Robert Rodi's Blog, page 9

Mansfield Park, chapters 22-24

With the Bertram girls now gone off to wreak havoc on the larger world, Fanny is left as the only specimen of female nubility at Mansfield Park (barring any sleek bitches in Sir Thomas's hunting pack we haven't been told of). This makes her for the first time a novelty in the house, meaning that "it was impossible for her not to be more looked at, more thought of and attended to, than she had ever been before; and 'where is Fanny?' became no uncommon question, even without her being wanted for any one's convenience." In other words, welcome to Fanny hell.
And it's not just at home; she's suddenly flavor of the month at the Parsonage, too—"that house which she had hardly entered twice since Mr. Norris's death." This comes about by accident, when Fanny, on an errand for Aunt Norris, is caught by a sudden downpour and takes refuge beneath a tree visible from the Parsonage windows. She is of course invited into the house and of course refuses, until Dr. Grant himself comes out with an umbrella to entreat her. This is classic Fanny: once again she's used her power of denial to throw an entire household into disarray. You find yourself wishing the Grants would just say, "She'd rather stay in the rain?...Hooo-kay. Her call."
But in this instance that's not an option, because the Parsonage is home to Mary Crawford, and on a long, wet day Mary would lasso the Apocalypse Beast himself across her threshold just for the few hours' break from boredom he would supply. Actually, the Apocalypse Beast might make for more diverting company that Fanny, whose résumé isn't long on turning monotony into novelty. More the reverse. But ah, we're reckoning without the ingenuity of Mary, who immediately forces Fanny out of her wet clothes and into some of her own dry ones—Austen's subtle way of telegraphing that Mary's going to make Fanny over into the kind of companion she requires (or die trying).
And things do go well initially, though not without the usual depressing caveats from our heroine:
…Fanny might have enjoyed her visit could she have believed herself not in the way, and could she have foreseen that the weather would certainly clear at the end of the hour, and save her from the shame of having Dr. Grant's carriage and horses to take her home, with which she was threatened.
She should look at the bright side; possibly Dr. Grant might choose instead to kick her downhill all the way home, thus preserving her humility.
Then Mary learns, to her astonishment, that Fanny has never heard her play the harp—and, "calling to mind an early-expressed wish on the subject, was concerned at her own neglect." (Again: this is the rival we're meant to hate? This thoughtful charmer? This snookums?) She gets right down to business, sitting down at the instrument and running through her entire repertoire for her harp-starved neighbor—though Fanny's eyes inevitably stray to the window, because she's worried that someone, somewhere might be wanting to yell at her about now, and what will they do if she's not there? Mary can only keep her from bolting by promising next to play Edmund's favorite piece. Of course Fanny will stay for that. Fanny would stay to be shown the stain on the carpet where Edmund threw up his picked herring.
Anyway, from this moment on, Mary and Fanny become kinda-sorta BFF's.
Fanny went to her every two or three days; it seemed a kind of fascination; she could not be easy without going, and yet it was without loving her, without ever thinking like her, without any sense of obligation for being sought after now when nobody else was to be had; and deriving no higher pleasure from her conversation than occasional amusement, and that often at the expense of her judgment, when it was raised by pleasantry on people or subjects which she wished to be respected.
There's no mystery, really; Fanny's just in the thrall of a stronger, more vital, more vibrant personality. Her puny little scruples are no match for Mary's star power. It's harder to see what's in it for Mary, other than an audience (no mean thing, for someone of her persuasion).
The two friends spend most of their time taking long walks, during which Fanny is given to "ejaculations" of delight on the subject of nature's awesomeness:
"The evergreen!—How beautiful, how welcome, how wonderful the evergreen!—When one thinks of it, how astonishing a variety of nature!—In some countries we know the tree that sheds its leaf is the variety, but that does not make it less amazing, that the same soil and the same sun should nurture plants differing in the first rule and law of their existence. You will think me rhapsodizing; but when I am out of doors, especially when I am sitting out of doors, I am very apt to get into this sort of wondering strain. One cannot fix one's eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy."
Austen is trying rather hard to make us like Fanny here (especially when immediately contrasted with Mary's admission that "I see no wonder in this shrubbery equal to seeing myself in it"), but it doesn't work for me. It just makes me ask questions. I mean, these women spend two or three days a week together. Does Fanny extol the foliage every goddamn time?
Mary might be immune to nature's variety, but when pressed she admits that the pastoral life doesn't completely lack its charms, and that she "can even suppose it pleasant to spend half the year in the country, under certain circumstances." She then amplifies in a way that once again fixes her as a precursor to the witty, sardonic heroines of Wilde and Coward:
"An elegant, moderate-sized house in the centre of family connections—continual engagements among them—commanding the first society in the neighborhood—looked-up to perhaps as leading it even more than those of larger fortune, and turning from the cheerful round of such amusements to nothing worse than a tête-à-tête with the person one feels more agreeable in the world. There is nothing frightful in such a picture, is there, Miss Price?"
Miss Price has probably gone into cardiac arrest by now, but never mind.
This segues into a discussion of Maria's marriage and Mary's expectation that "we shall be all very much at Sotherton another year…for the first pleasures of Mr. Rushworth's wife must be to fill her house, and give the best balls in the country." And then comes one of those moments where Austen gives a bravura example of her psychological brilliance; for Mary exclaims, "Ah! here he is"—but it's not Mr. Rushworth she means, it's Edmund, who hasn't been mentioned by name for several pages, but who Mary clearly invoked when describing "the person one feels most agreeable in the world." Edmund's presence, summoned forth in this manner, is so much stronger than that of Mr. Rushworth, even when the latter is being openly discussed, that "Here he is" can only mean the former—at least for these two women. And they know it; they know it about each other, too. It's an unspoken thing between them…but we get the feeling Mary views it as a bond, while for Fanny it's more of a threat.
Edmund, accompanied by Mrs. Grant, joins the young ladies, and several pages of sparkling badinage ensue (in which Fanny, predictably, takes no part at all; not that anyone actively excludes her—she willingly sidelines herself). Eventually Mary and Edmund get around to tormenting each other in that special way they have, which begins with Mary proclaiming that she means to be a rich woman, since "A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of."
 "You intend to be very rich," said Edmund with a look which, to Fanny's eye, had a great deal of serious meaning.
"To be sure. Do not you?—Do not we all?"
"I cannot intend any thing which it must be so completely beyond my power to command. Miss Crawford may chuse her degree of wealth. She has only to fix on her number of thousands a year, and there can be no doubt of their coming. My intentions are only not to be poor."
They're still trying to negotiate some kind of a future together—but since Mary is too fearful of failure to attempt any other approach but a teasing one, and Edmund too earnest to give way even an inch, they wind up as emotionally bollixed as ever. Even when Edmund, by doggedly insisting that she define her terms, maneuvers Mary into a corner where it seems she'll be forced to concede him a point, she masterfully gets the better of him by saying, "Oh!...You ought to be in parliament"—in other words, his very skill at making a case for his clerical calling is just evidence he should be a politician instead. Mary's quicksilver that way, maddening and delightful. How can her creator not have been crazy about her?—How, in fact, can she ultimately slight her in favor of the drippy sourpuss who's been lurking at the margins of all this incandescent, heart-stopping talk? It's the insoluble mystery of Mansfield Park.
The chapter ends with Mrs. Grant inviting Fanny to dine at the Parsonage. Fanny of course declines, claiming that accepting "would not be in her power," and this is true, because her power is exclusively one of refusal. Edmund, however, accepts for her, which kind of screws the pooch, because her only other constant, besides negation, is the principle that Edmund Totally Rules.
When Lady Bertram hears about the invitation she's absolutely gobsmacked—"But why should Mrs. Grant ask Fanny?" she keeps repeating, over and over again, as though that lady had done something entirely incomprehensible, like cutting off all her hair and running naked through the town with her breasts painted blue. Edmund tries to explain the simple civility of the gesture, but Lady Bertram still can't wrap her mind around the idea of Fanny at an actual dinner party; you get the impression that at home they feed her from a ceramic bowl on the floor of the kitchen.
Eventually Edmund suggests that Lady Bertram appeal to her husband for his opinion on the matter, but this takes a while to accomplish, because it involves waiting for Sir Thomas to come within hailing range of Lady Bertram's couch. (The novel would go in an entirely different direction if anyone had the genius to affix the piece of furniture in question with wheels.) When the consultation does take place, Fanny has to sneak out of the room…
…for to hear herself the subject of any discussion with her uncle, was more than her nerves could bear. She was anxious, she knew—more anxious perhaps than she ought to be—for what was it after all whether she went or staid?—but if her uncle were to be a great while considering and deciding, and with very grave looks, and those grave looks directed to her, and at last decide against her, she might not be able to appear properly submissive and indifferent.
Anyone else really, really missing Lizzy Bennet right about now?...Hm? Show of hands?
Sir Thomas naturally decrees that Fanny can go to dinner at the Grants'—in fact he doesn't understand why he's been appealed to on the matter at all. Are we not having a civilization here, or what? "The only surprize I can feel," he says," is that this should be the first time of (such notice) being paid." Mrs. Norris, it's decided, will come and take Fanny's place so that Lady Bertram will have someone on hand to make her tea, without which, it is strongly implied, she will fall into a swift decline and immediately die.
When Aunt Norris gets wind of the extraordinary favor being shown to Fanny, she works herself into such a fit of furious indignation that it takes several pages of scaldingly hilarious invective to work herself out of it again. It's probably her best sustained monologue in the book. She hovers over the trembling Fanny, who's trying to get herself ready for the dinner, and hammers her with verbal abuse; she even manages to weave in a reminder of her jealous hatred of Mrs. Grant (remember that?):
"…I must observe, that five is the very awkwardest of all possible numbers to sit down to table; and I cannot but be surprised that such an elegant lady as Mrs. Grant should not contrive better! And round their enormous great wide table too, which fills up the room so dreadfully! Had the Doctor been contented to take my dinner table when I came away, as any body in their senses would have done, instead of having that absurd new one of his own, which is wider, literally wider than the dinner table here—how infinitely better it would have been! and how much more he would have been respected! for people are never respected when they step out of their proper sphere. Remember that, Fanny. Five, only five to be sitting round that table! However, you will have dinner enough on it for ten I dare say."
Then occurs this wonderful line: "Mrs. Norris fetched breath and went on again." How I'd love to see that line on every third page of Mansfield Park.
This remarkable performance eventually concludes with Aunt Norris telling Fanny that even though it's almost certain to rain again, she'd better not get any ideas of riding home, as though she were Maria or Julia or the Empress of Russia or something, but should make whatever preparations she must for a walk home in inclement weather. This is immediately followed by Sir Thomas poking his head in the door and saying, "Fanny, at what time would you have the carriage come round?"—and if you read this passage without barking out a laugh, you must be clinically dead or something. It's a simple comic turn, but Austen's epic set-up (two-and-a-half pages of Mrs. Norris's vitriolic harangue) is what makes the payoff so deliciously sidesplitting.
Fanny, unfortunately, not only can't bring herself to triumph over Aunt Norris; she can't quite not triumph over her, either. In fact she slinks out the room on Sir Thomas's heels specifically to avoid the issue altogether. Mrs. Norris is left to sputter and fume and put the best face on it she can:
"Quite unnecessary!—a great deal too kind! But Edmund goes;—true—it is upon Edmund's account. I observe he was hoarse on Thursday night."
Fanny has donned the white dress Sir Thomas bought her for Maria's wedding, which she hopes isn't too fine. Edmund thinks it's just right, and I only wish we were able to watch the play of her features as he reassures her with these words:
"A woman can never be too fine while she is all in white. No, I see no finery about you; nothing but what is perfectly proper. Your gown seems very pretty. I like these glossy spots. Has not Miss Crawford a gown something the same?"
I admit it: I barked a laugh again. That's twice in three pages. Austen's clearly on a roll here.
When Edmund and Fanny arrive at the Parsonage, they spot Henry Crawford's barouche outside. Edmund is glad to have his friend returned; Fanny not so much.
There was no occasion, there was no time for Fanny to say how very differently she felt; but the idea of having such another to observe her, was a great increase of the trepidation with which she performed the very aweful ceremony of walking into the drawing-room.
We last saw Fanny nearly thwarted by a door; now her difficulty is in only in entering a room. I suppose that's progress.
Once she's accomplished this daredevil feat, Fanny realizes that Crawford's unexpected arrival might be to her benefit, because "every addition to the party must rather forward her favourite indulgence of being suffered to sit silent and unattended to"—and indeed there is "such a happy flow of conversation prevailing in which she was not required to take any part" that we suspect we might be allowed our favourite indulgence of being suffered to forget she's in the novel at all.
But no…for in fact Fanny actually, really, honest-to-God-I-ain't-lyin' adds a layer to her eggshell veneer in this chapter. She becomes—wait for it—an avatar for female outrage. A very, very small and wholly ineffective one, granted, but even the faintest flourish of personality is a welcome relief from the nullity she's been up to now.
The inspiration for this change—the smirking cad who galvanizes her into actual strong feeling—is Crawford, who behaves in his usual blithe, careless manner, showing not only no penitence, but not even any awareness of what a completely amoral douchebag he was in his treatment of both Julia and (especially) Maria. Fanny is so offended by him that Austen resorts to the word "hate"—the strongest reaction we've ever had from Fanny about anything, anywhere, ever.
As she listens to Henry prattle on about what a golden age the Lovers' Vows rehearsals were for them all and how alive and energized they'd all been, Fanny is appalled by his "corrupted mind" (conveniently forgetting that she'd snuck in to watch his rehearsals with Maria for a little energizing of her own). And then Henry, emboldened by her silence—which he of course takes for tacit agreement—goes too far:
"I think if we had had the disposal of events—if Mansfield Park had had the government of the winds just for a week or two about the equinox, there would have been a difference. Not that we would have endangered (Sir Thomas's) safety by any tremendous weather—but only by a steady contrary wind, or a calm. I think, Miss Price, we would have indulged ourselves with a week's calm in the Atlantic at that season."
Fanny—"with a firmer tone than usual"—replies, "As far as I am concerned, sir, I would not have delayed his return for a day. My uncle disapproved it all so entirely when he did arrive, that in my opinion, every thing had gone quite far enough." Crawford is surprised by this admonitory blast from meek little Fanny, and is chastened by it—though more than a little charmed as well. It's like when a kitten surprises you by giving you a good, sharp swipe with its claws; you know you'll be more careful of it in future, but damn if that wasn't cute.
Having "trembled and blushed at her own daring," Fanny has pretty much exhausted herself with this display and so sits out the rest of the chapter, possibly even indulging in a restorative nap. Focus turns to the after-dinner conversations in the parlour, where Henry Crawford shocks his sister by revealing to her that Edmund is soon to take orders—and adding that he will "not have less than seven hundred a year," which in his opinion isn't so bad for a younger brother, especially since he'll still be living at home and "a sermon at Christmas and Easter, I suppose, will be the sum total of his sacrifice."
His sister tried to laugh off her feelings by saying, "Nothing amuses me more than the easy manner with which every body settles the abundance of those who have a good deal less than themselves. You would look rather blank, Henry, if your menus plaisirs were to be limited to seven hundred a year."
She's wounded to the quick, but refuses to show it—refuses to feel it, even. Instead, she puts on a front of blasé amusement. Later, when the others sit down to cards, she takes refuge in her harp (being "too much vexed by what had passed to be in a humor for any thing but music").
She was very angry with (Edmund). She had thought her influence more. She had begun to think of him—she felt that she had—with the greatest regard, with almost decided intentions; but she would now meet him with his own cool feelings. It was plain that he could have no serious views, no true attachment, by fixing himself in a situation which he must know she would never stoop to. She would learn to match him in his indifference. She would henceforth admit his attentions without any idea beyond immediate amusement. If he could so command his affections, her's should do her no harm.
Because, y'know, that always works.
While Mary is making up her mind to resist Edmund from now on, her brother is making up his mind to do something quite the opposite. Speaking the next morning of the two weeks he means to spend at Mansfield, he tells her: "And how do you think I mean to amuse myself, Mary, on the days that I do not hunt? I am grown too old to go out more than three times a week; but I have a plan for the intermediate days…to make Fanny Price fall in love with me."
Mary scoffs, and tells him he "ought to be satisfied with her two cousins." But nobody ever gained a point by telling Henry Crawford what he ought to do, and sure enough he sails right past it, waxing eloquent about the "wonderful improvement" Fanny has undergone since last he saw her. Mary points out, quite correctly, that the wonderful improvement he speaks of is that she's now the only girl for five miles in any direction—"and you must have a somebody" (wonderful line). She continues:
"(I)f you do set about this flirtation with her, you will never persuade me that it is in compliment to her beauty, or that it proceeds from any thing but your own idleness and folly."
Her brother gave only a smile to this accusation, and soon afterwards said, "I do not quite know what to make of Miss Fanny. I do not understand her. I could not tell what she would be at yesterday. What is her character?—Is she solemn?—Is she queer?—Is she prudish?"
Yes, yes, and yes. Or rather: she's not joyful—she's not conventional—she's not earthy. (It's always best to define Fanny by negatives.)
Mary knows Henry too well, and mocks him for targeting Fanny solely because of her coldness and sharpness to him; she represents a challenge to his charms.
"I do desire that you will not be making her really unhappy; a little love perhaps may animate and do her good, but I will not have you plunge her deep, for she is as good a little creature as ever lived, and has a great deal of feeling."
Personally, I can't but view this as another mark in Mary's favor. She knows full well she can't lure her brother off the prowl now that he's got Fanny's scent; but she might be able to minimize the angle of his descent on her. And frankly, if Fanny were any sort of normal human being, a decent flirtation would do her good. But how could someone like Mary—active, curious, adventurous—ever begin to suspect the engine of entropy that is Fanny Price?
But her brother is deaf to Mary's pleas.
"It can be but for a fortnight," said Henry, "and if a fortnight can kill her, she must have a constitution which nothing can save. No, I will not do her any harm, dear little soul! I only want her to look kindly on me, to give me smiles as well as blushes, to keep a chair for me by herself wherever we are, and be all animation when I take it and talk to her; to think as I think, be interested in all my possessions and pleasures, try to keep me longer at Mansfield, and feel when I go away that she shall be never happy again. I want nothing more."
Sometimes even Noël Coward wasn't quite this Noël Coward, knowhumsayin'?
Yes, Henry's a cad; yes, he's got the moral compass of a virus. But he's easy and glib and knows himself, and laughs at himself, and this can't help disarming any disapproval we might feel. Possibly the reason Mansfield Park—and Mansfield Park alone of Austen's major novels—fails to cohere is that she really sets herself too difficult a task. Maybe she felt she was up to it; if so, she learned her lesson afterward, to her immense benefit (as we'll discuss later, in our summation). In Fanny Price, she's created a heroine who's inert; in Mary Crawford, a rival who beguiles; in Edmund, a hero without passion; and in Henry Crawford, a gigolo who can't help being his own victim. We have to give her credit for trying to work with greater shade and complexity—it would have been so easy to give us two more hissing cretins, in the Lucy Steele-Mr. Wickham mode—but she goes too far in the opposite direction, granting her villains more earnest humanity (and gallons more charm) than her heroes. The narrative, thrown out of balance, never recovers, and our affections, once they've splashed outside the receptacle intended for them, can't be tipped back.
And so we watch with an interest entirely at odds with the author's as Henry begins to wear down the reserve of his chosen prey.
She had by no means forgotten the past, and she thought as ill of him as ever; but she felt his powers; he was entertaining, and his manners were so improved, so polite, so seriously and blamelessly polite, that it was impossible not to be civil to him in return.
In fact, we want her to succumb. We have a feeling it'd be good for both of them. And that feeling only deepens when Fanny's beloved brother William re-enters the narrative, the ship on which he serves having come home to dock at Portsmouth.
William isn't one of Austen's great creations. Like most fictional characters, he was invented to serve the narrative—in this case, by providing a means for those who think well of Fanny (Edmund, Sir Thomas, Henry) to make their regard apparent to her. (Since any favor to herself only horrifies her, there has to be another to whom a favor shown will make her go all melty.) Most fictional characters manage to accrue flesh and blood while serving their function in the narrative (as witness Mrs. Norris; her sole purpose is to brutally blunt Fanny's self-esteem, but she quickly develops into a comic creation of Falstaffian proportions). William never does; he remains a cipher. When he and Fanny are reunited, Austen tells us that "it was some time…before the disappointment inseparable from the alteration of person had vanished, and she could see in him the same William as before," but she doesn't tell us how he's been altered; and in fact to our eyes, he appears exactly the same (in every bland particular) as he did on his first appearance, many chapters back. And the scenes he and Fanny share are generalized to the point of near meaninglessness:
Fanny had never known so much felicity in her life, as in this unchecked, equal, fearless intercourse with the brother and friend, who was opening all his heart to her, telling her all his hopes and fears, plans, and solicitudes…
You get the drift. My point is, William hasn't been brought back to the narrative for his own sake, but to serve as a means by which Henry Crawford can see Fanny exhibit the kind of warmth and openness of affection he's been trying to charm out of her—and to realize, with a kind of shock, that he now wants it for its own sake; that he sees a value in her affection beyond the mere validation of his powers of seduction. It's been a long while (the opening chapters of Sense and Sensibility, in fact) since the narrative scaffolding of an Austen novel has poked through the storytelling this way, and as it's the only time it happens in all of Mansfield Park, let's just give our gal a pass.
What we're left with, then, is a changed Henry Crawford—a Henry who considers that "it would be something to be loved by such a girl, to excite the first ardours of her young, unsophisticated mind! She interested him more than he had foreseen. A fortnight was not enough. His stay became indefinite."
Welllll…okay. But only because we can't wait to see how Aunt Norris reacts to this.

Mansfield Park, chapters 19-21

"How is the consternation of the party to be described?" the author asks, with regard to the unexpected arrival of Sir Thomas on the premises. The answer is simple: it's to be described with flat-out, balls-to-the-wall hilarity, the cast seeming to dart about like characters in a French bedroom farce, in search of some screen or settee they might hide behind.
The exceptions are Maria and Henry Crawford, who, at the moment of the fateful announcement, are rehearsing a passionate scene between Frederick in Agatha in which the former presses the hand of the later against his heart. That Henry does not, on hearing the news of Sir Thomas's presence in the house, relinquish that hand, but keeps it fast in place, enabling Maria to continue copping a feel of his studly pecs, gives her a thrill of conquest. "She hailed it as an earnest of the most serious determination, and was equal even to encounter her father."
When the Bertram siblings finally file out, no doubt dragging their feet like a chain gang, to welcome their returning sire (with Mr. Rushworth fluttering behind them, piping "Shall I go too?—Had not I better go too?—Will not it be right for me to go too?"), Fanny stays behind with the Crawfords and Mr. Yates.
She had been quite overlooked by her cousins; and as her own opinion of her claims on Sir Thomas's affection was much too humble to give her any idea of classifying herself with his children, she was glad to remain behind and gain a little breathing time…She was nearly fainting; all her former habitual dread of her uncle was returning, and with it compassion for him and for almost every one of the party on the development before him…She had found a seat; where in excessive trembling she was enduring all these fearful thoughts…
We look for certain things in an Austen heroine, especially one placed under duress; "excessive trembling" is not among them.
While Fanny rattles and quakes, the Crawfords and Mr. Yates damn the luck that has brought the paterfamilias home at this precise juncture. The Crawfords realize it means the abrupt end of their theatrical experiment, but Mr. Yates—who is rapidly turning into a first-rate Austen idiot, a self-obsessed babbler who sees nothing beyond the tip of his nose—considers it only "a temporary interruption, a disaster for the evening." And when the Crawfords, understanding that in these circumstances retreat is the better part of valor, slink off home to the parsonage and advise Mr. Yates to likewise vamoose, he refuses.
"…(H)e preferred remaining where he was that he might pay his respects to the old gentleman handsomely since he was come; and besides, he did not think it would be fair by the others to have every body run away."
Mr. Yates has all the social instincts of a howler monkey.   But wait, he gets even better.
Fanny, meanwhile, has by some means—possibly a strong wind, or a minor earthquake—got herself to the drawing-room door, outside of which she pauses "for what she knew would not come, for a courage which the outside of no door had ever supplied her," and really, if her will to live can't withstand an encounter with a door, it's hard to hold out much hope for her.
As it happens, she enters the room just as Sir Thomas is enquiring after her ("But where is Fanny?—Why do I not see my little Fanny?"—the last bit of which, I'm sorry, my inner seven-year-old cannot read without a snort). And when she presents herself, he's so sweet and solicitous that it throws her into a confusion. For a moment she doesn't know whether to faint, or weep, or sink her teeth into his arm. Ultimately affection for him wins out, especially when she sees that he "was grown thinner and had the burnt, fagged, worn look of a hot climate," which suggests that in the movie version he be played by Donatella Versace.
Returned to his ancestral homestead and with his family gathered around him, Sir Thomas is in fine spirits, and he even takes a liking to his future son-in-law, Mr. Rushworth, a gentleman not famous for making a positive first impression. (Or a second, or a third, for that matter.) He gathers his clan around him to bask in their affection, and his wife is so moved by joy that "she had been almost fluttered for a few minutes," and actually moves her needlework and her pug aside to make room on the couch for him—which is the Lady Bertram equivalent of serenading him beneath a window, or launching a thousand ships to sail on Troy.
Aunt Norris, however, is pretty p.o.'ed at her brother-in-law's sudden return—because he has surprised her as fully as the others, leaving her not one damn thing to do.
Mrs. Norris felt herself defrauded of an office on which she had always depended, whether his arrival or his death were to be the thing unfolded; and was now trying to be in a bustle without having any thing to bustle about, and labouring to be important where nothing was wanted but tranquillity and silence.
She's at her riotous best in these scenes of Sir Thomas attempting to relate his adventures to his family; as, for instance, "in the most interesting moment of his passage to England, when the alarm of a French privateer was at the height, she burst through his recital with a proposal of soup." He gently refuses all her entreaties, to the point you half expect her to sneak off and set fire to the dining room, just so she can be seen to be the one who puts it out.
Eventually Lady Bertram, in her Olympian cluelessness, says, "How do you think the young people have been amusing themselves lately, Sir Thomas? They have been acting." Which prompts all the young'uns to clear their throats and hastily say things like Only a little, just a few lines here and there, nothing substantial, pay no attention, hey is that a bear at the window, tell us again about the French privateer, and Hey, how ABOUT some soup?
This successfully derails Sir Thomas from the subject until he decides he can't "be any longer in the house without just looking into his own dear room," and is so quickly off to do just that that no one has time think of sticking a leg out to trip him, or throwing a burning log in his path.
Tom is the first to recover his wits and he hurries after, reaching him just as Sir Thomas is standing in astonishment—not only at the transformation of his billiard room into a candelit playhouse, but at the presence there of "a ranting young man, who appeared likely to knock him down backwards." Mr. Yates, interrupted in the midst of running through his lines, is no less astonished, and gives "perhaps the very best start he had ever given in the whole course of his rehearsal." People who think Jane Austen didn't write physical comedy, need to think again.
Despite the harrowing peril this puts him in, Tom can't help finding the funny side (which is, of course, why we love Tom):
His father's looks of solemnity and amazement on this his first appearance on any stage, and the gradual metamorphosis of the impassioned Baron Wildenhaim into the well-bred and easy Mr. Yates, making his bow and apology to Sir Thomas Bertram, was such an exhibition, such a piece of true acting as he would not have lost on any account. It would be the last—in all probability the last scene on that stage; but he was sure there could not be a finer. The house would close with the greatest éclat.
Tom steps in to make a formal introduction, which doesn't help matters, as Sir Thomas is apparently familiar with Mr. Yates's family, and not in a way that promises ski weekends together. And it doesn't help that Mr. Yates's "easy indifference and volubility in the course of the first five minutes seemed to mark him as the most at home of the two." The three gentlemen return to the drawing room, "Sir Thomas with an increase of gravity which was not lost on all." 
It is, however, entirely lost on Mr. Yates, who proceeds to yammer away for the remainder of the evening on the history of the production, how it originated in the ill-fated production at Ecclesford, how it subsequently took root here, and every single detail of how it has proceeded since that day, short of the actual number of drop-stitches Mrs. Norris worked into Mr. Rushworth's pink satin cloak.
(He related) every thing with so blind an interest as made him not only totally unconscious of the uneasy movements of many of his friends as they sat, the change of countenance, the fidget, the hem! of unquietness, but prevented him even from seeing the expression of the face on which his own eyes were fixed—from seeing Sir Thomas's dark brow contract as he looked with inquiring earnestness at his daughters and Edmund…
Fanny, however, doesn't miss those harsh glances thrown at Edmund. "She knelt in spirit to her uncle, and her bosom swelled to utter, 'Oh! not to him. Look so to all the others, but not to him!"
Kneeling in spirit: another trait we very much don't look for in an Austen heroine.
When Mr. Yates's monologue finally runs out of steam—it happens somewhere around the autumn of 1907—Sir Thomas makes a visible attempt to keep his temper on an even keel, and condescends to change the subject by asking about the Mr. and Miss Crawford whom he has heard mentioned in several letters. Tom, "being entirely without particular regard for either…could speak very handsomely of both" (brilliant!) and commends them to his father as "a most pleasant gentleman-like man;—his sister a sweet, pretty, elegant girl." Which provokes Mr. Rushworth—jealous as he is of Henry Crawford (and possibly jealous, too, of Mr. Yates having just having spectacularly stolen his title as the novel's champion boor), wildly interjects:
"I do not say he is not gentleman-like, considering; but you should tell your father he is not above five feet eight, or he will be expecting a well-looking man."
Sir Thomas did not quite understand this, and looked with some surprize at the speaker.
Fortunately, Mr. Rushworth then redeems himself by saying how tired he is of acting anyway, and how he thinks "we are a great deal better employed, sitting comfortably here among ourselves, and doing nothing." Doing nothing being, in all likelihood, Mr. Rushworth's favorite hobby. Sir Thomas, "aware that he must not expect a genius in Mr. Rushworth," is thus satisfied to find him a "well-judging steady young man" (this judgment may founder a bit when he learns about the pink satin cape), and Mr. Rushworth is "most exceedingly pleased with Sir Thomas's good opinion, and saying scarcely any thing, he did his best towards preserving that good opinion a little longer."
By now it's pretty clear that Lovers' Vows is about to be replaced by Hell To Pay. Edmund, not willing to wait around for the part assigned to him, beards his father in his den the next morning and makes a full confession of his own culpability in the matter of the theatricals, with humble regrets inserted where appropriate.
"We have all been more or less to blame," said he, "every one of us, excepting Fanny. Fanny is the only one who has judged rightly throughout, who has been consistent. Her feelings have been steadily against it from first to last. She never ceased to think of what was due to you."
This is clearly a load of crap. Fanny was an active participant in every aspect of the production, except the acting of it. And even there, while unwilling to take a role herself, she was more than ready to help the others learn their lines, and to prompt them during rehearsals. Possibly Edmund, who can't but see Fanny as his own creation, is unable to discern this clear hypocrisy. And Austen, as Edmund's creator as well as Fanny's, seems saddled by the same impairment.
Sir Thomas is sufficiently mollified by Edmund's manful blame-taking, that "He did not enter into any remonstrance with his other children: he was more willing to believe that they felt their error, than to run the risk of investigation," which makes him at least more self-aware than his son. Edmund is congenitally blind to Fanny's faults; Sir Thomas makes a conscious decision not to see those of his offspring.
He does, however, see quite clearly Mrs. Norris's guilt in the matter, and doesn't let her off so lightly. The children are young and, with the exception of Edmund, "he believed of unsteady characters" (which is a nice way of saying they're completely deranged hyena people); but Mrs. Norris, as a grown woman, ought to have exercised better judgment. When he confronts her on the matter, she gives one of her best comic performances in the novel—a real tour de force. Realizing she can't possibly excuse or even mitigate her role in advancing the theatricals, she makes a panicked, desperate case for herself by enumerating at length (and this being Mrs. Norris, the term "at length" is no mere figure of speech), the many, many, many, many, many, many other services she provided the Bertram family in Sir Thomas's absence. "Her greatest support and glory was in having formed the connection with the Rushworths," which has resulted in Maria's engagement. "There she was impregnable."
And to hear her tell it, her efforts on that score were no less than Herculean; for example, she gives an account of how she managed to dislodge Lady Bertram from her sofa and haul her across the county to meet Mrs. Rushworth. "You know the distance to Sotherton," she says; "it was in the middle of winter, and the roads almost impassable, but I did persuade her." Sir Thomas keeps valiantly trying to derail her with a series of Yes-but's, which she plows right through, building the story of the journey to Sotherton into an adventure more fraught with incident than Sir Thomas's encounter with the French privateer.
"My heart quite ached for (the coachman) at every jolt, and when we got into the rough lanes about Stoke, where what with frost and snow upon beds of stones, it was worse than anything you can imagine, I was quite in an agony about him. And then the poor horses too!—To see them straining away! You know how I always feel for the horses. And when we got to the bottom of Sandcroft Hill, what do you think I did? You will laugh at me—but I got out and walked up. I did indeed. It might not be saving them much, but it was something, and I could not bear to sit at my ease, and be dragged up at the expense of those noble animals. I caught a dreadful cold, but that I did not regard. My object was accomplished in the visit."
If allowed to run on longer, she might also claim to have dug the coach out of a sudden rockslide, and warded off a pack of ravenous wolves. Unfortunately, Sir Thomas chooses this moment to give in to her—she's exhausted all the sternness right out of him—and the interview ends there. Still, it's one of the best comic scenes in the whole Austen canon, and makes one regret yet again that Austen never wrote for the stage. Just imagine the meal a good character actress could have made out of a scene like this one. Even the most dour audience member might have required an oxygen mask.
Sir Thomas then turns his hand to clearing out every last atom of evidence that Lovers' Vows ever infiltrated his hallowed halls. Essentially he tilts the entire house up forty-five degrees, and just shakes all the offending elements right out the door and windows. When the place is thus disinfected, the damage seems minimal: "The scene painter was gone, having spoilt only the floor of one room, ruined all the coachman's sponges, and made five of the under-servants idle and dissatisfied," and sweet Jesus, if we must, if we absolutely must suffer a deluge of modern novels attempting to flesh out or continue Austen's originals, can't someone at least have the ingenuity to turn his or her mind to the story of those five under-servants? (Ply me with enough single-malt scotch and I may just do the damn job myself.)
The sole exception to Sir Thomas's Lovers' Vows housecleaning is, of course, Mr. Yates, who manages to cling like a barnacle to the floorboards when the shaking is going on. He's such a sublime idiot that he's only just now twigging to the fact that the play may not be going forward as planned, and his thought process on hearing this confirmed is worth examining:
To be a second time disappointed in the same way was an instance of very severe ill-luck; and his indignation was such, that had it not been for the delicacy towards his friend and his friend's youngest sister, he believed he should certainly attack the Baronet on the absurdity of his proceedings, and argue him into a little more rationality…but there was a something in Sir Thomas, when they sat around the same table, which made Mr. Yates think it wiser to let him pursue his own way, and feel the folly of it without opposition…He was not a man to be endured but for his children's sake, and he might be thankful to his fair daughter Julia that Mr. Yates did yet mean to stay a few days longer under his roof.
Masterful stuff—another example of Austen's genius at its pithiest, most acerbic, and most psychologically devastating. Mr. Yates has been stripped naked and flayed alive before our eyes, and though it takes us a moment to appreciate this, we realize—to our delight—that he still hasn't. How she manages to toss off these lethal little character bits, so glibly that you almost don't feel the knife going in till the final punctuation, is a perpetual mystery to me.
We now turn our attention to Maria, who's growing increasingly frantic because her father's reappearance has set the wheels of her marriage to Mr. Rushworth in motion. But Henry Crawford—whom she hasn't seen since the moment their rehearsal was interrupted, has yet to arrive to rescue her from this fate. "It was of the utmost consequence to her that Crawford should now lose no time in declaring himself, and she was disturbed that even a day should be gone by without seeming to advance the point." At least she doesn't have to suffer Mr. Rushworth's clumsy attentions in the meantime; he "had set off early with the great news for Sotherton; and she had fondly hoped for such an immediate eclaircissement as might save him the trouble of ever coming back again."
Eventually Henry does reappear, in the company of Dr. Grant, both come to pay their respects to the returned lord of the manor, and "Maria saw with delight and agitation the introduction of the man she loved to her father." But alas, mere moments later Henry takes a chair near Tom and Maria is jolted out of her raptures by overhearing him say that "he was going away immediately, being to meet his uncle at Bath without delay, but if there were any prospect of a renewal of 'Lovers' Vows,' he should hold himself positively engaged…The play should not be lost by his absence." He soon turns to Maria and gives her the same piece of news, "with only a softened air and stronger expressions of regret."
But what availed his expressions or his air?—He was going—and if not voluntarily going, voluntarily intending to stay away; for, excepting what might be due to his uncle, his engagements were all self-imposed.—He might talk of necessity, but she knew his independence.—The hand which had so pressed her's to his heart!—The hand and the heart were alike motionless and passive now!
And then, just like that, Henry is gone—"gone from the house, and within two hours afterwards from the parish; and so ended all the hopes his selfish vanity had raised in Maria and Julia Bertram." We're still disposed to like Henry; and since Maria and Julia have never shown themselves to be anything but spoiled narcissists, we don't take much account of their wounded feelings. But suddenly Austen surprises us by rendering the sisters more human—reminding us that, in this novel, she's making a conscious effort to paint her villains, as well as her heroes, in more subtle hues:
Julia could rejoice that he was gone.—His presence was beginning to be odious to her; and if Maria gained him not, she was now cool enough to dispense with any other revenge.—She did not want exposure to be added to desertion.—Henry Crawford was gone, she could even pity her sister.
A few days later, Sir Thomas finally succeeds in dislodging Mr. Yates as well (possibly with the aid of his hounds and a loaded shotgun), and with that preening gas bag out of the picture there is, finally, nothing left in his field of vision to remind him that Lovers' Vows ever existed, even as a concept.
Before Austen closes the chapter, she gives the final bow to our favorite player:
Mrs. Norris contrived to remove one article from (Sir Thomas's) sight that might have distressed him. The curtain over which she had presided with such talent and such success, went off with her to her cottage, where she happened to be particularly in want of green baize.
So Aunt Norris has outfoxed Sir Thomas, virtually getting away with murder, and scored some decent textiles into the bargain. You gotta imagine she's sleeping well at night.
Everyone else, though, not so much. Sir Thomas's return to Mansfield has meant not just the crash and burn of Lovers' Vows, but the end of the revolving door of guests and revelers. Mansfield House goes into total lockdown: no one comes in, no one goes out. Sir Thomas wants to spend quiet evenings alone with his family, and goddammit, that's what he's going to do.
This comes as quite a shock to us as well, after the last few rollicking chapters. And in the sudden, deafening quiet—we can almost hear the ticking of the hall clock echoing through the house like a series of tiny thunderclaps—who should emerge from the shadows, but the character we've all but forgotten in the recent tumult: Fanny. She creeps noiselessly back into the narrative, where everyone is bemoaning the loss of all company, and tries to talk Edmund into happy submission to the new regimen. Of course she does; a vacuum is the thing Fanny likes best. When Edmund laments that even Dr. and Mrs. Grant are now shut out, and that they would "enliven us, and make our evenings pass away with more enjoyment to my father," Fanny counters:
"Do you think so?...In my opinion, my uncle would not like any addition…And it does not appear to me that we are more serious than we used to be; I mean, before my uncle went abroad. As well as I can recollect, it was always much the same. There was never much laughing in his presence; or, if there was any difference, it was not more I think than such an absence has a tendency to produce at first."
In other words, everyone was happy sitting around staring at their cuticles before; soon, we all will be again!
Fanny then observes, "I suppose I am graver than other people." Gosh, ya think? Girl is graver than most graves. (Gravity being, need I say it, another quality we absolutely don't look for in an Austen heroine). She goes on to comment on how much she loves listening to her uncle's stories of the West Indies. "It entertains me more than many other things have done—but then I am unlike other people I dare say." Which, give her credit, is a slam-dunk.
Edmund informs Fanny that the compliment is returned—that Sir Thomas enjoys her company as well; though at this point his enjoyment is largely due to Fanny having (ahem) filled out in all the right places.
"Your complexion is so improved!—and you have gained so much countenance!—and your figure—Nay, Fanny, do not turn away about it. It is but an uncle. If you cannot bear an uncle's admiration what is to become of you? You must really begin to harden yourself to the idea of being worth looking at.—You must try not to mind growing up into a pretty woman."
"Oh! don't talk so, don't talk so," cried Fanny, distressed by more feeling than he was aware of…
Hooo boy.
This tendency of Fanny's—to escape, to flee, to lurk in the margins—seems to have its effect on her creator as well, as we can almost sense Austen having to remind herself to bring Fanny forward. Not a difficulty she suffered with any of her other protagonists.
And indeed we're on the brink of losing Fanny again for a significant chunk of the narrative, as we segue into developments on the Maria-and-Mr. Rushworth front. The male Bertrams are to dine at Sotherton, and Fanny hopes Sir Thomas's initial good opinion of Mr. Rushworth will survive the occasion. Edmund won't bet money on it.
"That is impossible, Fanny. He must like him less after to-morrow's visit, for we shall be five hours in his company. I should dread the stupidity of the day, if there were not a much greater evil to follow—the impression it must leave on Sir Thomas. He cannot much longer deceive himself. I am sorry for them all, and would give something that Rushworth and Maria had never met."
So much for Mr. Norris's much-trumpeted credit in arranging the match. Can't wait to see this flung back at her, right? (I'm not being cruel here. It's just that, as we've seen, a cornered Aunt Norris is a very entertaining Aunt Norris.)
And it all goes down just as Edmund predicted. Sir Thomas spends an evening experiencing Mr. Rushworth in all his glory—perhaps showing off his favorite pair of house slippers, and reciting the alphabet all the way up to "G"—and comes away convinced that his son-in-law-to-be has less active grey matter than his nine-month-old Irish setter, and considerably less humility. He then makes a point of observing how his daughter behaves towards him, and notes—as we've seen illustrated all too clearly over the last hundred pages—that Maria now treats Rushworth as something like a human compost heap.
And here's where Sir Thomas shows himself, in spite of everything, to be a pretty standup guy. He decides to give Maria an out. If she wants to end the relationship, he'll back her up on it.
Advantageous as would be the alliance, and long standing and public as was the engagement, her happiness must not be sacrificed to it. Mr. Rushworth had perhaps been accepted on too short an acquaintance..(he) assured her that every inconvenience should be braved, and the connection entirely given up, if she felt herself unhappy in the prospect of it.
We expect her to jump at the chance, because we know full well that Henry Crawford has forever soiled Mr. Rushworth in her eyes. Ah, but we forget who we're dealing with: Maria Bertram, whose thoughts never stray farther ahead than the next ninety seconds. Rather than consider how a marriage to Foghorn Leghorn will fundamentally impinge on her freedom, her character, her very identity, all she cares about is "not giving Crawford the triumph of governing her actions, and destroying her prospects." In other words, it's not her future happiness that concerns her, it's her current fit of pique. So far from wanting out, Maria wants to hurry on the nuptials:
In all the important preparations of the mind she was complete; being prepared for matrimony by an hatred of home, restraint, and tranquilllity; by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry. The rest might wait. The preparations of new carriages and furniture might wait for London and spring, when her own taste could have fairer play.
Only a first-rank misanthrope could so breezily write such unremittingly scalding lines.
The marriage accordingly takes place within the month, and we finally get—for the very first time in Austen!—an actual description of a wedding ceremony. Here it is, in all its sumptuous, rapturous, dizzying chick-lit splendor:
It was a very proper wedding. The bride was elegantly dressed—the two bridesmaids were duly inferior—her father gave her away—her mother stood with salts in her hand, expecting to be agitated—her aunt tried to cry—and the service was impressively read by Dr. Grant. Nothing could be objected to when it came under the discussion of the neighborhood, except that the carriage which conveyed the bridge and bridegroom and Julia from the church door to Sotherton, was the same chaise which Mr. Rushworth had used for a twelvemonth before. In every thing else the etiquette of the day might stand the strictest investigation.
Seriously, the marquis de Sade has more romance in him than Jane Austen. (This is not a criticism. Quite the opposite.)
Mrs. Norris exults in having played matchmaker so well, "and no one would have supposed, from her confident triumph, that she had ever heard of conjugal infelicity in her life, or could have the smallest insight into the disposition of the niece who had been brought up under her eye." Meantime, the newylweds head to Brighton for their honeymoon, and Julia with them, since "Some other companion than Mr. Rushworth was of the first consequence to his lady". The greatly depleted family circle at Mansfield can't but feel their absence, and Austen remembers in the nick of time to add that oh yeah, Fanny misses them, too.

The fruits of my absence

Thank you for your patience. A new post will be up in a few days.


One of the reasons for my recent hiatus is that, in addition to my upcoming hardcover travel memoir, Seven Seasons In Siena, I've also just published a new novel (my eighth), The Sugarman Bootlegs, as an e-book on both Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook.


The Sugarman Bootlegs is a social satire-slash-Hitchcockian thriller—a kind of bastard child of All About Eve and Frankenstein. You can read more about it on my author blog.


I have one or two additional literary announcements coming, but they can wait. We have belated business at Mansfield Park to attend to. Till then, stay well.

An Accidental Hiatus

It's been two months since my last post, so I thought I'd better reassure you all that I haven't given up on the blog. I've simply got caught up in the final stages of production for my upcoming book, Seven Seasons In Siena, which will be published by Ballantine in June. In addition, I've become deeply involved in another major publishing endeavor, which I hope to be able to announce very, very soon. And as if that weren't enough, I'm also up to my knees in a major overhaul of my website to accommodate and celebrate all this new productivity.


As a result, I've had to temporarily set aside some pet projects (i.e. those that earn no actual money). I won't abandon them for long, because they're close to my heart—this one more so than the rest.


So until we meet again, enjoy these first shimmering days of spring. (Who am I kidding, like we won't still get socked with at least one more snowstorm. You want to lay money on it? I got a twenty here says I'm right.)  

Mansfield Park, chapters 16-18

The Fanny Problem becomes, in these chapters, exacerbated by the essential absence at her core.  When we left her, she had just refused to act in Lovers' Vows—refused even against the exhortation and outright coercion of the entire theatrical party—and had done so both adamantly and inarticulately.  She refused, but wouldn't say why; or rather, couldn't say why.  For Fanny, the word "no" is its own justification.
Up in the East Room—the former schoolroom of the Bertram girls, which Fanny subsequently claimed, inch by inch, kudzu-style—she is free to reflect on her misery.  Being essentially morbid by nature, she of course wallows in reliving every horrifying moment of her trial:
To be called into notice in such a manner, to hear that it was but the prelude to something so infinitely worse, to be told that she must do what was so impossible as to act; and then to have the charge of obstinacy and ingratitude follow it, enforced with such a hint at the dependence of her situation, had been too distressing at the time, to make the remembrance when alone less so,—especially with the superadded dread of what the morrow might produce in continuation of the subject.
She lurches around the room in a ferment, eventually pausing before a portrait of Edmund to see "if she could catch any of his counsel," which works about as well as that kind of thing usually does.  I suppose we should be grateful she doesn't sit cross-legged before it, burning incense and playing finger-cymbals.  Instead she continues her coyote-like pacing of the perimeter, which forces her, by presenting her with a grand tour of all the gifts and tokens she's received from her cousins over the years, to wonder whether her obstinacy is, in fact, justifiable by any measure.
Was she right in refusing what was so warmly asked, so strongly wished for? What might be so essential to a scheme on which some of those to whom she owed the greatest complaisance, had set their hearts?  Was it not ill-nature—selfishness—and a fear of exposing herself?
Well?...Was it?...This is the question—the BIG one—we've been waiting for Fanny to confront.  She's on the precipice of a breakthrough, here—a recognition that maybe, just maybe, her kneejerk reaction of saying no to everything in the entire universe and cosmos might be doing her no favors, and in fact may constitute a form of passive-aggressiveness bordering on the truly sociopathic.
But before she can quiiiite reach this blessed epiphany, there's a tap on the door, and "her gentle 'come in,' was answered by the appearance of one, before whom all her doubts were wont to be laid.  Her eyes brightened at the sight of Edmund."  Her eyes, anyway; ours are more likely to roll right up into our craniums.  All hope of Fanny reaching a new understanding evaporates as her hero, idol, and chief enabler enters, to reinforce all her worst character traits.
Or does he?...In fact, Edmund has come to astonish her.  Alarmed by Tom's efforts to find someone to take one of the uncast roles—which apparently involve riding around the countryside petitioning every male who can stand upright in his boots without wetting himself—Edmund is moved to drastic measures: to save his sister and Miss Crawford from excessive familiarity with a stranger (because in Edmund's view, reciting ribald lines from a playbook is pretty much third base), he has made up his mind to take the role himself.  Well, you could knock Fanny over with a feather.  (Actually, you can probably knock Fanny her with a feather at the best of times.  But let it pass.)
Edmund desires Fanny's approval, which she isn't ready to give (though she doesn't quite refuse it, either; bold, decisive girl).  She says how sorry she is that Edmund's complete 180 will give "such a triumph to the others," which he's forced to admit it will; but he must bear all their smug smiles and fist-pumping and high-fives and focus on the power he will then have to keep the production from going completely off the rails.
"As I am now, I have no influence, and they will not hear me; but when I have put them in good humour by this concession, I am not without hopes of persuading them to confine the representation within a much smaller circle than they are now in the high road for.  This will be a material gain.  My object is to confine it to Mrs. Rushworth and the Grants.  Will that not be worth gaining?"
Of course it is, and Fanny knows it.  But still she withholds her assent, because that's what Fanny does best: she withholds, withdraws, refuses.  It doesn't help, of course, that Edmund keeps harping away on the danger to Mary Crawford, as though trying to convince himself that this is really his motive, and that there's no appeal, none at all do you hear, in the idea of murmuring salaciously wicked couplets in Mary's lovely ear.  He even scolds Fanny for not being more sensible to Mary's certain relief at having him rescue her this way, especially after Mary rescued her just a few hours earlier—not realizing that with every word he's further damning Mary in Fanny's eyes.  At this point, if Mary were clinging for dear life off one of the white cliffs of Dover, Fanny would so far make an exception to her rule of complete and total inertia, as to stamp ever so lightly on Mary's pretty fingers.
Fanny manages to mumble enough evasive but agreeable-sounding syllables to convince Edmund that she does indeed give him her blessing, and the interview winds down.  Edmund, in a little spate of amiable chatter before he departs, makes it clear that despite her being a creature of his own creation, has absolutely no idea who she is. 
"How does Lord Macartney go on?—(opening a volume on the table and then taking up some others.)  And here are Crabbe's Tales, and the Idler, at hand to relieve you, if you tire of your great book.  I admire your little establishment exceedingly; and as soon as I am gone, you will empty your head of all this nonsense of acting, and sit comfortably down to your table."
He may be the most clueless hero in all of Austen—and he doesn't exactly make up for it with boatloads of charm.  (Unless he's around Mary, who manages to elicit something winsome and sweet out of him, the way hummingbirds use their long beaks to draw nectar from deep within a flower.) 
As you might have guessed, Fanny's prediction comes to pass, and the theatrical party do triumph over Edmund's submission.  Like there was ever any doubt.  Maria is constitutionally incapable of not exulting when she gets her way.  If she tried, she might blow the top of her scalp right off—with a tiny mushroom cloud as a grace note.  We're told that they all "congratulated each other in private on the jealous weakness to which they attributed the change…he was to act, and he was driven to it by the force of selfish inclinations only"—meaning, they're perfectly aware of the part Mary Crawford played in changing his mind.  He has, therefore, lost all moral standing in their eyes, which pretty much torpedoes his chances of setting them on a less self-exposing course of action.  At this point, if a runaway carriage were barreling towards them, and Edmund strongly advised moving out of its path, they might take this as sufficient reason for standing firm till they thought it over.
But to his face, of course, they're completely congenial and collegial.
It was all good humour and encouragement.  Mrs. Norris offered to contrive his dress, Mr. Yates assured him that Anhalt's last scene with the Baron admitted a good deal of action and emphasis, and Mr. Rushworth underook to count his speeches.
There's a danger to Fanny, though, that the party, emboldened by its victory over Edmund, might renew its assault on her to join the cast; but she's saved by Mrs. Grant agreeing to take the part earlier offered to her.  You'd think this would be unalloyed joy for Fanny, but no, because Mrs. Grant has signed on at the urging of Mary Crawford (though it can't have taken much urging.  You get the impression Mrs. Grant could be persuaded into bungee-jumping off Tower Bridge by a single hint dropped two rooms away).  Thus it's due to Mary that Fanny is spared from further attack.  She is obliged to her, and she doesn't like it. Not. At. All.
Even worse, Fanny's black hole of inertia now seems to have lost its negative power over the household.
Every body around her was gay and busy, prosperous and important, each had their object of interest, their part, their dress, their favourite scene, their friends and confederates, all were finding employment in consultations and comparisons, or diversion in the playful conceits they suggested.  She alone was sad and insignificant; she had no share in any thing; she might go or stay, she might be in the midst of their noise, or retreat from it to the solitude of the East room, without being seen or missed. 
In other words, Fanny can't take any pleasure in being inert anymore, if she's not also sucking the life out of every room she enters.  What good is her power of denial, if everybody around her is just thoughtlessly taking whatever they want anyway, without even considering her?...It's here we finally begin to see the "monster of complacency and pride…under a cloak of cringing self-abasement" that Kinglsey Amis declared her to be.
"She could almost think any thing would have been preferable" to her new irrelevancy in the household, but despite this "she could never have been easy in joining a scheme which, considering only her uncle, she must condemn altogether."  But she's not considering only her uncle; she'd already decided the play itself is beyond the pale.  She therefore has two pillars of moral support for holding herself apart from the theatricals.
Fanny's not alone in languishing on the fringes of the Lovers's Vows enterprise.  Julia, too, exists in a state of irrelevancy.  Henry Crawford, in plainly favoring her sister, has wounded Julia so deeply that she "either sat in gloomy silence, wrapt in such gravity as nothing could subdue…or allowing the attentions of Mr. Yates, was talking with forced gaiety to him alone, and ridiculing the acting of the others."  In other words, it's either Notice me, I'm sulking, or Notice me, I'm perfectly happy without you.  Either one of those tacks might have worked, but when you use them together, they kinda cancel each other out. 
Even worse for Julia, she makes the tactical mistake of rebuffing Henry's attempts to conciliate her, which just persuades him to give up the attempt entirely.  He's thus emboldened to go openly sniffing and pawing about Maria as though she were a bitch in high heat, which can't possibly escape the notice (and the alarm) of everybody else.  Julia is forced to watch from the sidelines as the man she apparently does in fact love, makes a spectacle of himself over the sister "who was now her greatest enemy."  Julia's only comfort is in selfishly hoping for a scandal that will disgrace both.  Never mind that it would mean the ruin of her family and the wreck of her household; her feelings are hurt, dammit.  Scourge the whole damn planet, if that's what it takes.
You'd think Fanny and Julia, as the two outcasts from theatrical paradise, might make common cause, or at least come together to commiserate, but "there was no outward fellowship between them.  Julia made no communication, and Fanny took no liberties."  Of course not.  It's her nature to refuse, not to offer.  She could no more extend a sympathetic hand to Julia, than she could climb the walls like a spider and cavort across the ceiling. 
But Fanny and Julia aren't to be alone in their discontent for long.  For Edmund's submission has marked the high point of the proceedings; only a short while later, we find all the harmony and high spirits dissipated.  "Every body began to have their vexation…"
Fanny, being always a very courteous listener, and often the only listener at hand, came in for the complaints and distresses of most of them.  She knew that Mr. Yates was in general thought to rant dreadfully, that Mr. Yates was disappointed in Henry Crawford, that Tom Bertram spoke so quick he would be unintelligible, that Mrs. Grant spoilt every thing by laughing, that Edmund was behind-hand with his part, and that it was a misery to have any thing to do with Mr. Rushworth, who was wanting a prompter through every speech…Every body had a part either too long or too short;—nobody would attend as they ought, nobody would remember on which side they were to come in—nobody but the complainer would observe any directions.
I could happily read stuff like this all the day long, and can't helping wishing Austen had just turned her attention in this direction instead of continually wresting it back onto old Misery Guts.
Speaking of whom, is it surprising to you that she ends up being the mother confessor to the whole cast, given her antipathy to the play and her staunch moral stand against its being undertaken in Sir Thomas's absence?...Well, get a load of this:
Fanny believed herself to derive as much innocent enjoyment from the play as any of them;—Henry Crawford acted well, and it was a pleasure to her to creep into the theatre and attend the rehearsal of the first act—in spite of the feelings it excited in some speeches for Maria.—Maria she also thought acted well—too well;—and after the first rehearsal or two, Fanny began to be their only audience, and—sometimes as prompter, sometimes as spectator—was often very useful.
WTF?!?  Hello, hypocritical much?  Either the play is immoral, or it isn't; either the production is a breach of decorum, or it isn't.  Fanny appears to want to have it both ways: standing aloof in her black cloak of disapproval, and yet fluttering on in for a couple hits of sensation whenever the fancy strikes her. 
In fact this is where Fanny and I part company, for good.  Her hollow core is finally revealed for the moral and spiritual abyss it is.  She has no ballast, no bottom; she's a thin, dry reed, a stick-thing, propped up by the cold wind of pride, though her roots are utterly dead.  Never mind the Jane Austen horror mash-ups that are flooding the market these days; Austen herself anticipated them.  In Fanny Price, she has given us a perfectly creditable vampire. 
Denied the power to suck the life out of the entire endeavor, Fanny has been reduced to darting about its perimeter like a ghoul, sipping when she can from the torrents of emotion that flow there (notably wild jealousy of Henry Crawford's superior acting skills) and helping Aunt Norris with all the needlework the production requires.  "(Fanny's) gloom of her first anticipations was proved to have been unfounded.  She was occasionally useful to all; she was perhaps as much at peace as any."   This is one of Austen's subtler jibes, because none of them is at anything close to peace—Fanny the succubus least of all.
Fanny's chief cause for anxiety is a scene—soon to be rehearsed—between Edmund and Mary Crawford, "the whole subject of (which) was love—a marriage of love was to be described by the gentleman, and very little short of a declaration of love be made by the lady."  Heady stuff, apparently; the Regency equivalent of a money shot.
(Fanny) had read, and read the scene again with many painful, many wondering emotions, and looked forward to their representation of it as a circumstance almost too interesting.  She did not believe they had yet rehearsed it, even in private.
As it happens, she's right about that; and confirmation arrives in the form of Mary Crawford herself, who intrudes upon Fanny in the frigid confines of East Room (henceforth to be known alternately as Castle Dracula) with an unusual request.
"I came here today intending to rehearse (the third act) with Edmund—by ourselves—against the evening, but he is not in the way; and if he were, I do not think I could go through it with him, till I have hardened myself a little, for really there is a speech or two…There, look at that speech, and that, and that.  How am I ever to look him in the face and say such things?  Could you do it?  But then he is your cousin, which makes all the difference.  You must rehearse it with me, that I may fancy you him, and get on by degrees.  You have a look of his sometimes."
Mary's motives deserve some consideration, here.  Because where Austen can't seem to bring Fanny to life in the way she desires (in fact it's the only real epic fail in her canon), she never puts a foot wrong with Mary.  So we have to take Mary at face value; she's never once shown even the slightest impulse for dissembling.  If anything, her habit is to be excessively truthful, and to delight in the gasps and blushes that follow.  So if she says she's too shy to rehearse these romantically charged scenes with Edmund, we have to believe her.  In fact it's endearing; Mary, who wouldn't think twice about reciting an obscene limerick for the Archbishop of Canterbury (possibly even while pole-dancing on his crosier), is nervous about exchanging some suggestive lines with Edmund.  Why?...Because they may reflect on her own true feelings; and while Mary may happily flout convention, that kind of nakedness is enough to give her pause.
And yet…I think there's a dual purpose to her prevailing on Fanny this way.  Yes, she wants to build up her courage for the rehearsal by running through the lines in advance with the one person on whom she can depend to help her do so; but she also recognizes that that very person is someone whose palpable feelings for Edmund (which Mary alone can see—because she's the only person who's actually bothered to look at Fanny) might cause some sort of trouble or disruption down the road.  That pointed reference to Edmund being Fanny's cousin, and therefore beyond the reach of any embarrassment at acting the lover with him, is Mary's subtle way of reminding Fanny of the hopelessness (if not the silliness) of any tenderness she may feel for him.  This isn't, I'm convinced, a case of Lucy Steele-type cattiness on Mary's part; quite the opposite—she's more likely to be trying to save Fanny from disappointment and heartbreak, than to forestall her becoming a rival.
Her point made, Mary—aware that she may have mortified Fanny by her observation—goes to great lengths to comfort her in the manner Mary knows best: through gossip.  She draws up two chairs and settles into a cozy little chin-wag about all the others, as in this anecdote (which, incidentally, again reveals Mary's essentially perceptive and generous nature) about "those indefatigable rehearsers," Maria and Henry Crawford:
"If they are not perfect, I shall be surprised…I looked in upon them five minutes ago, and it happened to be exactly at one of the times when they were trying not to embrace, and Mr. Rushworth was with me.  I thought he began to look a little queer, so I turned it off as well as I could, by whispering to him, 'We shall have an excellent Agatha, there is something so maternal in her manner, so completely maternal in her voice and countenance.'  Was not that well done of me?  He brightened up directly."
Go ahead, try to despise this woman.  Try, even, not to love her to smithereens.  And try, just go ahead and try, to prefer the gaping void in the chair opposite.
At Mary's behest, Fanny begins to read the scene with her—again, leaping right into those incendiary lines that had previously so shocked her she'd utterly refused to have anything to do with them—and it's all going swimmingly until there's another knock on the door, and Edmund enters.  (Let me just say again, it's a shame Austen never wrote for the stage; her theatrical instincts are infallible.  Even in a novel in which she heaps opprobrium on the whole concept of theatricals.)
Edmund has, of course, come to Castle Dracula for the same reason Mary did: to run through his lines with Fanny before daring to attempt them with Mary.  (Since, it goes without saying, no possible discomfort could accompany reciting them before Fanny; he might as well be trying them out in a mirror.  Or on the family dog.  Or on a moderate-sized piece of masonry.) 
Once the awkwardness of the coincidence has passed, the two colleagues figure they might as well seize the opportunity and read their lines together here and now, and ask Fanny "to prompt and observe them." 
She was invested, indeed, with the office of judge and critic, and earnestly desired to exercise it and tell them all their faults; but from doing so every feeling within her shrank, she could not, would not, dared not attempt it…
We begin to see a pattern here.  Fanny is more than willing to set aside her lofty standards and affronted morals at the request of a single supplicant, whether this means helping Mr. Rushworth learn his lines, or Mrs. Norris run up the costumes.  Indeed, she's all but giddy to lend a hand.  But when two or more of them appeal jointly to her, suddenly she draws herself up and cloaks herself in No.  In other words, when there's something before her that can conceivably be termed an audience, she—what else can you call it?—puts on an act.  She acts.
I repeat: hypocrite.
In this case, however, she's pretty much forced to give in; she can't resort to her usual tactic—fleeing to the East Room—because they're already in the East Room.  And it's clear Edmund and Mary aren't going to budge from it till they've got what they came for.  In fact, they'd probably just forge ahead whether Fanny was with them or not, so the whole point of Fanny's refusal is rendered moot.  She finds herself sitting and listening to them, and witnesses "the increasing spirit of Edmund's manner," and we're supposed to feel the depths of her suffering.  Hm.  Not so much.
Now that Edmund and Mary have cut their teeth on their big emotional scene, we're ready for the first regular rehearsal of the first three acts, which takes place that very evening.  Everyone's in high spirits, milling about the makeshift theater, eager to get started; they're just awaiting the arrival of the Crawfords and Mrs. Grant.  But alas, the Crawfords arrive alone.  Mrs. Grant has had to stay behind due to her husband suffering an "indisposition" after having not having eaten dinner, which makes no sense.  Unless he turned away the dinner because he'd already gobbled up the downstairs parlor maid.
Without Mrs. Grant the rehearsal can't proceed.  Unless…all turn as one to Fanny.  "If Miss Price would be so good as to read the part," someone says, with the emphasis on read as opposed to act, which everyone knows Fanny would rather hurl herself into quicksand than agree to.  Fanny, who's already given way on so many other little issues connected with the production, is on far less secure ethical footing now, and even Edmund urges her: "Do Fanny, if it is not very disagreeable to you."
"You have only to read the part," said Henry Crawford with renewed entreaty.
"And I do believe she can say every word of it," added Maria, "for she could put Mrs. Grant right the other day in twenty places.  Fanny, I am sure you know the part."
Fanny's falseness and hypocrisy have finally trapped her; and, in the manner of sinners and criminals everywhere, she seems almost glad of it.  In a way, it will be a relief to shed the burden of so much negativity; to join at last in fellowship, to embrace activity openly and without conditions.  She is, we realize, once again on the point of salvation: this could be the very moment at which she's drawn out of the cold isolation of her cycle of refusals, and into the warm embrace of the country of Yes.  Her heart pounds…her mouth goes dry…but she's ready to do it.  She's ready…she's willing.  She will do it.  She says as much.  She'll help them—and she'll be free.
They (began)—and being too much engaged in their own noise, to be struck by unusual noise in the other part of the house, had proceeded some way, when the door of the room was thrown open, and Julia appeared at it, with a face all aghast, exclaimed, "My father is come!  He is in the hall at this moment!"
The candles snuff; the casements slam shut.  And Fanny Price pulls her shroud tight around her, and slips gratefully back into her tomb.

Mansfield Park, chapters 13-15

The Honourable John Yates, a new friend of Tom's who's been lurking at the margins for a while (you could almost hear him clearing his throat, trying to get our attention), now finds his way into the plot proper.  It seems he's just come from a "large party assembled for gaiety at the house of another friend," which broke up unexpectedly when a death in the family put a pall over the proceedings, as a death in the family usually will.  Thus Mr. Yates has arrived in Mansfield "on the wings of disappointment, and with his head full of acting, for it had been a theatrical party," organized to put on the play Lovers' Vows "at Ecclesford, the seat of the Right Hon. Lord Ravenshaw, in Cornwall, which would have immortalized the whole party for at least a twelvemonth!"

So disappointed is Mr. Yates that he can't stop ruminating on his bum luck at never getting a chance to shine on the stage, and reiterating how wonderful he would have been and how astonished the audience and damn damn damn and the world is so unfair and do you want to hear his speeches?  Oh.  Well, do you want to hear them again?
Rather than running from such a drum-beating bore, or hiding behind the settee at the first tinkling of his voice in the hall, the Bertrams sit raptly and eat it all up with a spoon.  "From the first casting of the parts, to the epilogue, it was all bewitching, and there were few who did not wish to have been a party concerned, or would have hesitated to try their skill."  Austen doesn't tell us who those few were, but we don't need telling.  We can already see Edmund looming over the group, glaring at them with a great fiery eye like Sauron on Mount Doom; and where Edmund disapproves, so must Fanny, though from a greater distance—say, the other side of the room, next to an open window so that if anyone looks askance at her she can just noiselessly fling herself through it.
But as usual Austen is less concerned with her nominal heroine—really, Fanny can barely hold her interest, I don't know she expects her to hold ours—than she is with the follies and foibles of the pro-show crew, who spend the rest of the chapter puffing up their own egos in a way that makes you sorry Austen didn't live long enough to get to know actual theatre folk in London, because damn if she couldn't have delivered a real acid-bath to the whole profession.  But we'll have to settle for what we have here, which is not inconsiderable.  There is, for instance, the endless, self-pitying whingeing of Mr. Yates:
"It is not worth complaining about, but to be sure the poor old dowager could not have died at a worse time; and it is impossible to help wishing, that the news could have been suppressed for just the three days we wanted.  It was but three days; and being only a grand-mother, and all happening two hundred miles off, I think there would have been no great harm…"
Then there's the irreverent glibness of Tom, who's constitutionally incapable of taking anything seriously:  "An after-piece instead of a comedy," he quips, like a Noël Coward character (all he needs is a tumbler of gin in one hand); "Lovers' Vows were at an end, and Lord and Lady Ravenshaw left to act My Grandmother by themselves."
Then, after the Mansfield pack decides—as of course you knew they inevitably would—to take up the mantle themselves (though not in a theatre, in the privacy of their house), Austen masterfully charts the escalation of the plan, degree by degree, till suddenly we've got Tom all but knocking down walls and turning his absent father's billiards room into the Folies-Bergère.  When Edmund—who's begun to snark like a sarcastic thirteen-year-old whom no one will listen to—cautions Tom to have a care with how he handles the house, Tom replies that ahem, as the heir to whole estate he has perhaps a tad more reason than Edmund to care about the condition of the house, so why not trust him to look after it, there's a good little cretin.  When Edmund says he's sure their father wouldn't approve, Tom just contends the opposite.  Never mind, Edmund keeps coming up with reasons to cease and desist—Maria's status as a wife-to-be, Julia's marriageability, the obligations of their class and the standards of the community—and Tom breezily counters with Maria's and Julia's ability to think for themselves, and hey how about the obligations and standards of shut the fuck up.
But then Tom oversteps himself, by arguing that:
"And as to my father's being absent, it is so far from an objection, that I consider it rather as a motive; for the expectation of his return must be a very anxious period to my mother, and if we can be the means of amusing that anxiety, and keeping her spirits for the next few weeks, I shall think our time very well spent, and so I am sure will he.—It is a very anxious period for her."
Cut immediately to Lady Bertram sprawled out on her chaise, snoring lightly, a little drool running down the side of her mouth.  Anyone else might be abashed at having so baldly overstated his case, but Tom just laughs aloud and admits, Okay, maybe not so much, and lets it go.  (Seriously, how much do we love Tom?  Show of hands?...Thought so.)
But Edmund won't leave off; he's like a little terrier, tugging at Tom's pants leg and yipping at everyone else.  We've all known this type, haven't we; the sanctimonious do-righter, who stands on the sidelines while everyone else is reveling in the energy and excitement of some new endeavor, forging a community and—well, living life—and pestering them with a continual chorus of "You guys are in soooo much trouble.  Man, I would not want to be you when Dad gets home."  I mean, yeah, of course he's right.  That just makes him all the more despicable.  (If Austen were herself, and not laboring under some kind of pentitential delusion, she'd agree.)  Eventually Tom has had enough, and throws down the gauntlet: "Don't act yourself, if you do not like it, but don't expect to govern every body else."
Edmund of course can only say that he'd rather have root canal surgery than act—no, kidney-stone surgery—no wait, all his limbs amputated—but oops, never mind, Tom's already walked away.  So Edmund retreats to where Fanny is still poised to leap through that window at the first loud noise.  He doesn't act on her suggestion to shore up his side of the argument by enlisting Aunt Norris on his side by saying, "Family squabling is the greatest evil of all, and we had better do any thing than be altogether by the ears."  In other words: he'd rather make a great show of sulking.
But even that pleasure is denied him when a new arrival bursts in (perhaps finally sending Fanny over the sill and down into the hedgerow):
…Henry Crawford entered the room, fresh from the Parsonage, calling out, "No want of hands in our Theatre, Miss Bertram.  No want of under strappers—My sister desires her love, and hopes to be admitted into the company, and will be happy to take the part of any old Duenna or tame Confidante, that you may not like to do yourselves."
Maria shoots Edmund a look of triumph, and practically does the Snoopy dance, because if Mary Crawford is in favor of the theatricals, Edmund can't make too big a stink about it.  And in fact Mary's approval does turn his mind a bit:
(He) was obliged to acknowledge that the charm of acting might well carry fascination to the mind of genius; and with the ingenuity of love, to dwell more on the obliging, accommodating purport of the message than on any thing else.
I think Austen wants us to fear for Edmund here; we're meant to see him as a man of principle, succumbing to the charms of a vivacious but amoral temptress.  But seriously…Mary just brims with life-force; Tom too.  That Edmund pits himself against them, only mars him in our eyes.  And the way he gives up his assault on the theatricals the minute he hears of Mary's participation, just makes him look cynical to us.  Or weak.  Or both.  Edmund is a straw man, who pretends to have a spine of iron.  He, not Mr. Yates, is the bore in this business. 
In a rare shaft of perception, Fanny assures Edmund that the whole enterprise may founder on the selection of material, because with all the egos various at work, it's unlikely they'll ever find a play to satisfy every desire for stardom.  And so it falls out, with the company unable even to decide whether to go for drama or comedy, with Tom for latter and everyone else the former.  Austen has great fun with them tearing through the western canon, discarding great works of art like gristle from a chicken:
"…That might do, perhaps, but for the low parts—If I must give my opinion, I have always thought it the most insipid play in the English language—I do not wish to make objections, I shall be happy to be of any use, but I think we could not choose worse."
Austen is speaking now directly to her readers of 200 years hence, who have suffered through many business meeting in which exactly this dynamic plays out, time and time again.  Were she alive now, she'd be a wizard at corporate satire.  She even has Tom Bertram step in to play the role every such meeting inevitably delivers up: the self-appointed mediator, who makes a great show of heroically taking the first step towards necessary compromise:
"This will never do…We are wasting time most abominably.  Something must be fixed on,  No matter what, so that something is chosen.  We must not be so nice.  A few characters too many, must not frighten us.  We must double them.  We must descend a little.  If a part is insignificant, the greater our credit in making any thing of it.  From this moment on, I make no difficulties.  I take any part you choose to give me, so as it be comic.  Let it but be comic, I condition for nothing more."
In other words: I graciously and humbly agree to accept whatever the rest of you choose, as long as it's exactly what I suggested in the first place.
Eventually they do settle on a play—Lovers' Vows, the very piece Mr. Yates's party had been engaged in before that selfish old grandmother had to put the kibosh on it by dying.  You might have thought they would've just chosen this piece at the outset, by default—I mean, Mr. Yates already knows it backwards and forwards.  Indeed, someone even says, "How came it never to be thought of before?  It strikes me as if it would do exactly."  So, in terms of plot, pretty much everything in the preceding pages might be cut—all the negotiating and posturing and grandstanding—and I'll lay down a wager those scenes are missing from The Reader's Digest Condensed version.  This is the danger of concentrating solely on plot; because the meat of Jane Austen is character, and the reason we love her—the reason she's immortal—is the absolute sureness of touch with which she renders our vanity, venality, hypocrisy and greed.  To wit:
Mr. Yates was particularly pleased; he had been sighing and longing to do the Baron at Ecclesford, and had grudged every rant of Lord Ravenshaw's, and had been forced to re-rant it all in his own room.
Take out passages like this, and you essentially gut Jane Austen with a Bowie knife.  And what you've got left is pretty people in their waistcoats and pelisses, gliding about being photogenic.  Which is, believe it or not, exactly what some people want from Austen.  Seriously.  I've met them.  What they crave is less Jane Austen than The Jane Austen Catalog, with bonnets and gloves and china cups you can imagine wantonly Adding To Cart.
Austen continues with her show-biz psychodrama, as the Bertram sisters—already rivals over Henry Crawford—try to angle each other out for the plum female role.  "Each sister looked anxious; for each felt the best claim to Agatha, and was hoping to have it pressed on her by the rest."  Mr. Crawford himself is the chief agent of appeal; and he chooses Maria, but again proves himself the most polished of silver-tongued devils, by doing so in terms designed to flatter Julia right out of her knickers.
"I must entreat Miss Julia Bertram…not to engage in the part of Agatha, or it will be the ruin of all my solemnity.  You must not, indeed you must not…I could not stand your countenance dressed up in woe and paleness.  The many laughs we have had together would infallibly come across me, and Frederick and his knapsack would be obliged to run away."
But Julia's no fool; she steals a glance at Maria, and seeing the "smile of triumph" on her face just confirms "the injury to herself."  And if she's on the fence on how to react—whether graciously, or in a temper—Tom tips the scales for the latter by chiming in:


"Oh! yes, Maria must be Agatha.  Maria will be the best Agatha.  Though Julia fancies she prefers tragedy, I would not trust her in it.  There is nothing of tragedy about her.  She has not the look of it.  Her features are not tragic features, and she walks too quick, and speaks too quick, and would not keep her countenance.  She had better do the old countrywoman; the Cottager's wife; you had, indeed, Julia."
Mr. Yates is astonished, declaring the Cottage's wife "an insult…At Ecclesford the governess was to have done it," and proposes the second female role, Amelia, instead; but Tom Bertram has Mary Crawford in mind for that ("Amelia should be a small, light, girlish, skipping figure.  It is fit for Miss Crawford and Miss Crawford only") and won't budge.  There's more wheedling, pettiness, and desperate flattery—not to mention more serenely satisfied smiles from Maria—before Julia decides which role she's going to play, and it's that of Screw the Whole Lot Of You, I'm Audi.  And with a big violent rustle of fabric, she storms out.
This leaves Maria all clear for her preferred role, which is Most Misunderstood Of All God's Lonely Creatures, as she whimpers to Mr. Crawford, "I am sure I would give up the part to Julia most willingly, but that though I shall probably do it very ill, I feel persuaded she would do it worse," which elicits all sorts of there-there-you-poor-suffering-angels from Henry.  And maybe another smile of triumph from Maria.  Smiling in triumph seems to be her default mode.
When the party breaks up, Fanny—who's remained on the fringes this whole time, watching and listening like a spaniel who's been ordered into a sit-stay and is taking special pride in holding it even when no one's looking—sneaks over to the table where the copy of Lovers' Vows lies open, and gives it a skim.  Within moments she drops it as through she'd inadvertently picked up the latest issue of Hustler.  (I haven't read Lovers' Vows, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't require much more carnality than the average episode of Yes, Dear to singe Fanny's delicate fingers.)  She comes away shocked, shocked that her cousins would even consider putting on this carnival of debauchery.
Of course, Fanny's dismay and disapproval mean exactly flap all to anybody, so the plan continues apace.  Mr. Rushworth is drawn into the production and is highly flattered by the attention and by the consequence it seems to give him in Maria's eyes—though he can't understand why her character and his aren't allowed any scenes together; apparently he thinks the company is writing the play as well as acting it.  But any sulking on his part is preempted by "pointing out the necessity of his being very much dressed, and choosing his colours…(he) liked the idea of his finery very well, though affecting to despise it, and was too much engaged with what his own appearance would be, to think of the others, or draw any of those conclusions, or feel any of that displeasure, which Maria had been half prepared for."  Indeed, when Edmund returns after a morning out, Mr. Rushworth greets him with an enthusiasm bordering on molestation:
"We have got a play," said he.—"It is to be Lovers' Vows; and I am to be Count Cassel, and am to come in first with a blue dress, and a pink satin cloak, and afterwards am to have another fine fancy suit by way of a shooting dress.—I do not know how I shall like it."
From here on in, this is Mr. Rushworth's role in every scene: to boast of the glories of his part, then tag a disclaimer on the end of it.  In sitcoms, many a character has made shtick no meatier than this play out for entire seasons.  Mr. Rushworth certainly plays out his for all it's worth. 
"I come in three times, and have two and forty speeches.  That's something, is not it?—But I do not much like the idea of being so fine.—I shall hardly know myself in a blue dress, and a pink satin cloak."
A few more recurrences of this and whaddaya know, he's even got a catchphrase—and you might find yourself wishing for a t-shirt that reads, not THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID, or WORST. EPISODE. EVER, but I HAVE TWO AND FORTY SPEECHES.
Edmund, whose errand this morning was apparently to refuel his depleting tank of outrage, now rips into Maria over the choice of that scandalous play.  He challenges her to "Read only the first Act aloud, to either your mother or aunt, and see how you can approve it."  I actually think Maria should've taken him up on this; after all, Lady Bertram would smile on nod dreamily through a reading of Fanny Hill, while Mrs. Norris would just wallow in delight at Maria's impeccable aspirates and vowel sounds.
Edmund has better luck appealing to her vanity ("You must set the example.—If others have blundered, it is your place to put them right, and shew them what true delicacy is.—In all points of decorum, your conduct must be law to the rest of the party").   But at the last moment Maria realizes that if she withdraws from the play, Julia will just step in and take her part, and there goes that. 
Aunt Norris interrupts with a long, hilarious speech on the misbehaviors of some neighbors ("the Jacksons are very encroaching, I have always said so,—just the sort of people to get all they can") which demonstrates, once again, that Austen understands the principle of projection and is all too happy to use it for comic effect.  (Remember Mrs. Bennet's endless harangues about Lady Lucas's pushiness and arrogance?)  By the time she rambles to a conclusion, tempers have cooled, and Edmund finds "that to have endeavoured to set them right must be his only satisfaction," though he's been such a remarkable killjoy that no one now dares to speak of the project in his presence—even Tom, who up to now has seemed pretty immune to Edmund's Catholic-nun censoriousness. 
Mary Crawford now shows up, and reading the currents instantly, attempts to assuage Tom's wounded pride by speaking, not to him, but to his mother in his hearing, complimenting her on the fortitude with which she's bearing all the noise and silliness of the players.  We know this can't really be meant for Lady Bertram because the woman has the fortitude of your average sea-dwelling invertebrate, and also because several times during the address Mary glances "half fearfully, half slily, beyond Fanny to Edmund."  I love that added detail of having to look past Fanny—or possible through her.
Mary is then welcomed into the company and brought up to speed (Mr. Rushworth informs her of his two and forty speeches), and everyone gets down to business.  But dang if they don't run into a hitch right off the bat: there are a couple of roles still uncast.  Mary, adopting her most flirtatious manner—she all but gets up and cavorts around his chair—tries to get Edmund to take the bait by reverse-psychology.  She tells him she understands he refuses to act, but what then would he advise the company to do about the role of Anhalt?  Edmund, not falling for such guile, says, Change the play.
Mary, not giving up, decides on a more direct approach, noting that, "If any part could tempt you to act, I suppose it would be Anhalt…for he is a clergyman, you know."  Edmund replies that that would actually prevent him from taking the part, because he'd "be sorry to make the character ridiculous by bad acting."  This is a pretty lame excuse, and very far from the blistering outrage we expect from him (i.e. "No role could tempt me to enlist in an enterprise so certain to expose my sister and others to opprobrium and shame").  It's clear he can't summon up that much ire with Mary seated before him—Mary in the firelight, no less (because, canny creature, she's seated herself right before the hearth, so that the flames can dance over her skin).
Jane Austen helped invent the conventions of courtship comedies, so we can't exactly accuse her of cheating us here; this is just shy of the midpoint of her career, and she was still perfecting her craft, trying new things.  But after a few more scenes like these, we're going to feel pretty damn cheated anyway.  We've been taught, time and time again, in the two centuries since Mansfield Park, that couples whose attraction for each other is at odds with moral, ethical, or political differences, will always end up happily setting aside the world and finding contentment only in each other.  And we've learned to like it that way.  What we don't want, is to have the differences win; we don't want lovers to turn away from each other over belief systems or points of etiquette.  And I can't believe Austen does, either.  Maybe that's why Mansfield Park ultimately feels like a betrayal; Austen was betraying herself.
Just look at what happens now, when the novel's professed heroine, Fanny, is called on to take the part of the Cottager's Wife.  She refuses; despite all entreaties (and there are a lot of entreaties, plus a few veiled threats), she holds firm and keeps repeating: I cannot act, you must excuse me, I cannot act, you must excuse me.  Obviously we're meant to see this as some kind of heroism on her part, some clinging fast to a higher principle.  But we understand instinctively that it's just another example of Fanny's all-consuming negativity; she is an abyss, into which all potential, all hope, irrevocably disappears.
Whereas Mary—Mary is quicksilver; she's alive to the ebb and flow, to shifts in power; she can see when persuasion edges into persecution.  She witnesses Fanny's tears, and mistaking them for evidence of girlish shyness (how is someone like Mary to understand that Fanny's real distress is at being pressed to choose action over inaction, presence over absence?  How can a life force comprehend a vacuum?), she takes Fanny's side.  She rescues her from her tormentors; she comforts her.
Mary Crawford, ladies and gentlemen.  Let's give her full props, and while we're at it, the keys to the Chevy and the title of Prom Queen in Heaven.  Because she won't get a happily-ever-after from anyone else but us.  I'm just sayin'.

Mansfield Park, chapters 10-12

We find Fanny as we left her, alone on the grounds of Sotherton.  The wilderness that surrounds her evokes Shakespeare, and indeed lovers and would-be lovers now come and go before us, so that we might indeed be in the forest of Arden, or the Athenian wood.  The exception, of course, being Fanny, who takes no part in any such frolics; she's immobile, inert—once again, a pillar of negation around whom life, in all its turbulent, awful, wonderful variety, swirls.
First to arrive are Maria, Mr. Rushworth, and Henry Crawford.  Maria is enjoying herself thoroughly, reveling in her power over the two men, the first of whom she's engaged to marry, the latter with whom she's engaged in a flirtation.  The three of them briefly remark on stumbling across Fanny, the way you might say, "Oh look, here's where the dog got to," then proceed to ignore her entirely.
Maria notices an iron gate, and half a mile beyond it a knoll from which the entire party might enjoy a better view of the estate.  She declares this will aid them in their continuing discussion of Mr. Crawford's proposed improvements, and the gentlemen of course agree—in this company, Maria could suggest they all clamber up a tree and munch on leaves like giraffes and they'd be all "Yes, yes, the very thing"—but unfortunately the gate is locked.  Uh-oh.  Cue a screeching halt to the good times.  And everyone knows whose fault it is.
Mr. Rushworth wished he had brought the key; he had been very near thinking whether he should not bring the key; he was determined he would never come without the key again; but still this did not remove the present evil.
We've all been in this spot, and we can feel for Mr. Rushworth, who's spent the whole morning in a kind of confused cloud, wondering why he feels so unsettled, such a third wheel here with his fiancée and his helpful friend.  He's not the sharpest tool in the shed, poor sod, but in this instance at least he knows exactly what he has to do: run all the way back to the house (and I do mean run) and get that damned key.
As soon as he's gone Maria and Mr. Crawford start flirting more brazenly, as though Fanny really were a dog, or some kind of illiterate deaf-mute who could only ever convey her knowledge of their indiscretions by drawing stick figures in the dirt.  Maria, in the tone of a wounded woman, accuses Henry of having had too much fun with her sister:  "You seemed to enjoy your drive here very much this morning...You and Julia were laughing the whole way."  But he's a polished seducer and knows how to mollify her with flattery:
"Were we? Yes, I believe we were; but I have not the least recollection at what.  Oh!  I believe I was relating to her some ridiculous stories of an old Irish groom of my uncle's.  Your sister loves to laugh."
"You think her more light-hearted than I am."
"More easily amused," he replied, "consequently you know," smiling, "better company.  I could not have hoped to entertain you with Irish anecdotes during a ten miles' drive."
Now it's his turn to needle her, by observing that if she really wanted to get beyond the gate she might juuuuust be able to squeeze round its post, but of course she'd never think of proceeding "without Mr. Rushworth's authority and protection".  This has exactly the desired effect, as Maria launches to her feet and is shimmying around the gate in about a microsecond.  Mr. Crawford follows, after deputizing Fanny to tell Mr. Rushworth they've gone on ahead, but Fanny is scandalized by this development, and calls after Maria to stop.  She knows her cousin well enough to understand that an appeal to propriety won't halt her, so she ingeniously warns her that she'll harm herself or, worse, her outfit.  Alas, by the time she gets the words out Maria is already on the other side, and tosses her an acid, "Thank you, my dear Fanny, but I and my gown are alive and well, and so good bye."
Soon she and Henry are lost to view, and Fanny's alone again—but not for long, as a few minutes later Julia descends on her like the Allies onto the beach at Normandy, demanding to know where everyone's got to.  She's just met Mr. Rushworth, who was "posting away as if upon life and death, and could but just spare time to tell us his errand, and where you all were."  Except now that she's arrived, she finds only Fanny, which is just a hair better than finding no one at all.
Fanny explains where Mr. Crawford and Maria have gone, and how, which of course prompts Julia to do execute the very same stunt; and just as before, Fanny attempts to stop her, begging her to wait for Mr. Rushworth's return.  But Julia refuses, saying as she wriggles past the gate:
"I have had enough of the family for one morning.  Why child, I have but this moment escaped from his horrible mother.  Such a penance as I have been enduring, while you were sitting here so composed and so happy!  It might have been as well, perhaps, if you had been in my place, but you always contrive to keep out of these scrapes."
Fanny feels this as an "unjust reflection"—doesn't anyone realize how hard her lot is?  How much effort it requires to stay perfectly still and never speak, never stir, never think or even (metaphorically, anyway) breathe?...Oh, she is so very misunderstood. 
But give her credit: it's not principally for herself that she's upset.  She's well aware of how mortified Mr. Rushworth will be when he returns and finds everyone but her vanished.  And here he comes now—huffing and puffing and holding onto his hat; an unkinder author would give him a pratfall—and it's Fanny's unappy duty to tell him what's occurred.  "At first," we're told, "he scarcely said any thing; his looks only expressed his extreme surprise and vexation, and he walked to the gate and stood there, without seeming to know what to do." 
After an interval of silence, "I think they might as well have staid for me," said he.
"Miss Bertram thought you would follow her."
"I should not have had to follow her if she had staid."
Well.  Can't argue that one.
Mr. Rushworth then reveals he's not as stupid as everyone thinks he is, by delving right to the heart of his troubles: "Pray, Miss Price, are you such a great admirer of this Mr. Crawford as some people are?  For my part, I can see nothing in him."  When Fanny attempts to answer diplomatically, he waves it aside.  "In my opinion, these Crawfords are no addition at all.  We did very well without them."  And if that isn't surprise enough, he decides against any further scurrying after Maria, until Fanny manages to persuade him to it—I mean, otherwise the whole hundred-yard-dash for the key was all for nothing, right?
This sudden glimmer of dignity—wounded dignity, to be sure, but dignity just the same—isn't what we expect from one of Jane Austen's buffoons.  Her powers are expanding, deepening; becoming more what we might today consider traditionally literary.  And this throws another light on why Mansfield Park fails to satisfy: Austen's earlier novels were thick with monsters and freaks of the most appalling and hilarious kind; Mansfield Park has had none to speak of—just Mrs. Norris, carrying the entire weight of Austenian absurdity on her bony back (and admittedly, doing a bang-up job of it).  Mr. Rushworth has been a figure of fun up to this point; but now that we've seen him as a man of feeling—a man, period—we can't really laugh at him anymore.  Similarly, his mother, whom Julia calls "horrible," isn't horrible at all by Austen standards; she's a bit of a snob, but she exhibits a self-deprecating wit.
We can feel, then, that Austen is striving for something new here, and not just in her heroine; she's reaching for a greater verisimilitude, a sense of her secondary characters as actual human beings as opposed to broadly drawn burlesques.  With her next novel, Emma, she'll grandly achieve everything she aims for here: a heroine of genuine complexity and shading, and supporting characters, like Miss Bates, who manage to be knee-slappingly funny while yet coming across as fully developed personae.  But for the moment, we're here in Mansfield Park, and she hasn't quite found her way there yet.
Anyway, back to Fanny—who, perhaps suffocating in the miasma of humiliation Mr. Rushworth has left in his wake, is finally roused to action.  She goes in search of Edmund and Mary, and finds them pleasurably whiling away the time on the very avenue she's been trumpeting her desire to see for the past seven hundred years or so.  Once again she's soaked through with mortification; Edmund protests that they'd missed her, of course, but it's clearly they didn't miss her all that freaking much.  Abashed by how badly his thoughtlessness has injured Fanny, he suggests returning to the house, where they find everyone else in a pretty similar funk—all the running-after-but-continually-missing-each-other that produces such magical results in Shakespeare here only resulting in sour tempers and wounded egos.  With the exception, as always, of Aunt Norris, God love her, who's had an absolutely ripping day, getting to know the gardener and the cook and all the other major players on the household staff, and coming away with armloads of Sotherton swag. 
When Aunt Norris tries to make it a perfect day all around by dumping a barrowful of indebtedness into Fanny's lap ("Well, Fanny, this has been a fine day for you, upon my word!... I am sure you ought to be very much obliged to your aunt Bertram and me, for contriving to let you go.  A pretty good day's amusement you have had!"), Maria is sufficiently irritated to say, "I think you have done pretty well yourself, ma'am," and then go on to accuse her of "spunging."  You can imagine how well that goes over.  Mrs. Norris spends the remainder of the carriage ride declaring that the bounty was forced onto her by her new friends, who insisted she take it all despite her adamant refusals.  That's Aunt Norris for you: always the victim, even in prosperity.
If the Bertram sisters thought the Sotherton outing was a wash, they soon discover they have worse awaiting them, when the learn their dear old dad is coming home—"November was the black month fixed for his return."  Maria and Julia have been pretty much getting away with murder while he's been away, tearing around the neighborhood like a biker gang, but all that's bound to come to a screeching halt when Sir Thomas gets wind of it.  Maria in particular is distressed because she knows that once her father's home, there'll be no more reason to delay her wedding, and she's no longer a hundred percent sure she wants to get married so soon…if at all.  At least, not to Mr. Rushworth.  She decides to deal with the anxiety in the time-honored manner of teenage girls: by just not thinking about it.
It was a gloomy prospect, and all that she could do was to throw a mist over it, and hope when the mist cleared away, she should see something else.  It would hardly be early in November, there were generally delays, a bad passage or something; that favouring something which everybody who shuts their eyes while they look, or their understandings while they reason, feels the comfort of.  It would probably be the middle of November at least; the middle of November was three months off.  Three months comprised thirteen weeks.  Much might happen in thirteen weeks.
We've all done this, haven't we?...And yes, we know just how swimmingly it usually works out.
Mary Crawford isn't any more keen to see Sir Thomas back home, because that will also be the cue for Edmund to be ordained.  "Don't be affronted," she says, laughing; "but it does put me in mind of some of the old heathen heroes, who after performing great exploits in a foreign land, offered sacrifices to the gods on their safe return."  Edmund corrects her: there's no sacrifice involved—his taking orders is "quite as voluntary" as Maria's marrying.
But Mary can't see it; to her, a religious life is a sentence, not a calling, and she can't wrap her mind around anyone willingly embracing it.  She can only assume Edmund is taking it on, because he's sure of being provided a living by his father—in other words, it's the path of least resistance.  Fanny now comes to Edmund's defense, as though he's being picked on by the schoolyard bully, observing that this isn't any different from the way the son of an admiral will choose the navy, or the son of a general the army.  "Nobody wonders that they should prefer the line where their friends can serve them best."
But Mary can easily understand why the army or navy might be chosen on its own merits—given that the enlistee can go on to cover himself in glory (and in shiny medals—accessories always being a high motivator in Mary-land).  A clergyman, by contrast, is essentially a well-connected couch potato.
"It is indolence, Mr. Bertram, indeed.  Indolence and love of ease—a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen.  A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish—read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife.  His curate does all the work, and the business of his own life is to dine."
Edmund is able lightly to dismiss all this, because he knows Mary hasn't ever really known any clergyman; only her admittedly unspectacular brother-in-law, and he only recently.  Her prejudices have been formed by hearsay; "You are speaking," he tells her, "what you have been told at your uncle's table."  But she's adamant: "I speak what appears to me the genuine opinion; and where an opinion is general, it is usually correct."  Yeah, I've been hearing that reasoning a lot around election time.
Mary's continuing—and increasingly snarky—attacks on Edmund's chosen profession are muted by our understanding of what's behind them, which is simple, desperate selfishness.  It's not that she can't see Edmund as a vicar; it's that she can't see herself as a vicar's wife.  She's in love with him, but can't bring herself to acknowledge that she can't have him without giving up some essential part of herself—that part which longs for wealth and rank and society.  We forgive her for it, because we know, simply by the fact of her making the case over and over again, that she's being slowly worn down; if her choices are to give up Emund, or take him on and become a rural Mrs. Nobody like her sister, well then, all right, fine, Door Number 2 please.  She just has to go through this flailing period first—this battering herself against the iron wall of fate.  When she's finaly exhausted herself, she'll be ready.  It's a very nuanced portrait Austen gives us here, and she relies on us to read it as she intends; and we do. 
Fanny, however, doesn't, and continues defending Edmund; which might annoy or irk Mary, had she not already decided Fanny presented no kind of threat to her.  Instead she's come to see her as Edmund's devoted little dog, and in just the way we might compliment the loyalty of a good friend's pooch, Mary now openly admires Fanny.  When Edmund echoes the sentiments, Mary—perhaps noticing a blush creep over Fanny's cheek, or perhaps Fanny endeavouring to crawl under the settee—adds, "I fancy Miss Price has been more used to deserve praise than to hear it"—and might go on to offer more in the same vein, were she not now summoned to the piano, "earnestly invited by the Miss Bertrams to join in a glee":
(She) tripped off to the instrument, leaving Edmund looking after her in an ecstacy of admiration of all her many virtues, from her obliging manners down to her light and grateful tread.
Girl knows how to bring it.
But while Edmund may effuse over her, he pointedly remains by the window with Fanny, gazing with her out at the "solemn and soothing" unclouded night, which inspires Fanny to some rather prosaic raptures:
"Here's harmony!" said she.  "Here's repose!  Here's what may leave all painting and music behind, and what poetry only can attempt to describe.  Here's what may tranquilize every care, and lift the heart to rapture!  When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene."
Again, I get the impression Austen is using her heroine to lecture herself—to try to re-form her own attitudes and behaviors by exalting those of her idealized heroine's; because I'm pretty goddamn sure that were she herself on hand, in this scene she's invented, she'd be over at that glee like white on rice.  And frankly, so would I.
And so, it turns out, would Edmund.  The charms of the window are apparently insufficient to transfix him for long—Fanny, by contrast, would be happy to pull up a chair and settle down with a bowl of popcorn—and eventually he drifts over to the piano, where Maria, Julia and Mary are now performing the Regency equivalent to "Stop! In the Name of Love," with Miss Crawford as Miss Ross.  Leaving poor Fanny to sigh "alone at the window till scolded away by Mrs. Norris's threats of catching cold."
So our score at the chapter's end is Gloaming 0, Glee 4.  Extra points for the latter should Fanny really come down with the sniffles.
Jump-cut to November, and Tom Bertram arriving home…
…to be gay, agreeable, and gallant again as occasion served, or Miss Crawford demanded, to tell of races and Weymouth, and parties and friends, to which she might have listened six weeks before with some interest, and altogether to give her the fullest conviction, by the power of actual comparison, of her preferring his younger brother.
It was very vexatious, and she was heartily sorry for it; but so it was; and so far from now meaning to marry the elder, she did not even want to attract him beyond what the simplest claims of conscious beauty required…were he now to step forth the owner of Mansfield park, the Sir Thomas complete, which he was to be in time, she did not believe she could accept him.
Mary functions as the heroine's rival in this novel, the way Lucy Steele and Caroline Bingley did in Austen's earlier works; but she's cut from decidedly different cloth than those calculating, viperish villains.  Mary is flesh and blood; she has impulses, good and bad, and has a harder time accommodating the former than the latter.  But she perseveres; she's self-aware to an uncomfortable degree; and you can see the strain of her efforts beneath her veneer of breezy, cheeky charm.  It's absolutely impossible not to like her; certainly she engages our sympathies much more actively than Fanny, who remains virtually inanimate throughout the novel. 
Thus we can view Mary's character both as clear evidence of the growth of Austen's powers—she is no longer content to treat her antagonists as outsize cartoons—and as an indication of how far she has yet to go; for, while succeeding in turning Mary into a three-dimensional character, she diminishes her capacity to fill the role set out for her.  Mary as adversary…?  To herself, maybe; no one else.
While Mary languishes at center stage, her brother bows out of the narrative completely, if temporarily; leaving the Bertram sisters to pine for him, and to stew in their jealousy of each other.  And here's where we can see how far Mary has pulled ahead of him, since their introduction as a pair of lip-smacking satyrs not so many chapters back.  For, so far from allowing any genuine feeling to ripple the placid surface of his self-regard, Henry sails on untroubled:
(A) fortnight of sufficient leisure in the intervals of shooting and sleeping, to have convinced the gentleman that he ought to keep longer away, had he been more in the habit of examining his own motives, and of reflecting to what the indulgence of his idle vanity was tending; but, thoughtless and selfish from prosperity and bad example, he would not look beyond the present moment.  The sisters, handsome, clever, and encouraging, were an amusement to his sated mind; and finding nothing in Norfolk to equal the social pleasures of Mansfield, he gladly returned to it at the time appointed, and was welcomed thither quite as gladly by those whom he came to trifle with farther.
In other words: the car's barreling towards a brick wall, but everyone in it is having a hella good time.
Fanny is the only one who sees the danger, but of course she doesn't say anything; she has no confidence in her own opinion.  The most she can manage is to heavily drop hints when Edmund's around—things like, Isn't it strange that Mr. Crawford came back so early from his journey, or How fond both your sisters are of Mr. Bertram, how very very fond, or My goodness how odd it was that we should discover Mr. Crawford with his entire forearm down Maria's bodice front. 
Edmund, oblivious lump of granite that he is, dismisses all these insinuations.  On the subject of Henry being too attentive to Maria, for instance, he lectures Fanny:  "I believe it often happens, that a man, before he has quite made up his own mind, will distinguish the sister or intimate friend of the woman he is really thinking of, more than the woman herself."  Which makes you wonder exactly how much time Edmund spends watching the Disney Channel.
He's not the only one with blinders on.  Mrs. Norris, too, sees just what she wants to see—as on the occasion of a ball held by the Rushworths.  We get the incident from Fanny's point of view, because amazingy enough, she's on hand to overhear it.  (It's her first ball, and she's only been allowed to come because there was a place to fill in the ranks, for which anyone with more vigor than a potted plant would be acceptable.)  Watching Maria dance with Mr. Rushworth, her face distorted with affected smiles and spraying machine-gun laughter every time they chance to whirl by Henry Crawford and Julia, Mrs. Norris has only this to say: "(D)ear Maria has such a strict sense of propriety, so much of that true delicacy which one seldom meets with now-a-days, Mrs. Rushworth, that wish of avoiding particularity!"
Mm-hm.  Maria avoids particularity like Sarah Palin avoids publicity.
Anyway, while Fanny is languishing against the wall, her cousin Tom descends on her, and her little heart goes all a-flutter because she's sure he's going to ask her to dance, but instead he pulls up a chair, and proceeds to give her "an account of the present state of a sick horse, and the opinion of the groom, from whom he had just parted."  After which, he "took a newspaper from the table, and looking over it said in a languid way, 'If you want to dance, Fanny, I will stand up with you.'"  Fanny "with more than equal civility" declines, and Tom sighs in relief.  "I am glad of it…for I am tired to death.  I only wonder how the good people can keep it up so long."  Honestly, are we supposed to be mortified for Fanny here?  Because…sorry.  Can't.  Too busy making clubbed-baby-seal noises that frighten my dogs.
Tom then goes on to indulge in some nice, juicy trash-talking, including some gossip about Dr. Grant, unaware that Dr. Grant is pretty much right at his elbow, so that Tom has to snap himself into some serious spin control.  "A strange business this in America, Dr. Grant!—I always come to you to know what I am to think of public matters."  But it's grim going, and when Mrs. Norris comes over to co-opt both gentlemen for a game of bridge with her and Mrs. Rushworth, Tom decides the least worst choice open to him is to grab Fanny and make for the dance floor.
"A pretty modest request upon my word!" he indignantly exclaimed as they walked away.  "To want to nail me to a card table for the next two hours with herself and Dr. Grant, who are always quarrelling, and that poking old woman, who knows no more of whist than of algebra…It raises my spleen more than any thing, to have the pretence of being asked, and of being given a choice, and at the same time addressed in such a way as to oblige one to do the very thing—whatever it be!  If I had not luckily thought of standing up with you, I could not have got out of it."
It's right about here that we experience our first twinge of regret that Mary Crawford hasn't kept up her campaign for Tom.  Imagine the two of them going off together, and taking the novel with them, and all of us getting to listen to them chatter away to each other like this, for hundreds and hundreds of pages.  What the hell…I can dream, can't I?

Mansfield Park, chapters 7-9

In my analysis of Pride and Prejudice I observed that the triangulations of, and repartee between, Lizzy and Darcy anticipate the conventions of romantic comedy.  We now come to a chapter of Mansfield Park that seems to anticipate another modern genre: the "cringe comedies" that have become all the rage lately (and of which Curb Your Enthusiasm may be the standard bearer).  It's comedy as blood sport, with a deeply flawed protagonist, incapable of ever learning anything, trying to get through a day with some measure of dignity, but continually bringing the same shit storm of humiliation down on himself.  And so we have Fanny Price in chapter 7, in which she stubbornly sounds her passive-aggressive gong again and again and again, even though its only effect is to knock her flat on her…well, fanny.

The only problem with this analysis is, I don't think Austen means it to be funny.  I think she intends us to lament the injustice of a world that keeps snapping a wet towel in poor Fanny's face.  I can't help it if my reaction is the opposite.  I invariably up always end up cackling like a lunatic.
We begin on the morning after the dinner party at the park, with Edmund asking Fanny's opinion of Mary Crawford's conduct.  Sensing that Edmund is impressed with Mary, and of course always wanting to agree with him, she readily offers that Mary is a heckuva gal, both witty and pretty.  "It is her countenance that is so attractive," Edmund agrees.  "She has a wonderful play of feature!  But was there nothing in her conversation that struck you Fanny, as not quite right?"
Fanny immediately twigs that she hasn't given him the correct answer, and so hastily switches gears, criticizing the way Mary spoke slightingly of her uncle.  Edmund now smiles and commends her judgment, and possibly tosses her a small fish as a reward; which emboldens her to add that Mary's conduct was also ungrateful.  Uh-oh—Edward frowns again!   Bad Fanny!
"Ungrateful is a strong word.  I do not know that her uncle as any claim to her gratitude; his wife certainly had; and it is the warmth of her respect for her aunt's memory which misleads her here.  She is awkwardly circumstanced.  With such warm feelings and lively spirits it must be difficult to do justice to her affection for Mrs. Crawford, without throwing a shade on the admiral…I do not censure her opinions; but there certainly is impropriety in making them public."
Fanny's now completely confused; do we like Mary Crawford, or don't we?  Testing the waters, she remarks that Mary was out of line for using Henry's skimpy letter-writing as blanket proof that no brother can't spare more than a few dashed-off lines to his sister.  Her brother William certainly wouldn't fit that mold, if he ever got around to writing her.  "And what right had she to suppose," she adds, "that you would not write long letters when you were absent?"  She looks up eagerly, expecting approval; but oh dear.  Not gonna happen:
"The right of a lively mind, Fanny, seizing whatever may contribute to its own amusement or that of others; perfectly allowable, when untinctured by ill humour or roughness; and there is not a shadow of either in the countenance or manner of Miss Crawford…"
So Fanny has just blown it again.  But never mind, she lets Edward have the last word, so that he's ultimately satisfied with the way she rolls over and claps her fins and honks the little horns to play Auld Lang Syne.  "I am glad you saw it all as I did," he says in conclusion, which even Austen is forced to comment on with a well, duh:
Having formed her mind and gained her affections, he had a good chance of her thinking like him; though at this period, and on this subject, there began now to be some danger of dissimilarity, for he was in line of admiration of Miss Crawford, which might lead him where she could not follow.


Mary Crawford is juuuust beginning to chap Fanny's ass.  Which condition soon worsens, as Mary's much-longed-for harp finally arrives, and she skillfully employs it not only as a musical instrument but as a devastating fashion accessory:
A young woman, pretty, lively, with a harp as elegant as herself; and both placed near a window, cut down to the ground, and opening on a little lawn, surrounded by shrubs in the rich foliage of summer, was enough to catch any man's heart.  The season, the scene, the air, were all favourable to tenderness and sentiment.  Mrs. Grant and her tambour frame were not without their use; it was all in harmony; and as every thing will turn to account when love is once set going, even the sandwich tray, and Dr. Grant doing the honours of it, were worth looking it.
Okay, maybe Austen does mean for us to laugh; but I doubt she intends our laughter to be so thoroughly at Fanny's expense.  But that's exactly the scenario she's given us.  The great yacht Mary Crawford has sailed into harbor, leaving the dinghy Fanny Price to bob perilously in her wake…whoops! there she goes, capsized.  Anyone got a life preserver?  Oh never mind, I'm sure she floats.
Edmund and Mary are now "a good deal in love," which is a bit of a mystery to Mary; "for he was not pleasant by any common rule, he talked no nonsense, he paid no compliments, his opinions were unbending, he attentions tranquil and simple."  But she doesn't let it bother her: "he pleased her for the present; she liked to have him near her; it was enough."  Like a cat luxuriating in a patch of sunlight, she's content just to enjoy it.
But with Edmund sprinting over to the parsonage every morning to render Mary all weak-kneed with his tranquility and compliments-withholding, Fanny finds herself missing his presence at the park.  "(I)f Edmund were not there to mix the wine and water for her, (she) would rather go without it than not."  Which is Fanny in a nutshell, right there.  I'm pretty sure that, in a similar situation, Mary would be thinking, Edmund's not here to mix my wine and water?...Thank God, I can finally drink it straight.
And you can just guess what happens when Mary takes a look around and sees all the ladies on horseback but her.  She drops a coy hint about wanting to learn to ride, and Edmund is ready to strap on a saddle himself to accommodate her.  Fortunately, calmer heads prevail and he decides instead to borrow the horse he'd only recently given Fanny.  Fanny, for her part, is "almost overpowered with gratitude that he should be asking her leave for it," not pausing to consider what he might do if she actually said no.  I'm pretty sure the result would be Mary 1, Fanny 0.
Mary's riding time is supposed to conclude early enough to allow Fanny to have hers; and her first day out, it does.  But alas, "The second day's trial was not so guiltless.  Miss Crawford's enjoyment of riding was such, that she did not know how to leave off."  Which leaves Fanny "ready and waiting and Mrs. Norris was beginning to scold her for not being gone". There's something almost metaphysically significant about being scolded for "not being gone."  Fanny really just cannot win.
Fanny goes out looking for Edmund and Mary, and has the exquisite agony or spotting them from afar, riding with Henry, Dr. Grant, and Mrs. Grant, and having a grand old time of it.  "(S)he wondered that Edmund should forget her, and felt a pang.  She could not turn her eyes from the meadow, and could not help watching all that passed"—big surprise, Fanny is a self-torturer.  Eventually she concludes that all this activity, followed by her own ride, must be hard on the mount—"if she were forgotten the poor mare should be remembered."  Mm-hm.  Self-pitier too.
When Mary finally returns the horse, she gaily says, "My dear Miss Price…I am come to make my own apologies for keeping you waiting—but I have nothing in the world to say for myself—I knew it was very late, and that I was behaving extremely ill; and therefore, if you please, you must forgive me.  Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no hope of a cure."  Fanny's answer, we're told, is "extremely civil."  When charm meets civility, guess which wins?...Actually, don't bother guessing.  Just look at Edmund's face.
Edmund excuses Mary's lateness by observing that it's actually been a favor to Fanny, because the clouds are moving in now, so that Fanny will have escaped riding in the heat.  And if that weren't indignity enough, Edmund then escorts Mary away, leaving Fanny to be partnered by the old coachman—whose company is made even more hilariously awful when he can't stop talking about Mary, who he declares a natural horsewoman.  "I never see one sit a horse better…Very different from you, miss, when you first began…Lord bless me!  How you did tremble when Sir Thomas first had you put on!"
These sentiments are echoed by the Bertram sisters later that day; they praise Mary's figure, form, and energy of character.  "I cannot but think that good horsemanship has a great deal to do with mind."  Really, if someone mistakenly threw Fanny into the fire in place of a log, it couldn't get worse than this.
But she absolutely brings it on herself.  When Edmund asks her whether she means to ride the next day, she maddeningly replies "No, I do not know, not if you want the mare."  When he says that Mary's enjoyment must be secondary to hers, Fanny goes for the gold in the passive-aggressive Olympics and says she has no plans to ride for the foreseeable future.
Edward, unsurprisingly, is delighted (what did she expect? That he'd beg her to reconsider?) and the next few days find the young couple galloping all over the island of country together, with Fanny left behind to indulge in menial labor of the Cinderella variety—only she's at the mercy of two wicked stepmothers, not one.  (Though really, Lady Bertram is more witless than wicked.)  She's made, for instance, to cut roses in the heat of the sun, which leaves her sick with a headache—and when Edmund finds out about it, and about the other tasks she's had to perform, like ping-ponging between the park and Mrs. Norris's house, he basically Hulks out.  (Well…the Edmund equivalent, anyway.  Which means standing in the middle of the room and frowning very, very hard.)
Mrs. Norris, realizing she's been busted for working Fanny like pharaoh worked the Jews, goes into panicked spin control mode. 
"I am sure I do not know how it as to have been done better…unless I had gone myself indeed; but I cannot be in two places at once; and I was talking to Mr. Green at that very time about your mother's dairymaid, by her desire, and had promised John Groom to write to Mrs. Jeffries about his son, and the poor fellow was waiting former half an hour.  I think nobody can justly accuse me of sparing myself upon any occasion, but really I cannot do every thing at once.  And as for Fanny's  just stepping down to my house for me, it is not much above a quarter of a mile, I cannot think it was unreasonable to ask it.  How often do I pace it three times a-day, early and late, ay and in all weathers too, and say nothing about it."
In other words, I didn't do it, it's not my fault, I'm not even here, I left twenty minutes ago, oh look! a bat!, hey who wants cake?
But in fact Edmund's ire is principally directed at himself, because he's the one who abandoned Fanny to this fate.  He makes up for it by giving her a soothing glass of madeira, while shooting his and aunt and mother a Not. One. Word. look.  Fanny, being Fanny, "wished to be able to decline it; but the tears which a variety of feelings created, made it easier to swallow than to speak."
Seriously: confronted with Fanny Price, Lizzy Bennet would roll her eyes so hard they might actually leap out of her head.
After this satisfying feast of Fanny-mortification, what comes next is necessarily anticlimactic; it's one of those switching-gears chapters all novelists must eventually rely on, and thus is heavy on getting things done, with a lighter hand on the hilarity.  Mr. Rushworth revives the idea of welcoming a party to his house, and there's a lot of talk along the lines of oh what fun and shall we take only the carriage or also the barouche, and who's going to sit with Lady Bertram and watch her stare at molecules while we're gone, Fanny of course, no Fanny must come so I will instead, no Edmund you must come too, okay I will, thanks Mrs. Grant you're swell.  You may find your attention drifting a bit during all this, though Mrs. Norris has a couple of sterling moments.  You could pretty much stuff Mrs. Norris into a cupboard bound and gagged, and she'd still manage to entertain.
The only plot point of significance here is that, come the day of the expedition, when everyone gathers to pile into the carriages, there's a question of who will be the lucky gal who gets to sit up in the barouche box with dreamy Henry Crawford.  Julia wins, and Maria doesn't take it well.  In fact, if there were a blunt instrument somewhere within reach, Julia's brains might have ended up dashed all over the driveway.  Instead, Maria must be satisfied with sulking and stewing and trying to blow up the entire planet with her mutant mind powers…at least until the carriage reaches the perimeter of the Sotherton estate, when she can stop simmering over Henry and start showing off to Mary everything that will very soon be hers, hers, hers.  Austen puts it beautifully: "She had Rushworth-feelings and Crawford-feelings, and in the vicinity of Sotherton, the former had considerable effect."
Mary, however, is more interested in keeping tabs on Edmund, who follows on horseback; as is Fanny, who has more time to devote to this endeavor since no one bothers talking to her.  Austen pauses to compare the two women, and one passage particularly intrigues me:
(Mary) had none of Fanny's delicacy of taste, of mind, of feeling; she saw nature, inanimate nature, with little observation; her attention was all for men and women, her talents for the light and lively.
Pardon me, but doesn't that sound like Austen describing herself?...I've posited before that Mansfield Park may be some kind of rehabilitative therapy on Austen's part, perhaps religiously motivated, in which she tries to exorcise the merrier, more earthly, sensual side of her nature and exalt her more neglected spiritual and empathic qualities (which may have been less apparent to her than they are to us); but it's a doomed business, and when the final judgment comes down, it will feel forced and unhappy.
How much better when the two sides can be allowed to coexist, if not in perfect equanimity at least in perfect accord, as in this charming passage:
In looking back after Edmund…when there was any stretch of road behind them, or when he gained on them in ascending a considerable hill, (Mary and Fanny) were united, and a "there he is" broke at the same moment from them both, more than once.
The party is welcomed into Sotherton Court, "where a collation was prepared with abundance and elegance.  Much was said, and much was ate," but nothing is described—as ever, Austen is largely indifferent to food.  In that respect, certainly, she's innocent of excessive sensuality.  Then Mr. Rushworth's mother gives her guests a tour of the premises.
…Miss Crawford, who had seen scores of great houses, and cared for none of them, had only the appearance of civilly listening, while Fanny, to whom every thing was almost as interesting as it was new, attended with unaffected earnestness…delighted to connect any thing with history already known, or warm her imagination with scenes of the past.
Once more, Austen seems to be building up her heroine with virtues she thinks she ought to embrace more than those she actually does.  Try a little thought experiment, here: you're in the entrance hall of a great country house.  To your left, there's a small knot of fashionable people chatting, gossiping, laughing.  To your right, an old woman blathers on about the family portraits hanging over the staircase.  You've got Jane Austen straining on a leash; when you unhook her, which direction does she go?...Well?
Eventually Mrs. Rushworth leads her guests to the family chapel, and Fanny whispers her disappointment to Edmund:
"This is not my idea of a chapel.  There is nothing awful here, nothing melancholy, nothing grand.  Here are no aisles, no arches, no inscriptions, no banners.  No banners, cousin, to be 'blown by the night wind of Heaven.'  No signs that a 'Scottish monarch sleeps below.'"
This is like an early glimpse of Catherine Morland, the heroine of Northanger Abbey, whose swooning, hyper-imaginative romanticism leads her to look for gothic awfulness in every possible corner.  We have a moment of hope that Fanny might be afflicted with some similarly entertaining folly; but alas, Edmund tells her to stop being so silly, and she stops being so silly.
Mary Crawford wanders up just as Edmund and Fanny are shaking their heads over the sad way family chapels have fallen into disuse.  You can just imagine Mary's opinion on that score.  Far from envying the Rushworth ancestors who used to gather here to worship, she's convinced:
"…if the good people who used to kneel and gape in that gallery could have foreseen that the time would ever come when men and women might lie another ten minutes in bed, when they woke with a headach, without danger of reprobation, because chapel was missed, they would have jumped with joy and envy."
Fanny is roused to anger by Mary bringing her brand of glib irreverence into a place designed specifically for reverence, but even now Edmund strives to excuse her, saying, "Your lively mind can hardly be serious even on serious subjects."  They go on to debate the merits of public versus private worship, with Mary defending the latter in the airy manner of someone whose moments of prayer can probably be measured in nanoseconds.  They're so immersed in this animated exchange that they don't even notice Henry and Maria Bertram flirting madly by the altar, which behavior is certainly a damn sight more irreverent than dispensing a few lilting witticisms. 
Julia doesn't see the sparks flying between Henry and Maria either; she's too wrapped up in a dizzy little conceit she's come up with, that this would be the perfect opportunity, right here, right now, for Maria and Mr. Rushworth to actually tie the knot, "If Edmund were but in orders!"  On hearing this, Mary Crawford's jaw hangs open like a rural mailbox as she realizes she's just been arguing the irrelevancy of clergymen with…a clergyman.  She pulls herself sufficiently together to apologize, then beats a hasty retreat.
Mrs. Rushworth then leads them out of the chapel and is just considering the best way she might show them the grounds, when they come upon an outer door opening onto a flight of steps, and all the young people just plunge right through it.  "Suppose we turn down here for the present," Mrs. Rushworth belatedly calls after them.  It's one of the best gags in the novel; I bark out a laugh every time.
The party quickly divides into thirds.  Mr. Rushworth and Mr. Crawford go on a fault-finding mission accompanied by Maria; Edmund, Fanny and Mary Crawford "seemed as naturally to unite"; and bringing up the rear, we find Julia sadly saddled with the old women, Mrs. Rushworth and Mrs. Norris.
Poor Julia, the only one out of the nine not tolerably satisfied with their lot, was now in a state of complete penance, and as different from the Julia of the barouche-box as could well be imagined.  The politeness which she had been brought up to practise as a duty, made it impossible for her to escape; while the want of that higher species of self-command, that just consideration of others, that knowledge of her own heart, that principle of right which had not formed any essential part of her education, made her miserable under it.
If I may quote The Simpsons' Nelson Muntz:  "Haaaa ha!"
Edmund, Fanny and Mary take refuge from the heat in a little enclosed wilderness, where Mary, having rallied her spirits, takes the opportunity to get back to teasing Edmund—but this time with a slight edge of desperation to her tone.  He can't really mean to be a clergyman, can he?  "I thought that was always the lot of the youngest, where there were many to choose before him."  Edmund, stung, shoots back, "Do you think the church itself never chosen then?"  Mary backpedals, but just a hair:  "Never is a black word.  But yes, in the never of conversation which means not very often, I do think.  For what is to be done in the church?  Men love to distinguish themselves, and in either of the other lines, distinction may be gained, but not in the church."
Edmund is accordingly prompted to give a defense of his calling—the defense I wanted to hear someone, anyone, provide in Sense and Sensibility, when Edward Ferrars's choice of the collar was being so universally mocked.  Well, it's finally arrived, and it's worth waiting for—as much for the vindication of the profession, as for an insight into how Austen herself must view it:
"A clergyman cannot be high in state or fashion  He must not head mobs, or set the ton in dress.  But I cannot call that situation nothing, which has the charge of all that is of the first importance to mankind, individually or collectively considered, temporally and eternally—which has the guardianship of religion and morals, and consequently of the manners which result from their influence.  No one here can call the office nothing.  If the man who holds it is so, it is by the neglect of his duty, by foregoing its just importance, and stepping out of his place to appear what he ought not to appear."
Take that, Mr. Collins.
But Mary isn't having it.  "You really are fit for something better," she tells him.  "Come, do change your mind.  It is not too late.  Go into the law."
"Go into the law! with as much ease as I was told to go into this wilderness."
"Now you are going to say something about law being the worst wilderness of the two, but I forestall you; remember I have forestalled you."
"You need not hurry when the object is only to prevent my saying a bon-mot, for there is not the least wit in my nature.  I am a very matter of fact, plain spoken being, and may blunder on the borders of repartee for half an hour together without striking it out."
A general silence succeeded.
Yeah, I'll bet it did.
Fanny now announces that she's tired; undoubtedly from the rigors of touring the house and grounds, but also probably from having whipped her head back and forth following Edmund and Fanny's verbal tennis match.  Everyone agrees to sit and rest for a spell, but Mary's shapely booty hasn't even warmed the bench before she springs to her feet again.  "I must move," she says, "resting fatigues me"—a wonderfully apt summation of her entire character.  Edmund gets up to accompany her, ostensibly on some further exploration of the wilderness, but really to explore whether their compatability, already fragile, has been irrevocably shattered.  He forbids Fanny to come along as well, even though she protests she's fine now, really fine, all rested up and full o' pep and hey look, she can even kick up her heels and…whoops, did anyone see where her shoe went?
So Fanny stays behind, all alone and no doubt forgotten the moment Edmund and Mary turn their backs on her.  And you think, heart full of hope, that maybe no one will remember to come and fetch her, and she'll just stay there till the 19th Century heads into its downslope, when some intrepid Victorian botanist will stumble across her bones while seeking out interesting fungi.  But in fact fate—and Austen—have other plans for Fanny.  Which we'll discover next time.

Mansfield Park, chapters 4-6

We now find a denuded family in residence at Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas and his eldest son having been carried off to Antigua on a wave of Manifest Destiny.  Lady Bertram, far from dissolving into the helpless histrionics of her heirs in Victorian fiction, discovers she gets along just swimmingly without her principal menfolk, and you get the impression that just a few weeks will find her staring perplexedly at their portraits in her locket, unable to recall which is which.
But whereas for Lady Bertram out of sight really does mean out of mind, for Mrs. Norris the world beyond Mansfield is a place of hazards and perils, all of which she contemplates with the satisfaction of a genuine sadist, or a reality-show addict.  In fact she's whipped herself into a wonderful certainty of some lethal fate befalling both father and son.
…(A)nd as she depended on being the first person made acquainted with any fatal catastrophe, she had already arranged the manner of breaking it to all the others, when Sir Thomas's assurances of their both being alive and well, made it necessary to lay by her agitation and affectionate preparatory speeches for a while.
Love that "for a while".
Winter comes and goes without incident—in fact, almost without punctuation—and then the social season begins, which is the Bertram daughters' opportunity to make a big splash.  And with their Aunt Norris's tireless help they do just that, so much so that their reputation as the crème de la crème is pretty soon cemented in the neighborhood.  In one of Austen's subtler (and therefore funniest) passages, she remarks on its effect on the girls:
Their vanity was in such good order, that they seemed to be quite free from it, and gave themselves no airs; while the praises attending such behaviour, secured, and brought round by their aunt, served to strengthen them in believing they had no faults.
Lady Bertram doesn't venture out to witness her daughters' triumphs, because that would require things like listening to other people speak, not being in the supine, and a pulse.  Seriously, at this point I doubt her ankles even work anymore.  When she dangles her feet over the edge of her chaise, I imagine they just drape there, like Salvador Dali's clocks.  But never mind, Aunt Norris is only too keen to take her place.  Hell, she's such a team player she'd wear a BERTRAM GIRLS sweatshirt and duckbill cap, given the chance.  She also relishes "the means it afforded her of mixing in society without having horses to hire."
This leaves Fanny to stay at home and keep Lady Bertram company, which has got to be a fairly easy task, given that Lady Bertram mainly passes the time by making mouth bubbles.  "As to her cousins' gaieties," we're told, "(Fanny) loved to hear an account of them…but thought too lowly of her own situation to imagine she should ever be admitted to the same, and listened therefore without an idea of any nearer concern in them."  Seriously, if she were a dog, you'd just shoot her and call it a mercy.
Then Fanny's old grey pony dies.  She's soon feeling "the loss in her health as well as her affections," because no effort is made to replace him.  Now, here you do have to feel a slight tremor of pity, because if Fanny's only exercise has consisted of going out on an old grey pony…well, for God's sake.  How old is she, ninety?  The most strenuous thing about the whole endeavor must have been staying awake so as not to fall out of the saddle.  If Fanny really wanted exercise, she could have taken up something more vigorous, like counting the chairs in the dining room, or whistling, or jumping to conclusions.
When Edmund gets wind of Fanny's deprivation, he's on it like white on rice.  "Fanny must have a horse," he insists, in the face of arguments against it by both his mother and aunt.  It's the only reply he bothers giving them; he keeps repeating it over and over, like an 18th Century Rain Man.  Eventually he takes the matter into his own hands, and exchanges one of his own three mounts for one able to "carry a woman," the criteria for which we aren't given, but which presumably involve a daintier step, a calmer demeanor, and a coat complementary to her fashion season.  (Fanny is pretty much sure to be a Winter.)  You can guess Fanny's reaction to this kindness; her feelings for Edmund, already fulsome, now expand into the downright cringeworthy.  "She regarded her cousin as an example of every thing good and great, as possessing worth, which no one but herself could ever appreciate"—basically, she's so abjectly devoted to him she'd throw her jacket over a puddle for him to walk over.  With her still in it.
Word now comes that Sir Thomas's homecoming, long anticipated, is to be delayed.  "Unfavorable circumstances had suddenly arisen…and the very great uncertainty in which every thing was then involved, determined him on sending home his son".  Austen always understates matters of high moment (she will, for instance, refer to soul-shredding grief as "severe distress") so those phrases "unfavorable circumstances" and "very great uncertainty" carry a chill with them.  They conjure up sounds of gunfire and screams of terror, the crackle of flames and the cracking of whips. 
Aunt Norris apparently agrees with me, because after hearing this news "she could not help feeling dreadful presentiments; and as the long evenings of autumn came on, was so terribly haunted by these ideas, in the sad solitariness of her cottage, as to be obliged to take daily refuge in the dining room of the park."  This is acid, knife-edge stuff right here; the bitch in the bonnet at her most scaldingly, hilariously misanthropic.  How do people manage to gloss over this, or worse, bury it beneath cozy, dozy images plucked from Austen's pastoral milieu—a milieu she never chose, but with which she was stuck, and uncomfortably so?  It just lays me flat.
Anyway, Mrs. Norris is now pretty much on hand 24/7, so she's there for the debut at the park of Mr. Rushworth, a staggeringly rich and even more staggeringly stupid neighbor who sets his cap at the eldest Bertram girl, Maria.  Aunt Norris does everything she can to promote the match, short of actually cinching the couple together in a lariat, but Maria doesn't really need all that much encouraging:
…as marriage with Mr. Rushworth would give her the enjoyment of a larger income than her father's, as well as ensure her a house in town, which was now a prime object, it became, by the same rule of moral obligation, her evident duty to marry Mr. Rushworth if she could.
Which of course she can.  Mr. Rushworth is such an incredible sap, he could probably be persuaded to swallow his own fist without too much trouble; so when Maria makes half an effort to dazzle him, he is obligingly dazzled.  An engagement soon follows, and though it will be several months before Sir Thomas's consent can be had, everyone is so sure of his approval that there's no other attempt at secrecy "than Mrs. Norris's talking of it every where as a matter not to be talked of at present."
Then, as though it's Christmas or something, we're treated to two more additions to the cast: Mary Crawford, the adored younger sister of Mrs. Grant, comes to live at the parsonage for a while, and their dashing brother Henry accompanies her.  The Crawfords are worldly young people, and Mrs. Grant worries that they might find Mansfield too rustic or boring; but in fact the pair of them are utterly feline in nature, and plunked down amidst the Northamptonshire country folk, are less appalled by any lack of fashion or manners, than they are giddy at the preponderance of plump, scurrying natives for them to torture and ultimately eat.
Mary hasn't even got her boots unlaced before she's decided her chief game will be Tom Bertram.  "Matrimony was her object, provided she could marry well, and having seen Mr. Bertram in town, she knew that objection could no more be made to his person than to his situation in life.  While she treated it as a joke, therefore, she did not forget to think of it seriously."  That last line has so modern a sheen to it, it almost knocks you right out of the Regency; and in fact Henry and Mary Crawford are Austen's most forward-looking creations.  They're basically Noel Coward characters air-dropped into an Austen novel, and bringing with them all the wiliness, sarcasm, insouciance, and casual irreverence we've come to associate with heroes and heroines of the past hundred years.  Perhaps understandably, then, they're not the hero and heroine here; quite the opposite.  This world isn't ready for their brand of topsy-turvy social satire; though it's becoming so.  Even Edmund, who never met a caprice he couldn't cow with a scowl, will succumb to Mary's coy contrariness before ultimately coming to his senses and settling down with Fanny, who has all the wit, charm, and sex appeal of an exceptionally loyal golden retriever.
As for me—well, it should be pretty clear I'm crazy about the Crawfords.  In order to hear one muttered aside from Mary Crawford, I'd push Fanny into oncoming traffic.
The Crawfords and the Bertrams hit it off beautifully.  We're told that "Miss Crawford's beauty did her no disservice with the Miss Bertrams.  They were too handsome themselves to dislike any woman for being so too," which is a nice change from what we'd expect—the usual catty jealousies you get in stories of beautiful women (invariably written by men).  Mr. Crawford, not quite as hot as his sister, at first makes no strong impression; but his charm and insinuating manner soon win over the Bertram sisters big time, and though Maria's engagement "made him in equity the property of Julia," Maria is queasy at the idea of just handing him over.  She takes one look at him standing next to Mr. Rushworth, and knows the sinking feeling of having chosen too soon—like a woman who buys a pair of party pumps at Payless, then wanders past the window at Jimmy Choo.
As for Henry Crawford himself, he doesn't see why he shouldn't flirt with both sisters.  "He did not want to die of love; but with sense and temper which ought to have made him judge and feel better, he allowed himself great latitude on such points."  There's that feline nature again. 
Mrs. Grant tries to head off any trouble by making certain Henry prefers Julia.  He tells her, "Miss Bertram is certainly the handsomest, and I have found her the most agreeable, but I shall always like Julia best, because you order me."  Understandably finding this less than reassuring, she reminds him that Maria is engaged, and Henry replies:
"Yes, and I like her the better for it.  An engaged woman is always more agreeable than a disengaged.  She is satisfied with herself.  Her cares are over, and she feels that she may exert all her powers of pleasing without suspicion.  All is safe with a lady engaged; no harm can be done."
And he says this to the wife of a clergyman.  I think this is why I'm so fond of Mr. Crawford, where I loathed Mr. Willoughby and Mr. Wickham; he hides nothing, engages in no subterfuge.  He's selfish, hedonistic, and utterly amoral, but he admits it right up front, with a great big dazzling smile.  As for Mrs. Grant, she's completely seduced; neither young, nor beautiful, nor clever herself, she hero-worships her younger siblings to the point of laughing off their shocking morals.  And her husband is equally content to have them around, "a talking pretty young woman like Miss Crawford" being "always pleasant society to an indolent, stay-at-home man; and Mr. Crawford's being his guest was an excuse for drinking claret every day."
As for Mary's pursuit of Tom: that goes well, too.  While she finds both Bertram brothers pretty fly, Tom has "more liveliness and gallantry than Edmund…She had felt an early presentiment that she should like the eldest best.  She knew it was her way."  Every once in a while Austen drops some small line or phrase that utterly reveals her genius; "She knew it was her way" is one of them.  It instantly tells us volumes about Mary: we now know that she isn't just self-centered, she's self-aware.  This kind of complexity—so lightly dispensed, as though there were nothing really difficult in it—is one of the reasons people compare Austen to Shakespeare.  The perversity of Mansfield Park is that Austen eventually decides she must punish herself for this sublime creation—and punish the creation too, and us for responding to her.
Pleased with Tom's optics, Mary, no swooning romantic, turns her attention to his other attractions.
She looked about her with due consideration, and found almost every thing in his favour, a park, a real park five miles round, a spacious modern-built house, so well placed and well screened as to deserve to be in any collection of engravings of gentlemen's seats in the kingdom, and wanting only to be completely new furnished—pleasant sisters, a quiet mother, and an agreeable man himself—with the advantage of being tied up from much gaming at present, by a promise to his father, and of being Sir Thomas hereafter.
Are we supposed to despise her for this bit of calculation?  Austen has made more than a few references to Mary Crawford's harrowing upbringing—orphaned young, brought up by an uncle "of vicious conduct" until forced out by the installation of the man's mistress—so we can all too easily understand Mary's longing for property, stability, and harmonious surroundings.  We can also infer that at least some of her impudence and spiky wit are well worn survival mechanisms.  Austen seems deeply conflicted here; she continually prompts us to dislike Mary, while providing us ample reasons not to.
Chief among these, is that when push comes to shove, Mary can't even act on her calculations.  She ends up tumbling instead for the sober solidity of the second son—succumbing to the same qualities that Fanny herself rolls over on her back for, though confusing herself in the process so that she can't help mocking the very things that endear her.  We find the first inklings of this mutual attraction in a sparkling conversation between the two during an otherwise unremarkable walk about the park.  The other young people are all along (except of course Fanny, who, being a little mole creature, isn't disposed to traveling in a pack) but Mary and Edmund seem to be the only ones doing much talking.  Their subject, strangely enough, is Fanny herself.  "Pray, is she out, or is she not?" Mary asks. "I am puzzled.—She dined at the parsonage, with the rest of you, which seemed like being out; and yet she says so little, that I can hardly suppose she is."
Edmund, whose head is perpetually up his trouser seat, can only give her an equivocal answer.  "My cousin is grown up.  She has the age and sense of a woman, but the outs and not outs are beyond me."  This sets Mary off on a dazzling stand-up routine about how easy it is to tell whether a girl is out or not out—and how the process of coming out itself is often transformative in the worst sense.
"They sometimes pass in such very little time from reserve to quite the opposite—to confidence!  That is the faulty part of the present system.  One does not like to see a girl of eighteen or nineteen so immediately up to every thing—and perhaps when one has seen her hardly able to speak the year before.  Mr. Bertram, I dare say you have sometimes met with such changes."
As it happens, he has; in fact he was once deeply embarrassed by the young sister of a friend, who as a child had practically hidden behind the furniture from him, as though afraid rays from his eyes might set fire to her hair.  When he met her again after her coming out, she bounded over to him, attached herself to him like a lamprey, and proceeded to pummel him with talk, oblivious to the fact that he had no idea who she was.  Edmund is convinced Mary has heard this story and is teasing him about it.  Mary protests her innocence, but a little half-heartedly.  Austen never says, but I'm pretty sure Mary has heard the story is deliberately using it to prod Edmund, knowing his dignity is his sore spot.  (Again, that feline batting-about of helpless prey.)
This leads to a long discussion on proper and improper feminine behavior, notable because Tom steps in to share a couple of juicy Girls Gone Wild anecdotes from his own experience; he, like Mary, is obviously an avid trash-talker.  Edmund retires from the conversation till Mary brings it back 'round to Fanny: "Does she go to balls?  Does she dine out every where, as well as at my sister's?"
"No," replied Edmund, "I do not think she has ever been to a ball.  My mother seldom goes into company herself, and dines no where but with Mrs. Grant, and Fanny stays at home with her."
"Oh! then the point is clear.  Miss Price is not out."
And with that, Mary seems to dismiss Fanny from any of her future calibrations; certainly the girl can't pose any kind of threat to her.  (Nor, in an ideal world—or novel—would she.)
Fanny appears at the next gathering, a dinner party at the park which Mary rather dreads, because Tom won't be there, having gone off to race one of his horses.  Even worse from Mary's point of view, Mr. Rushworth is there, and he brutalizes everyone with incessant talk about his scheme to improve his property.  No one else can get a word in, and as you may have inferred by now, if Mary's in a room where someone is talking incessantly, she likes it to be herself.  But she's met her match in Mr. Rushworth. Seriously, you could base a college drinking game on how many times he says the word "improvement."
The subject had been already handled in the drawing-room; it was revived in the dining-parlour.  Miss Bertram's attention and opinion was evidently his chief aim; and though her deportment showed rather conscious superiority than any solicitude to oblige him, the mention of Sotherton Court, and the ideas attached to it, gave her a feeling of complacency, which prevented her from being very ungracious.
Again, love that "very."
Aunt Norris is also present, engaging in two of her favorite pastimes, encouraging others to spend money while eating food she hasn't paid for.  When Mr. Rushworth mentions an architect whose terms are five guineas a day, she lashes into him.
"Well, and if they were ten…I am sure you need not regard it.  The expense need not be any impediment.  If I were you, I should not think of the expense.  I would have every thing done in the best style, and made as nice as possible."
She then goes on at length about the few meager but wonderful improvements she herself managed to make at the parsonage, in particular an apricot tree she planted, that she seems to feel Dr. Grant, its inheritor, ought to get down on his knees and thank her for.  When Dr. Grant, quite the contrary, disparages the blandness of the fruit as rendering it "little worth the trouble of gathering," Mrs. Norris draws herself up in indignation, and possibly levitates half an inch out of her chair.
"Sir, it is a moor park, we bought it as a moor park, and it cost us—that is, it was a present from Sir Thomas, but I saw the bill, and I know it cost seven shillings, and was charged as a moor park."
Dr. Grant isn't impressed; he essentially tells her she wuz robbed—"(T)hese potatoes have as much the flavor of a moor park apricot"—and Mrs. Grant has to insert herself and play peacemaker before Mrs. Norris hurls a plate or something.  You gotta love Jane Austen dinner parties.  They're always such riotous set pieces.
But inevitably (sigh) Fanny speaks up, and immediately all the air goes out of the room, the candles sputter and die, and the wine goes flat.  "I should like to see Sotherton before it is cut down," she says, "to see the place as it is now, in its old state; but I do not suppose I shall."  You almost have to admire her; she turns passive-aggressiveness into an art form.
Edmund, not quite her equal in this, yet takes up the gauntlet and gives it a shot.
"I do not wish to influence Mr. Rushworth…but had I a place to new fashion, I should not put myself into the hands of an improver.  I would rather have an inferior degree of beauty, of my own choice, and acquired progressively.  I would rather abide by my own blunders than his."
Mary, unimpressed, skillfully—almost unnoticeably—manages to turn this into a discussion about herself; she's an artist of a different sort.  Other Austen characters have been in the habit of bending any topic of conversation their way, but Mary is unique in that she does it so deftly, without any hint of arrogance; and also in that her experiences and point of view really are invariably more interesting than what she's steering the conversation away from.
Soon she's informing Edmund on the whereabouts of one of her prized possessions:
"Mr. Bertram…I have tidings of my harp at last.  I am assured that it is safe at Northampton; and there it has probably been these ten days, in spite of the solemn assurances we have so often received to the contrary…The truth is, that our inquiries were too direct; we sent a servant, we went ourselves: this will not do seventy miles from London—but this morning we heard of it the right way.  It was seen by some farmer, and he told the miller, and the miller told the butcher, and the butcher's son-in-law left word a the shop."
This is so giddily subversive, it might be lifted right out of The Importance of Being Earnest.  Mary continues in this bubbly, delightfully mocking vein for several effervescent pages, interrupted only occasionally by Fanny saying something about how she should dearly love to be within fifty miles of a harp someday, or wondering aloud whether if everybody's now had seconds she might humbly presume to have firsts.
But alas, even Mary Crawford eventually has to take a breath, and as soon as she does Mr. Rushworth blurts "Improvement!*" and regains the ground he'd lost.  Everyone is again forced to discuss the improvement* of his estate, and soon Henry Crawford is volunteered to come and stay at his house and advise him, Henry's taste being presumably impeccable.  Aunt Norris, who realizes that this scheme will necessarily remove Henry from Julia's clutches for God knows how long—a week at least; Julia will be a haggard old maid by the end of it—is emboldened to ask, "(B)ut why should not more of us go?—Why should not we make a little party?  Here are many that would be interested in your improvements,* my dear Mr. Rushworth, and that would like to hear Mr. Crawford's opinion on the spot"—excepting of course Fanny, whose longing to see the place before its alteration has fallen on not deaf, but hostile ears.  Fanny could offer to crawl to Sotherton on a road of glass shards strewn with mousetraps, and Mrs. Norris would turn her down. 
Even I'm not that cruel.  I'd certainly grant that request.  Hell, I'd even prime the mousetraps myself.

*Bottoms up!

Mansfield Park, chapters 1-3

Is there anyone who doesn't have a problem with Mansfield Park?...Having just given the world one of its most irresistible literary characters, Jane Austen faced the same dilemma as a bowler returning to the lanes for the first time after scoring ten straight strikes: How the hell do you follow up a perfect game?  Most probable answer: You choke.
Though of course we're taking literature, not tenpins, so the reality is likely to be more complicated.  My own take is that Austen was feeling a...