of the expedition to that magnificent pile of bricks—not to mention the transporting joy of having been in the company of Maria and Julia. But now that she thinks of it, he might call on them in Brighton; they'd certainly condescend to see him, being the gracious, magnanimous, sweet-smelling paragons of super-specialness that they are, and plus?—also?—completely and totally by coincidence?—"I could send a little parcel by you that I want to get conveyed to your cousins."
God love Aunt Norris; she never, ever disappoints. But in this case, alas, her transparent little gambit to save a few cents on postage fails her, as Sir Thomas advises William against going so far when he'll have other opportunities to meet Maria and Julia closer to home. So Mrs. Norris has been nice to William for nothing, which has got to gall her just about as much as the size of Mrs. Grant's table.
Henry Crawford then turns the topic of conversation back to himself (and really, given the company, who can blame him). He confesses a "scheme" to rent a house in the neighborhood the following winter.
…(H)e had set his heart upon having a something there that he could come to at any time, a little homestall at his command where all the holidays of his year might be spent, and he might find himself continuing, improving, and perfecting that friendship and intimacy with the Mansfield Park family which was increasing in value to him.
We realize at once that Henry's primary motive is almost certainly the establishment of a bachelor pad into which he might entice Fanny for glass or two of bubbly, a little Montavani on the stereo, and maybe an hour or six of sweet monkey lovin'. But either Fanny herself is ignorant of this, or is just too mortified to react, because "She said little, assented only here and there, and betrayed no inclination either of appropriating any part of the compliment to herself or of strengthening his views in favour of Northamptonshire."
Sir Thomas certainly sees nothing objectionable in Henry's plan, except for his choice of Thornton Lacey as the house in question. Yeah, that's right, Henry has been trying to convince Edmund to make the place over so that he himself can live there. This is the kind of brass-balled arrogance that's so completely over the top you can't even be offended by it; you can only laugh. Henry may be a man after the main chance, but he's so completely upfront about it that you can't scorn him for it. Might as well scorn a dog for running off with your Frisbee.
But unfortunately for Henry, it seems Edmund has plans to live in the house himself, which is something Henry hadn't counted on; he'd naturally presumed Edmund would remain at Mansfield Park and just swing over to his living every week or two for christenings or funerals or whatever else was on the docket. But Sir Thomas, obviously proud of his son, sets him straight:
"[Edmund] knows that human nature needs more lessons than a weekly sermon can convey, and that if he does not live among his parishioners and prove himself by constant attention their well-wisher and friend, he does very little either for their good or his own."
We're told that "Mr. Crawford bowed his acquiescence," but I'm guessing the whole speech turned into Tagalog as soon as it reached his ears.
Mary Crawford, however, has heard every word of it, and not happily. She'd been listening to her brother's airy suggestions for Thornton Lacey's improvement and had allowed herself to imagine inhabiting such a place, whose improvements would "shut out the church, sink the clergyman, and see only the respectable, elegant, modernized, and occasional residence of a man of independent fortune"—and now she was "considering Sir Thomas, with decided ill-will, as the destroyer of all this", though without, of course, "daring to relieve herself by a single attempt at throwing ridicule on his cause."
The paradox here is that I like Mary a great deal, yet I enjoy seeing her writhe in anxiety and even anguish; the more Austen torments her, the more lovable she appears to me. And while I generally disdain Fanny, I can't stand it when Austen torments her. Maybe this is due to the nature of the torments. Mary is plagued by a sinking inevitability that, in order to be with the man she loves, she'll have to give up everything she now prizes; she's thus being made more human—being brought, by degrees, to a reluctant acceptance of sacrifice.
Whereas Fanny's torments always hinge on being forced from passivity to activity—even so passive an activity as merely being noticed. This is what happens now, when her brother William asks Sir Thomas, "Is not Fanny a very good dancer, sir?"
Fanny, in dismay at such an unprecedented question, did not know which way to look, or how to be prepared for the answer. Some very grave reproof, or at least the coldest expression of indifference must be coming to distress her brother, and sink her into the ground.
If only she would sink into the ground. But of course she's given no cause; quite the opposite. Sir Thomas has now spent several chapters being uniformly kind to and solicitous of her, yet she still acts like if he notices she's in the room, he might just unhinge his jaws and devour her whole, like a snake swallowing a muskrat.
Henry, having taken the trouble to look at Fanny as a human being, sees this, and accordingly declines to join the discussion of Fanny's terpsichorean skills because, "There is one person in company who does not like to have Miss Price spoken of," that being of course Miss Price, and so would everyone please just knock it off for her sake. And yet, of course, he's still Henry Crawford:
True enough, he had once seen Fanny dance; and it was equally true that he would now have answered for her gliding about with quiet, light elegance, and in admirable time, but in fact he could not for the life of him recall what her dancing had been, and rather took it for granted that she had been present than remembered any thing about her.
This is exactly the kind of attention she asks for, so again, can you blame him?
But Fanny's dancing won't remain a subject for speculation for much longer, because Sir Thomas—that horrible ogre who strikes perpetual fear into Fanny's cringing heart—decides that William's desire to see his sister dance must be gratified; and he alone is the man who can gratify it. And so the next morning at breakfast, he tells William:
"It would give me pleasure to see you both dance. You spoke of the balls at Northampton. Your cousins have occasionally attended them; but they would not altogether suit us now…I believe, we must not think of a Northampton ball. A dance at home would be more eligible, and if—"
"Ah! my dear Sir Thomas," interrupted Mrs. Norris, "I knew what was coming. I knew what you were going to say. If dear Julia were at home, or dearest Mrs. Rushworth at Sotherton…if they were at home to grace the ball, a ball you would have this very Christmas. Thank your uncle, William, thank your uncle."
This is classic Aunt Norris: barging in, presupposing, and berating a poor relation into expressing gratitude for having had nothing whatsoever done for him.
But in fact Sir Thomas, "gravely interposing," corrects her assumption that without his daughters at hand there's insufficient reason for a ball. "Could we be all assembled, our satisfaction would undoubtedly be more complete, but the absence of some is not to debar the others of amusement."
Chided, Mrs. Norris eventually takes comfort in knowing that with Lady Bertram being about as useful as a beached beluga, she'll have to step in and be the hostess for the evening. Accordingly, she's soon "ready with her suggestions as to the rooms he would think fittest to be used" and the date most suited for the event, but finds to her dismay that Sir Thomas has already settled these things on his own. Happily, here's a case where no paradox creeps in to unsettle me: I cheerfully despise Aunt Norris, and love, love, love to watch Austen poke and prick and mortify her.
Austen then gives us a brief survey of some of the others in the household, as the event draws near. Fanny has worked herself up into a dithering state over what to wear—her chief concern being that she has no chain on which to hang an amber cross William has given her. Should she wear it with a ribbon then, despite the ball's formality? Or should she not wear it at all, and risk hurting William's feelings…? This is a bit of a tempest in a teapot, and you find yourself wondering why Austen devotes such a quantity of narrative space to it; but she has her reasons, which we'll discover soon.
Meanwhile, over to Edmund, whose mind is less on the ball than on what follows swiftly on its heels: his ordination. Everything is set for the commencement of his career as a clergyman, but the question of the wife who will be the partner of his labors. There's really only one candidate, of course; and while Mary has certainly shown him in every conceivable way that she's fond of him, she's also been equally definitive in expressing her complete disdain for the clerical life; so that he scarcely knows whether she's the kind of woman who would happily inhabit a vicarage or who would more happily burn it to the ground.
The issue of all depended on one question. Did she love him well enough to forego what had used to be essential points—did she love him well enough to make them no longer essential? And this question, which he was continually repeating to himself, though oftenest answered with a "Yes," had sometimes its "No."
Of course the surest way to discover this is simply to ask her; but it seems Edmund hasn't quite worked up the stones to do that yet. And so he sets his sights a little lower than that for the present: "To engage her early for the two first dances, was all the command of individual happiness which he felt in his power, and the only preparation for the ball which he could enter into, in spite of all that was passing around him on the subject, from morning to night."
While Edmund broods over Mary, she's on Fanny's mind as well. Still uncertain about how to dress for the ball, Fanny decides to seek out Mary's advice, and heads over to the Parsonage to see her—only to meet her halfway, coming the opposite direction and carrying a parcel. They return to the Parsonage where Mary "proposed their going up into her room, where they might have a comfortable coze, without disturbing Dr. and Mrs. Grant" (what they're doing that requires such privacy is, thankfully, not mentioned) and there Mary, who's totally a proto-fashionista, "gave her all her best judgment and taste, made every thing easy by her suggestions, and tried to make every thing agreeable by her encouragement."
When Mary asks whether Fanny will be wearing her brother's cross, Fanny admits she has nothing to hang it by; and here we discover why Austen made such an issue of this lack earlier on. For Mary now unwraps the parcel she'd been carrying, producing a trinket box containing several gold chains and necklaces, "and in the kindest manner she now urged Fanny's taking one for the cross and to keep for her sake"—which of course Fanny, one of the world's most tireless self-deniers, refuses "with a look of horror", as though Mary were offering her a tit clamp, or earrings made of human teeth. But Mary presses her hard:
"You see what a collection I have…more by half than I ever use or think of. I do not offer them as new. I offer nothing but an old necklace. You must forgive the liberty and oblige me."
Eventually Fanny "found herself obliged to yield that she might not be accused of pride or indifference, or some other littleness"—and note, please, the wording there: she yields not out of fear that she might be guilty of pride or indifference, but that she might be accused of them.
Fanny pores over the offerings, "longing to know which might be least valuable"—presumably to seem humble rather than be it—and eventually settles on a certain necklace that Fanny keeps bringing to her attention over all the others, in the hopes that she is thus "chusing what Miss Crawford least wished to keep." Mary does indeed seem pleased with Fanny's choice, immediately jettisoning the others and insisting on affixing this one to Fanny's neck before she changes her mind.
Fanny had not a word to say against its becomingness, and excepting what remained of her scruples, was exceedingly pleased with an acquisition so very apropos. She would rather perhaps have been obliged to some other person. But this was an unworthy feeling. Miss Crawford had anticipated her wants with a kindness which proved her a real friend.
How difficult is it to not hate Fanny here?...I can't answer, because I can't manage it. Smug, proud, judgmental little twit; she has the sheer gall to seek out Mary's help, discover Mary already on the case and ready to answer with more than was asked for—and yet Fanny would rather be "obliged to some other person." I suppose we're meant to forgive this ignoble behavior because Fanny herself recognizes that it's unworthy; but hey, as long as she doesn't appear unworthy, what's it to her?
She gets what she deserves in the immediate aftermath, when Mary reveals that the necklace in question was one that had been given to her by her brother Henry. Fanny rips it from her throat—really, she couldn't be more nakedly scornful if she stamped and spat on it—but "Miss Crawford thought she had never seen a prettier consciousness," which tells us only that Mary still thinks she's dealing with a shy, uncertain innocent, and hasn't yet seen the acres of scorched earth behind Fanny's lovely gaze.
It takes all of Mary's considerable powers of persuasion to get Fanny to take up the necklace again, though she does so with considerably less willingness before, "for there was an expression in Miss Crawford's eyes which she could not be satisfied with." Oh, for the love of God. What expression? And then there's this:
It was impossible for (Fanny) to be insensible of Mr. Crawford's change of manners…He evidently tried to please her—he was gallant—he was attentive—he was something like what he had been to her cousins; he wanted, she supposed, to cheat her of her tranquility as he had cheated them; and whether he might not have some concern in this necklace!—She could not be convinced that he had not, for Miss Crawford, complaisant as a sister, was careless as a woman and a friend.
What Austen is inviting us to do here—whether she knows it or not—is to suspect Mary of aiding Henry in a conspiracy of rape; whether actual or metaphorical, it amounts to the same thing. It's absolutely jarring—it doesn't tally a jot with anything we've been led to feel for or about Mary—or Henry either, for that matter—but from this point on, it's what drives the plot. As I've said, it's Austen's only real failure in her entire body of work; but it is, alas, a massive one, and from here on in, Mansfield Park becomes heavy going because of it.
In fact, we plunge right on in to one of the most distressing chapters in all of Austen. Fanny hurries back home and goes up to her room intending to deposit "this doubtful good of a necklace" in a box, and when she opens the door she finds Edmund there, at her writing table. "Such a sight having never occurred before, was almost as wonderful as it was welcome."
He's come, we learn, to give her a chain for William's cross, which he would have given her earlier but for blah blah blah (Edmund's dialogue, like Edmund himself, does not sparkle) but here it is now and no don't thank me, now I must rush off before your torrent of rapture submerges and drowns me. Except Fanny—who's thrilled not only by the simpler taste of Edmund's chain, but by the excuse it now gives her to forego Mary's necklace—implores him to stay and advise her on the best way to return the gift to Mary.
Edmund, hearing of Mary's largesse, predictably goes all moony over her perfection in having foreseen Fanny's need, and offers her the opposite counsel to the one being sought: rather than offend her friend, Fanny must wear Mary's necklace:
"For one night, Fanny, for only one night, if it be a sacrifice…wear the necklace, as you are engaged to do tomorrow evening, and let the chain, which was not ordered with any reference to the ball, be kept for commoner occasions. That is my advice. I would not have the shadow of a coolness between the two…in whose characters there is so much general resemblance in true generosity and natural delicacy as to make the few slight differences, resulting principally from situation, no reasonable hindrance to a perfect friendship."
No, I don't know what drugs Edmund has been taking, but I sure wish I knew where to score some.
He then goes on to refer to Mary and Fanny as "the two dearest objects I have on earth," which sends Fanny into a little tailspin of happy-sad:
She was one of his two dearest—that must support her. But the other!—the first!...Could she believe Miss Crawford to deserve him, it would be—how far more tolerable! But he was deceived in her; he gave her merits which she had not; her faults were what they had ever been, but he saw them no longer.
All right, maybe we can chalk up this rank ingratitude to understandable dismay at her realization that Edmund is going to wed Mary and that any kinda-sorta-sometimes-under-the-covers-at-night hopes she herself might have had in that direction were "an insanity". But then comes the real cray-cray: Fanny greedily scoops up the letter Edmund had been writing to her and reads over its single unfinished sentence with little gasps of ecstasy.
Two lines more prized had never fallen from the pen of the most distinguished author—never more completely blessed the researches of the fondest biographer. The enthusiasm of a woman's love is even beyond the biographer's. To her, the hand-writing itself, independent of any thing it may convey, is a blessedness. Never were such characters cut by any other human being, as Edmund's commonest hand-writing gave! This specimen, written in haste as it was, had not a fault; and there was a felicity in the flow of the first four words, in the arrangement of "My very dear Fanny," which she could have looked at for ever.
If you had shown me this passage out of context and asked me to guess its author, Jane Austen is just about the last name I'd have given you. Pretty much everyone else in the western canon would have come before it. Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot…what the hell, Jean-Paul Sartre, H.P. Lovecraft, Mickey Spillane. But Austen? This is exactly the kind of archness, the kind of preciousness—the kind of flat-out romantic fetishism—that our girl typically mocks. (The brazenly irreverent juvenile Jane would have gone even further: she'd have had Fanny actually try to stare at those four words forever, and perish from hunger in the attempt.) I don't know exactly what happened to Austen here, but you want to avert your eyes and pretend not to notice, like when someone you love farts in a church.
Thankfully, these turgid passages come to an end in a swift onrush of minor incident; but then, just as swiftly, we arrive at the night of the ball, when Fanny, on her way upstairs to make herself ready, reflects that yesterday "it had been about the same hour that she had found Edmund in the east room", and "in a fond indulgence of fancy" she wonders whether she'll find him there again—only to have Edmund appear right there before her on the stairs. You blink once, then twice, and you wonder: What the hell has happened to Jane Austen? This…this is a Barbara Cartland moment.
It continues in this chest-heaving vein. Edmund, who looks seriously beat down, tells Fanny he's just come from the Parsonage, and "You may guess my errand there, Fanny." She of course presumes he's popped the question, and quietly goes into cardiac arrest, until he says, "I wished to engage Miss Crawford for the first two dances," and then sunshine and lollipops, Fanny is so relieved, and if I had hair I would tear it out right at the roots.
But while Mary has agreed to the first two dances, "she says it is the last time that she will ever dance with me…She never has danced with a clergyman, she says, and she never will." Edmund then prevails on Fanny's sterling qualities as a listener to bear with him as he tears down Mary's character—yes, Mary, who mere pages before he was rhapsodizing as the pinnacle of sweetness and consideration and delicacy—as being no different in essentials than Fanny herself—and of course Fanny is only too happy to listen, and in her Fanny way encourage him with silence…agreeing by withholding agreement. Not that Edmund needs encouragement or agreement; like an eighth-grader who's been rejected by the popular girl, he intends to salve his pride by sullying the reputation of the one who wounded it. Suddenly and miraculously, he's able to point to all sorts of subtle indications that Mary's not really a quality human being at all, and…
…and, you know what? Enough, already. I can't bear it anymore. We'll get into the actual ball next time, but right now I need a good stuff drink. A tumbler of Glenfiddich ought to do it.
Actually, better make that a double.