[In the following essay, Smith regards the happy ending of Mansfield Park to be a dismal failure and contends that the incestuous overtones of Fanny and Edmund's relationship reveal the crippling effects of sister-brother relationships within a constricted, hierarchical family structure.]

Regarded as a happy ending to Mansfield Park, the marriage of Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram is a dismal failure. Jane Austen, I believe, intends this failure: as Fanny settles into smug seclusion at Mansfield, “the daughter that he wanted”¹ to Sir Thomas and sister-wife to Edmund, her marriage reveals the constrictions of family in the novel. The incestuous overtones of Fanny's relationship with Edmund suggest an approach to these constrictions that illuminates not only Mansfield Park but the effects of nineteenth-century idealization of sister-brother love. In this essay I will attempt to show that incest in Mansfield Park demonstrates the crippling effects of sister-brother love within a hierarchical family structure.

I begin by linking the nineteenth-century idealization of sister-brother love to incest in Mansfield Park. I then define incest as both an emotional relationship and a social strategy and delineate its personal and social functions at Mansfield. After contrasting Sir Thomas's exogamous aims with Fanny's desire for exclusivity, I discuss the disruptive place-shifts at Mansfield consequent on Henry Crawford's exogamous courtship. In my examination of the novel's “happy” ending, I maintain that Fanny's and Edmund's incestuous marriage and the restoration of proper places at Mansfield demonstrate the constrictions of family.

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In the nineteenth century a creed of home and family fostered the exaltation of sister-brother love which ultimately bound siblings within the family. The home, as Ruskin put it, became “the shelter … from all terror, doubt, and division,” a refuge from “danger” and “temptation.”² The family flourished within this shelter; a network of what J. A. Froude called one's “most human relations,” it “give[s] our hearts leave and leisure to love”³ (my emphasis). As a result of this creed, sister-brother love became a privileged affection: because it centered in the home, and because it disentangled love from sexuality, the sexual “dangers” and “temptations” of non-familial strangers. Domestic and asexual, sister-brother love often became the model not only for affection within the original family but for the formation of new homes and families. William Alcott, for instance—not incidentally, a proponent of sexual continence within marriage—held that the “leading design” of marriage should be “to form a brotherhood or sisterhood for life.”⁴ But to regard strangers as brothers and sisters in this way, as Michael Paul Rogin notes, “would be to spread the incest taboo throughout society and … to paralyze all libidinal ties.”⁵ As Freud points out, the danger is that

the family will not give the individual up. The more closely the members of a family are attached to one another, the more often do they tend to cut themselves off from others, and the more difficult is it for them to enter into the wider circle of life.⁶

This situation of constriction within the family characterizes the relationship between Fanny and Edmund. Raised together at Mansfield Park, they come to regard themselves as sister and brother. Sister-brother love, turned not outward to form new families but inward to maintain the original family at the Park, becomes in Fanny and Edmund incestuous paralysis within their pseudo-sibling relationship. Their marriage is emblematic of this paralyzed retreat within the family, and proleptic of the nineteenth-century inescapable family.

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Before discussing this marriage and the pseudo-sibling relationship leading to it, I wish to clarify the two concepts of incest to be developed in this essay. To define the incestuous overtones of Fanny's and Edmund's relationship, we must move beyond a strictly sexual concept of incest to consider it first as an emotional relationship. Considered in this way, incest as I define it is “domestic” and “exclusive”: domestic, because even in the absence of a literal sister-brother kinship (as in Fanny's and Edmund's case), the relationship is conceived as fraternal; exclusive, because the intensity of such an affection tends to preclude romantic attachments outside the family.⁷ This exclusivity can become what David Smith calls “a kind of turning inward and backward, away from the ‘otherness’ of other people.”⁸ Such a withdrawal from others, Philip Slater posits, is “far more likely to occur if the attachment is narcissistic (i.e., based on resemblances between the partners”); in fact, this tendency toward an exclusive relationship “closer to absolute narcissism than any other relationship can be”⁹ is one explanation of incest taboos. In their narcissistic closeness, sister and brother may become too alike, may tend to reflect or repeat each other.

This tendency toward repetition is the aspect of emotional incest I wish to develop in this essay. The repetition in Fanny's and Edmund's emotionally incestuous relationship can be seen in the mutual self-reflection which culminates in their marriage. As Fanny conforms herself to Edmund's standards of propriety, she becomes a reflection of him. By internalizing and then reflecting back to him his own standards, she draws him away from the improper Mary Crawford back to his proper self and to her. When he marries Fanny, Edmund narcissistically ratifies this reflection of himself.

The exclusivity which characterizes incest as an emotional relationship can also be seen as a twofold social strategy: a strategy both for protecting the family from contamination by strangers and for maintaining a hierarchical family structure against the forces of exogamous sexuality removing children from that structure. By drawing Edmund away from Mary and back to herself, Fanny accomplishes the first aim of this strategy; when Sir Thomas approves Fanny's and Edmund's marriage, he accomplishes the second. A clue to the dynamics of his accomplishment can be found in the work of anthropologist Raymond Firth. Adducing violations of the incest taboo among the ruling families of several societies, Firth postulates that when such ruling groups “demand it for the preservation of their privileges, the union permitted between kin may be the closest possible.”¹⁰ If we see Sir Thomas as a group of one, a ruler who demands “the preservation of [his] privileges” of absolute authority in the Mansfield hierarchy, then we can see that this demand requires Fanny's and Edmund's incestuous marriage. “[A]nxious to bind by the strongest securities all that remained to him of domestic felicity” (p. 471), Sir Thomas accomplishes this binding through the marriage, for Fanny and Edmund accept his rule and share his revulsion from “ambitious and mercenary connections” outside the Bertram family. As a social strategy, incestuous marriage functions to exclude threats to the family-centered “domestic felicity” Sir Thomas desires at Mansfield.

Prior to this desire, however, Sir Thomas has pursued not only exclusivity—the preservation of his privilege of authority within the Park—but the extension of that privilege of authority outside the family. His early social strategy for extension, like his later strategy for exclusivity, is the arrangement of marriages: forwarding the marriage of his daughter Maria to Rushworth and encouraging the marriage of his niece Fanny to Henry Crawford. Before Sir Thomas realizes the advantages of Fanny's and Edmund's marriage, his aims for Fanny are in conflict with her desires: where he plans to extend the family circle, she wishes to contract it. By contrasting Sir Thomas's aims for Maria and Fanny with Fanny's aims for herself and Edmund, we can chart the conflict in the novel between a movement towards exogamous extension and one toward incestuous exclusivity.

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It is clear from the first pages of Mansfield Park that Sir Thomas has educated his daughters toward the exogamous extension of the Bertram family circle. While we are told that he is “a truly anxious father” (p. 19), we soon learn that his anxiety is limited. Maria and Julia “continued to exercise their memories, practise their duets, and grow tall and womanly; and their father saw them becoming in person, manner, and accomplishments, every thing that could satisfy his anxiety” (p. 20). His care, that is, is reserved for his daughters' external luster, for this will enable him to “extend [the] respectable alliances” of the Bertram name. Hence Sir Thomas's anxiety is assuaged by Maria's engagement to the aptly-named Rushworth, owner of “one of the largest estates and finest places in the country” (p. 38).

In furthering this match despite perceiving that Maria “could not, did not like” her future husband (p. 200), Sir Thomas expects to extend his domestic authority. He sacrifices his daughter to an extension of respectable alliances, for this extension will both bring Rushworth's estate within his own orbit of authority and, he believes, keep Maria within that orbit.

It was an alliance which he could not have relinquished without pain; and thus he reasoned … [A] well-disposed young woman, who did not marry for love, was in general but the more attached to her own family.

(p. 201)

“[H]appy to secure a marriage which would bring him such an addition of respectability and influence, and very happy to think any thing of his daughter's disposition that was most favourable for the purpose” (p. 201), Sir Thomas blinds himself to the fact that Maria wishes marriage in order to “escape from him and Mansfield as soon as possible” (p. 202). Although, it is said ironically, he “felt as an anxious father must feel” after the ceremony (p. 203), “It was a very proper wedding”: a respectable alliance, at whatever cost, has been assured.

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Against Sir Thomas's plans for exogamous marriage, we may set Fanny's desire to marry into the Bertram family. This desire to remain within Mansfield Park as Edmund's wife stems from Fanny's childhood: both her love for Edmund as a surrogate for her blood-brother and her childhood status as a Bertram family dependent have accustomed her to Mansfield's ways. As a pseudo-sister and a dependent during her childhood, Fanny learns the behavior that turns her from dependent to favored relative and that enables her incestuous marriage to Edmund.

Fanny's love for Edmund begins in her childhood when she associates him with William, the brother she has left behind at Portsmouth. When he helps Fanny write to William, Edmund becomes her Mansfield brother. “Edmund prepared her paper, and ruled her lines with all the good will that her brother could himself have felt, and probably with somewhat more exactness” (p. 16). Austen's cool aside here alerts the reader to other clues that it is not she but Fanny who thinks Edmund is perfection as a brother. For instance, his response to Fanny's tears of loneliness for William—“You are sorry to leave [your] Mamma, my dear little Fanny, … which shows you to be a very good girl” (p. 15)—indicates his patronizing obtuseness to the real nature of her sorrow. Moreover, like the other Mansfield inhabitants (albeit less overtly than they), Edmund begins to value Fanny only when she displays “gratitude” (p. 16). Nevertheless, he shares William's place in Fanny's affections: “her heart was divided between the two” (p. 22).

Fanny's associating Edmund with William accelerates the process whereby, as a dependent, she learns to conform herself to Mansfield's ways. When Fanny lived with her original family, she was dependent on William as her “advocate” with parental authority (p. 15). As she attaches herself to Edmund—described by Bernard J. Paris as “a stronger and more favored member of the family”¹¹—Fanny similarly finds an advocate who “urged her claims to … kindness” on his family (p. 17). Hence she begins to adapt herself to the value system at Mansfield, learning “to know their ways, and to catch the best manner of conforming to them.” Fanny thinks “too lowly of her own claims” (p. 20) and “too lowly of her own situation” (p. 35) to challenge these values that keep her low. Despite her dislike of her aunt, for instance, Edmund can persuade her to acquiesce in the plan to relocate her with Mrs. Norris; Fanny admits that “I ought to believe you to be right rather than myself,” and adds that “I am very much obliged to you for trying to reconcile me to what must be” (p. 27). As her initial timidity is increased by such feelings of obligation, Fanny learns her place within the patriarchal family structure that prescribes submission for poor relations and women. Her childhood love for and submission to her surrogate brother reconcile her to her dependence.

Fanny's subservience to and dependence on Edmund further a relationship of narcissistic mutual self-reflection between them. Her “gratitude and delight” at his epistolary aid cause Edmund to regard her as “an interesting object” (p. 16), so that he takes it upon himself to “assist the improvement of her mind” by “encourag[ing] her taste, and correct[ing] her judgment” (p. 22). “In return for such services,” Fanny loves him “better than any body in the world except William.” Fanny's love, gratitude, and delight at having a brother-protector attach to Edmund; Edmund's love, gratitude, and delight at having a protégée devolve on Fanny. The result is that Fanny learns to reflect Edmund's standards: “Having formed her mind and gained her affections,” Austen says wryly, “he had a good chance of her thinking like him” (p. 64).

To complete this discussion of Fanny's desire to remain within Mansfield Park, I will glance briefly at the theatricals. During this episode Edmund, while continuing to value Fanny as a reflection of his standards, turns increasingly toward Mary Crawford, the woman who challenges those standards. Edmund's vacillation between the narcissistic self-ratification Fanny provides and the sexual attraction of Mary's otherness causes corresponding shifts in place for Fanny. This place-shifting shows her maneuvering for position within the family hierarchy, in order to maintain her relationship with Edmund and her place at Mansfield.

Edmund seeks Fanny's approval in order to justify his volte-face in deciding to act; he does so by urging Fanny to put herself in his place. “Do not you see it in the same light?” as he, Edmund urges; “I see your judgment is not with me. Think it a little over” (p. 154). He then asks her to sympathize with Mary's reluctance to act with a stranger: “Put yourself in Miss Crawford's place,” he suggests.

Edmund's twofold appeal creates a conflict in Fanny between the conscientious sense of propriety he has instilled in her and her sense of obligation as a dependent. Edmund, having “formed her mind,” has heretofore been Fanny's conscience; he now wants her to be his, the placeholder of the self he still values yet no longer wants to be. “If you are against me,” he tells her, “I ought to distrust myself—and yet—” (p. 155). Fanny remains Edmund's reflection, but this Edmund-self, this conscience, she cannot use against him. He successfully forces her to skew to his purpose the conscience he has instilled in her, because Fanny cannot use this conscience to oppose him without fearing that she is ungratefully forgetting all his various claims on her. Her tendency to defer to Edmund and her feelings of obligation to him bring her to approve his acting.

Fanny's incestuous relationship with Edmund—the ingrown nature of her love, her attempt to become Edmund so as to win him by narcissistic ratification—is at its most knotted as she rehearses with Mary a scene from Lovers' Vows. In yet another change of place, Fanny stands in for Edmund during the scene in which Amelia (Mary) declares her love to Anhalt (Edmund-Fanny). We have seen Edmund urge Fanny to put herself in Mary's place; now Mary persuades her to take Edmund's place, to (again) become Edmund. Allowed to relinquish his place when Edmund appears, Fanny must then not only watch but prompt his love-rehearsal with Mary. As Madeline Hummel remarks, “Something dark and sexually tainted pervades these scenes where Fanny must watch what is most offensive to her own sexuality”;¹² this taint, I believe, arises from Fanny's almost masochistic willingness to reflect Edmund, to turn herself into him.

Fanny's final shift of place during the theatricals occurs when she joins the acting group. In order to please Edmund, who repeatedly urges her to join the actors and adds “a look of even fond dependence on her good nature” (p. 172), Fanny overcomes her conscientious scruples and capitulates. In so doing she becomes Mary-like; that is, her love for and sense of obligation to her cousin prompt her to adopt Mary's “obliging manners,” which she knows Edmund admires (p. 112). She is saved from completing this last place-shift by Sir Thomas's return from Antigua, the dramatically apt conclusion to the theatricals.

Had Fanny completed her submission to Edmund's “dependence on her good nature,” she would have become Mary, who “readily … falls in with the inclination of others” (p. 112). To win Edmund, however, Fanny must remain Edmund-Fanny; she must preserve for him “that moral elevation which he had maintained” before consenting to act (p. 158). She can save Edmund from Mary and for herself only by turning inward, continuing her narcissistic ratification of the standards Edmund has temporarily abandoned in his pursuit of exogamous sexuality.

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Fanny's aim of saving Edmund for herself is complicated by the difficulty of saving herself for Edmund. Henry Crawford's proposal brings her into conflict with Sir Thomas when she must uphold her desire for exclusivity against his code prescribing exogamy. As he and Edmund abet Henry's efforts to force her into exogamous marriage, Fanny must insist on her place as dutiful niece and submissive sister so as to obtain her final position as daughter-sister-wife. With the marriage which ensures this place, the remaining inhabitants of Mansfield are returned to their rightful places: this incestuous marriage confirms and solidifies the patriarchal hierarchy at Mansfield.

Before turning to the confusion of roles when Sir Thomas and Edmund take Henry's place as Fanny's wooer, I wish to examine Henry's attempt to take the place of her brother when William visits Mansfield. This place, as we have seen, is already half-occupied by Edmund; Henry's effort to displace Fanny's brother and her surrogate brother is an early indication that the nineteenth-century idealization of sister-brother love cannot fully protect the family from the disruptive force of exogamous sexuality. We have seen that Edmund's narcissistic affection for Fanny is not proof against his sexual attraction to Mary; more striking is the fact that Fanny's sororal love for William not only does not protect her from Henry's attentions but actually increases her attractions for him. Fanny's love for her brother exposes her to Henry's courtship and hence threatens the fulfillment of her desire for a fraternal-conjugal tie with Edmund.

A connoisseur of sexual gratification, Henry Crawford is titillated into desire for Fanny by her love for her brother. For Henry, Fanny's attractions “increased two-fold” with William's arrival, for she welcomes her brother with a joy that shows Henry “the capabilities of her heart” (p. 235).¹³ Hence, when he fails to give Fanny the news of her brother's arrival, he regrets that “All those fine first feelings, of which he had hoped to be the excitor, were already given” (p. 232). Fanny's sisterly response to William's sea-stories—“the glow of [her] cheek, the brightness of her eye, the deep interest, the absorbed attention”—arouses Henry: “It would be something to be loved by such a girl, to excite the first ardours of her young, unsophisticated mind!” (p. 235). Seeing the “picture” of Fanny's affection for William as she listens to her brother, Henry is excited by the prospect of transferring this affection to himself. He “wished he had been a William Price” (p. 236), for, were he in a brother's place, his exploits would excite Fanny's sororal-conjugal “ardours.” In its early stages, then, Henry's courtship reveals Fanny's sisterly love for William to be not a protection from but a lure to sexual love from a stranger.

As the courtship continues, it brings into relief an additional difficulty in sister-brother love, the potential conflict between Fanny's love for Edmund as a brother and her developing sexual love for him as a prospective husband. Henry's courtship, the overtly sexual wooing by a stranger, makes explicit the implicit difficulty of Fanny's loves for Edmund: like the intrusion of sexuality from outside, the new element of sexuality within Mansfield threatens family hierarchy. Sir Thomas as uncle and Edmund as brother-mentor are Fanny's authority figures; when they become, with Henry, her wooers, their positions of hierarchical authority become tainted with associations of incestuous sexuality. By examining the merging of Henry, Sir Thomas, and Edmund as they court Fanny, we can see that Henry's disruptive sexuality and his catalyzing of role-changes at Mansfield reveal the constrictions of the hierarchical family.

Henry's picture of Fanny and his plan to win her by conferring obligations on her link him in courtship with Sir Thomas. Henry's “picture” of Fanny's sororal attractions we have seen; he finds another in her “manners,” which are “the mirror of her own modest and elegant mind” (p. 294). In this Fanny-mirror Henry expects to see himself, the reflection of his own consequence. When they are married, he boasts,

it will be the completion of my happiness to know that I am … the person to give the consequence so justly her due … What can Sir Thomas and Edmund together do, what do they do for her happiness, comfort, honour, and dignity in the world to what I shall do?

(p. 297)

To force Fanny to accept this consequence, Henry confers obligations on her through her brother. Lending William his horse, “conferring a kindness where he wished to oblige” (p. 237), produces in Fanny “that obligation … which he had fully intended it should produce.” Henry secures William's promotion so that Fanny's gratitude—her feeling “more obliged to you than words can express” (p. 302)—will “oblig[e] her to love him” (p. 327).

Like Henry, Sir Thomas has a picture of Fanny as docile and submissive, the mirror which reflects his condescending kindness in conferring obligations on her. “[E]ducation and manners”—the manners that have attracted Henry—“she owed to him,” Sir Thomas feels (p. 276); hence her refusing Henry “disappoint[s] every expectation I had formed” of her submission (p. 318). Already “almost ashamed of herself, after such a picture as her uncle had drawn, for not liking Mr. Crawford” (p. 316), Fanny now feels “[h]er heart … almost broke by such a picture of what she appeared” to her uncle (p. 319). More overtly than Henry, Sir Thomas attempts to win Fanny over by stressing her obligations. Reminding her of the “consideration and deference” she owes him (p. 318), he accuses her of being “wilful” and concludes with a charge of “ingratitude” (p. 319). From this dual emphasis on the picture Fanny is expected to present, and on what she owes her uncle, the reader sees Sir Thomas's tactics of oppression. But Fanny, accustomed to a sense of obligation, is unable or unwilling to see that, as Henry is “forcing” (p. 326) and “obliging her to love him” (p. 327), so too is her uncle.

“Entirely on his father's side of the question” (p. 335), Edmund becomes linked with Sir Thomas and Henry in their pursuit of Fanny. Had Henry consulted him about courting Fanny, Edmund tells her, “My theoretical and his practical knowledge together, could not have failed. He should have worked on my plans” (p. 348). A more telling identification between these two occurs when Edmund connives in Henry's badgering of Fanny. After reading from Henry VIII,¹⁴ Henry commences “a very thorough attack” on Fanny; Edmund beats a strategic retreat, “very sincerely wishing that dear little Fanny might be persuaded” (p. 342). We remember Edmund's earlier use of the phrase “dear little Fanny,” when he misunderstood her childhood sorrow at being separated from William. This second instance of obtuseness and condescension now connects Edmund, who continues to regard Fanny as a child, with Henry, who sees her recalcitrance as arising from her “youth of mind” (p. 326).

The condescension of this attitude further links the two men to each other and to Sir Thomas in a tendency to picture Fanny as a paragon of submission. Henry values Fanny's “sweetness and patience” (p. 296) in serving her aunt Bertram; like Sir Thomas and Edmund when they second his proposal, he expects docile submission from her.¹⁵ His earlier insistence that he appreciates Fanny more than do “Sir Thomas and Edmund together” can now be seen as an ironic identification of the three men. Sir Thomas has improved Fanny with “education and manners”; as Robert Colby notes, Fanny's mind is to Edmund what estates are to Henry—“soil for improvement”;¹⁶ and all three suitors expect the same return on their investment: Fanny's subservience. If Fanny is a proto-angel in the house, “in many ways perfect femininity in a patriarchal society,” as Jane McDonnell maintains,¹⁷ it is the tutelage of Sir Thomas and Edmund that has made her the docile angel Henry approves.

While both Henry and Edmund condescend to Fanny as a submissive angel, both also exalt her as a moral arbiter, and both use this elevation as a weapon of courtship. As a maneuver in his “very thorough attack” of wooing, Henry tells Fanny that “I fancied you might be going to tell me I ought to be more attentive” at church, adding coquettishly, “Are you not going to tell me so?” (p. 340). When she refuses this role as his moral angel, Henry steps up the attack. While he admits that he lacks “equality of merit” with her (p. 344), he insists that his recognition of “some touches of the angel in you” means that he has “the best right to a return.” Fanny's difficulties of articulation in repulsing Henry (“No, indeed, you know your duty too well for me to—even supposing—” [p. 340]; “You quite astonish me—I wonder how you can” [p. 342]) suggest that she is tempted by his praises, but they also show that she is suffering “a grievous imprisonment of body and mind” (p. 344) under his insistent elevation.

Fanny is equally a prisoner of the no less exalted picture of her as a moral arbiter which Edmund, like Henry, uses as a weapon of courtship. “You have proved yourself upright and disinterested” by modestly refusing Henry, Edmund assures Fanny; “prove yourself grateful and tender-hearted [by accepting him]; and then you will be the perfect model of a woman, which I have always believed you born for” (p. 347). The obtuseness and condescension we have seen in Edmund's view of Fanny are again apparent during the conversation that follows. Fanny's insistence that Henry will “never, never, never” win her brings only the reply, “This is not like yourself, your rational self.” Edmund then argues that

“you will make him every thing.”

“I would not engage in such a charge,” cried Fanny in a shrinking accent—“in such an office of high responsibility.”

“As usual, believing yourself unequal to anything!—Fancying every thing too much for you!”

(p. 351)

Edmund's belief in Fanny's moral superiority (“you will make him every thing”) links him with both Henry and Sir Thomas. Like Henry, he exalts Fanny's moral virtues, but he patronizingly dismisses her “shrinking” from Henry's, and his, exaltation of her. She is “her rational self” only when she agrees with him; when she ventures to disagree, he “scarcely hear[s] her to the end” (p. 349). Even her powerful rebuttal, too long for inclusion here, is unavailing; Edmund concludes the conversation with patriarchal condescension, leaving Fanny still subject to his “kind authority of a privileged guardian” (p. 355). Edmund has increased the family constrictions of Fanny's position by becoming not only brother-mentor but a proto-Sir Thomas.

The one difference between Henry and Edmund is that between exogamous and domestic sexuality. Henry values Fanny's attractions only as they ratify his choice of her, so that his courtship, like Edmund's affection, is condescending and narcissistic. But Henry is an outsider, a sexual predator, whereas Edmund is an inhabitant of Mansfield, a cousin, brother, and guardian. It is this difference that enables Fanny to accept Edmund's constricting picture of her. This image has been familiar to her from childhood, where Henry's image of her, coupled as it is with his sexual desire, is unfamiliar and frightening. After Henry proves his sexual rapacity by eloping with Maria, Fanny's fears of exogamous sexuality seem justified; when Edmund is frightened into her arms by Mary's “perversion of mind” in pooh-poohing the elopement (p. 456), exogamy is fully routed. Fanny is to Edmund “my only sister … now” (p. 444) and, some thirty pages later, his wife.

Two striking differences between Fanny's “unchecked, equal, fearless intercourse” (p. 234) with her brother William and her relationship with Edmund complete the picture of incestuous narcissism. Edmund sees himself not as Fanny's equal but as an older brother who is also, like Sir Thomas and Henry, a patron: one who confers obligations to enforce dependence. Although he is a brother in Fanny's thoughts, Edmund is revealed by his attitudes never to have been ideally fraternal in his behavior.

Hence the second difference between Fanny's two sororal relationships: Fanny is not “fearless” with Edmund but cunning and secretive. Their discussion of Mary that completes Edmund's return to Fanny displays this cunning. Mary's hopes that Edmund might become Sir Edmund had been raised by the earlier illness of Tom (Edmund's elder brother). Edmund does not know this; Fanny does, but she cannot openly speak her knowledge to Edmund lest she appear to criticize his judgment in having loved Mary. Instead she appeals covertly to his sense of propriety. Edmund has already criticized the smile he received from Mary at their final meeting, “a saucy playful smile, seeming to invite, in order to subdue me” (p. 459). Fanny now “hint[s]” that Mary's smile might have been directed at the proleptic Sir Edmund, that is, motivated by what he sees as Mary's excessive regard for money and rank. In this way Fanny deflects Edmund's culpable misunderstanding of Mary onto Mary's character: she tells him something about Mary that he could not otherwise have known and hence could not have judged. Edmund's response is everything she could have hoped: “Fanny's friendship was all that he had to cling to” (p. 460).

In this conversation Fanny secretly transforms her childhood relationship with Edmund while seeming to retain it, and thereby enables her marriage. During her childhood Edmund had “formed her mind and gained her affections”; Now Fanny, unbeknownst to him, has formed his mind and gained his affections. Although she is secretly Edmund's manipulator, Fanny appears to him still to be his protégée; he continues to believe that “Fanny thought exactly the same” as he (p. 460), that is, at his direction. Wounded by Mary's overt and recognizable attempts to “subdue” him, Edmund is happy to submit to Fanny's more subtle manipulations. Both become narcissistically and incestuously embedded at Mansfield, remaining within the family and accepting its closure. “Edmund and his cousin,” in Darrel Mansell's words, “collapse into each other's arms, and into each other,”¹⁸ and finally into Sir Thomas as they reflect his patriarchal values. With their incestuous marriage, Fanny and Edmund accept the hierarchical family structure shown throughout the novel to be deeply flawed.

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The ending of Mansfield Park demonstrates what Lionel Trilling calls an ironist's “malice,” an “interference with our moral and intellectual comfort.”¹⁹ In the final chapter Mansfield is sealed off and Sir Thomas, Edmund, and Fanny return to their proper places; this closure and constriction are completed by Fanny's and Edmund's inward-turning marriage. Like all of Austen's “so-called perfect matches,” as Robert Draffan notes, this marriage is “so hard-won and surrounded by such folly” that to call it a happy ending “makes nonsense of what has preceded.”²⁰ By pointing up her artifice in arranging this marriage, Austen interferes with our comfortable expectations for a happy ending of romantic rather than fraternal-sororal love.

In closing Mansfield Park against Maria and Mrs. Norris, Sir Thomas returns to his proper place of authority over its remaining inhabitants. Having expelled undutiful Maria, he discovers in dutiful Fanny “the daughter that he wanted,” for she, unlike Maria, is a good return on his investment, “a rich repayment” of his “liberality” and “charitable kindness” (p. 472).²¹ As the “mutual attachment” between Sir Thomas and Fanny becomes “very strong,” his courtship of her is complete. When Edmund receives the Mansfield living as Sir Thomas's gift, he too is securely bound within his father's orbit. In these ways Sir Thomas ensures the “domestic felicity” of a daughter and son who accept his dominion.

With the departure of Maria and the routing of Mary, Fanny parlays her consequence as true daughter and only sister into a secure place as Edmund's wife. “[W]hat could be more natural,” Austen asks ironically, than that Edmund should learn to transform his fraternal feeling for Fanny, “a regard founded on the most endearing claims of innocence and helplessness,” into a conjugal tie.

[H]er mind in so great a degree formed by his care, and her comfort depending on his kindness, an object to him of such close and peculiar interest, dearer by all his own importance with her than any one else at Mansfield, what was there now to add, but that he should learn to prefer [Fanny's] soft light eyes to [Mary's] sparkling dark ones.

(p. 470)

As we have seen, Fanny has maneuvered Edmund into viewing her mind as still “formed by his care”; an interestingly dependent and endearingly helpless “object” as when she was a child, she remains “important” to Edmund as a reflection of his own importance. Given the success of her manipulations, it is not surprising that Fanny finds the parsonage she shares with her husband “as thoroughly perfect in her eyes, as every thing else, within the view and patronage of Mansfield Park, had long been” (p. 473). In ironies of “in her eyes” and “view and patronage” are clear indications of Austen's “malice,” her calling attention to the self-satisfied smugness of the wife as well as the husband.

These interferences with the “moral and intellectual comfort” of a happy ending are completed when Austen points up her artifice in obtaining this ending.

I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own … I only intreat every body to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny, as Fanny herself could desire.

(p. 470)

Although this ending might almost have been written by Fanny (“as Fanny herself could desire”), the reader is invited to help Austen write the ending, to fix the date of the “natural” transference of Edmund's affections. By insisting on her engineering of this Fanny-specified ending, by inviting the reader to participate in this engineering, and by again using the word “natural” ironically, Austen reveals the artificiality not only of the marriage but of the narrative convention that mandates it: the happy ending. By reminding us that she has maneuvered the happy ending of sister and brother turned into wife and husband, she overturns our expectations that romantic love between Edmund and Fanny will supersede their childhood fraternal tie. When Edmund turns away from the “subdu[ing]” Mary, that is, he turns away from exogamous romance and back to incestuous narcissism, to Fanny's ratification of his importance. This constricting marriage, I believe, shows Austen examining narrative as well as familial structures. Imposing the narrative convention of the happy ending on her novel yet insisting on its artificiality, Austen is suggesting a parallel between constricting narrative structures and constricting family hierarchies.

Trapped within a narcissistic sibling relationship during their early years together, Fanny and Edmund demonstrate in their marriage the constrictions of sister-brother love. Their retreat from otherness, from exogamous sexuality that would place them outside Mansfield; Edmund's patriarchal condescension to Fanny as a younger and dependent sister; the self-distortion Fanny undergoes to win his fraternal-conjugal love—all manifest these constrictions. The “happy” ending of mutual self-reflection within a sealed-off Mansfield Park displays an early version of the nineteenth-century family that “will not give the individual up,” the shelter that becomes a prison. Sister-brother love, increasing a disinclination to leave the family and a fear of exogamous sexuality, often leads in the nineteenth-century novel to death: Catherine Earnshaw, Maggie Tulliver, and Pierre Glendinning, to name a few, can find no other release from incestuous love. Fanny and Edmund, of course, do not desire release: when their relationship comes full circle with the expulsion of the Crawfords and their own installation within the “view and patronage” of Mansfield Park, they feel themselves to have achieved the height of fraternal-conjugal felicity. While one is sympathetic to the fears of Crawfordian sexual rapacity that prompt Fanny's and Edmund's retreat within Mansfield to in-turning marriage, the overtones of incestuous constriction remain resonant. Both fraternal and conjugal ties are revealed in Mansfield Park to be the bonds of the inescapable family.

Notes

1. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, vol. 3 of The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), p. 472. Further references to this work appear in the text.

2. John Ruskin, “Of Queens' Gardens,” in Sesame and Lilies and The King of the Golden River, ed. Herbert Bates (New York: Macmillan, 1922). p. 67.

3. James Anthony Froude, The Nemesis of Faith; cited by Walter F. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind: 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 345-46.

4. William Alcott, The Physiology of Marriage; cited by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Sex as Symbol in Victorian Purity: An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Jacksonian America,” in Turning Points: Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family, ed. John Demos and Sarane Spence Boocock (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 242.

5. Micheal Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), p. 182.

6. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), p. 50.

7. This point is suggested by Donald Reiman, Letter, Times Literary Supplement, 1 Nov. 1974, p. 1231.

8. David Smith, “Incest Patterns in Two Victorian Novels,” Literature and Psychology, 15 (1965), 149.

9. Philip E. Slater, “On Social Regression,” American Sociological Review, 28 (1963), 362.

10. Raymond Firth, We, the Tikopia: A Sociological Study of Kinship in Primitive Polynesia (New York: American, 1936), p. 340. See also Russell Middleton, “A Deviant Case: Brother-Sister and Father-Daughter Marriage in Ancient Egypt,” American Sociological Review, 27 (1962), 603-11.

11. Bernard J. Paris, Character and Conflict in Jane Austen's Novels (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1978), p. 48.

12. Madeline Hummel, “Emblematic Charades and the Observant Woman in Mansfield Park,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 15 (1973), 260-61.

13. In Hard Times, James Harthouse is similarly awakened to a sister's susceptibilities: Louisa Gradgrind's joyous welcome to her brother reveals to Harthouse “the solitude of her heart, and her need of some one on whom to bestow it” (Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ed. George Ford and Sylvère Monod [New York: Norton, 1966], p. 100). A more explicit examination of the perversion of sister-brother love than Mansfield Park, Hard Times shows the nineteenth century's increasing concern with the dilemma that Freud articulates at the end of the century, that of family members so closely attached to each other as to be cut off from “the wider circle of life.”

14. Margaret Kirkham discusses the appropriateness of Henry VIII for Henry's courtship in her illuminating Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (Sussex: Harvester, 1983), pp. 115-16.

15. On this aspect of Henry's desire for Fanny, see Kirkham, p. 102.

16. Robert Colby, Fiction with a Purpose: Major and Minor Nineteenth-Century Novels (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1967), p. 79. See also Joseph Wiesenfarth's argument that Fanny is Galatea to Edmund's Pygmalion (“Austen and Apollo,” in Jane Austen Today, ed. Joel Weinsheimer [Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1975], pp. 50-54).

17. Jane McDonnell, “‘A Little Spirit of Independence’: Sexual Politics and the Bildungsroman in Mansfield Park,” Novel, 17 (1984), 201.

18. Darrel Mansell, The Novels of Jane Austen: An Interpretation (Bristol: Macmillan, 1973), p. 141.

19. Lionel Trilling, “Mansfield Park,” in The Opposing Self (New York: Viking, 1955), pp. 206-30; rpt. in Discussions of Jane Austen, ed. William Heath (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1961), p. 88.

20. Robert A. Draffan, “Mansfield Park: Jane Austen's Bleak House,” Essays in Criticism, 19 (1969), 382.

21. One is reminded of the narrator's self-serving musings on charity in Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener.”