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Hello friends,
Jane Austen makes the best baddies. You just have so many great awful characters to choose from, from vain Sir Walter, to greedy siblings Mary and Henry Crawford (sexy and horrific), and snobby Mr. Collins, and we’re tackling all of them in light of Adam Smith as our series continues - so hang on and stay tuned.
But there’s one special baddie who gets special treatment from Jane Austen. Austen takes great pains and goes deep and into detail to show us this character and her badness - raising this character right above more subtle character portraits of people like Frank Churchill, Sir Thomas, Henry Crawford, and other characters who have degrees of goodness and imprudence in them. This character is all bad - and she is a matronly aunt, and the aunt of Mansfield Park heroine Fanny Price:
She is Mrs. Norris and she is just plain mean.
![Self-portrait of a 19th century artist, Rolinda Sharples, depicts the artist at work paintaing amidst a background of paintings, as her mother looks on in satisfaction. The artist's expression is serene as she looks at the viewer, a paintbrush poised in her hand. Self-portrait of a 19th century artist, Rolinda Sharples, depicts the artist at work paintaing amidst a background of paintings, as her mother looks on in satisfaction. The artist's expression is serene as she looks at the viewer, a paintbrush poised in her hand.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa1946706-e7b0-4c0d-9c06-316afc27d264_1276x1496.png)
And damaging - and we as readers are forced, unlike those around her, to feel her damage because we are so often in this novel in the point of view of Miss Fanny Price, a disenfranchised niece of Sir Thomas who comes to stay as a mere child in this house which (spoiler) she will eventually rise to dominate.
And, friends, let’s cut to the chase to point out that this kind of Fanny Price ascendence is not realistic, even though Austen is innovating the realist novel as she goes - it’s not a guide or expectation you should have for your life; it’s a fantasy, being worked out through story and with a lot of philosophical examinations embedded in that story, as we are always saying.
But nevertheless Fanny Price, as we have written before will rise, will get smart, will maintain her integrity amidst oppression and bullying, and she will, eventually, dominate. She will do this partly through her own steadfastness and stubbornness - or what Austen would call “constancy” - and partly through the folly and cluelessness of those around her. Which is something we should never expect to happen in life - Austen knew better than anyone - but something we can absolutely make happen through art, if we’re clever enough. And Austen was.
And this all brings us to 18th century Enlightenment philosopher and economist Adam Smith, who we are right this minute exploring in this Austen Connection series on Jane Austen and Adam Smith, and who warns of all the horrors Fanny Price is encountering - and whether or not Fanny Price has read Smith (her reading is badass, encompassing nothing less than Global Oppression) - Jane Austen might have read Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft certainly has read Smith, and it’s all coming out through story here at Mansfield.
So today we’re going to take a tour of the horrors of Mansfield Park - we’re in this together, as we always say! - and Smith is going to be our tour guide. Hold on tight.
Big baddies in a Smithian system
Some scholars - despite plenty of connections to the slave trade and wanton entitlement and all kinds of horrors happening at Mansfield - still think Sir Thomas is supposed to be basically a good guy. It appears Austen was pulling the wool over people’s eyes, but 200 years later we can begin to see through it can we not.
And yet to see Sir Thomas’s goodness is understandable. This portrait of Sir Thomas is a nuanced portrait. It’s possible Austen’s tactic here is to leave breadcrumbs, breadcrumbs that time-travel across centuries, as she is doing in so many of her stories1, and she doesn’t want her examination of the power structures of her time to be the first thing you see (especially if you’re reading back there in the Regency, where we’re still recovering from the shock - shock! - of Mary Wollstonecraft’s personal revelations not to mention Eliza Haywood or the Duchess of Devonshire).
And then there is this delicious setting: There is lots to appreciate and love in early 19th-century England - and much of it is at Mansfield Park: its gardens, its grand architecture, its rituals, and decorum, its leisure, and ease. And Fanny herself loves it, and in some ways it rescues her and makes her.
Fanny Price, as we have written before will rise, will get smart, will maintain her integrity amidst oppression and bullying, and she will, eventually, dominate. She will do this partly through her own steadfastness and stubbornness - or what Austen would call “constancy” - and partly through the folly and cluelessness of those around her. Which is something we should never expect to happen in life - Austen knew better than anyone - but something we can absolutely make happen through art, if we’re clever enough. And Austen was.
But we learn through the complex novel Mansfield Park that Austen is able to appreciate these things and also to acknowledge and also examine, to a point, the underpinnings of oppression that made these things possible. In titling this book Mansfield Park it’s possible she’s connecting the title of this novel to Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice who was making rulings on the slave trade while raising a young Black heiress niece in the Mansfield household - she’s a real Black heiress of the Regency era, and her name is Dido Elizabeth Belle.
But there’s more than just time-traveling breadcrumbs: So much of what is being examined is right there in plain sight and it’s in the story that is about - as we’ve discussed in Emma and in Mansfield Park posts - influence, and power, and the arbitrariness of power and abuse of power.
And this is where Sir Thomas comes in. His command, his influence, is the command, as Austen says through Fanny’s consciousness of “absolute power.” And, to critics and readers for two centuries this power and its attractions have won us over, and we’ve overlooked the fact that in this story that Austen is intentionally telling us, this holder of absolute power happens to be misguided and just wrong. And Austen made him wrong. So what happens then?
Fiction is the means Austen utilizes to find out.
And she’s got some heavy lifters who have laid the groundwork for this philosophical examination - namely, of course: Adam Smith.
With Sir Thomas and his iron will in mind, and also with his eldest son Tom Bertram, a party-boy who stands to inherit the whole of Mansfield Park and its abhorrent holdings, let’s hear what Adam Smith is telling us from 1759 in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, about princes holding absolute power, and what Smith would like us to keep in mind about them and for them to keep in mind about themselves. And Adam Smith in 1759 (and revising his Theory in the 1770s and incorporating them into The Wealth of Nations) is not talking about democratic governments because representative democracy is not, as professor and author Robert Morrison has said, really a thing in this period. So when Smith writes of “princes” what he is getting at is “power” - in the form of princes, and also perhaps elder sons, inherited wealth, or even presidents. Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Mr. Adam Smith:
Of all the “arrogance” of “princes,” writes Smith, “sovereign princes are by far the most dangerous … and consider the state as made for themselves, not themselves for the state.” … Meanwhile: “The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular order or society. … He should, therefore, be equally willing that all those inferior interests should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the universe …” (Smith 276)
When you observe Sir Thomas and his dictating, his traveling, his Antigua business-making, and at home his dealings with his daughter’s loveless marriage, his pious script-burning of the house theatricals, his insistence on his niece’s advantageous marriage and his absolute piety alongside his lack of interest in anyone’s actual moral character, we are not witnessing a leader who is thinking about “the greater interest of the universe.”
In fact in this election year it’s helpful to pick up a breadcrumb Austen left us and ask: Who’s acting with the “greater interest of the universe” and the “public interest” in mind. Sir Thomas is acting as if the universe, or “the state,” is “made for” him and not the other way around. Not at all.
We know Aunt Norris is mean, Austen makes this clear and there’s not much nuance going on there - and Sir Thomas however is in one big way just like Aunt Norris, although she has the superiority of being worse: He sees and feels himself to be a rightful Director of the lives of others, as does Aunt Norris. This “Director” role is a role Jane Austen gave them - it’s clear, and it’s obviously meaningful, but why and what is the meaning behind it?
Here’s a two-paragraph passage that shows the plight of Fanny Price, still young, dependent, and making her way in a grand house. Fanny Price has gone for a walk in the shrubbery, as recommended (you could say ordered) by Sir Thomas. Mrs. Norris sees this and doesn’t like this little bit of apparent-agency shown by her niece. She announces to the assembled that Fanny should have notified her, Mrs. Norris, that she was going out - so that Mrs. Norris could give her an errand and Fanny could be useful to her. We must point out that Fanny is perfect: She is always useful, always ready to help, is always prudent, quiet, and respectful - so much so that she drives the contemporary reader to distraction. Nevertheless, this is not good enough for Mrs. Norris and here we are having to listen to this lady:
“If I had known you were going out, I should have got you just to go as far as my house with some orders for Nanny,” said she, “which I have since, to my very great inconvenience, been obliged to go and carry myself. I could very ill spare the time, and you might have saved me the trouble, if you would only have been so good as to let us know you were going out. It would have made no difference to you, I suppose, whether you had walked in the shrubbery, or gone to my house.”
“I recommended the shrubbery to Fanny as the dryest place,” said Sir Thomas.
“Oh,” said Mrs. Norris with a moment’s check, “that was very kind of you, Sir Thomas; but you do not know how dry the path is to my house. Fanny would have had quite as good a walk there, I assure you; with the advantage of being of some use, and obliging her aunt: it is all her fault. If she would but have let us know she was going out —but there is a something about Fanny, I have often observed it before,—she likes to go her own way to work; she does not like to be dictated to; she takes her own independent walk whenever she can; she certainly has a little spirit of secrecy, and independence, and nonsense, about her, which I would advise her to get the better of.”
As a general reflection on Fanny, Sir Thomas thought nothing could be more unjust, though he had been so lately expressing the same sentiment himself …”
Did you catch this - “there is a something about Fanny”?! A something! Yes, there is, Mrs. Norris, and you are about to see it. This passage doesn’t get more Jane Austen - recounting something that seems to be about a domestic errand and the dryest place to take a walk but is actually about “independence,” “secrecy,” and being “dictated to.” It’s absolutely zero stretch here to say that Mrs. Norris seems to see Fanny as her own “property,” in a way that to contemporary eyes just has to call to mind the system of slavery that is underwriting the whole enterprise of Mansfield.
Jane Austen doesn’t have to call this place “Mansfield”; she doesn’t have to put this on an estate funded by the slave trade in Antigua; she doesn’t have to bring up the slave trade at the dinner table (and have it be met with “dead silence”); she certainly doesn’t have to read and name abolitionist authors like Cowper and Clarkson as favorites; she doesn’t’ have to follow up in her last, unfinished novel with a wealthy “precious” Black heiress who may be the wealthiest character in Austen, Miss Lambe.
But Austen does all of this, and so surely it’s not much of a stretch to say that Austen, like Smith before her, is deploying rational and Enlightenment principles to a story that forces an examination of power - asking: Who gets to direct and influence the lives of a young, disenfranchised girl growing into womanhood in Regency England.
Whether or not we buy into the parallels or the coincidences of naming in this story, it’s just clear in the text that Austen is pointing to the undeserved and arbitrary power of not only Aunt Norris but also of Sir Thomas, and possibly of all of England. And not only is she showing it to us here, but she’s making us feel it.
But yet: Behold the beauty of Mansfield Park, its gardens, its estates, powered by a slave trade in Antigua. But here’s Smith giving us a clue here to Austen’s contradictions yet again as he describes what Smithians will recognize as the Spirit of System - and it’s a passage that can be read with not its inhabitants but the whole of Mansfield Park as a place in mind.
Smith says here: Yes it’s beautiful; but it’s only successful inasmuch as it benefits the most vulnerable living under its jurisdiction.
Did we hear this? It’s a challenge! Your grand ideals and experiments, your fancy architecture and gardens, are only as good as they benefit the poorest and least powerful among you. Listen up, Sir Thomas:
“We take pleasure in beholding the perfection of so beautiful and grand a system, and we are uneasy till we remove any obstruction that can in the least disturb or encumber the regularity of its motions. All constitutions of government, however, are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them. This is their sole use and end. From a certain spirit of system, however, from a certain love of art and contrivance, we sometimes seem to value the means more than the end, and to be eager to promote the happiness of our fellow-creatures, rather from a view to perfect and improve a certain beautiful and orderly system, than from any immediate sense of feeling of what they either suffer or enjoy.” (Smith 217)
Friends, this passage illustrates the argument between our heroine Fanny Price and the powerful estate and landlord Sir Thomas Bertram. They will come to heads - and this is what it’ll be about.
Sir Thomas - and Mrs. Norris - embody the spirit of system, a system that leaves Fanny outside of it. They adore its power, its beauty, its architecture, and its convenience. Its gardens, its gatherings, its rituals. But Fanny, when it comes to the crunch and she’s asked to go against her conscience in order to fit into this system of wealth and power, never mind the lack of morals involved, will have a question. And her question will be the Smithian question: Are we valuing our means more than our end? Are we putting the “certain beautiful and orderly system” above what individuals under it might “suffer and enjoy”? And Smith used the word “suffer,” not us. And if you think of Fanny, who raises the question of the slave trade at the dinner table, the next logical stop on this train is Antigua.
A handsome suitor sent to test us
And so along comes a suitor - a handsome, charming, and rich Henry Crawford who proposes to Fanny. He is sent to us in this novel to test us all - who is going to pass the Henry Crawford test? Only one of us in this zombie-nation that has become Mansfield, and that is: Fanny Price.
![Frances O'Connor is Fanny Price, standing with her back to the sea, looking off wistfully to the side, as the actor Alessandro Nivola approaches her. They stand on a seaside cobb, under a grey English sky. The still is from Paticia Rozema's 1999 production of 'Mansfield Park'. Frances O'Connor is Fanny Price, standing with her back to the sea, looking off wistfully to the side, as the actor Alessandro Nivola approaches her. They stand on a seaside cobb, under a grey English sky. The still is from Paticia Rozema's 1999 production of 'Mansfield Park'.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F92586919-ba23-4e2f-b9ea-6715f70e82c0_1682x926.png)
Because by the time Henry enters stage right, the young Fanny Price has grown up to become a person of integrity and education, and she’s resolute that Henry Crawford doesn’t measure up.
And she’s right! But all the other inhabitants of Mansfield Park, even those she trusts, even the one who’s supposed to be our wet-noodle hero, Edmund Bertram, are unable to see past Henry’s charm and his wealth. And his relative power.
They’re in love with their system, from which they benefit greatly; but Fanny is not. Having grown up as an outsider, she’s more attuned to the actual vices and virtues that Adam Smith calls for.
And - spoiler - in the end, Fanny’s constancy and her virtue and her courage are going to win her the status, win her the wealth, and of course win her the guy (such as he is) and she Slays. Because this is not real life. Because this is a story.
They’re in love with their system, from which they benefit greatly; but Fanny is not. Having grown up as an outsider, she’s more attuned to the actual vices and virtues that Adam Smith calls for. And - spoiler - in the end, Fanny’s constancy and her virtue and her courage are going to win her the status, win her the wealth, and of course win her the guy (such as he is) and she Slays. Because this is not real life. Because this is a story.
Mrs Norris, Church Lady vs. Adam Smith
But not so fast - because there has been one sinister aunt in our midst all along.
And this character really has to be experienced in the pages of this novel to be believed: Because, in a nutshell, this lady lives to control people. You all know someone like her, possibly every family has one. It’s Aunt Norris’s idea to bring the 10-year-old Fanny Price, her poor, badly-married sister’s daughter, to Mansfield to begin with. Aunt Norris is a comic character because she’s super-thrifty and takes every opportunity to save herself money and live off of the Mansfield estate that her other sister Lady Bertram has married into. But the comedy turns sinister on a regular basis, as Aunt Norris sends Fanny out in the hot sun to pick roses, denies her a fire in her rooms, and - worse - constantly reminds Fanny and the Bertram sisters, the ladies of the house, of the Bertrams’ superiority. She goes out of the way to reinforce the young Fanny’s status as outsider. (In comparison, Sir Thomas seems Magnanimity Personified - but don’t be fooled! Being better than Aunt Norris does not make you virtuous.)
An extraordinary detail in Austen, and one discussed at length seldom but brilliantly in Helena Kelly in Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, is one that not only makes Aunt Norris a first-rate baddie but also connects her first-rate badness to the Church of England.
Say what? But Jane Austen was a Christian lady. Maybe. But nevertheless:
In all the choices and all the plots meandering through the pathways of Mansfield, Austen again doesn’t have to make Aunt Norris a widow to the late clergyman Mr. Norris, whose name - breadcrumb alert! - calls to mind for contemporary Regency readers Henry Hanley Norris, a well-known clergyman involved in the slave trade through the Church of England’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which itself owned at least one plantation.2
Aunt Norris sends Fanny out in the hot sun to pick roses, denies her a fire in her rooms, and - worse - constantly reminds Fanny and the Bertram sisters, the ladies of the house, of the Bertrams’ superiority. She goes out of the way to reinforce the young Fanny’s status as outsider. (In comparison, Sir Thomas seems Magnanimity Personified - but don’t be fooled! Being better than Aunt Norris does not make you virtuous.)
Smith also understands that religion is not always on the side of justice, writing: “it is really religion that misleads him, and not the pretense of it, which is made a cover to some of the worst of human passions.”
So there’s one extraordinary moment in the novel Mansfield Park where Mrs. Norris manages to combine her stinginess, her lack of affection and generosity, and her piety and the Church of England all in one incident that also is just funny. (And we have to say - so unnecessary, so Austen is going out of her way here - those breadcrumbs!) As Fanny is ejected, by Sir Thomas, from the estate of Mansfield Park and sent home to the disorder and impoverishment of Portsmouth, Aunt Norris thinks about sending with Fanny a little gift for Aunt Norris’s god-daughter, Fanny’s younger sister, Susan. But in the end Fanny arrives in dreary Portsmouth from the land of plenty with not a thing to give Susan, and here’s how that has played out:
“Fanny had indeed nothing to convey from aunt Norris, but a message to say she hoped her god-daughter was a good girl, and learnt her book. There had been at one moment a slight murmur in the drawing-room at Mansfield Park, about sending her a Prayer-book; but no second sound had been heard of such a purpose. Mrs. Norris, however, had gone home and taken down two old Prayer-books of her husband, with that idea, but upon examination, the ardour of generosity went off. One was found to have too small a print for a child’s eyes, and the other to be too cumbersome for her to carry about.” (MP 263)
What a lot of fun is Aunt Norris. In this pious lady’s stingy search for a pious hand-me-down to give a young girl, you couldn’t be farther from the riotous joyful embrace of fun and field and play of mind that you get in our Austen heroes and heroines. A preacher’s kid she may have been; but Austen is not looking to the Church of England for joy of life; she is looking very much elsewhere.
And neither is she looking to the Church or its clergy for fairness and justice - as neither will Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, whose spirit is struck down by the awful clergyman Brocklehurst, 33 years later.
We know what justice looks like - and so does Adam Smith, and it doesn’t look like Mrs. Norris’s or Brother Brocklehurst’s version of it.
In this pious lady’s stingy search for a pious hand-me-down to give a young girl, you couldn’t be farther from the riotous joyful embrace of fun and field and play of mind that you get in our Austen heroes and heroines. A preacher’s kid she may have been; but Austen is not looking to the Church of England for joy of life; she is looking very much elsewhere.
And here’s what justice is not, according to Adam Smith:
Injustice naturally occurs in all human actions - things don’t and won’t come out even, he warns, as “the current is too rapid and too strong” and he continues:
“Yet, when … violence and artifice prevail over sincerity and justice, what indignation does it not excite in the breast of every human spectator? What sorrow and compassion for the sufferings of the innocent, and what furious resentment against the success of the oppressor? We are equally grieved and enraged at the wrong that is done, but often find it altogether out of our power to redress it. When we thus despair of finding any force upon earth which can check the triumph of injustice … And thus we are led to the belief of a future state, not only by the weaknesses, by the hopes and fears of human nature, but by the noblest and best principles which belong to it, by the love of virtue, and by the abhorrence of vice and injustice.” (Smith 195)
We, readers, are spectators at Mansfield Park, and Austen has put us there, intentionally and for a reason. She gave the place its beauty, and its oppression; its power and its piety and its immorality and its injustice, and its absurdity and its potential for fantasy and love. It’s all there in the pathways meandering through Mansfield.
And Smith, in the passage above, describes our emotions as we read the story of Fanny Price - our “indignation” when “artifice” and “violence” prevail over “sincerity and justice.” But this is fiction, and we can do something about it.
The saddest thing in all of Austen
So for Smith and certainly for Austen it’s not religion, or rules, or doctrine, and certainly not power or titles or princes - but affection and justice that should guide us, according to Smith. Religion can mislead us.
And even, Smith writes, our families - as Austen shows well - including the good works of father, or a husband, mean little without affection. It’s: Love.
And all this brings us to the Saddest thing in all of Austen - the passage about Mrs. Norris being unable to attach herself to even those whom she preferred and loved.
We, readers, are spectators at Mansfield Park, and Austen has put us there, intentionally and for a reason. She gave the place its beauty, and its oppression; its power and its piety and its immorality and its injustice, and its absurdity and its potential for fantasy and love. It’s all there in the pathways meandering through Mansfield.
Here’s Mrs. Norris, meeting her end, and keep in mind this is the Mansfield apocalypse where by the end of this novel everyone with any status and power at Mansfield - from the sick Tom Bertram to the glorious, flaky Bertram sisters, to the Crawford siblings, to a baffled Sir Thomas himself - have all failed, fled, and been slayed by the ascendent Fanny Price, still just maintaining her virtues and enjoying the gardens. And here in the midst of this aristocratic zombie apocalypse is Mean Mrs. Norris, with her niece Maria, banished from society to live and chaperone this “fallen” niece she’s spoiled and whose vanity she’s fed until everyone self-destructed - so that even Sir Thomas is glad to be rid of her, and as always he’s glad of anything that is convenient to him:
“He had felt her as an hourly evil, which was so much the worse, as there seemed no chance of its ceasing but with life; she seemed a part of himself, that must be borne for ever. To be relieved from her, therefore, was so great a felicity, that had she not left bitter remembrances behind her, there might have been danger of his learning almost to approve the evil which produced such a good.
She was regretted by no one at Mansfield. She had never been able to attach even those she loved best, and … not even Fanny had tears for aunt Norris —not even when she was gone for ever.”
And wow talk about HEAs - if this is a happily ever after, give me Frankenstein instead. And this is the part that is quite possibly the saddest thing - and possibly also the scariest thing - in all of Austen: “She had never been able to attach even those she loved best.” How desperately sad. How terrifying. What an end for pious, pompous, class-oppressive Mean Mrs. Norris.
But this ending also offers a challenge. You can’t read it without turning it around to ask: How does one - and this is a question Smith examines over and over - attract sympathy and ultimately love to ourselves? How do we attach, in Austen’s word, and survive, and capture, affection in a world that Smith describes as being made up of what he calls “the connexions and dependencies of things.”
Smith also provides a possible answer - and it’s one that’s also evident in Austen’s heroines: Action. We can deploy action and agency. We can be useful; loving. Results matter.
Adam Smith for Fanny Price, Conqueror
So let’s take this out on a positive note with one more from Smith, this time a passage with a way out of this hellscape that is Mansfield Park, through an inner goodness and superiority that defies outer class and status symbols and power plays - something that Austen also of course is always doing, and Austen here transposes Smith’s “man” to her heroines; so you can read Smith’s man and think of Fanny Price, Conqueror:
“Our happiness in this life is thus, upon many occasions, come: a hope and expectation deeply rooted in human nature; which can alone support its lofty ideas of its own dignity; can alone illumine the dreary prospect of its continually approaching mortality, and maintain its cheerfulness under all the heaviest calamities to which, from the disorder of this life, it may sometimes be exposed. … “here the owner of those humble talents and virtues which, from being depressed by fortune, had, in this life, no opportunity of displaying themselves: which were unknown, not only to the public, but which he himself could scarce be sure that he possessed, and for which even the man within the breast could scarce venture to afford him any distinct and clear testimony; where the modest, silent, and unknown merit will be placed upon a level, and sometimes above those who, in this world, had enjoyed the highest reputation, and who, from the advantage of their situation, had been enabled to perform the most splendid and dazzling actions …” (Smith 154)
When you think of the humble person depressed by fortune there’s no character in literature perhaps better placed to illustrate this vision than Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price. And Smith also offers here the vision for what can happen when you are among “the least of these, my brethren,” but yet your own conscience, that impartial spectator, knows your merit, that is enough; it is enough for you to know that your own ethics, your actions, your own affections are carried out in a way that places you above your surroundings. But not only that, it’s almost as if Smith anticipates Fanny Price when he goes further, suggesting that someone under the heaviest of “calamities” and “disorder of this life” in Portsmouth, might even rise “above those who, in this world, had enjoyed the highest reputation.”
And Fanny Price does just that - she rises, through her own conscience and merit, above not only the fancy Bertram sisters, charming Henry Crawford, moral Edmund, but also above the powerful, patriarchal Sir Thomas himself. He is confounded and weak - the man within his own breast is in great confusion and bafflement - while Fanny Price stays steady and ultimately wins a reputation, a marriage, a situation - and yes even all the attachments and affections - that surpass all at Mansfield Park.
Smith merely provides a glimpse of possibility, and Austen picks up the call and carries it to its logical extreme, through story. Austen’s answering a question Smith doesn’t even intend to ask.
And her answer calls for us to take action toward benevolence, toward goodwill, to effect results and not just good intentions; and in doing so to act in a way that will bring us connection, sympathy, goodness, and love - all of it - to see us through.
—------------
Friends, let us know your own reading of Mansfield Park. First of all - I have to add this question after the comments we got on this post - are you Team Henry or Team Edmund or Team No One for Fanny Price? Are you crushing on Mary Crawford? Would it all have worked out between Fanny and Henry - it’s ok to be a little obsessed with this question. I’m not sure Austen herself wasn’t ambiguous about this ending! Do you relate to Fanny Price, or do you find her Austen’s most difficult heroine to relate to - as many do!
Let us know these things and any other things and dreams on your mind.
Meanwhile, hope you’re enjoying a beautiful summer. Beware the Henry Crawfords in your path - and definitely steer clear of the Aunt Norrises and the Sir Thomases. Think of Fanny Price - reading and reflecting and agenting her way through the difficulties, as we can too.
Yours truly,
Plain Jane
Cool links and community
Quotes are from The Theory of Moral Sentiments Penguin Classics edition; and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Norton Critical Edition edited by Claudia L. Johnson.
What Fanny Price is reading - Susan Allen Ford, in JASNA, on what Fanny Price is reading in the East Room at Mansfield Park. And here’s another piece by Ford on Fanny Price and Mansfield Park.
Dido Elizabeth Belle was the Regency-era great-niece of Chief Justice Mansfield, who made judicial rulings on the slave trade. Dido Belle grew up on the Mansfield estate alongside her cousin, Elizabeth Murray. As scholar Corinne Fowler (more below), a researcher of English great houses has reported, Jane Austen knew Elizabeth Murray, so it’s possible she met Belle. And, there’s a film! Based on the book by Paula Byrne.
Here’s the Austen Connection podcast episode on race, the Regency and Bridgerton with Professor Danielle Christmas.
Here’s an Austen Connection podcast episode with author and Professor Gretchen Gerzina on Black communities in 18th century Britain and beyond.
Gerzina mentions in this episode the work of British public historian David Olusoga - this BBC series on Britain’s Black history is just amazing.
Discussion on Dido Belle as Fanny Price - a high-school winning essay!
The Woman of Colour, edited by Lyndon J. Dominique, is a novel about a biracial Jamaican heiress in Regency England - it’s a wonderful read alongside Mansfield Park or any Jane Austen. This book cover is taken from a portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle and her cousin Elizabeth Murray.
See: National Trust research into the connection to the slave trade in its great houses.
Edward Said’s books of essays “Culture and Imperialism” contains the highly influential 1993 essay “Jane Austen and Empire” and discusses the need to read what’s there and not-there in Jane Austen - a game-changer in Austen studies.
Interesting paper by University of Leicester Professor Corinne Fowler on the legacy of Said’s work on Austen scholarship and creative production.
Robert Morrison’s book on life in the Regency is: The Regency Years, and we discussed it in this Austen Connection post Sex, drugs, celebrities, vampires
One of my favorite examples I just discovered this week, and it comes from the wonderful podcast from my friends Zan and Diane at The Thing About Austen, and their recent episode about Mr. Knightley’s strawberries. They point out links in Emma between the strawberry picnic of the novel and the Prince Regent’s actual birthday picnic, whom the horrible Mrs. Elton appears to be imitating. For Zan and Diane, drawing from scholarly work by Colleen Sheehan in Persuasions On-Line 27, it is clear that Austen is making a dig at the Prince Regent, whom the book is dedicated to (almost certainly reluctantly and out of pressure) by having one of the worst characters in her entire canon seeking to emulate his ridiculous birthday picnic. And here’s Colleen Sheehan’s article: https://jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol27no1/sheehan.htm?
Helena Kelly’s Jane Austen, the Secret Radical explores this possibility and it’s fascinating and insightful. You’ll never read Jane Austen the same again.
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I am old enough to have been in College (1973) for the rediscovery of women who wrote neglected “edgy” literature, Woolf, Lessing, who were soon being overshadowed again, as they had by men from the Beats, by Gravity ‘s Rainbow, Foucault, Derrida, and followers
Despite Trilling, modern women novelists were only saved for Grad School by Women Studies born just when I graduated from a new, progressive Liberal Arts College, Pitzer.
Regarding actually evil characters, I think it goes without saying that Mrs. Norris is evil personiphied, and the Crawfords are tainted by evil. In her last encounter with Edmund, Mary Crawford reminds me of a cat, in the worst sense, and not an adorable little kitten. The word devious comes to mind. And she was playing with Edmund. I do think Henry loved Fanny, but it was not a pure love. Agree Edmund Bertram is somewhat of a wet noodle, but I will continue to study him. He has human failings, and J.A. generally did not like perfect characters, though there Is Anne Elliot. Even almost-perfect Mr. Knightley becomes jealous of Mr. Frank Churchill, which I think is understandable. I think Mr. Elliot is also tainted by evil as shown by his refusal to aid Mrs. Smith. Sir Thomas is duly punished for his sins and redeemed, in a sense. He realizes his errors and comes to understand that only Fanny was in the right. He is a complicated character.