Feminist Irony and the Priceless Heroine of Mansfield Park
[In the following essay, Kirkham outlines the irony of Fanny Price's characterization in Mansfield Park as it subtly mocks the sentimental conduct-book ideal of womanhood.]
“‘I do not quite know what to make of Miss Fanny. I do not understand her.’” So says Henry Crawford (Mansfield Park, p. 230).1 What to make of Miss Fanny is the central moral puzzle Jane Austen presents to her anti-hero. He fails to discover the correct solution. It is also the central puzzle presented to the reader, testing the soundness of his moral attitudes and the quickness of his wits. It may be that the author misjudged what could be expected of her readers, for they have not, by and large, solved the riddle of Miss Price satisfactorily. Even Henry Austen took a bit of time over it (Letters, nos. 92-94). He had the advantage of familiarity with contemporary works to which allusion is made, as well as a knowledge of the author's point of view, and yet he found this puzzle a difficult one. No wonder, then, that later readers, lacking his privileged knowledge, have sometimes blundered.
In this essay, I shall try to show that Jane Austen teases us about Miss Fanny. Irony, far from being suspended in Mansfield Park, is turned upon the reader. We are given a heroine who, in some respects, looks like an exemplary conduct-book girl, but this is deceptive. Fanny is not a true conduct-book heroine and, insofar as she resembles this ideal—in her timidity, self-abasement, and excessive sensibility, for example—her author mocks her—and us, if we mistake these qualities for virtue. Jane Austen hated “unmixed” characters in general, and “unmixed” heroines in particular, a point on which she disagreed with the Dr. Johnson of Rambler 4. Writing to her niece Fanny Knight (the one with a weakness for Evangelical gentlemen), she discusses the opinions of an aptly named Mr. Wildman, who had not found her novels to his taste:
Do not oblige him to read any more.—Have mercy on him. … He and I should not in the least agree of course in our ideas about Heroines; pictures of perfection as you know make me sick and wicked—but there is some very good sense in what he says, and I particularly respect him for wishing to think well of all young Ladies; it shows an amiable and delicate Mind—And he deserves better than to be obliged to read any more of my Works.2
If Jane Austen created a conduct-book heroine, it cannot have been without an ironic intention of some kind. A clue to what it was occurs in an unsigned article on the “Female Novelists” published in New Monthly Review in 1852: “Then again, in Mansfield Park, what a bewitching ‘little body’ is Fanny Price …”3 This Victorian writer sees in Fanny, not a paragon of virtue, but a little enchantress, and it is important to notice that, when Crawford falls in love, he too sees her in this way. Fanny's apparent saintliness is closely connected with her sexual desirableness, as Crawford shows in Chapter XII of the second volume, where he tells his sister that he is in love. His appreciation of “Fanny's graces of manner and goodness of heart,” as well as his recognition of her “being well-principled and religious,” is mingled with his dwelling on her “charms” (p. 294), “her beauty of face and figure,” her beautifully heightened color, as she attends to the service of that stupid woman, her Aunt Bertram, and the neat arrangement of her hair, with “one little curl falling forward … which she now and then shook back” (pp. 296-97).
Crawford is incapable of understanding that the “religious principles” he admires in Fanny are formed, as Providence intended rational beings to form moral principles, out of rational reflection upon experience. His view of her is deeply sentimental, for he sees her as something like the ideal woman of Rousseau's Émile, innocent, virtuous, tractable, and crying out for protective love, which her prettiness and gentleness excite in him. By Volume Three, he discovers that she has “some touches of the angel” in her (p. 344). Henry Austen must have seen at that point, if he had not seen it before, that his sister would not allow her heroine to marry Crawford, for Austen's objection to the comparison of young women to angels is so consistently maintained that this blunder of Crawford's could not pass unnoticed. Elizabeth Bennet once says, jokingly and critically, that her sister Jane has angelic characteristics (Pride and Prejudice, p. 134); otherwise, from the Juvenilia to the mature works, only fools or villains make this analogy. It is pointedly avoided by all the Austen heroes, but used to define the defects of the more complex anti-heroes, notably Willoughby and Crawford, and to define Emma's disillusion with Frank Churchill (Emma, p. 479).
The point is of great importance to a right understanding of Fanny Price and Mansfield Park, because it directs us to the criticism of the conduct-book ethos which is the essential irony of Miss Price's characterization. It may seem strange to us that physical weakness, or lassitude, should be thought to enhance a girl's sexual attractiveness, nor do we think religiosity alluring, but it was not always so. The conduct-book ideal of young womanhood was deeply sentimental, and the genre included works in which salaciousness was mixed with moral advice.
Two examples, quoted and proscribed by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, are of especial interest. Wollstonecraft berates James Hervey, whose Meditations and Contemplations, written between 1745 and 1746, were “still read” in 1792. Hervey told his readers (mostly female) that:
Never, perhaps, does a fine woman strike more deeply, than when, composed into pious recollection, and possessed with the noblest considerations, she assumes, without knowing it, superior dignity and new graces; so that the beauties of holiness seem to radiate about her, and the bystanders are almost induced to fancy her already worshipping among the kindred angels.
Mary Wollstonecraft could not stand that sort of thing. “Should,” she asks, “a grave preacher interlard his discourses with such folleries? … Why are girls to be told that they resemble angels: but to sink them below women.” Like Jane Austen, she has no patience either with Dr. Fordyce, whose Sermons to Young Women (1766) contain a remarkable passage in which the awfulness of abusing young angels is discussed with salacious relish:
Behold these smiling innocents, whom I have graced with my fairest gifts, and committed to your protection; behold them with love and respect; treat them with tenderness and honour. They are timid and want to be defended. They are frail; oh do not take advantage of their weakness! Let their fears and blushes endear them. Let their confidence in you never be abused. But is it possible, that any of you can be such barbarians, so supremely wicked, as to abuse it? Can you find in your hearts to despoil the gentle, trusting creatures of their treasure, or do anything to strip them of their native robe of virtue? Curst be the impious hand that would dare to violate the unblemished form of chastity! Thou wretch! thou ruffian! forbear; nor venture to provoke Heaven's fiercest vengeance.
Mary Wollstonecraft says, not unreasonably:
I know not any comment that can be made seriously on this curious passage, and I could produce many similar ones; and some, so very sentimental, that I have heard rational men use the word indecent when they mentioned them with disgust.4
It will be remembered that it was Fordyce's Sermons that Mr. Collins chose, after having turned down a novel, to read aloud to the ladies at Longbourn. Perhaps it was at just such a passage that Lydia Bennet, no angel, but “a stout well-grown girl of fifteen,” interrupted his “monotonous solemnity” to tell her mother an interesting bit of gossip about the regiment quartered nearby. At all events, Mr. Collins' approbation of Fordyce is a clear indication that Jane Austen disapproved of him.
There is good reason to think, in the light of her novels and letters, that this was a disapproval founded in sympathy with rational, post-Enlightenment feminism. This is not to suggest that Austen was in agreement with Wollstonecraft on anything more than these fundamental ideas: (a) that women, being possessed of the same “powers of mind” as men, have the same moral status and the same moral accountability; (b) that girls should be educated in a manner appropriate to this view of the female sex; (c) that a “respectable” marriage is an “equal” marriage, in which man and woman are “partners,” and must therefore rest on “friendship and esteem,” and (d) that literary works in which any other view is endorsed are objectionable. Modern feminists may find these very tame, but around 1800 they were the essential convictions of rational feminism. We need not be put off because Austen is “a moralist” after the Johnsonian fashion; so, in many respects, is Wollstonecraft, especially in the Vindication, itself a sort of conduct book. The moral argument upon which Wollstonecraft bases her feminist case derives very largely from Bishop Butler's Analogy of Religion (1796) and from Richard Price's Review of the Central Question in Morals (1758). Butler was a bishop of the established church, whose views accord to a large extent with Johnson's. Price was a Dissenter and, through his influence upon progressive Dissent, associated not only with Wollstonecraft herself but with many of the radicals of his time. His ambience was thus quite different from Butler's, but the essential character of his view of morals was not, as he himself acknowledges.
So far as late-eighteenth-century feminism went, Butler and Price could both be seen as laying down principles upon which a feminist moralist could found her argument. This is crucial to a right understanding of the relationship between the first well-known English feminist theorist, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the first major woman novelist in English. Thinking of them, as we do, as totally different in their religious and political affiliations, lifestyle, and temperament, we may easily miss what connects them as feminist moralists, whose roots lie in a common tradition of ethical discussion. There is no need to assume that Austen was an undercover Jacobin because she is so close to Wollstonecraft as a feminist moralist.
Austen's implicit demand that men and women be judged, and judge themselves, by the same, somewhat strict, standard in sexual matters, should not be seen as a sign of her commitment to anti-Jacobin fervor. It is no more than the mark of her convinced feminism. Among the radicals, as both Gary Kelly5 and Marilyn Butler show, feminist feeling went hand in hand with emphasis upon the need for reason and restraint in sexual matters. Butler is impatient with them about it: “In sexual matters, the Jacobins thought and behaved (whatever their opponents claimed) like forerunners of the Evangelicals.” Believing in the power of reason to liberate mankind, they renounced the example of “Rousseau, Goethe and Kotzebue … when they refused to exploit sexual passion as a powerful natural ally against a moribund society and its repressive conventions.” Butler contrasts the English Jacobins unfavorably in this respect with their Continental counterparts, including Madame de Staël.6
A feminist point of view is not only compatible with the argumentative style of an eighteenth-century moralist, but may be positively connected with it. Were Mansfield Park primarily about political and social questions other than feminist ones, the conservative character of the moral argument which it embodies would justify us in supposing it to be fundamentally conservative in outlook, but, if the feminist issues are the central ones, it may be that the orthodox, rather old-fashioned character of the argument indicates feminist radicalism rather than orthodoxy. An example may be useful here. In attacking the education commonly provided for middle-class girls, Mary Wollstonecraft says:
Though moralists have agreed that the tenor of life seems to prove that man is prepared by various circumstances for a future state, they consistently concur in advising woman to provide only for the present.7
She refers to the belief, best exemplified in Bishop Butler's Analogy of Religon, and popularized in many sermons and moralistic works, that the world is so ordered as to teach us moral principle through secular experience. Even without a belief in God, the order of nature, including human nature, of which rational powers are a part, insures that we are rewarded when we act well and punished when we act badly. It was an orthodox belief of established moralists that this was so, but, in applying it to women, Mary Wollstonecraft is able to use it to attack existing practices in education and social custom, which rule out one half of mankind from the benefits of exercise in the moral gymnasium designed to teach moral principles.
In the Austen novels the heroines learn about morals through the application of rational reflection to experience. This is how they are shown to acquire principle. They never learn it from clerical advisers. The process by which they acquire understanding of duty, and of right courses of action, is entirely secular, as Ryle noted.8 The way in which they are shown as becoming morally accountable may look a little old-fashioned, if we forget that they are young women, not young men. If we remember it, and see it in relation to contemporary feminist discussion, we may see that Jane Austen is sometimes a radical wolf when she pointedly adopts orthodox moralists' sheep's clothing.
It is time to return to Miss Fanny, and to show further that her characterization is to be illuminated by Mary Wollstonecraft. The implication of this must be that either Austen had read Wollstonecraft or that she was familiar with her works through the filtering through of their arguments and examples to other, less controversial writers. I do not mean to argue the case for direct influence here. During the five years she spent in Bath, with its well-stocked bookshops and circulating libraries, by no means confined to fiction,9 Austen had access to the works of Mary Wollstonecraft. In the absence of direct biographical information, the case must stand upon the probability implied by closeness of point of view and, in some instances, of allusion and vocabulary.
Vindication is not primarily about the political and constitutional rights of women, but about the ideas referred to above as constituting the essence of post-Enlightenment rational feminism. It is largely an attack upon Rousseau, especially the Rousseau of Émile, and upon those sentimental moralists and divines who had followed him in denying women the moral status of rational, adult, moral agents. With them are coupled imaginative writers of both sexes, including Madame de Staël, who, by emphasizing the sensibility of women at the expense of their powers of reason, have “Rendered them Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt” (p. 173). Wollstonecraft's animus against Rousseau arises from his having made Sophie—his ideal mate for Émile, the ideal man—a different kind of moral creature. Whereas Émile is to enjoy bodily and mental exercise, Sophie is to be confined to bodily weakness and to obedience. This, Rousseau thought, was in accordance with the nature of the two sexes and with their purposes in life. It was for the man to enjoy the advantages of a free, experiential life; it was for the woman to please him, to arouse his sexual passion, to enjoy his protection, and to obey him. All this was anathema to Wollstonecraft and, to Austen, a fit subject of ridicule.
Take first the question of health and strength, which is of particular importance to the characterization of Miss Fanny. Wollstonecraft objects to Rousseau's belief that genuine weakness and the affected exaggeration of weakness are natural to women and a means by which they gain an ambiguous power over men. She quotes with disgust a passage from Émile in which it is asserted of women:
So far from being ashamed of their weakness, they glory in it; their tender muscles make no resistance; they affect to be incapable of lifting the smallest burdens, and would blush to be thought robust and strong.
(p. 174)
Wollstonecraft declares that
… the first care of mothers and fathers who really attend to the education of females should be, if not to strengthen the body, at least not to destroy the constitution by mistaken notions of female excellence; nor should girls ever be allowed to imbibe the pernicious notion that a defect can, by any chemical process of reasoning, become an excellence.
(p. 126)
She then attacks such conduct-book authors as have taken their cue from Rousseau and encouraged girls to cultivate either real or affected weakness and low spirits. Among these she reluctantly places Dr. John Gregory, whose A Father's Letters to His Daughters (1774)
actually recommends dissimulation and advises an innocent girl to give the lie to her feelings, and not dance with spirit, when gaiety of heart would make her feel eloquent without making her gestures immodest. In the name of truth and common sense, why should not one woman acknowledge that she has a better constitution than another?
(pp. 111-12)
Austen did not admire physical weakness or ill-health or ignorance in young women, but a lot of people, including those who ought to have known better, did. The relevance of this to Miss Price is obvious. Austen created in her a heroine whom the unwary might take for something like the Rousseauist ideal of the perfect woman, but she expects her more discerning readers to see through it, and gives them a good many indications that this is not a proper reading. The most important of these is, of course, the category mistake of the anti-hero, but there is a good deal else. The true hero is never shown as encouraging Fanny in her partly self-imposed fragility and timidity, although he is kind to her when he observes her genuine tendency to tire easily. He gets her a horse, encourages her to ride regularly, and tells her to speak up for herself, even to her uncle. But the major comic emphasis, through which Austen shows that she does not admire hypochondria in women, even beautiful ones, comes through the splendid portrait of pampered indolence in Lady Bertram.
Fanny is quite different from her aunt in that she has, both as a child and as a very vulnerable adolescent, experienced both neglect and hardship. Given Mrs. Price's predilection for sons and her slatternly housekeeping, there is little reason to think that the health (whether of body or mind) of her eldest daughter had ever received much attention. At Mansfield, the somnolence of Aunt Bertram, the sadism of Aunt Norris, and the false regard for wealth and status of Sir Thomas Bertram, his elder son, and his daughters, have all combined to ensure that Fanny's mental and physical health are put in jeopardy. She has not a strong constitution, but she was not as a child devoid of normal impulses to active life. She did not enjoy such freedom as Catherine Morland, rolling down green slopes with her brothers, and it is never positively established that she preferred cricket to dolls or nursing dormice, as Catherine did, but Fanny, in her early years at Portsmouth, was important as “play-fellow,” as well as “instructress and nurse” to her brothers and sisters. The single instance of remembered childhood activity which Austen mentions concerns dancing. William recalls how he and Fanny used to dance together as children. It is what prompts him to ask Sir Thomas if his sister is a good dancer, Sir Thomas being forced to reply that he does not know. William says, “I should like to be your partner once more. We used to jump about together many a time, did not we? when the hand organ was in the street?” (p. 250). Fanny's excessive fragility of body and lack of self-confidence are the result of inconsiderate, and sometimes humiliating, treatment by her illiberal, selfish aunts, but it has not quite stamped out of her an impulse to life which is to be seen in her continued love of dancing. At her first ball, “she was quite grieved to be losing even a quarter of an hour … sitting most unwillingly among the chaperons … while all the other young people were dancing” (pp. 116-17). Later, when a ball is given in her honor, the narrator tells us, “She had hardly ever been in a state so nearly approaching high spirits in her life. Her cousins' former gaiety on the day of a ball was no longer surprising to her; she felt it to be indeed very charming” (p. 273). And she actually practices her steps in the drawing room, when she is sure Aunt Norris won’t see. She gets tired later at this ball, partly because she is jealous of Miss Crawford, but it is three o’clock in the morning, and she is up earlier than anyone else, apart from William, next day, in order to see him off.
Fanny Price's feebleness is not a mark of Clarissa Harlowe-like saintliness, as Lionel Trilling thought, nor is it to be dismissed, as Marilyn Butler dismisses it, as “quite incidental.” It is essential to the play of anti-Rousseauist, feminist irony upon Miss Price and those who seek to interpret her. Once her cousins leave Mansfield, prolonged ill-treatment is seen to have curious effects. The affectation of fragility, which it took an expensive education to achieve, Fanny lacks, but a genuine fragility now makes her seem something like the Rousseauist ideal, and by this Crawford is, as he puts it, “fairly caught.” But, if Fanny's physical frailty amounts to more than it seems, the strength of her mind, despite the physical and emotional deprivation she has endured, is truly formidable. Housed within the “bewitching little body,” lurking behind the “soft light eyes,” is a clear, critical, rationally judging mind, quite unlike the tractable, childlike mind of the true conduct-book heroine. Wollstonecraft says, “The conduct of an accountable being must be regulated by the operation of its own reason; or on what foundation rests the throne of God?” (Vindication, p. 121). Just before Fanny offends her uncle by insisting upon her right to regulate her conduct, by the operation of her own judgment, in a matter of great moment, he is made to say, though without understanding what it implies, “You have an understanding, which will prevent you from receiving things only in part, and judging partially by the event.—You will take in the whole of the past, you will consider times, persons, and probabilities” (p. 313). He is talking about Aunt Norris's past behavior, but he describes exactly what Fanny does in forming her opinion of Crawford.
The moral and comic climax of Mansfield Park occurs at the start of Volume Three, in the East room, when Fanny confronts her august uncle and defies him. Sir Thomas, once he is able to make out that she intends to refuse Crawford, thunders away at her about ingratitude, selfishness, perversity, and sheer obtuseness as to her own interest. He is forced to wonder if she does not show “that independence of spirit, which prevails so much in modern days, even in young women, and which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offence” (p. 318). Austen expects us to laugh at him, but she does not spare her heroine either. Returning from her walk in the shrubbery, Fanny finds that a fire has already been lighted, on Sir Thomas's orders, in the bleak East room. She does not say, as a creature wholly regulated by reason might have done, “Well, wrongly though he has judged and acted, he has kind and benevolent aspects.” She says—and it is truer to life, as well as to the comic spirit—“in soliloquy,” ‘“I must be a brute indeed, if I can be really ungrateful … Heaven defend me from being ungrateful!’” (pp. 322-23).
Jane Austen laughs at Fanny when she herself acquiesces, as she often does, in the submissive role in which an unjust domestic “order” has cast her. She exposes, with a more bitter ridicule, the foolishness which has all but stamped out of Fanny her ability to laugh, dance, play, or to act—in any sense. But she does not despair. Reason, and the will of a less insane God than that invoked by such clerics as Fordyce and Mr. Collins or Dr. Grant, will prevail, where men have such sense as Edmund and women such sense as Fanny. “Good sense, like hers, will always act when really called upon” (p. 399), and so it does. Fanny becomes “the daughter that Sir Thomas Bertram wanted,” that is, lacked, and, together with Edmund, is shown as capable of establishing at the parsonage a more liberal and more securely based domestic order than that of the Great House.
Fanny does not, as some critics, more concerned with mythic elements of plot than sound moral argument, have thought, “inherit” Mansfield Park. She marries the younger son, not the heir (who is pointedly restored to health), and she goes to live at the parsonage, where an enlightened, rational, secular Christianity is likely to be the order of the day. It is, perhaps, unlikely that the next Lady Bertram will waste so many years in a state of semiconsciousness, devoid of mental or physical life, upon a sofa, with a lapdog and a tangled, useless, meaningless bit of needlework, as the former Miss Maria Ward has done. But it is at the parsonage, not the Great House, that there is to occur that “unspeakable gain in private happiness to the liberated half of the species; the difference to them between a life of subjection to the will of others, and a life of rational freedom,” of which J. S. Mill was later to write.10
In Mansfield Park, Austen shows some sympathy with points made in the Vindication and anticipates Mill On the Subjection of Women. It looks to me as though she may also have profited from a critical reading of Wollstonecraft's two novels. There is no direct evidence that she read them, but Godwin's publication of his Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798 caused a great deal of interest in its subject. The “Advertisement” to Mary (1788) tells us that its heroine is “neither a Clarissa, a Lady G. [randison] nor a Sophie.” In it, “the mind of a woman who has thinking powers” is to be displayed. Mary, its heroine, had “read Butler's Analogy, and some other authors: and these researches made her a Christian from conviction” (p. 23). Austen would not have countenanced the pretentious tone of this, but, in her own ironic way, she shows us that much the same could be said of Fanny. By the time Maria was written—it was still unfinished in 1797, when Wollstonecraft died—the author had become a Deist, rather than a Christian, but this does not prevent her from applying Butler's argument about how we learn moral principles in her new work. She says that in most novels “the hero is allowed to be mortal, and to become wise and virtuous as well as happy, by a train of events and circumstances. The heroines, on the contrary, are to be born immaculate …” (p. 73).
Both in Wollstonecraft and Austen, the language of law and property as well as the language of capture and captivation are shown as improperly applied to marriage and to decent sexual relationships. Mansfield Park opens with the captivation by Miss Ward of Huntingdon, of a baronet to whom her uncle, “the lawyer, himself, … allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim” (my italics). Wollstonecraft's Maria talks about “the master key of property” (p. 157). Austen, in the Sotherton episode, makes use of the lock and key image in connection with Rushworth and his property. Wollstonecraft's Maria says, “Marriage had bastilled me for life” (p. 155). Maria Bertram, flirting with Crawford while her intended husband has gone off to look for the key to the iron gate, which gives her “a feeling of restraint and hardship,” alludes to the starling which Yorick found caged in the Bastille, and which sang incessantly, “I can’t get out, I can’t get out” (p. 99). She also refers to Sotherton as a prison, “quite a dismal old prison” (p. 53). Wollstonecraft's anti-hero declares “that every woman has her price” (p. 161). Austen borrows, as the name for her heroine, that of Crabbe's in one of The Parish Register tales. Crabbe's Fanny Price is a refuser of the captive-captivate game; Austen's is shown as unfit, by her nature, to become a commodity in the marriage market, though capable of paying the price of enduring wrongful abuse and misunderstanding, which secures her “right to choose, like the rest of us.”
Jane Austen does not, like Mary Wollstonecraft, present us with an innocent heroine imprisoned in a marriage for which she is not regarded as bearing a responsibility. Austen's Maria chooses her own fate, though neither Sir Thomas nor the moral standards of the society of which he is a pillar are held blameless. Fanny, who avoids an imprisoning marriage, since she enters a partnership based on affection and esteem, does so not because she is “innocent,” but because she is what Milton called “a true wayfaring Christian.” Hers is not “a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed,” but one that has been put to “trial … by what is contrary.”11
Once the irony at work in the characterization of Miss Price is recognized, the way is open to consideration of what is shown as truly valuable in the right ordering of domestic society and in the world beyond it. Jane Austen did not believe that individuals had to create their own morality; she believed that moral law was objectively enshrined in the nature of the world itself. To that extent, she supposes that human beings are required to be obedient to moral laws or principles, but she is perfectly clear that the individual human being has the right, and duty, of determining, by the operation of his or her own reason, what these principles are and how they are to be applied in the personal regulation of conduct. By showing that Sir Thomas's niece and his younger son are better to be relied upon in judging correctly, an implicit criticism of “birthright and habit,” which debar women and younger sons from influence, even when their superior abilities are known, is made. It is quite in line with Wollstonecraft's attitude to “the Pernicious Effects which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society” (part of the title of Chapter 9 of Vindication). When Mary Crawford says that Edmund ought to have gone into Parliament, he replies, “I believe I must wait till there is an especial assembly for the representation of younger sons who have little to live on” (p. 214). Sir Thomas is a Member of Parliament, as, presumably, his elder son will also be. It is suggested (p. 161) that Mr. Rushworth will also enter the House when Sir Thomas is able to find him a borough. A rotten borough is not specified but would undoubtedly be appropriate. The case for the recognition of the equality of women with men is implicitly allied with the case against such unnatural distinctions and inequalities as are inherent in the law of primogeniture and in the unrepresentative character of Parliament.
Mansfield Park is also pointedly concerned with fraternity. What ought to be, and sometimes is—as in the relationship between Fanny and her brother William—the paradigm of equal, affectionate relationships between men and women is always held up as an ideal, having implications beyond the literal meaning of “brother” and “sister.” Edmund Bertram treats his inferior little cousin as a sister early in Volume One. He does not fall in love with her until the final chapter, in which this is treated cursorily and ironically. This is not because Jane Austen had suddenly and unselfconsciously become interested in incest; it is because the marriage which provides the necessary happy ending of a comic work carries implications about the right relationships between men and women, both in marriage as a social institution and in society at large. As Mill was to say some fifty or more years later:
The moral regeneration of mankind will only really commence, when the most fundamental of the social relations is placed under the rule of equal justice, and when human beings learn to cultivate their strongest sympathy with an equal in rights and cultivation.
Austen, in Mansfield Park, shows that such an ideal is more readily to be found, in contemporary society, between brothers and sisters than husbands and wives, though she seeks a transference to the marriage relationship of the ideal. With William, Fanny experiences a “felicity” which she has never known before, in an “unchecked, equal, fearless intercourse” (p. 234).
It is, however, with liberty, and the moral basis upon which individual liberty must be founded, that Mansfield Park is clearest and boldest. Women, in the Midland counties of England, like servants, were not slaves. Even a wife, not beloved, had some protection, “in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age.” So Catherine Morland had learnt, under the tutelage of Henry Tilney. “Murder was not tolerated … and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured like rhubarb, from every druggist” (Northanger Abbey, p. 200). But what of an indulged wife? And a falsely respected one? In the Midland counties of England, murder might not be necessary where a wife could retain all the advantages of outward respect, rank, precedence, and “respectability,” while passing her days in a state of partly self-induced semiconsciousness. Lady Bertram had “been a beauty, and a prosperous beauty, all her life; and beauty and wealth were all that excited her respect” (p. 332). She values herself on her possession of these things and, in the corrupt social order of which she is part, is valued for them. Never shown as going outside, or breathing fresh English air, Lady Bertram represents the slavery to which women who accede to such ideas reduce themselves, with the unwitting connivance of those, like Sir Thomas, who see nothing disgraceful in their condition. Not literally a slave and not suffering from the effects of a literal sleeping potion, what is she as a human being? What is she morally, as a rational, accountable one?
It is well known that in America the movement for women's rights was accelerated by the part women played in the movement for the emancipation of the slaves. As they heard, and put, moral arguments against slavery, they made an analogy between the moral status of a slave and of a woman, especially a married woman. This analogy is made in the Vindication and implied in Mansfield Park. Wollstonecraft says that a “truly benevolent legislator always endeavours to make it the interest of each individual to be virtuous; and thus private virtue becoming the cement of public happiness, an orderly whole is consolidated by the tendency of all the parts towards a common centre” (p. 257). Women, however, are not taught to be virtuous in their domestic life and so are not to be trusted in either private or public life. They learn to be subject to propriety, “blind propriety,” rather than to regulate their actions in accordance with moral law as “an heir of immortality” ought. She asks, “Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subjected to prejudices that brutalise them, when principles would be a surer guard of virtue?” (p. 257).
In England, agitation against the slave trade had gone on all through the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The arguments against it were rehearsed widely in the early nineteenth century, leading up to the passing of the Act of Abolition, which became effective in 1808. Jane Austen must have been familiar with them and, in a letter of 1813, speaks of having been in love with Thomas Clarkson's writings (Letters, p. 292). In 1808, Clarkson published The Abolition of the African Slave Trade:
We have lived in consequence of it to see the day when it has been recorded as a principle of our legislation that commerce itself shall have its moral boundaries. We have lived to see the day when we are likely to be delivered from the contagion of the most barbarous opinions. Those who supported this wicked traffic virtually denied that man was a moral being. They substituted the law of force for the law of reason. But the great Act, now under our consideration, has banished the impious doctrine and restored the rational creature to his moral rights.
It is easy to see here that a woman who rejoiced that the slave trade had been ended might ask whether it had yet been recorded “as a principle of our legislation that commerce itself shall have its moral boundaries”—so far as women were concerned. Was it universally accepted that woman was “a moral being”? Had the rational creature been restored to her moral rights?
Clarkson goes over the history of the anti-slavery movement and refers to a particularly famous legal judgment, which established that slavery was illegal in England. This was the Mansfield Judgment, given by the Lord Chief Justice of England in 1772, in a case concerning a black slave, James Somerset, the question being whether, having been brought to England, he could still be held to be “owned” by his master. Arguing that he could not, counsel for the defence, referring to an earlier judgment given in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, said:
… it was resolved that England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe in … and I hope my lord the air does not blow worse since—I hope they will never breathe here; for this is my assertion, the moment they put their feet on English ground, that moment they are free.
Lord Mansfield found in favor of Somerset and, by implication, of this view of English air.
In Mansfield Park the English patriarch is also the owner of Antiguan plantations and of the slaves who work them. When he returns to England, his niece puts a question to him about the slave trade (p. 198). We are not told what the question was, nor what answer was given, but, through her title, the making of Sir Thomas a slaveowner abroad, and the unstated question of Miss Fanny, her moral status in England is implicitly contrasted, yet also compared, with that of the Antiguan slaves. Since it is often assumed that Jane Austen could not have thought much about anything which did not impinge upon her domestic life and familial relations, or else been said by Dr. Johnson, it may be worth noting that at the house of her brother Edward she met Lord Mansfield's niece on a number of occasions, and that Boswell reported Johnson's view on another slavery case, Knight v. Wedderburn, as follows: “No man is by nature the property of another. The defendant is therefore by nature free!”12
Slaves have masters but cannot truly be said to have a country, since they are neither protected by its laws nor accorded those rights which belong to freeborn citizens. That this was true in England of women is a point made by Wollstonecraft in Maria, where the heroine has no redress in “the laws of her country—if women have a country” (p. 159). Austen, not doubting that even such an unpromising feminist as Fanny Price “speaks the tongue that Shakespeare spoke” and, apart, no doubt, from a small difference about Adam and Eve, holds “the faith and morals … which Milton held,” assumes that enlightened readers will know that she has the same “titles manifold” to British freedom as anyone else. She assures us that the soil at Mansfield is good, especially at the parsonage, and she makes a great point of the wholesomeness of English air, which is frequently associated with health and liberty. At Sotherton, with its prisonlike atmosphere, all the young people share “one impulse, one wish for air and liberty.” Fanny's need for fresh English air is stressed again and again, often in ironic contexts. After berating her for not accepting Crawford, Sir Thomas tells her to get some exercise outside, where “the air will do her good,” and Henry Crawford says of her, that she “requires constant air and exercise … ought never to be long banished from the free air and liberty of the country” (pp. 410-11). Of course, he means the countryside, but does not Austen expect the intelligent, enlightened reader to see a bit further?
Finally, we come to Lovers' Vows. It has been thought that, because this play has been attacked in anti-Jacobin circles, Austen's choice of it must be taken as a sign of her reactionary political viewpoint. However, it is quite directly associated with the main feminist themes of this novel. For a start, as its title shows, it is about the sentimental treatment of lovers' promises and is used to point the contrast between the lack of commitment involved in such promises as Baron Wildenhaim made to Agatha before he seduced her, or as Crawford half-makes to Maria, and the binding nature of the marriage contract. Lovers' Vows is a work in that tradition of Rousseauist literature which Mary Wollstonecraft objected to as rendering women objects of pity bordering on contempt. Agatha, having endured twenty years of poverty and humiliation because Wildenhaim broke his promise to her, makes a grateful, tearful acceptance of his eventual offer (following their son's intervention) to marry her. The curtain comes down on the following tableau:
Anhalt leads on Agatha—The Baron runs and clasps her in his arms—supported by him, she sinks on a chair which Amelia places in the middle of the stage—The Baron kneels by her side, holding her hand.
Baron. Agatha, Agatha, do you know this voice?
Agatha. Wildenhaim.
Baron. Can you forgive me?
Agatha. I forgive you (embracing him).
Frederick (as he enters). I hear the voice of my mother!—Ha! mother! father!
(Frederick throws himself on his knees by the other side of his mother—She clasps him in her arms.—Amelia is placed on the side of her father attentively viewing Agatha—Anhalt stands on the side of Frederick with his hands gratefully raised to Heaven.) The curtain slowly drops.
Anyone who doubts whether Jane Austen laughed at this had better reread Love and Friendship, but we have good reason to suppose that she thought the “happy ending” morally objectionable, not because the baron was letting his class down by marrying a village girl, nor the honor of his sex by marrying the girl who had lost her virtue through his agency, but because Agatha should have had more respect for herself, and too much contempt for him to have him at any price.
Mansfield Park remains a puzzling novel, partly, I think, because Jane Austen enjoyed puzzles and thought it both amusing and instructive to solve them. She asks a great deal of her readers—sound moral attitudes, derived from rational reflection upon experience; quick-wittedness and ingenuity in making connections; and a belief in the wholesomeness of laughter. It would be possible to make of Mansfield Park something like a piece of feminist propaganda, in which regulated hatred predominates, but it would be false. It is a great comic novel, regulated by the sane laughter of an implish, rational feminist. The pricelessness of Miss Price is its heart—and head.
Notes
-
Page references to Mansfield Park and to other Austen novels are to R. W. Chapman, ed., The Novels of Jane Austen (London: Oxford University Press, 1931-34).
-
R. W. Chapman, ed., The Letters of Jane Austen (London: Oxford University Press, 1932).
-
Item 31 in B. C. Southam, ed., Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968).
-
Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 192-94.
-
Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 8.
-
Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 45.
-
Wollstonecraft, p. 118.
-
Gilbert Ryle, “Jane Austen and the Moralists,” in B. C. Southam, ed., Critical Essays.
-
W. J. Kite, “Libraries in Bath 1618-1964,” thesis for a Fellowship of the Library Association, 1966, pt. 2, passim.
-
“On the Subjection of Women,” in Richard Wollheim, ed., John Stuart Mill: Three Essays (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975).
-
Areopagitica in Milton's Prose, ed. H. W. Wallace (London: Oxford University Press, 1925), p. 290.
-
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Croker, p. 562.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.
Jane Austen's Dangerous Charm: Feeling as One Ought about Fanny Price
‘A Little Spirit of Independence’: Sexual Politics and the Bildungsroman in Mansfield Park