Mansfield

//**Mansfield Park**// Jane Austen 464 pages. Barnes & Noble Classics. $7.95

=Once Upon a Wallflower... =  Lisa Sproat

Woven into the pages of a typical Austen novel is a heroine with wit, spirit and a kind heart, but one who is rarely above mistakes and consequently must learn from them. Two such well-loved characters are Emma and Elizabeth, from //Emma// and //Pride and Prejudice// respectively, and it seems only natural that the classic Mary Crawford of //Mansfield Park// should join their ranks. There is only one thing keeping her from doing so, and that is the astonishing fact that Mary Crawford is not //Mansfield//’s heroine. 

Enter meek Fanny Price who is simultaneously physically weak and morally strong, who never errs in judgement and who comes from a world of dirt and dust so alien to her wealthy cousins that she can only ever befriend one of them. It is Fanny who is perhaps the most unlikely of all the Austen heroines- especially with elegant Mary Crawford as her worldly opponent. 

The story starts with three sisters, the Miss Wards, all believed to be handsome and expected to marry well, especially when Miss Maria departed to become the Lady Bertram- mistress of Mansfield Park and a very large income. But, as Austen laments, “...there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them,” and after waiting six years, Miss Ward became Mrs. Norris, wife of the Rev. Mr. Norris, with perhaps one thousand pounds a year- a reasonable sum for the time. It was Miss Frances who grabbed the short end of the stick and married a marine lieutenant, sans education, money or connections, and furthermore ended up with nine children whom she could scarcely feed. It is this seemingly wretched household that Fanny Price is born into and torn away from at the young age of ten years old, the victim of a kindness to her poor mother. 

When she arrives at Mansfield Park, Fanny Price is alone and friendless for the first- but perhaps not last- time in her life. Mrs. Norris is demeaning and harsh, Sir Bertram is intimidating, and none of the children can or bother to comfort her- until one week hence, when she is found, weeping alone, by her cousin Edmund. With gentle coaxing, she eventually reveals to him the source of her tears, and kind-heartedly, he offers her writing materials for a letter to her beloved brother, William. His good-natured kindness endears him to her, and her own moral capability and affectionate nature would one day make her as much a confidante to him as any. 

With the hero and heroine meeting so early on in the novel, Austen has cleverly left almost the entire book to focus not on the slow acceptance of Elizabeth and Darcy in //Pride and Prejudice// or the awkwardness between Anne and Wentworth in //Persuasion//, but deeper moral issues that perhaps darken the plot, but also make Mansfield Park a fascinating book, if not rather controversial. 

Mansfield Park is, in essence, a story of morality. It is anthropomorphized in its heroine, Fanny Price, and even somewhat in Edmund Bertram. When the nearly entire host of young characters grows interested in drama, insisting on playing //Lovers’ Vows// (an adaptation of the German ‘//Das Kind der Liebe//,’ and portrayed as extremely immoral in the novel) when Sir Bertram is away, only Fanny resists and remains resistant, a beacon of ethic light in a thick fog of rashness. Her general dislike of the Crawfords is grounded by the fact that they both, though enchanting and respectively handsome, are more charm than they are substance. 

But perhaps most significant, most surprising, and yet most understated of all is the underweight snippet on the slave trade- a subject that Austen delicately avoids in all of her other books. When Sir Thomas Bertram, uncle to Fanny and master of Mansfield Park, returns from a two-year journey to the West Indies (interrupting //Lovers’ Vows//, which annoys him greatly), an uncharacteristically bold Fanny questions him on the slave trade. Although Edmund later reflected, “‘It would have pleased [her] uncle to be inquired of farther,’” Fanny’s description of the dead silence suggests otherwise. It is possible that this event highlights Fanny’s upper hand in general morality. It has also been suggested that the scene was a sign of Europe’s general tolerance of slave labor, as the book does not mention that the estate of Mansfield Park itself would not have existed without such work. 

Although Fanny is timid and occasionally makes it hard for a reader to sympathize with her, she does begin to show some ounce of courage towards the close of the story, especially in her defense of her own refusal of Henry Crawford. Her otherwise insipid character is endeared by her possession of both perception and wishfulness, and although her lack of self-esteem is at first and often infuriating, it becomes less so as one reads on. In writing the polar opposite of one beloved Elizabeth Bennett, Jane Austen has created an entirely different world- a world where morality reigns.