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Mansfield Park, Horror Show

Jane Austen reduces this English Great House to a confederation of zombies taking tea in the gardens

Oct 7, 2021

Hello dear friends,

Happy October! I hope wherever you are, you are happening upon some fall leaves, some pumpkin patches, and maybe some spicy lattes in your life.

Here at the Austen Connection, October is set to be a month of horrors - horror, I tell you! - because as it happens, Austen is full of horrors. Not just insults, suffered by our heroes and heroines experiencing life, usually in some way, on the margins, but actual injuries, dangers, deprivations, and …. horrors!

And we’re starting with that horror show that is Mansfield Park.

This letter is for those who have read Mansfield Park and have not read Mansfield Park.

For those who have read Mansfield Park and loved it, and for those who have read Mansfield Park and hated it.

For those who have encountered Jane Austen’s deceptively uncomplicated heroine Fanny Price and hated her; and those who have endured her trajectory from weepy child to slaying conqueror and simply don’t know what to make of her.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about and don’t care.

Keep reading - we’ll make you care!

This letter is for those who have read Mansfield Park and have not read Mansfield Park.

Because it could be argued, and I’m going to attempt it here, that Mansfield Park is a radical novel. It appears to be a rather simple story about a neglected child who comes to reside in her wealthy relatives’ Great House, Mansfield Park, and finds love with a budding clergyman and lives happily ever after.

But, oh dear gosh, it is - one could argue and one will - about so much more!

Hold on tight.

Because today, in 2021, in our Janeite, literary, academic and fandom circles and beyond, when you talk about Mansfield Park, you are talking about, among other things: Colonialism, the legacy of slavery, and Britain’s reliance on Colonialism and slavery for the economic foundations that helped to fund and build many of its Great Houses (like Mansfield Park - see more research links on this history, below).

You are also talking about sexual harassment, incest, abuse, class oppression, and adultery.

In fact, this novel makes Regency-era adultery look almost quaint in light of everything else.

‘[A]s far as this world alone was concerned the greatest blessing would be … instant annihilation’: Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park ascends from timid child to woman conqueror. Photo: Dreamstime | © Ratpack2

Now, no one’s saying that these issues are advertised and that Jane Austen set out to overtly ramshackle the moral and economic and social foundations of her early 19th Century world. She likely was attempting no such thing.

Nevertheless, we don’t need Aunt Jane’s permission to look deeply. And when we look deeply into Mansfield Park, its world, its structures, its oppressions, and the sinister forces gathering under the surface throughout this novel, we see an ultimately cataclysmic splintering of the tight, restrained moral order of the novel’s beginning. It’s earth-shattering.

Mansfield Park and Zombies

The world of Mansfield Park gets leveled, my friends. “Instant annihilation” is not off the table (those are the words of Austen herself, through Fanny - see below!) And it’s Jane Austen - and timid Fanny Price - who does the leveling.

Let’s do this in two parts:

Let’s tackle the place, and then, next week, we’ll tackle the person.

And the Place is the stately Mansfield Park, which is, by the end of this novel, reduced to a pile of rubble through the arc of the storytelling. As we’ve discussed, Austen does some upending and table-toppling in Pride and Prejudice - turning its world inside out to challenge the established notions of class, gender, and other structures and strictures.

Austen also does this through the character of Fanny Price. Next week we’ll explore this further; stay tuned for a post we’re calling “Mousy, Monstrous Fanny Price.” The late great critic Nina Auerbach compared Fanny Price - back in the 1980s (and reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition of the novel, edited by Claudia Johnson) - to Frankenstein’s monster.

When I encountered this essay, thanks to the reprinting of it in the Norton edition, I settled in with a nice cuppa tea and a huge dose of skepticism. I was ready to be entertained by the preposterous, fantastical idea of mousy, shy Fanny as monster.

But friends, I don’t know what was in my tea, but I’m now convinced: Fanny Price is a Regency monster, who decimates the estate of Mansfield Park like your best zombie-slayer. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies chose the wrong book to adapt. Mansfield Park is the novel where a heroine shows up in Regency costume with Regency manners and slays everyone in the vicinity, while never breaking out in a sweat.

I don’t know what was in my tea, but I’m now convinced: Fanny Price is a Regency monster, who decimates the estate of Mansfield Park like your best zombie-slayer.

But that’s for next week - stay tuned!

Because before Austen can let Mansfield Park be reduced to rubble, she has to make us hate the place. She has to show us - while pretending to show us its graces - its abuses and its chaos.

And she does this! Am I wrong?

I ask genuinely. Because when I first read this novel - and my first serious reading of it was not as a student but as a grown-up double-degreed adult - I took the entire thing at face value: Mansfield Park was pretty. Sir Thomas was gracious and kind and long-suffering. And regal. Lady Bertram was lazy but also kind. Aunt Norris was a pain in the ass like a lot of domineering older relatives (for the record, I don’t have many of those - I’m lucky with my aunts). Julia and Maria were spoiled, yes, but society would treat them kindly, as they deserved, and they would find their footing. Of course, being an English major, I had caught the subtle and sinister undertow of Mary and Henry Crawford - but ironically on a closer reading, those two actually seem a bit more complicated and less villainous - while everyone else around them seems more sinister.

[W]hen we look deeply into Mansfield Park, its world, its structures, its oppressions, and the sinister forces gathering under the surface throughout this novel, we see an ultimately cataclysmic splintering of the tight, restrained moral order of the novel’s beginning.

Now, I hasten to explain, my view has changed. None of this is right. It’s all the outer covering - the “cover story,” as the great critics Gilbert and Gubar call it - of Austen’s plot, while the real story is deeper below the Regency layers.

Let’s start with the low-hanging bitter fruit:

Sir Thomas is not kind or judicial. Not really. Austen is painting him this way in the text, but taking it all back in the subtext (that clever distinction might be a common one, but I’m getting it from the critic Patricia Meyer Spacks, in an essay reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition of Emma, edited by George Justice.)

It is subtle, friends, oh-so-subtle: But when you look closely, Austen is not destroying the Mansfield Park setting outright but she’s doing what your mom told you to do - she’s using her words.

So what gets decimated with Austen’s words? Let’s review:

There’s that famous phrase, first: “dead silence.”

This is what happens when Fanny Price brings up the subject of the slave trade with Sir Thomas. As a reminder/explainer for those who have not read this book or it’s been a while, the great estate of Mansfield Park is financed by an Antigua sugar plantation, so it’s financed by the slave trade, and abolitionist writing and debate is a backdrop to this novel’s setting and time. So the novel’s trouble in Antigua, and Sir Thomas’s coming and going from that place, carry huge weight.

As Professor Danielle Christmas pointed out in our podcast conversation, Austen is making intentional, conscious choices about how Mansfield Park is financed and where Sir Thomas goes to and returns from in his to-ings and fro-ings.

So Fanny explains to her cousin and mentor (and love interest) Edmund that she had brought up the question of slavery to her uncle, and it was followed by “dead silence.”

In the context of the novel, the silence ostensibly is from the younger Bertrams who never have anything useful to say, like all Austen’s villains. But because - as many literary historians have pointed out and as is much discussed, the background horrors of slavery were very much in the consciousness and cultural currency of England during this time, and Austen was closely following these discussions - Austen is likely doing much more.

It is subtle, friends, oh-so-subtle: But when you look closely, Austen is not destroying the Mansfield Park setting outright but she’s doing what your mom told you to do - she’s using her words.

The clue is in the words she chooses. She can use any words, and these are the ones she chooses. Instead of a funny comment about her cousins’ empty minds, she chooses to use the words “dead silence” in a reference to the slave trade. This is Austen using a subtext to decimate her own text, one feels. And these kinds of deathly words chosen in the text are dropped throughout this novel, giving the proceedings a sinister, even haunting, tone that pervades the setting.

And while Austen was not a vocal abolitionist in any sense that we know of, it wouldn’t surprise me if this - slavery - were the evil Austen really wanted to highlight throughout this novel, in disguise.

Is that going too far, Friends? There’s no question that Mansfield Park is a morally chaotic, weak place that is faltering on its very foundations in the first half of the novel. And those foundations are financed partly by the slave trade - so unless you believe Austen puts things in her novels accidentally, perhaps you have to see this tying together of weakness, oppressiveness and cruelty, with the slave trade, as a conscious choice.

If you are interested in more about this, friends, check out the list of conversations, books and resources at the end of this letter - and these are only a start. There’s an impressive amount of research, writing and conversation that is revisiting this important backdrop and bringing it from the background to the foreground of our conversations about Austen. (Check out Professor Danielle Christmas’s chat with Austen & Co. Race and the Regency series, which she co-hosted, about the slave ship Zong and Mansfield Park, and also you can watch the film Belle for more on the historical setting of the slave trade and Mansfield Park.)

Courtship Plot or Horror Show?

In the moral universe of Fanny and Mansfield Park, the initial, ostensible source of this immorality and instability is the silly, prurient theater rehearsals of “Lover’s Vows” by the young residents of Mansfield Park - and I think for most readers, this appears as a rather bafflingly harmless source. Sure, it’s in line with Austen’s impatience for “acting” and falsity and inconstancy and duplicity - all of which is going on when Sir Thomas’s children defy him and begin dismantling the interior of the house to make way for their theatrics.

But we know that Jane Austen loved theater! So surely, and I imagine critics have pointed this out (scholar friends, please point the way for us here!), this is a not-so-subtle analogy for the dismantling and weak foundation of … something else? Perhaps: Colonial, class-oppressive, slave-trading Regency England, anyone?

And why wouldn’t Austen question and point to the possibility that that weak foundation and immorality was being driven by the country’s biggest horror, its propulsion of the slave trade? Plenty of Austen’s contemporaries, and some of her favorite writers as I understand it, were arguing this all around her. It’s possible she used her fiction to not exactly say it but to show it, making us think we’d come up with the idea ourselves.

Whatever Austen’s motivation or message, what the novelist ends up doing is building up a classic English Great House built on all that is seemingly good and right and honorable, and then, as we’ve said, dismantling it and fast.

Once we’ve accepted that Austen destroys her own world after building it, we can reverse-engineer it to her motive and I feel it becomes more likely that she was not just giving us a suspenseful Courtship plot - but also was striking at the heart of England.

Nevertheless, it’s the Courtship plot and the conservative novel format that is the pathway Austen traverses toward our destination and decimation.

[W]hy wouldn’t Austen question and point to whether that weak foundation and immorality was being driven by the country’s biggest horror, its propulsion of the slave trade? Plenty of Austen’s contemporaries were arguing this all around her. It’s possible she used her fiction to not only say it but to show it, making us think we’d come up with the idea ourselves.

By the end of this novel, the Mansfield Park princess, Maria Bertram, who has consistently been given precedence over the poor-relation Fanny Price, runs away with gallant, fashionable Henry Crawford. She’s destroyed.

But not only is Maria disgraced, it’s at this point in the story that we realize the whole thing - Mansfield Park - has now become a horror show. Its world and its order are decimated. Bring in the zombies.

Fanny, from a suddenly higher perch that will ascend in direct correlation to the destruction of the Bertram family’s fall from the heights, reflects on this betrayal of Maria’s as a “horror” and “horrible evil.”

What’s key here is that the horror is not just to Maria, it is to her entire family and its home, Mansfield Park. Jane Austen’s language and tone in the passages describing this downfall depart dramatically from any lightness of tone or comedy and take on gravity and depth that is actually present throughout the novel but heightened here.

From a safe, and morally ascendent distance, Fanny reflects that, for Sir Thomas and the Mansfield Park family, “as far as this world alone was concerned, the greatest blessing to everyone of kindred with Maria Rushworth would be instant annihilation.”

What?! Instant annihilation?! As far as this world alone was concerned?! Friends, we have entered the apocalypse and all that’s left is for Fanny to grab her sword and start swinging. Heads will roll. The best they can hope for is instant annihilation.

But before Mansfield Park is annihilated, leaving a confederation of Zombies taking tea in the gardens, gutted and lobotomized into better Regency morals, Fanny first returns to Portsmouth to find that her poor hometown is no better, and in fact is worse.

Fanny Slays

Readers, we want Fanny to love her home. We want her to love her poor mother. We want to be told and taught by Austen that poor people do not have poor ways. We want to find them gracious and resourceful, living a good life without resources, like Pegotty’s ramshackle seaside family in Dickens’ David Copperfield. But Austen will not even give us that, in this cataclysmic hell of a novel.

Portsmouth, instead, provides Fanny with outer chaos to match the internal moral chaos brewing at Mansfield.

It’s a mess. Her mother ignores her. Her father literally harasses her by making her “the object of a course joke.” Her family home has “incessant noise,” “ceaseless tumult,” and is “evil.”

To readers today, Austen’s insulting descriptions of this poor family can seem classist. And that might be part of it! But what also might be going on here is that Austen is giving ascendency to Fanny. What Austen is always showing us is that it’s a person’s inner character that gives value, not their outer means, whether those means are vast or meager, whether they are of Mansfield Park or Portsmouth. Austen could have, like Dickens did later, provided regal bearing to the poor.

And maybe that was Austen’s initial intention, even - but Portsmouth just was Portsmouth and the Prices were just a mess. Sometimes your characters, your settings have a mind of their own.

And what Austen might be doing here is sacrificing the poor Portsmouth Prices to the ascendency of Fanny. What matters is that it’s Fanny who will prevail. Austen is putting her heroine at the top, and Fanny’s going to stubbornly and quietly grapple her way there, messy-crying all the way.

And in this way, Fanny slays not only Mansfield Park the fictional place, but also Mansfield Park the novel, and even perhaps the intentions of Austen herself.

“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery,” Austen says at the end of this complicated novel.

But don’t believe her for a second. She, after all, just used her words - no one but she has written them, and you can be sure they are carefully chosen.

Guilt and misery, guilt and misery: That is where we end and begin at Mansfield Park - and it’s a wonder we have such a good time. Because we do have a good time, after all. And perhaps an even better time if we imagine that Austen has built up this conservative, Burkean, colonial and cruel Regency world, only to level it … with her words.

And Fanny, my friends, has so very much quiet endurance - quiet endurance that makes us want to scream at her (or, if you are Professor George Justice, fall in love with her). She endures first in Mansfield Park as a child, then Mansfield Park as a young woman in unrequited love, then in Portsmouth with her rude, neglectful parents, then Mansfield with its hypocrisies and its insults and its slave-owning Sir Thomas.

After all this endurance, our friend Fanny Price has had enough. And, my friends, she will lose it.

Stay tuned! How Fanny Price goes from messy-cryer to ascendent-conqueror of Mansfield, leaving it smoldering in its own embers, is our topic next week, friends.

And in the meantime, talk to me! Is this a crazy idea of Austen as Destroyer?

If so, that’s the beauty of this complicated story that is Mansfield Park.

And next week your Epistolary Plain Jane will attempt to convince you that Fanny Price - mousy, shy, cry-baby Fanny Price - is in fact a zombie slayer of the highest order, who has been fooling us all along.

As always, friends, please write to me. The best letters are replies.

The Austen Connection