I've always found the line that Fanny is Edmund's "second choice" and that therefore this is a kind of acceptance of lousy leftovers on Fanny's part very strange. It doesn't seem like a fair reading of human relationships, or of the "bad choices" that many of Austen's other characters make on their way to the good ones (i.e. Elizabeth and Wickham, Marianne and Willoughby). It's interesting that we assume that Elizabeth or Marianne could make mistakes that better knowledge and understanding later corrects but that Edmund's choice of Fanny is "settling," instead of a product of his correctly diagnosing Mary Crawford as a moral wastrel and even a kind of female rake. And positionally, it turns Fanny into more of a Darcy or a Colonel Brandon, which makes intuitive sense to me. Like both of those characters, she has a kind of moral wisdom and uprightness that manages to uphold itself even under attack--and just like both of them, she sits by and waits until her love interest figures out that she's the right one.
My only exposure to literary scholarship is reading the scholarly introductions to things, but... they often seem to describe a weirdly rigid, deterministic view of human behavior? Like, they cannot handle that people might change their minds, or that their behavior might be context-specific.
For instance, the introduction to the Arden Hamlet has a bit about how enigmatic it is that Hamlet is mean to Ophelia at one point, but then claims to have loved her at the grave scene. My reaction was, this doesn't seem terribly enigmatic!
For all their faults, the social scientists made their peace with this long ago. They would just say, "ah, Hamlet's affection for Ophelia is a dynamic variable that fluctuates at such-and-such a timescale, and we plug its current value into the softmax function to calculate his present probability of being mean to her".
In addition to being a fickle teenager, Hamlet's having a pretty hard time, what with ghosts telling him that his uncle killed his dad and married his mom and all. I think we can forgive him a little inconsistency!
It is rare to find such a carefully dispassionate, historically grounded reading of a literary work – rarer still to see that combined with honest and nuanced close reading. Jane Austen has been a moral battleground for critics for a very long time. This reading is positively redemptive and so refreshing.
Phenomenal, Henry. I appreciate your revisiting of Johnson and Amis pere, in particular, to explore the issue. Not to mention your piquant quotations from the text.
Not that I know anything about the topic, but "endless" rereadings doesn't necessarily mean "arbitrary" rereadings. There are infinite numbers between zero and one, for instance, but that interval also has the strict limits of... well, zero and one.
Personally I've started to think of it like: you can say almost anything to a classic, and a classic will have something interesting to say back. But it can't just be repeating the same thing back to you, because that would not be interesting!
On the topic of Edward W. Said, his Culture and Imperialism (1993) seems to me to perfectly exemplify why there has been such a drive in literary scholarship to augment or invent a discussion around slavery in Mansfield Park. Whilst intentionally misreading the 'silence' of the Bertram siblings and ignoring the approval with which Sir Thomas Bertram, the slaveholder, seems to hold Fanny's interest in the slave trade, Said gives the following as his justification for centralising the issue:
'In order more accurately to read works like Mansfield Park, we have to see them in the main as resisting or avoiding that other setting [the plantation], which their formal inclusiveness, historical honesty, and prophetic suggestiveness cannot completely hide. In time there would no longer be a dead silence when slavery was spoken of, and the subject became central to a new understanding of what Europe was. '
Was this ever true, or has this ever been true? Said's suggestion is that, really, the centre of European consciousness at this time was its secret awareness of its dependence on the colonial subject who, in a Hegelian way, is actually the true historical protagonist as opposed to the master and his children (for Said, Austen included) who depend on his labour. Perhaps and understandably due to an unwillingness in Said to confront the nature of self-consciously Eurocentric rightist thought in the twentieth century, he cannot but find ‘a paradox here in reading Jane Austen which I have been impressed by but can in no way resolve…everything we know about Austen and her values is at odds with the cruelty of slavery.’
This changes when we consider the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 (which ended the Thirty Years War) as a restatement of the ancient division between the European imperial subject and the barbarian. Seeing as the Westphalian Peace ended a religious understanding of the differences between European states and returned from this to an ethnic understanding of the European subject at home, but significantly not abroad, Austen’s pious concern for the oppressed denizens of Mansfield Park and surprising lack of interest in the slaves on Sir Thomas Bertram’s plantation is, in fact, not very surprising at all. It appears in actuality to be the product of the same mode of Europeanist thinking that Said identifies as animating the hypocrisy of the liberal John Stuart Mill when, in Principles of Political Economy, he ‘catches the spirit of Austen’s use of Antigua’ by only seeming to take an interest in ‘Our West Indian colonies [as] the place where England finds it convenient to carry on the production of sugar, coffee and a few other tropical commodities.’
But Said, who was probably smart enough to discover this psychological Eurocentrism, cannot ultimately get over the fact that Europe didn't depend on its colonies to create, for example, the many wonders of the Medieval and early modern world, not to suggest they didn't have a role. What is incomprehensible to him is the virtuality of slavery and abolition as signifiers for, for instance, the subjugation of a house maid, as opposed to the subjugation of the house maid standing in for the apparently greater evil of the slave trade. Not to stretch this out any further, but it reminds me of the time I spoke with an Indian historian about Western art and its uniqueness, and rather than mentioning Velasquez, Michelangelo, Rubens, or Blake, he immediately, instinctively mentioned Gaugin and his paintings of natives in Tahiti -which were rightly criticised as exotic and strange in a bad way by Wyndham Lewis in the early twentieth century, and many at the time. Why did he do this? He entered the discussion as a colonial subject relative to Western culture and couldn't imagine it going on without him.
There is, in conclusion, a horror in post-colonial critics who come from former colonies (Said, Bhabha, Spivak) that Europeans didn't depend on them for their cultural achievements, nor do they think about them especially often. This moment of horror is best represented by James Baldwin's excellent 'Stranger in the Village' (1953). I do not think it can be avoided.
I am often reminded when I see articles about Austen that many people suffer from what has been called "presentism" where everything from the past must be seen through our more "enlightened" times and usually deemed "problematic." Austen wrote what she wrote, and while some might be tempted to prefer it if she had (insert demand to satisfy ideology here), we must work with the text that we have. For those who would have preferred a novel in which Fanny stows away on a ship, frees the slaves on her uncle's plantation, overthrows the system, becomes Prime Minister, introduces universal suffrage, smashes the patriarchy, and returns to offer Edmund the chance to sleep with her when she wishes in return for him keeping house, they are free to write something of their own. The rest of us may enjoy what Austen left us, a masterpiece in my opinion.
It was really interesting to hear that plays were such a big focus of the evangelical movement at the time. I think one of the reasons people don't like Fanny is that this conflict just doesn't translate well to our time. It's hard to understand why the play is so horrifying to Fanny, so she comes across as a bit of a wet blanket.
It's so refreshing to see this novel discussed this way, in the context of Austen's own worldview!
I find the defense of Fanny so convincing, but I'm not as sure about the defense of the ending as happy. So many people find it unsatisfying, myself included, much more so than any of Austen's other novels. There are so many small ways in which Austen seems to decline to hit the "rewarding plot beat button." (Sir Thomas and Edmund never tell Fanny she was right about Crawford the way Mr Bennet tells Elizabeth she was right about Lydia, for example -- lots of little things like that). It feels like there's a deliberate shying away from a triumphantly happy ending, but if it's not for the reasons critics have often argued (ie. ironizing the hierarchies that Fanny is embedded in) I'm not sure why.
Do you think the ending is just unsatisfying for many modern readers, and wouldn't have struck this note for Austen's original audience?
People have found it unsatisfying for a long time, largely I think for the reasons you give. But Austen can give us a happy ending without giving us the ending we wanted which indeed she does in many of her novels. Thanks for kind words, I’m glad you liked the piece.
Love this. A really delightful read that makes me want to read MP again!
I do have some questions, or perhaps it’s pushback: Butler makes a strong argument for a reactionary Austen, but it doesn’t seem to me totally right. In Austen’s correspondence we find both light mockery of Evangelicals (written to Cassandra in 1809), and approval of Evangelicals who are motivated by the best, purest motives (by implication, not all are). It doesn’t seem to be the case that Austen converted to Evangelicalism, and I doubt she would have taken on board all their prejudices.
Such as the prejudice against theatricals. Austen herself participated in many family theatricals! As a young woman, she wrote plays, and she frequently attended the theater in London and Bath. Am I misreading you here?
Edmund loves Fanny the same way he might love a favourite goldfish. There's a line near the ending how one sort of eye colour can please just as well as another, revealing the depth of his feelings. (Although i personally think he's kidding himself. He will forever be haunted by the sexual chemistry he had with Mary Crawford).
Fanny is happy anyway, because he's the perfect trophy (landing him does indeed signal triumph over her enemies) and he comes with continued access to her one true love - Mansfield Park.
Austen tells us not to judge them, because judging others is a theme of the novel and Austen is at least three different shades of ironic about it. Edmund and Fanny are constantly judging others and are often vindicated by the narrative, but undermined as well (Edmund more than Fanny; but the fact that she never questions him calls into question her own judgment as well - not just about the slavery thing). The mere suggestion that those two great judges now need to be defended against the readers' judgment themselves has its hint of spice.
I love Fanny, I think she shows remarkable courage in the face of pressure. But she's just not that deep. (Or just still quite young). The slavery conversation is Austen's way of hinting at that. To Fanny it's a fun talking point, a way to show off how serious and well informed she is compared to her frivolous cousins (very Mary Bennet - Austen is definitely making fun of her in that moment). She doesn't quite get why the issue is sensitive. I do think she misreads some of that silence. The cousins are bored, sure. But it might still be a fairly uncomfortable topic for Sir Thomas himself, since Fanny is probably perfectly unaware of the extent of his financial dependence on the institution. To his bottom line, the difference between amelioration and abolution might not be academical.
But I think Austen is just mocking Fanny here (just as she sometimes mocks Lizzy, and often Emma). She's maybe not judging her as harshly as Lauren Groff would, if Lauren Groff shared my reading of this scene. And for this we might judge Austen in turn.
Because the moral is judging is fun and also important, but better be prepared to become a target of judgment in turn. Judge not lest you be judged. But you will also be judged for any failure to judge. There're so escaping judgment.
I've always found the line that Fanny is Edmund's "second choice" and that therefore this is a kind of acceptance of lousy leftovers on Fanny's part very strange. It doesn't seem like a fair reading of human relationships, or of the "bad choices" that many of Austen's other characters make on their way to the good ones (i.e. Elizabeth and Wickham, Marianne and Willoughby). It's interesting that we assume that Elizabeth or Marianne could make mistakes that better knowledge and understanding later corrects but that Edmund's choice of Fanny is "settling," instead of a product of his correctly diagnosing Mary Crawford as a moral wastrel and even a kind of female rake. And positionally, it turns Fanny into more of a Darcy or a Colonel Brandon, which makes intuitive sense to me. Like both of those characters, she has a kind of moral wisdom and uprightness that manages to uphold itself even under attack--and just like both of them, she sits by and waits until her love interest figures out that she's the right one.
Agree!!
My only exposure to literary scholarship is reading the scholarly introductions to things, but... they often seem to describe a weirdly rigid, deterministic view of human behavior? Like, they cannot handle that people might change their minds, or that their behavior might be context-specific.
For instance, the introduction to the Arden Hamlet has a bit about how enigmatic it is that Hamlet is mean to Ophelia at one point, but then claims to have loved her at the grave scene. My reaction was, this doesn't seem terribly enigmatic!
Exactly so. The idea of “consistency” or characters “making sense” is over rated by critics
For all their faults, the social scientists made their peace with this long ago. They would just say, "ah, Hamlet's affection for Ophelia is a dynamic variable that fluctuates at such-and-such a timescale, and we plug its current value into the softmax function to calculate his present probability of being mean to her".
In addition to being a fickle teenager, Hamlet's having a pretty hard time, what with ghosts telling him that his uncle killed his dad and married his mom and all. I think we can forgive him a little inconsistency!
And he literally just got off of a pirate ship! Given the circumstances it's impressive how consistent he manages to be.
It is rare to find such a carefully dispassionate, historically grounded reading of a literary work – rarer still to see that combined with honest and nuanced close reading. Jane Austen has been a moral battleground for critics for a very long time. This reading is positively redemptive and so refreshing.
Thanks :)
wonderful essay. I am printing a copy to put by my copy of the novel. I wonder what school can be formed from those like me who adore Fanny?
Admirers of Fanny will prevail!!
Phenomenal, Henry. I appreciate your revisiting of Johnson and Amis pere, in particular, to explore the issue. Not to mention your piquant quotations from the text.
Thanks! The Amis essay is such a ride!
From the Amis essay (1957): “To invite Mr. and Mrs. Edmund Bertram round for the evening would not be lightly undertaken.” 😉
I might agree, but that’s not the same as concluding (as he does) that MP is “an immoral book.”
To invite Kingsley Amis round for the evening would not be lightly undertaken either!!
And yet sometimes I feel right at home with him….
Not that I know anything about the topic, but "endless" rereadings doesn't necessarily mean "arbitrary" rereadings. There are infinite numbers between zero and one, for instance, but that interval also has the strict limits of... well, zero and one.
Personally I've started to think of it like: you can say almost anything to a classic, and a classic will have something interesting to say back. But it can't just be repeating the same thing back to you, because that would not be interesting!
Oh yes indeed it’s not clear in what sense Sutherland means what she says but the context is suggestive
On the topic of Edward W. Said, his Culture and Imperialism (1993) seems to me to perfectly exemplify why there has been such a drive in literary scholarship to augment or invent a discussion around slavery in Mansfield Park. Whilst intentionally misreading the 'silence' of the Bertram siblings and ignoring the approval with which Sir Thomas Bertram, the slaveholder, seems to hold Fanny's interest in the slave trade, Said gives the following as his justification for centralising the issue:
'In order more accurately to read works like Mansfield Park, we have to see them in the main as resisting or avoiding that other setting [the plantation], which their formal inclusiveness, historical honesty, and prophetic suggestiveness cannot completely hide. In time there would no longer be a dead silence when slavery was spoken of, and the subject became central to a new understanding of what Europe was. '
Was this ever true, or has this ever been true? Said's suggestion is that, really, the centre of European consciousness at this time was its secret awareness of its dependence on the colonial subject who, in a Hegelian way, is actually the true historical protagonist as opposed to the master and his children (for Said, Austen included) who depend on his labour. Perhaps and understandably due to an unwillingness in Said to confront the nature of self-consciously Eurocentric rightist thought in the twentieth century, he cannot but find ‘a paradox here in reading Jane Austen which I have been impressed by but can in no way resolve…everything we know about Austen and her values is at odds with the cruelty of slavery.’
This changes when we consider the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 (which ended the Thirty Years War) as a restatement of the ancient division between the European imperial subject and the barbarian. Seeing as the Westphalian Peace ended a religious understanding of the differences between European states and returned from this to an ethnic understanding of the European subject at home, but significantly not abroad, Austen’s pious concern for the oppressed denizens of Mansfield Park and surprising lack of interest in the slaves on Sir Thomas Bertram’s plantation is, in fact, not very surprising at all. It appears in actuality to be the product of the same mode of Europeanist thinking that Said identifies as animating the hypocrisy of the liberal John Stuart Mill when, in Principles of Political Economy, he ‘catches the spirit of Austen’s use of Antigua’ by only seeming to take an interest in ‘Our West Indian colonies [as] the place where England finds it convenient to carry on the production of sugar, coffee and a few other tropical commodities.’
But Said, who was probably smart enough to discover this psychological Eurocentrism, cannot ultimately get over the fact that Europe didn't depend on its colonies to create, for example, the many wonders of the Medieval and early modern world, not to suggest they didn't have a role. What is incomprehensible to him is the virtuality of slavery and abolition as signifiers for, for instance, the subjugation of a house maid, as opposed to the subjugation of the house maid standing in for the apparently greater evil of the slave trade. Not to stretch this out any further, but it reminds me of the time I spoke with an Indian historian about Western art and its uniqueness, and rather than mentioning Velasquez, Michelangelo, Rubens, or Blake, he immediately, instinctively mentioned Gaugin and his paintings of natives in Tahiti -which were rightly criticised as exotic and strange in a bad way by Wyndham Lewis in the early twentieth century, and many at the time. Why did he do this? He entered the discussion as a colonial subject relative to Western culture and couldn't imagine it going on without him.
There is, in conclusion, a horror in post-colonial critics who come from former colonies (Said, Bhabha, Spivak) that Europeans didn't depend on them for their cultural achievements, nor do they think about them especially often. This moment of horror is best represented by James Baldwin's excellent 'Stranger in the Village' (1953). I do not think it can be avoided.
Thank you. I don't think we have to rescue Jane Austen - or Virginia Woolf or any other writer - from their attitudes and their time.
Thank you for another thoughtful piece.
I am often reminded when I see articles about Austen that many people suffer from what has been called "presentism" where everything from the past must be seen through our more "enlightened" times and usually deemed "problematic." Austen wrote what she wrote, and while some might be tempted to prefer it if she had (insert demand to satisfy ideology here), we must work with the text that we have. For those who would have preferred a novel in which Fanny stows away on a ship, frees the slaves on her uncle's plantation, overthrows the system, becomes Prime Minister, introduces universal suffrage, smashes the patriarchy, and returns to offer Edmund the chance to sleep with her when she wishes in return for him keeping house, they are free to write something of their own. The rest of us may enjoy what Austen left us, a masterpiece in my opinion.
Excellent.
Great piece. I can't help but be struck by the parallel with something we see in financial markets. I can't say more at this point.
The only commentary on Mansfield Park anyone needs to read is Tony Tanners introduction in the old Penguin Classics version. It’s basically perfect.
It was really interesting to hear that plays were such a big focus of the evangelical movement at the time. I think one of the reasons people don't like Fanny is that this conflict just doesn't translate well to our time. It's hard to understand why the play is so horrifying to Fanny, so she comes across as a bit of a wet blanket.
It's so refreshing to see this novel discussed this way, in the context of Austen's own worldview!
I find the defense of Fanny so convincing, but I'm not as sure about the defense of the ending as happy. So many people find it unsatisfying, myself included, much more so than any of Austen's other novels. There are so many small ways in which Austen seems to decline to hit the "rewarding plot beat button." (Sir Thomas and Edmund never tell Fanny she was right about Crawford the way Mr Bennet tells Elizabeth she was right about Lydia, for example -- lots of little things like that). It feels like there's a deliberate shying away from a triumphantly happy ending, but if it's not for the reasons critics have often argued (ie. ironizing the hierarchies that Fanny is embedded in) I'm not sure why.
Do you think the ending is just unsatisfying for many modern readers, and wouldn't have struck this note for Austen's original audience?
People have found it unsatisfying for a long time, largely I think for the reasons you give. But Austen can give us a happy ending without giving us the ending we wanted which indeed she does in many of her novels. Thanks for kind words, I’m glad you liked the piece.
Love this. A really delightful read that makes me want to read MP again!
I do have some questions, or perhaps it’s pushback: Butler makes a strong argument for a reactionary Austen, but it doesn’t seem to me totally right. In Austen’s correspondence we find both light mockery of Evangelicals (written to Cassandra in 1809), and approval of Evangelicals who are motivated by the best, purest motives (by implication, not all are). It doesn’t seem to be the case that Austen converted to Evangelicalism, and I doubt she would have taken on board all their prejudices.
Such as the prejudice against theatricals. Austen herself participated in many family theatricals! As a young woman, she wrote plays, and she frequently attended the theater in London and Bath. Am I misreading you here?
No
Edmund loves Fanny the same way he might love a favourite goldfish. There's a line near the ending how one sort of eye colour can please just as well as another, revealing the depth of his feelings. (Although i personally think he's kidding himself. He will forever be haunted by the sexual chemistry he had with Mary Crawford).
Fanny is happy anyway, because he's the perfect trophy (landing him does indeed signal triumph over her enemies) and he comes with continued access to her one true love - Mansfield Park.
Austen tells us not to judge them, because judging others is a theme of the novel and Austen is at least three different shades of ironic about it. Edmund and Fanny are constantly judging others and are often vindicated by the narrative, but undermined as well (Edmund more than Fanny; but the fact that she never questions him calls into question her own judgment as well - not just about the slavery thing). The mere suggestion that those two great judges now need to be defended against the readers' judgment themselves has its hint of spice.
I love Fanny, I think she shows remarkable courage in the face of pressure. But she's just not that deep. (Or just still quite young). The slavery conversation is Austen's way of hinting at that. To Fanny it's a fun talking point, a way to show off how serious and well informed she is compared to her frivolous cousins (very Mary Bennet - Austen is definitely making fun of her in that moment). She doesn't quite get why the issue is sensitive. I do think she misreads some of that silence. The cousins are bored, sure. But it might still be a fairly uncomfortable topic for Sir Thomas himself, since Fanny is probably perfectly unaware of the extent of his financial dependence on the institution. To his bottom line, the difference between amelioration and abolution might not be academical.
But I think Austen is just mocking Fanny here (just as she sometimes mocks Lizzy, and often Emma). She's maybe not judging her as harshly as Lauren Groff would, if Lauren Groff shared my reading of this scene. And for this we might judge Austen in turn.
Because the moral is judging is fun and also important, but better be prepared to become a target of judgment in turn. Judge not lest you be judged. But you will also be judged for any failure to judge. There're so escaping judgment.