Bits on Jane Austen and Mansfield Park
Monday 
around lunchtime 
Mystie
Jane Austen has always offended both the imaginative sensibility which yearns to transcend common experience [Marianne Dashwood], and the passionate temperament impatient of restraint, with which it is often combined. — Ian Watt
By C.S. Lewis, “A Note on Jane Austen”:
[Fanny] is almost a Jane Austen heroine condemned to a Charlotte Bronte situation.
One of the most dangerous of literary ventures is the little, shy, unimportant heroine whom none of the other characters value. The danger is that your readers may agree with the other characters.
But though Fanny is insipid (yet not a prig) she is always “right” in the sense that to her, and to her alone, the world of Mansfield Park always appears as, in Jane Austen’s view, it really is. Undeceived, she is the spectator of deceptions.
“This [a delicate feeling pained] is not so much like the Pharisee’s eagerness to condemn as the musician’s involuntary shudder at a false note.”
Where there is no norm, nothing can be ridiculous, except for a brief moment of unbalanced provincialism in which we may laugh at the merely unfamiliar. Unless there is something about which the author is never ironical, there can be no true irony in the work. “Total irony” — irony about everything –frustrates itself and becomes insipid.
[Austen's unyielding, principled core] is unexacting in so far as the duties commandd are not quixotic or heroic, and obedience to them will not be very difficult to properly brought up people in ordinary circumstances. It is exacting in so far as such obedience is rigidly demanded; neither excuses nor experiments are allowed. If charity is the poetry of conduct and honour the rhetoric of conduct, Jane Austen’s principles night be described as the grammar of conduct. Now grammar is something that anyone can learn; it is also something that everyone must learn. Compulsion waits.
The other untragic element of her mind is its cheerful moderation. [...] If she envisages few great sacrifices, she also envisages no grandiose schemes of joy. She has, or at least all her favorite characters have, a hearty relish for what would now be regarded as very modest pleasures. A ball, a dinner party, books, conversation, a drive to see a great house ten miles away, a holiday as far as Derbyshire – these, with affection (that is essential) and good manners, are happiness. She is no Utopian.
Edmund Wilson, “A Long Talk about Jane Austen”:
The woman reader wants to identify herself with the heroine, and she rebels at the idea of being Fanny. The male reader neither puts himself in Fanny’s place nor imagines himself marrying Fanny [...] What interests him in Miss Austen’s heroines is the marvellous portraiture of a gallery of different types of women, and Fanny, with her humility, her priggishness, and her innocent and touching good faith, is a perfect picture of one kind of woman.
Miss Austen is almost unique among the novelists of her sex in being deeply and steadily concerned, not with the vicarious satisfaction of emotion nor with the skillful exploitation of gossip, but, as the great masculine novelists are, with the novel as a work of art.
Lionel Trilling, “Mansfield Park”:
Jane Austen’s irony is only secondarily a matter of tone. Primarily it is a method of comprehension. It perceives the world through an awareness of its contradictions, paradoxes, and anomalies. It is by no means detached. It is partisan with generosity of spirit – it is on the side of life, of affirmation. But it is preoccupied not only with the charm of the expansive virtues, but also with the cost at which they are to be gained and exercised. This cost is regarded as being at once ridiculously high and perfectly fair. What we may call Jane Austen’s first or basic irony is the recognition of the fact that the spirit is not free, that it is conditioned, that it is limited by circumstance. [...] Her next and consequent irony has reference to the fact that only by reason of this anomaly [of limitation] does spirit have virtue and meaning.
Jane Austen’s malice of irony is directed not only upon certain characters of her novels but also upon the reader himself [for quickly judging her initial irony against the characters to be perfectly deserved].
But there is one novel of Jane Austen’s, Mansfield Park, in which the characteristic irony seems not to be at work. Indeed, one might say of this novel that it undertakes to discredit irony and to affirm literalness, that it demonstrates that there are no two ways about anything.
Charlotte Bronte despised Jane Austen for representing men and women as nothing but ladies and gentlemen.
Perhaps no other work of genius [but Mansfield Park] has ever spoken, or seemed to speak, so insistently for cautiousness and constraint, even for dullness. No other great novel has so anxiously asserted the need to find security, to establish, in fixity and enclosure, a refuge from the dangers of openness and chance.
There is scarcely one of our modern pieties that [Mansfield Park] does not offend.
Most troubling of all is [Mansfield Park's] preference for rest over motion. To deal with the world by condemning it, by withdrawing from it and shutting it out, by making oneself and one’s mode and principles of life the very center of existence and to live the round of one’s days in the stasis and peace thus contrived – this, in an earlier age, was one of the recognized strategies of life, but to us it seems not merely impracticable but almost wicked.
Mansfield Park was published in 1814, only one year after the publication of Pride and Prejudice, and no small part of itse interest deries from the fact that it seems to controvert everything that its predecessor tells us about life.
Pride and Prejudice celebrates the traits of spiritedness, vivacity, celerity, and lightness, and associates them with happiness and virtue. [...] It is animated by an impulse to forgiveness. [...] Almost the opposite can be said of Mansfield Park. Its impulse is not to forgive but to condemn. Its praise is not for social freedom but for social stasis. It takes full notice of spiritedness, vivacity, celerity, and lightness, but only to reject them as having nothing to do with virtue and happiness, as being, indeed, deterrents to the good life.
Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park. Fanny Price is overtly virtuous and consciously virtuous. Our modern literary feeling is very strong against people who, when they mean to be virtuous, believe they know how to reach their goal and do reach it. [...] We take failure [and hence virtue found through grace rather than merit] to be the mark of true virtue.
Fanny is one of the poor in spirit. It is not a condition of the soul to which we are nowadays sympathetic. We are likely to suspect that it masks hostility – many modern readers respond to Fanny by suspecting her.
We must keep in mind the tradition which affirmed the peculiar sanctity of the sick, the weak, and the dying.
That the self may destroy the self by the very energies that define its being, that the self may be preserved by the negation of its own energies – this, whether or not we agree – makes a paradox, makes an irony, that catches our imagination. Much of the nineteenth century preoccupation with duty was not love of law for its own sake, but rather a concern for the hygiene of the self.
Mary Crawford’s intention is not to deceive the world but to comfort herself; she impersonates the woman she thinks she ought to be. And as we become inured to the charm of her performance we see through the moral impersonation and are troubled that it should have been thought necessary. In Mary Crawford we have the first brilliant example of a distinctively modern type, the person who cultivates the style of sensitivity, virtue, and intelligence [without actually possessing sensitivity or virtue].
Among writers who … have approached nearest to the manner of Shakespeare’s characterization we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen. — Macaulay
(MCL)
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