Authors: Elizabeth Jenkins
But though a character like Fanny's, in a situation such as hers, does not constitute a spontaneous attraction to the opposite sex, it has a very great charm, and one which may, given favorable
circumstances, create that feeling of affection and confidence and comfort out of which sexual love can naturally develop. And there is no more exquisite example of perfect probability than the course of Edmund's love; his immediate infatuation for Mary Crawford, the manner in which he suffered from the abortive effects of two such disparate natures to join in a mutually acceptable scheme of life, the ready way in which he turned for sympathy to Fanny, with a
confidence in her that had been built up in the past eight years of her life at Mansfield, and the inevitable effect upon his sore heart of her affection and sympathy and her unconsciously spoken admiration.
That he did very well for himself by falling in love with
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her, few people would deny. Her character had a sensibility and depth that is most attractive, though it is not of the kind that will necessarily, as Lady Susan put it, "add a single lover to the list."
Much of her sensibility is shown in nervousness and alarm, but her love for Edmund is sometimes shown with the intensity of poetry.
Her passion for Edmund and the life-and-death importance of the struggle she made so that no one should suspect it are expressed at their highest pitch when she is leaving Mansfield for Portsmouth, and her feelings were in such a state that she "could neither speak nor look nor think when the last moment came with
him
," and she did not realize till it was over that he had kissed her goodbye.
The extreme sensitiveness and timidity of Fanny's nature are
agreeably contrasted by the robustness, both physical and mental, of William Price. William's affection for Fanny, and his vigorous enjoyment of dancing, and the bold manner in which he addressed Sir Thomas despite his gratitude and respect, and the eagerness with which he accepted Henry Crawford's offer of a horse, without, as a sailor, understanding either the mettle of a highly-fed hunter or the value of the loan, the admirable manner in which he related his adventures at sea, his despair in thinking he would never be
promoted, and the splendid figure he cut in his uniform when
Admiral Crawford had procured him his commission--all these form a picture not only of great historical interest, and of great interest in the biography of Jane Austen, but one which, first and foremost, adds a most striking variety to the whole in which it is placed. The influence of William's presence is reflected by the various
characters, and nowhere is the varying nature of such an influence better expressed than in the actual moment of his
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arrival at Mansfield. "Fanny . . . found herself. . . . watching in the hall, in the lobby, on the stairs, for the first sound of the carriage which was to bring her a brother.
"It came happily while she was thus waiting; and there being neither ceremony nor fearfulness to delay the moment of meeting, she was with him as he entered the house and the first minute of exquisite feeling had no interruption and no witnesses, unless the servants chiefly intent upon opening the proper doors could be called such.
This was exactly what Sir Thomas and Edmund had been separately conniving at, as each proved to the other by the sympathetic alacrity with which they both advised Mrs. Norris' continuing where she was, instead of rushing out into the hall as soon as the noises of the arrival reached them."
Another of those scenes, which most authors would treat from one aspect only, but which gain indescribably from being presented, as only Jane Austen does present them, with light converging upon them from a variety of angles, is the episode of Sir Thomas'
encountering the altogether unexpected resistance of Fanny to his desire that she should accept Henry Crawford's proposal. The scene occurs in the East Room, where Mrs. Norris long ago stipulated that Fanny should never have a fire. "She was all attention . . . in placing a chair for him, and trying to appear honored; and in her agitation had quite overlooked the deficiencies of her apartment, till he, stopping short as he entered, said, with much surprise: 'Why have you no fire today?'"
"'There was snow on the ground and she was sitting in a shawl. She hesitated. 'I am not cold, sir; I never sit here long at this time of year.'"
"'But you have a fire in general?'"
"'No, sir.'"
Sir Thomas is much annoyed at this evidence of Mrs. Norris'
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interference, whose existence he had never suspected; but the
question is lost sight of in the interview that follows: in which Fanny reveals that unexpected strength concealed in a nature at once gentle and moral, and Sir Thomas, putting as well as it can be put, the case for considering the feelings of other people besides one's own on the question of a marriage, feels that she has behaved extremely badly and reads her a lecture that reduces her to hopeless crying. He leaves her in great displeasure, advising her to try to control herself by taking a walk in the shrubbery; "she was struck, quite struck, when, on returning from her walk and going into the East Room again, the first thing which caught her eyes was a fire lighted and burning. A fire! it seemed too much; just at that time to be giving her such an indulgence was exciting even painful gratitude. She wondered that Sir Thomas could have leisure to think of such a trifle again; but she soon found, from the voluntary information of the housemaid, who came in to attend it, that so it was to be every day. Sir Thomas had given orders for it."
In
Mansfield Park
, beauty and brilliance are not the adornments of virtue.
The two most fascinating characters of the book occupy what would be, in a novel less true to life, the positions of villain and villainess.
The Crawfords are not villainous; but though each had "the moral good taste" to appreciate the integrity of Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price, they were both by nature coarse-grained and unscrupulous.
Fanny knew that it was so; when she suspected that Mr. Crawford had some share in the trick of the necklace, "She could not be convinced that he had not, for Miss Crawford, complaisant as a sister, was careless as a woman and a friend." Mary Crawford is amusing enough when she meets the Bertram brothers, and finding that she at first preferred Tom,
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she reflects: "She had felt an early presentiment that she should like the eldest best. She knew it was her way." But her letter to Fanny when she believes Tom on the point of death, and jokes about the possibility of Edmund's becoming Sir Edmund Bertram, is
distasteful to a degree. So is her behavior on her last interview with Edmund after the elopement of Maria and Henry. Her own attitude to adultery is much more that of the present day than Edmund's was; but that is beside the point. She knew--at least, she should have known--that Edmund was in very great distress, and she treated him without one impulse of sympathy, or even of common tact; and after their interview had become stormy and he had left her in
disillusionment and grief, she put her head out of the door and called him back, with "a saucy, playful smile." The insensitiveness that could turn their delightful gaiety and humor into something horrible, like the grin of a mermaid over dead men's bones, is characteristic of both brother and sister. Henry shows his complete inability to understand Fanny Price until he set himself to do so, by the way in which he jokes about the desirability of adverse weather for Sir Thomas' homeward journey, and his suggestion that he and Fanny should come to the first service conducted by Edmund, that they might stare him out of countenance.
The best part of Mary's character is associated with her charm, her spontaneous good nature, her readiness in the interests of those she is fond of; and her liveliness and grace are particularly interesting to us, since we have the authority of the Austen family for believing that the character, in some respects, is modelled on that of Eliza de Feuillide. The idea is a delightful one, but even with such sanction, one must take care not to build too much upon it. In the first place, Henry Austen himself said that, contrary to what
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might have been supposed, his sister never copied from life, but only took suggestions from it. Eliza died in 1813, and the following year Jane performed the famous journey to London with the widower,
reading
Mansfield Park
aloud to him in the coach. When one considers that the judgment on Mary Crawford is on the whole
markedly unfavorable, and that the best that even her lover can say for her is that she might have been very different had she not been ruined by bad training, one cannot imagine that Jane Austen would have read all this aloud to her favorite brother within a year of his wife's death, if he had supposed, or if she had conceived the
possibility of his supposing, that Mary Crawford was intended for a picture of that wife. The point is perhaps worth elaborating, because it illustrates once more the sort of error those people are constantly falling into who attempt to find originals, rather than suggestions, for Jane Austen's characters among her family and friends.
The points of similarity between Eliza de Feuillide and Mary
Crawford are that Eliza was said to have refused James Austen on the ground that he was a clergyman, and Mary expressed great
dislike of Edmund's taking orders; that they were both very fond of private theatricals, and both "somewhat small" but very lively and dashing; that Eliza was rather fonder of pleasure than some of the Austens liked, and Edmund very much regretted the frivolous tone of Mary's mind and manners.
The list of resemblances is a formidable one, and quite sufficient to justify the ordinary reader in thinking that Mary Crawford "was"
Eliza de Feuillide; yet if we examine the only one of the aspects common to both of which we have a knowledge in either--namely, their connection with theatricals--we see how very differently Mary and Eliza played their parts. Madame de Feuillide was, by common
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consent, the inspirer and organizer of the theatricals at Steventon.
The plays chosen were those that she had seen; she took the principal female parts, and we may be convinced that real ability went to her direction of all the matters in hand. None of this was true of Mary Crawford. She is brought in by her brother as an "under-strapper"; she accepts the post of the lively Amelia when it is found that Julia Bertram is not suited to it; she is alarmed at the nature of some of the speeches, and really uneasy until the part of Anhalt is cast and she may know to whom she is to say them. Lively and impudent as she is, her feelings for Edmund are such that she really shrinks from the awkwardness of proposing to him in the guise of Amelia and tries to harden herself by practicing the scene on Fanny. One cannot imagine Eliza de Feuillide taking another girl aside and reading a scene with her until she should have the countenance to deliver it to a man.
Private theatricals would never materialize if the people who got them up were affected with such interesting reluctance. Mary's embarrassment is of course chiefly caused by her extreme
consciousness of Edmund; but even before he had consented to take the part, and she thought she was to be opposite to the unknown Mr.
Madox, she was somewhat nervous, and said she should shorten a good many of his speeches and her own. There was something
cooler, one fancies, in the original.
In spite of the gaiety of the character, we feel that it is a doomed one almost from the start; partly because we so often have to dislike the form taken by her wit, and because so often Mary is shown, in small ways, to be subtly in the wrong. The
coup de grâce
is administered to her, not at the end of the book, when her callousness has lost her the one man she truly cares about, but at a simple evening party in the course of which they sit down to cards. Mary secured
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William Price's knave "at an exorbitant rate," saying: "'If I lose the game, it shall not be from not striving for it.' The game was hers, and only did not pay her for what she had given to secure it."
The poignant interest attaching to Mary Crawford arises from her capacity to appreciate, though she cannot imitate, a much better nature than her own; and it is precisely this touch of moral tragedy about her which makes one believe, independently of probability and of the evidence of Henry Austen himself, that Mary Crawford could never have been supposed to be an actual portrait of Eliza de
Feuillide by people who were acquainted with the latter. What
obviously suggested Eliza, beside the personal appearance, was the brilliant vivacity that seized upon the imagination of everybody whether they approved of it or not; the fact that when Mary
Crawford was in the room, she was the central point of interest and animation, and that, in addition to her natural powers, she had the air of sophistication and fashion which made her seem as of another world in the eyes of her friends and relations in the country.
To say that it is the war of good and evil in Mary Crawford and her brother that invests them with their interest is to attempt a definition in black and white of what Jane Austen has accomplished in the infinitely subtle gradations of human character; but Henry Crawford, like his sister, is attracted by someone who, he feels, offers him a more solid chance of happiness than any woman of his own circle with whom he has previously been acquainted. It is another instance of Jane Austen's complete freedom from any romantic falsity that she explains the attraction Fanny Price has for Henry Crawford as she does. There have been many novels, of which
Jane Eyre
was perhaps the first, in which an insignificant heroine captivates a man against what are
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apparently great odds; but to Jane Austen's mind that was not the normal course of events, and she most carefully smooths away the improbabilities inherent in the situation of a handsome, experienced and wealthy man's falling in love with a girl of very moderate attractions and who is almost always seen under a disadvantage before she allows that situation to arise. * The strongest weapon in the hand of the unconscious Fanny is her genuine indifference to Mr.