Mansfield Park
Though Jane Austen was writing at a time when Gothic potboilers such as Ann Ward Radcliffe's
The Mysteries of Udolpho and Horace Walpole's
The Castle of Otranto
were all the rage, she never got carried away by romance in her own
novels. In Austen's ordered world, the passions that ruled Gothic
fiction would be horridly out of place; marriage was, first and
foremost, a contract, the bedrock of polite society. Certain rules
applied to who was eligible and who was not, how one courted and
married and what one expected afterwards. To flout these rules was to
tear at the basic fabric of society, and the consequences could be
terrible. Each of the six novels she completed in her lifetime are, in
effect, comic cautionary tales that end happily for those characters
who play by the rules and badly for those who don't. In
Mansfield Park, for example,
Austen gives us Fanny Price, a poor young woman who has grown up in her
wealthy relatives' household without ever being accepted as an equal.
The only one who has truly been kind to Fanny is Edmund Bertram, the
younger of the family's two sons.
Into this Cinderella existence comes Henry Crawford and his
sister, Mary, who are visiting relatives in the neighborhood. Soon
Mansfield Park is given over to all kinds of gaiety, including a daring
interlude spent dabbling in theatricals. Young Edmund is smitten with
Mary, and Henry Crawford woos Fanny. Yet these two charming, gifted,
and attractive siblings gradually reveal themselves to be lacking in
one essential Austenian quality: principle. Without good principles to
temper passion, the results can be disastrous, and indeed,
Mansfield Park is rife with adultery, betrayal, social ruin, and ruptured friendships. But this
is
a comedy, after all, so there is also a requisite happy ending and
plenty of Austen's patented gentle satire along the way. Describing the
switch in Edmund's affections from Mary to Fanny, she writes: "I
purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that everyone may be at
liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable
passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as
to time in different people." What does
not vary is the pleasure with which new generations come to Jane Austen