“Mansfield Park” is, by far, the strangest of Jane Austen’s novels. In juxtaposition to the merry and major key orchestrations of her four better-known novels, “Pride and Prejudice,” “Sense and Sensibility,” “Persuasion” and “Emma,” Austen’s third published book sings in a decidedly minor key. The other novels are not the romances that film studios so often mistake them for — they are, instead, clever and cogent satires on societal mores — but since they are written in the major key, they can seem “too light & bright & sparkling,” as Austen herself once said jokingly in a letter about “Pride and Prejudice.”
Compared with the others, it’s true that “Mansfield Park” can appear too dark & dim & lugubrious. Perhaps this is why, for most of my life as a reader, I resisted it and thought of it as the one flaw in her otherwise four-carat, marquise-cut oeuvre. In time, however, I’ve come to see “Mansfield Park” as her boldest, riskiest, most subversive and most artistically mature work of all.
A big assertion! True; “Mansfield Park” is a big book. For one thing, it’s the only one of Austen’s novels that takes place on a large canvas, over the course of a decade or so, while the others flash by in from one to three years. For another, while all of Austen’s books are deeply invested in moral questions, her third book is entirely built around the ideal of deep, serious moral purpose, which drives the plot; serious moral purpose is what lends the novel its solemn, melancholy flavor; serious moral purpose happens to be the primary, and perhaps sole, heroic attribute of our protagonist, Fanny Price.
Poor Fanny. Unlike so many of Austen’s young women, she is neither a great beauty, nor a wealthy heiress, nor witty, nor charming; her cousin Tom calls her a “creepmouse” and she does tend to twitch and scuttle, physically feeble and gray, around the corners of the room. To onlookers who, unlike the reader, are not privy to her interior life, she has only one really compelling quality: an aunt who had the astonishing luck 30 years earlier to have married a wealthy baronet, Lord Bertram.
Another aunt, a parsimonious busybody, married a Reverend Norris, and Fanny’s own mother rather too hastily married one Price, a lieutenant of marines, who has become an out-of-work heavy drinker by the time we meet him. To her great misfortune, soon after her marriage, Mrs. Price has nine children in 11 years, with not nearly enough money to support them, and in desperation she agitates for a rapprochement among the sisters, and the rich Bertram family at last deigns to help. Thus, the oldest Price girl, Fanny, is plucked from her pack of siblings and, at 10 years old, largely unlettered, hypersensitive and extremely timid, the girl is thrust into the life of Mansfield Park, a great estate in the country. Out of nowhere, this child raised in roughness is elevated to a class so far from her own that she feels terrified all the time, and is told in every possible way that she is worthless by her nasty, domineering Aunt Norris.
Next to Emma Woodhouse, Elizabeth Bennet or even Anne Elliot from “Persuasion” (who is perhaps the most sophisticated and complex of Austen’s heroines), Fanny Price indeed looks a little wan and thin, a bit of a party-pooper, mulishly unwilling to join in the fun when the superego of the estate, Lord Bertram, is away on his property in Antigua and the young people of the household decide to put on a play.
This is an unjust assessment, however, because the other Austen heroines are full-grown women from good families who love them, if imperfectly, and poor Fanny is still just a child who is almost entirely unloved, having been forcibly removed from her family of birth, verbally abused on the daily, left to linger in an uncertain and inferior status in the house, and, among the noisy extroverted cousins, she’s the solo introvert who, if she wants to have any space at all to breathe, has to escape to a forgotten room that is painful to her because she has been forbidden to keep a fire there. This sensitive creature is so starved for affection that the scraps of kindness that fall somewhat indifferently from her cousin Edmund’s hand — giving her the paper so that she can write a letter to her beloved brother, the use of a horse for exercise, the gift of a chain — make her love him fervently.
Austen so adeptly lulls the reader into seeing Fanny as something of a pale little pushover for the first part of the book that it’s a dash of cold water in the face when the girl, upon being wooed by the beautiful, rich and charismatic Henry Crawford, adamantly refuses his offer of marriage. She doesn’t dislike Henry, and, on a practical level, marrying him would solve all of her rather serious problems. She would no longer have to feel like a burden in her aunt’s house. She could repay her aunt and uncle for taking a risk in raising her by bringing to their family a husband with an elevated social position. She could do a great deal to alleviate the misery of her siblings in the crowded, dirty house in Portsmouth. She could at last have some freedom and money of her own. Her future would be taken care of; she wouldn’t have to fear what might happen to her if she, penniless and unable to work, found herself a spinster, having been unable to attract a husband. She would do some good, as well: Her gravity and moral clarity would save Henry from his impulsiveness, laziness and love of pleasure.
But it doesn’t matter to Fanny how practical the marriage would be, or even that most young women would be ecstatic to marry dashing Henry, her cousins Maria and Julia included. No: She has seen the way that Henry Crawford plays with the affections of the women around him, and she knows that despite his charm and money, he is, deep down, a weak and inconstant man. In marrying him, she would be betraying her own good judgment and her heart. And so she simply refuses.
As a result, she is pressed, disparaged and scorned by her Aunt Norris and all the men of the family, but even under such intense pressure — mostly masculine pressure, it must be said, which she has been trained from birth to submit to — this shy teenager remains steadfast. She, who has nothing, will not sell herself. She will retain her freedom, despite the consequences. And they are severe: Fanny is sent back to the darkness and crowdedness and insecurity of Portsmouth, where the food is so rough and haphazardly cooked that she would starve if she didn’t use her little allowance to buy herself delicacies.
Fanny’s unwillingness to become a hypocrite to please the men around her has led the literary critic Clara Calvo to see “Mansfield Park” as a take on “King Lear,” and Fanny as a Regency version of Cordelia, who in the original would not lower herself to false flattery to keep her father’s love. Other critics have not been so kind to Fanny; Austen’s own mother called the character “insipid,” and C.S. Lewis said that “into Fanny, Jane Austen, to counterbalance her apparent insignificance, has put really nothing except rectitude of mind, neither passion, nor physical courage, nor wit, nor resource.”
Not a single review took notice of “Mansfield Park” when it was first published in 1814. (When “Emma” was published the next year, in 1815, it was reviewed by five journals, including a thoughtful, insightful, very positive 20-page essay in The Quarterly Review by none other than the celebrated writer Walter Scott, who summarized Austen’s previous work, and yet remained mysteriously silent about “Mansfield Park.”)
Many hypotheses seek to explain the silence that greeted the book until 1821, a full seven years after its publication, among them Austen’s turn toward deeper and darker themes; child abuse, poverty, infidelity, alcoholism, abandonment, violence, pervasive death and of course divorce at a time when divorce was simply not done.
But I find particularly seductive the arguments that the critic Helena Kelly makes in her 2016 book “Jane Austen, the Secret Radical.” Though centuries of readers have found fault with “Mansfield Park” for being insufficiently morally interested in the enslavement of Black people on the Antigua sugar plantation that makes the Bertrams’ lives back in England so comfortable, Kelly argues that Austen put so many markers of slavery into her novel that Regency audiences would have been made constantly — and overtly — aware of the book’s engagement with the issue.
For one, a contemporary audience would have been well aware of the real-life Lord Mansfield, a judge who, having no children of his own, adopted his great-nieces, one of whom was Dido Elizabeth Belle, the mixed-race daughter of Mansfield’s nephew and an African woman. Lord Mansfield was notorious, both celebrated and excoriated, because he, without entirely meaning to, had presided over a trial that, in effect, outlawed slavery in England in 1772. By naming her book “Mansfield Park,” Austen is keeping the idea of slavery constantly before the reader’s eyes.
Kelly likewise unleashes an avalanche of details from the novel, all of which would have brought the contemporary reader’s attention back toward either abolition or slavery, and all of which would have been legible to the average educated readers of the time. These range from Fanny quoting the poet William Cowper, the poet of abolition of his era, to the name and characteristics of Aunt Norris being a sharp echo of a pro-slavery activist of the same name, to a passage in Laurence Sterne’s “A Sentimental Journey,” alluded to during an especially fraught moment on a trip to a neighboring estate, a passage that ends like this: “Disguise thyself as thy wilt, still, Slavery! Said I, — still thou art a bitter draught! and though thousands in all ages have been made to drink of thee, thou art no less bitter on that account.”
On and on the examples build up, weaving a thick and convincing fabric of Austen’s likely intention. To force readers to constantly turn their thoughts toward something as unpleasant as slavery is extraordinarily bold and risky.
Another thing that perhaps made “Mansfield Park” seem dangerous was that Austen did not quail from expressing overt criticism of clerics in this novel, none of whom are particularly good shepherds of their flocks or even more than lukewarm in their faith. This rankled some of her own family; Austen’s father was an ordained cleric and rector of the Church of England; two of her brothers were also clerics.
The most radical criticism that Austen levies in the book, according to Kelly, is that the writer obviously and intentionally reminds her readers of the well-known fact that the Anglican Church, under the aegis of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, still enslaved human beings in the Caribbean at that time, not simply keeping the enslaved persons that it had been given, but buying new humans and even branding them as church property.
Austen literally links slavery and the church; when Fanny’s brother William gives her an amber cross from his travels, Edmund, the good kind cousin who was intended to be ordained by the church for a living, gives the girl a chain. The cross and the chain are not simply symbols; they are materially linked as ornaments on the very person of Fanny Price.
Fanny, too, is the only person in the book who dares to mention slavery out loud. When this painfully shy girl asks her uncle about it, she is met with only terrible and ringing silence.
Fanny will not bend, she has an ironclad moral core, she will never let herself become a hypocrite; by mere juxtaposition with her clear and quiet example, Austen shows the hypocrisy of the Church of England, and, perhaps, the reader’s own.
How daring! How startling and modern to lull readers into an uncomfortable feeling of their own complicity in a deeper evil.
And yet, in the light of all this, how can one read the ambivalent ending of the book? Some truly brilliant readers, like the critic Edward Said, see the restoration of Fanny Price to the position of the most treasured member of this family, which still draws its wealth from the sweat and pain of enslaved human beings, as a terrible letdown. Austen, Said says in “Culture and Imperialism,” is herself culpable of enshrining the evils of imperialism: “In ‘Mansfield Park,’ which within Jane Austen’s work carefully defines the moral and social values informing her other novels, references to Sir Thomas Bertram’s overseas possessions are threaded through; they give him his wealth, occasion his absences, fix his social status at home and abroad, and make possible his values, to which Fanny Price (and Austen herself) finally subscribes.”
Perhaps. It’s true that the book can be read as Fanny Price subscribing to the family’s values; I’m not sure this necessarily means that Austen herself does. I read “Mansfield Park” with its constant attention to enslavement and abolition to be speaking loudly and clearly about the subjugation of all of the vulnerable in the world to the will of the powerful. In this book, those who are wealthy and adult and male run roughshod over the weak, the poor, the women and the children among them. Women who dare to step outside the boundaries of what is expected of them are entirely crushed. The men of Fanny’s family attempt to force her to bend under their will, and are enraged when they cannot. Far from Austen subscribing to and upholding the hegemonic imperial power in the England of her time, I see this book as a brave and lonely voice standing up for the tyrannized creatures of the world.
When read in this way, the end of the book is drenched in a kind of cold and solemn irony. Fanny Price’s strong moral flame has snuffed itself out. To pragmatically accept married life with her cousin Edmund (who himself chooses her in disappointed second place), to find herself at last safe and loved, Fanny silences whatever abolitionary voices were speaking clearly inside of her. She has closed her eyes. She has joined the powerful. The conclusion rings in simultaneous and contradictory voices: Fanny gets what she wants, and the ending is the happy one that Austen’s readers have come to expect; yet in a separate and darker and deeper voice, “Mansfield Park” sings itself a tragedy.
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