Mansfield Park (Penguin Classics)
by Jane Austen
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jane AustenBrand: PBS
Introduction: Tony Tanner
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-04-29
ISBN: 0141439807
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Book Reviews of Mansfield Park (Penguin Classics)
Book Review: One of Austen's most overtly feminist works
Summary: 5 Stars
Jane Austen once mused that her novels are like a miniature mural painted on a two-inch square of ivory. While that's a lovely image, and while Austen was a master of deep character and thoroughly explored emotion, her books have important political elements that should not be overlooked. I'm surprised that more people haven't picked up on this, but Mansfield Park is certainly a defense of feminism and a profound statement on the importance of women's education. It is also, perhaps, a response to people's reactions to the heroines in her earlier works Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice.
At the time, women of a certain class were expected to be "accomplished," but not necessarily educated. We see this also in "Pride and Prejudice," when Mr. Darcy chides Miss Bingley on being so very accomplished in such vital arts as table painting though not well-read. Here, the heroine of Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, reads a great deal, but her older cousins the Misses Maria and Julia Bertrams are more accomplished in needlework and playing the pianoforte, as befits the daughters of a baronet. The middle set-piece of the book, the theatricals (they put on a play!), we see how each of the girls reacts when presented with an opportunity to do something fun that is perhaps a tad disreputable and, more importantly, something they know will piss off their father. In the latter part of the book, the three girls are offered various marriages and situations in life. Maria makes disastrous choices that still draw gasps (or at least rolled eyes) today. Julia's choices are hasty and panic-driven, though not as deplorable as her elder sister's. Only Fanny Price is patient, makes the correct moral choices that are not mercenary, and marries for love and honor.
Sir Thomas Bertrams muses that, "...the most direful mistake in his plan of education [of Maria and Julia]. Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting; that they had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and tempers by that sense of duty which alone can suffice. They had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice. To be distinguished for elegance and accomplishments - the authorized subject of their youth - could have had no useful influence that way, no moral effect on the mind. He had meant them to be good, but his cares had been directed to the understanding and manners, not the disposition; and the necessity of self-denial and humility, he feared, they had never heard from any lips that could profit them. Bitterly did he deplore a deficiency which now he could scarcely comprehend to have been possible. Wretchedly did he feel, that with all the cost and care of an anxious and expensive education, he had brought up his daughters without their understanding their first duties, or his being acquainted with their character and temper."
Sir Thomas's sentiments and even vocabulary are astonishingly similar to those of Mary Wollstonecraft in "A Vindication of the Rights of Women": that "The conduct and manners of women...prove that their minds are not in a healthy state ... one cause of this ... I attribute to a false system of education, ...more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers; and the understanding of the sex has been so [deluded] by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century ... are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect. ... It is acknowledged that they spend many of the first years of their lives in acquiring a smattering of accomplishments; meanwhile strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire of establishing themselves, --the only way women can rise in the world, --by marriage. And this desire making mere animals of them, when they marry they act as such children may be expected to act: they dress; they paint, and nickname God's creatures [TK: a reference to Hamlet.] Surely these weak beings are only fit for a seraglio! ... Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of a man; and should they be beautiful, everything else is needless, for at least, twenty years." Wollstonecraft's ultimate point is that if women have immortal souls, the only way that women can save them is to be educated, for without education, women are merely animals of habit and beasts of fashion.
Ultimately, Fanny Price is the central figure of this novel. Others vilify her as passive and puritanical. Indeed, when asked to join the theatrical production, Fanny insists several times, "I cannot act!" and this repeated statement has more meaning as a metaphor than as a statement of a lack of thespian abilities.
Fanny is, however, good and moral. She does the right thing. She does not marry for money, though everyone urges her to, and even though it means she may end up a spinster and a burden to her cousins and uncle. She finally does marry for love, and one is again reminded of Wollstonecraft's statement that, "the woman who strengthens her body and exercises her mind will ... become the friend, and not the humble dependent of her husband." Fanny gets a happy marriage.
Fanny's erstwhile friend, Mary Crawford, (who some people like but who I think is horrible) is obviously an answer to those people who liked Elizabeth Bennet (of P&P) a little too much. While Elizabeth Bennet is smart and witty, Mary Crawford has a sparkling but superficial wit. Mary Crawford does not think deeply upon anything but pops off whatever witticism (even ribald ones) that rise to the top of her head. Mary urges Fanny to go to Everingham, the country house that Fanny would live in if she married the wrong man, in a reflection of Elizabeth Bennet's comment in P&P that she started to love Mr. Darcy when she saw the grounds of his house (Pemberly.) In the end, when confronted with a moral fiasco, Mary refuses to consider how the perpetrator has wounded those around her and offended God by breaking a sacrament, and only laments that so many people know about it.
TK Kenyon
Author of Rabid: A Novel and Callous: A Novel
Summary of Mansfield Park (Penguin Classics)
Listen to audio presented by Literary Affairs: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.
View our feature on Jane Austen.Begun in 1811 at the height of Jane Austen's writing powers and published in 1814, Mansfield Park marks a conscious break from the tone of her first three novels, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice, the last of which Austen came to see as "rather too light." Fanny Price is unlike any of Austen's previous heroines, a girl from a poor family brought up in a splendid country house and possessed of a vast reserve of moral fortitude and imperturbability. She is very different from Elizabeth Bennet, but is the product of the same inspired imagination.
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. --Alix Wilber
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