Northanger Abbey, chapters 1-5

In my concluding remarks on Emma—a novel I otherwise regard very fondly—I lamented that it found Austen in lyrical, pastoral mode, rather than her usual urbane, satiric one. No such complaint can be made about Northanger Abbey. From its first pages, it drop-kicks us back to the sensibility of the juvenile Jane Austen, that merry subversive who would’ve booted the entire British empire down a flight of stairs if it made for a good joke.

There is a problem, though; which is that this blog has been devoted to charting Austen’s development as both a novelist and a satirist. Northanger Abbey throws that plan a curve ball, as it was the first novel that Austen ever completed for publication, though it actually wasn’t published until after her death; and while she put it through another revision in the months prior to her decease, it represents, in any objective sense, the author as she was before Emma, not the one who emerged on the other side of that immortal triple-decker.

Still, it was Austen’s intention that Northanger Abbey (although that wasn’t her title for it) follow Emma, so we’ll have to take it on its own terms. Which are considerable.

In fact, Northanger Abbey is in many ways the most modern of Austen’s works. It is, for instance, entirely unsentimental, sometimes brutally so, in a way that prefigures Austen’s bracingly misanthropic successors (Kingsley Amis, Nancy Mitford, and Evelyn Waugh come immediately to mind). It’s also, I think, one of the earliest examples of metafiction in English literature. Northanger Abbey is a novel about reading novels—ostensibly in defense of the pursuit; though its heroine, Catherine Morland, is by any standard of measure mildly deranged by having read too many of them.

What should be made clear at the outset, however, is that the word “novel” in Northanger Abbey means something different than the associations the word calls forth today. In Austen’s time, the novel was a new literary form and slightly disreputable; its popularity was due in large part to the kinds of works we today would call “gothic”: overwrought tales of innocent virgins, hissing villains, passionate love affairs, dauntless heroes, and mysterious castles with secret chambers. Austen satirizes these works from the very first paragraph, in which she explains to us that her heroine isn’t the kind we’re accustomed finding at the center of a novel; she’s a very ordinary girl living in unremarkable circumstances.

Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard—and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence besides two good livings—and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters.

This is so exactly the tone of the juvenile Austen that it’s almost startling; like watching a middle-aged woman turn a cartwheel across the room, for old time’s sake. We’re still reeling from that salvo, when Austen says of Catherine’s mother that she “had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing them into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on”—and we realize, okay, this is where we are now: back in nothing-is-sacred territory.

Austen spends a page or two really heaping it on, not merely about Catherine’s ordinariness, but about really her complete unsuitability for a heroic role of any kind. “She never could learn or understand anything before she was taught, and sometimes not even then, for she was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid.” She is, we’re told, a washout at music, at drawing, and at French. And yet for all these miserable failures, “at ten years old, she had neither a bad heart nor a bad temper,” and her looks actually begin to improve as she enters her teens to the point at which her parents can remark, “Catherine grows quite a good-looking girl—she is almost pretty.”

Her one enthusiasm is for reading; “provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all.”

But even at seventeen, which is pretty much the age at which the heroines of such books come into their gory glory, Catherine remains completely unlike them; she has yet even to inspire any local lads to defy death or dishonor for her sake, to leap a barricade or sail on Troy or dare the depths of Hell or whatever. “This was strange indeed!” Austen remarks. “But strange things may be generally accounted for if their cause be fairly searched out.” And the cause for this one doesn’t take much searching:

There was not one lord in the neighbourhood; no—not even a baronet. There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door—not one young man whose origin was unknown. Her father had no ward, and the squire of the parish no children.

From our point of view, it’s like Austen is impishly giving the Brontë sisters’ titties a twist, thirty years before there’s cause.

So there it is: by both nature and nurture, Catherine isn’t heroine material. Except…here she is, at the center of a novel. So what the hell? Austen, going meta again, explains.

But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.

And what happens is that one Mr. Allen, a landed big-shot in the environs where Catherine has grown up, invites her to accompany him and his wife to Bath—“probably aware that if adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.” So off she goes into the big, bad, dangerous world, filled with wicked men on the make, the kind who don’t consider a day well spent until they’ve ravished a virgin and left her bereft of hope and honor. And before lunch, if at all possible.

Despite this, Catherine’s parents seem able to see her off with relative sangfroid:

Cautions against the violence of such noblemen and baronets as delight in forcing young ladies away to some remote farmhouse, must, at such a moment, relieve the fullness of [Catherine’s mother’s] heart. Who would not think so? But Mrs. Morland knew so little of lords and baronets, that she entertained no notion of their general mischievousness…Her cautions were confined to the following points. “I beg, Catherine, you will always wrap yourself up very warm about the throat, when you come from the rooms at night; and I wish you would try to keep some account of the money you spend; I will give you this little book on purpose.”

The travelers’ journey is uneventful. “Neither robbers nor tempests befriended them, nor one lucky overturn to introduce them to the hero. Nothing more alarming than a fear, on Mrs. Allen’s side, of having once left her clogs behind her at an inn, and that fortunately proved to be groundless.” I suppose there must be, somewhere, some sad, sour soul who, reading these chapters, gets tired of the same joke being told over and over again. What can I say, I personally find it hilarious every time. The juxtaposition of the over-the-top genre conventions of the period with the bland realities of Catherine’s life, is just a comedy gold mine…at least in Austen’s nimble hands.

Catherine is suitably awed by the size and bustle of Bath, and settles in with the Allens, looking forward to a happy stay. We’re now given a brief profile of Mrs. Allen, who is, Austen tells us, “one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them. She had neither beauty, genius, accomplishment, nor manner.” What she does have, we soon discover, is style. She’s an unregenerate clotheshorse, with an extensive wardrobe and a husband who can afford to keep it cutting-edge. In fact, Mrs. Allen has to take Catherine’s dress and grooming in hand so that she’s sufficiently fashion-forward to stand beside her when they finally go out into society—a companion being, for her, apparently just another accessory, like a trained monkey, or a chapeau.

On their debut at the principal ballroom, Mr. Allen dashes off to the gambling tables, leaving his wife and Catherine “to enjoy a mob by themselves.” And a mob it certainly is; the two women squeeze themselves through the crowd looking for a place to survey the action, but manage to see “nothing of the dancers but the high feathers of some of the ladies.” At last they find themselves in a passage where the view isn’t quite so impeded, and Catherine feels herself longing to dance, but of course they don’t know anyone in the place who might ask her, and also, getting back to the dance floor at this point would take about a week and a half and probably involve some loss of limb.

Mrs. Allen did all that she could do in such a case by saying very placidly, every now and then, “I wish you could dance, my dear—I wish you could get a partner.” For some time her young friend felt obliged to her for these wishes; but they were repeated so often, and proved so totally ineffectual, that Catherine grew tired at last, and would thank her no more.

The two women drift for a while, like flotsam, eventually arriving in the tea room, where they feel “the awkwardness of having no party to join, no acquaintance to claim, no gentleman to assist them…without having anything to do there, or anybody to speak to, except each other.” But never mind, one of them at least has found a silver lining.

Mrs. Allen congratulated herself, as soon as they were seated, on having preserved her gown from injury. “It would have been very shocking to have it torn,” said she, “would it not? It is such a delicate muslin. For my part I have not seen anything I like so well in the whole room, I assure you.”

Mrs. Allen is shaping up to be an early favorite. Her preoccupation with costume, and costume alone—to the exclusion of family, faith, king, country, and probably health and happiness—mark her as a new and extremely promising type of Jane Austen character. We’ll be watching her as the novel progresses (but not nearly so closely as she’ll be watching herself).

Catherine, however, isn’t quite so worthy of attention, as Austen points out while getting in one more encore of her running joke: “She was seen by many young men…Not one, however, stared with rapturous wonder on beholding her, no whisper of eager inquiry ran around the room, nor was she once called a divinity by anybody.” A couple of strutting dudes do give her passing marks within her hearing, and being a humble sort of kid, that’s enough for her to chalk up the evening as a win.

The next few days pass uneventfully, with Mrs. Allen dragging Catherine all over Bath, where they stand around looking swell but never talking to anybody. “The wish of a numerous acquaintance in Bath was still uppermost with Mrs. Allen, and she repeated it after every fresh proof, which every morning brought, of her knowing nobody at all.” But hey, at least she looks sensational.

Since the novel would pretty much stall out if this situation continued, eventually they’re paired up at a dance with a certain Mr. Tilney. “He seemed to be about four or five and twenty, was rather tall, and had a pleasing countenance, a very intelligent and lively eye, and if not quite handsome, was very near it. His address was good, and Catherine felt herself in high luck.” What’s more, he’s pretty much a gold medalist in small talk, and while they dance he hits Catherine with such a barrage of disarmingly arch nonsense that she almost trips over her own hem.

“I have hitherto been remiss, madam, in the proper attentions of partner here; I have not yet asked you how long you have been in Bath; whether you were ever here before; whether you have been in the Upper Rooms, the theatre, and the concert; and how you like the place altogether. I have been very negligent—but are you now at leisure to satisfy me in these particulars? If you are I will begin directly.”

He then rewinds and asks her every single one of these questions, one right after the other, to which she replies in bleats and squeaks and other barnyard noises, but never mind, it’s really only his own voice he wants to hear anyway.

“Have you been long in Bath, madam?”

“About a week, sir,” replied Catherine, trying not to laugh.

“Really!” with affected astonishment.

“Why should you be surprised, sir?”

“Why, indeed!” said he, in his natural tone. “But some emotion must appear to be raised by your reply, and surprise is more easily assumed, and not less reasonable, than any other. Now let us go on.”

Tilney is, astonishingly, the hero of this novel. Yet clearly, his precursors in Austen’s canon are the smooth-talking sumbitches like Willoughby, Wickham, Henry Crawford, and Frank Churchill. What are we to make of an Austen hero who’s a silver-tongued bon vivant? We certainly know what his predecessors would have made of him. Five minutes in the same room, and Mr. Knightley would want to smash a piano bench over his head.

This is where our chronology problem rears its head. We can’t know for sure whether Austen is deliberately giving us a hero who’s a complete 180 from her previous stalwarts, who were so cloaked in gravitas it’s a wonder they could stand upright, or whether Tilney is just a holdover from Jane’s juvenile period who survived multiple edits. All we know for sure is that, by the self-consciously zany way he talks, he might have stepped out of a Lewis Carroll novel—if Lewis Carroll had written any at this point.

“I see what you think of me,” said he gravely—“I shall make but a poor figure in your journal tomorrow.”

“My journal!”

“Yes, I know exactly what you will say: Friday, went to the Lower Rooms; wore my sprigged muslin robe with blue trimmings—plain black shoes—appeared to much advantage; but was strangely harassed by a queer, half-witted man, who would make me dance with him, and distressed me by his nonsense.”

“Indeed I shall say no such thing.”

“Shall I tell you what you ought to say?”

“If you please.”

“I danced with a very agreeable young man, introduced by Mr. King; had a great deal of conversation with him—seems a most extraordinary genius—hope I may know more of him. That, madam, is what I wish you to say.”

“But, perhaps, I keep no journal.”

“Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not sitting by you. These are points in which a doubt is equally possible.”

Did you catch the bit about the sprigged muslin?...Not the kind of detail Austen heroes are accustomed to finding worthy of comment, or even noticing at all. Colonel Brandon could die and be reincarnated six hundred thousand times; he’ll never know muslin from sackcloth. But there’s something epicene about Tilney—today, we’d call him a metrosexual, and that’s only if we gave him the benefit of the doubt. Just listen to him as he boasts of his expertise to Mrs. Allen, who is exactly the sort to be flattened by admiration of it:

“…I always buy my own cravats, and am allowed to be an excellent judge; and my sister has often trusted me in the choice of a gown. I bought one for her the other day, and it was pronounced to be a prodigious bargain by every lady who saw it. I gave but five shillings a yard for it, and a true Indian muslin.”

After a whole evening of this kind of conversation—witty bon mots spiked with an occasional jibe at someone else’s unfortunate dress sense—Catherine departs the assembly “with a strong inclination for continuing the acquaintance.” We twenty-first century types aren’t surprised; what teenage girl doesn’t long for a gay best friend? But this is the nineteenth century, when accepeptable varieties of acquaintance between men and women were fewer than they are today. It was basically cleave-to-and-bear-children, or fuhgeddaboudit. So Catherine’s stuck with actually falling in love with the guy.

Not that she complains. She isn’t an ambitious girl, or a particularly savvy one, points that are driven home about ninety-three times on every page, so falling in love with the first man who speaks to her is just fine, thanks. Couldn’t ask for better. And as we’ll increasingly see, Tilney’s tender feelings for her are pretty much triggered by one thing: her good taste in choosing him. When he looks at her, he might as well be looking in a mirror.

Clearly, we’re a long, long way from Elizabeth and Darcy. But never mind, this is all going to be tremendous fun—trust me. If only because this couple—and this novel—are the biggest rebuke ever to Austen’s reputation as a romantic. Her dewy-eyed dowager fans, fretting over their Earl Grey and therapeutically stroking their seventeen cats, have no idea what to make of it. No. Idea. Nor does anyone else, apparently. Ask yourself: which is the only Austen novel never to be made into a major motion picture? Studios cough up new versions of the other five every few seasons, but Northanger Abbey—whose tone is more Monty Python than Masterpiece Theater—completely defeats them from the get-go.

So, great, we have our hero and our heroine. But Catherine’s pursuit of her man is dealt a serious blow when he suddenly, seemingly, evaporates into thin air. Everywhere she goes she looks for him, and everywhere she goes, she’s disappointed. Which at least allows Mrs. Allen the pleasure of reviving her catchphrase, “How pleasant it would be if we had any acquaintance here.”

But she soon loses even that privilege (maybe she can fall back on “I see no one whose muslin moves me to regret my own”) when she encounters a Mrs. Thorpe, whom she immediately recognizes as an old school chum. “Their joy on this meeting was very great, as well it might, since they had been contented to know nothing of each other for the last fifteen years”; and they fall into “talking both together, far more ready to give than to receive information, and each hearing very little of what the other said.” Who but an unrepentant misanthrope could pen such lines? But wait, there’s more:

Mrs. Thorpe…had one great advantage as a talker, over Mrs. Allen, in a family of children, and when she expatiated on the talents of her sons, and the beauty of her daughters, when she related their different situations and views…Mrs. Allen had no similar information to give, no similar triumphs to press on the unwilling and unbelieving ear of her friend, and was forced to sit and appear to listen to all these maternal effusions, consoling herself, however, with the discovery, which her keen eye soon made, that the lace on Mrs. Thorpe’s pelisse was not half so handsome as that on her own.

Then it occurs—England still being a small country, and enough with the lack of supporting characters already—that Mrs. Thorpe’s daughters have met Catherine’s brother, and they exclaim and clap their hands and cavort around Catherine’s chair in delight over her tremendous resemblance to him. The Miss Thorpes then declare their “wish of being better acquainted with her; of being considered as being already friends, through the friendship of their brothers, etc., which Catherine heard with pleasure”. The eldest of the sisters, whose name is Isabella, asks Catherine to take a turn about the room with her, which pretty much cements them as inseparable besties for the rest of the novel—Catherine being about as discriminating in choosing her closest confidante as she is about the man she adores. In both cases, it’s first come, first served.

Their friendship is actually a pretty equitable one, despite the rather casual way it falls into place, because Isabella’s specialty is talking, and Catherine’s is letting her. Isabella is also four years older, which gives her the experience with which to “compare the balls of Bath with those of Cambridge, its fashions with the fashions of London”, and other vitally important issues which Catherine would probably be too dim to pick up herself even if she were the senior of the pair by four, or ten, or thirty-five years.

Before these two girls run away with the novel (because of course they’re going to; at least, Isabella is, leading Catherine by the hand, no doubt with Catherine looking over her shoulder and asking please, hold up a minute, I think I dropped a glove or something), Austen pauses to give a little back story on Mrs. Thorpe, the gist of which is: widow—not very rich—pleasant—spoils the kids—oldest girl a beauty—the others, meh. None of this is vital stuff or even wildly interesting, till we discover it’s all been the set-up for another of Austen’s satiric jabs at her chosen genre:

This brief account of the family is intended to supersede the necessity of a long and minute detail from Mrs. Thorpe herself, of her past adventures and sufferings, which might otherwise be expected to occupy the three or four following chapters; in which the worthlessness of lords and attornies might be set forth, and conversations, which had passed twenty years before, be minutely repeated.

She’s having a whale of a time here, our J.A.

As I noted earlier, Isabella and Catherine are now inseparable. But having what is basically an incessantly talking parrot clamped to her shoulder doesn’t prevent Catherine from looking everywhere for Mr. Tilney. Alas, it’s in vain.

He was nowhere to be met with; every search for him was equally unsuccessful, in morning lounges or evening assemblies; neither in the upper nor lower rooms, at dressed or undressed balls, was he perceivable; nor among the walkers, the horsemen, or the curricle-drivers of the morning. His name was not in the pump-room book, and curiosity could do no more. He must be gone from Bath.

Of course there’s an easy way know for certain whether he’s still in town. Just hire Liza Minnelli to play one of the assemblies. If Tilney doesn’t show for that, he ain’t within crawling distance.

The inexplicableness of his disappearance makes him a figure of mystery to Catherine; and if that’s not sufficient to feed the fires of her crush, there’s Isabella constantly pressing her for details, eager to live vicariously through Catherine’s spectacular new romance.

Isabella was very sure that he must be a charming young man…She liked him the better for being a clergyman, “for she must confess herself very partial to the profession”; and something like a sigh escaped her as she said it. Perhaps Catherine was wrong in not demanding the cause of that gentle emotion—but she was not experienced enough in the finesse of love, or the duties of friendship, to know when delicate raillery was properly called for, or when a confidence should be forced.

It’s just as well. “Delicate raillery” is probably not in her repertoire. You might as well ask her to spew obscenities in Punjabi.

But we get a pretty good clue as to “the cause of that gentle emotion” when we learn, a page or two on, that Isabella and Catherine’s favorite activity is “to shut themselves up, to read novels together.” Which launches Austen into a mini-manifesto on the art form, which has become the single most excerpted section of Northanger Abbey:

Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust.

“Alas!” she cries, going meta again. “If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it.” She later laments that “there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.”

“Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”: or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

Austen is playing a very sophisticated game here. She’s mounted a spirited defense of her chosen art form, and a sound one; but she’s done so in the pages of a novel in which her heroine—who, unlike those other heroines whose snooty derision she scoffs at—is a novel-devouring fanatic, and whose mind is so deranged by this illicit passion that she almost can’t function in the real world. In fact, she’ll ultimately suffer very real consequences for it.

So what is Austen playing at?...My own view is that she’s just exhibiting her own exhilarating, diabolical genius. Jane Austen, issue a tub-thumping pronouncement on the excellence of the novel, in the rhetorically polished phrases of a member of Parliament?...Not without her alter ego—that other Jane Austen—slipping in behind her back to subvert her arguments within her own plot. Austen’s is simply too expansive a mind to chart a course and follow it through, like some dutiful pack horse. She’s compelled to make it interesting for herself.

In the end, of course, it’s this very paradox that prevails. Austen proves her point by disproving it; the fact that we’re here, two hundred years later, still talking about Catherine Morland and Northanger Abbey in a way we don’t talk about, or even remember, Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda, is because of this novel’s complexities—its dissonances—its strangeness and its irreverence, its little bouts of fisticuffs with itself—all of which render it endlessly, agelessly delightful. Yes, in fact a novel is a magnificent thing; but not the kinds of overstuffed Gothic doorstops with which Catherine Morland benumbs her brain; rather the kind whose quicksilver flashes of the divine Jane Austen, perhaps alone among her immediate contemporaries, helped to invent. And which no one since has ever done better.

Maybe as well…but never better.

~

For the remainder of my analysis of Northanger Abbey, see Bitch In a Bonnet Volume 2, which you can purchase from Amazon and other fine sites.

Emma, chapters 1-3

Jane Austen’s fourth novel, Emma, is arguably as beloved as her second, Pride and Prejudice; in fact Austenites will often define themselves by which one they prefer, even a bit contentiously, which is sort of like taking sides over which champagne you like better, brut or demi-sec. For my part, I don’t care, just top off my glass, please.

In each of Austen’s novels we find her trying to achieve something new, and in Emma it’s to do with her heroine. Having just given us (to disastrous effect, I think) a protagonist so passive and repressed as to render her utterly inert, she swings to the opposite extreme here. Emma Woodhouse is everything Mansifeld Park’s Fanny Price is not: rich, beautiful, spoiled, self-confident. She has character flaws you could steer an oil tanker through, but her rank makes her virtually unassailable; as a result of which she’s a charming, beguiling, utterly relentless terror. The novel is about her metamorphosis into a human being. I’m reminded of the story of Greta Garbo at a screening of Beauty and the Beast, reacting to the hero’s climactic transformation into a prince by exclaiming, “Give me back my beast!” Readers of Emma may feel similarly when our pushy, tart-tongued heroine is finally brought down a peg or seven, and learns to play nice. But it’s only a small vexation, because the solution is obvious: just go back to page one read the whole damn thing over again.

Emma begins with the entrancing plangency of a folk tale by the brothers Grimm, as Austen lays out the particulars of our heroine’s biography: mistress of a large house from an early age, after the death of her mother and the marriage of her elder sister—both of whose places in her life have been filled by a governess, one Miss Taylor, whose “mildness of…temper had hardly allowed her to impose any restraint,” so that Emma has grown up “doing just what she liked; highly esteeming Miss Taylor’s judgment, but directed chiefly by her own.” Austen doesn’t mince words:

The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much of her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.

But now things have changed, because Miss Taylor has become Mrs. Weston and left the Woodhouse establishment for one of her own. Emma consoles herself for the loss of her friend to “a man of unexceptionable character, easy fortune, suitable age and pleasant manners” by remembering that she’s the one who pretty much threw them in each other’s path in the first place, and blocked any avenue of escape until they looked around and noticed each other and thought, “Hubba hubba.” So she takes credit for the match; “but it was a black morning’s work for her”, because it’s now left her alone at home with her voraciously infirm father, and no one to follow her around all day and listen to her prattle and watch her kick up her heels and just generally reinforce her belief that God created Emma Woodhouse on Day One and then the rest of the cosmos on Two through Seven.

Austen’s narrative tone here is gentler, kindlier; but I think this is a deliberate dodge, an attempt at ironic dissonance. For instance, she says of Emma’s father that “having been a valetudinarian all his life, without activity of mind or body, he was a much older man in ways than in years; and though every where beloved for the friendliness of his heart and his amiable temper, his talents could not have recommended him at any time.” This has fooled many people into imagining Mr. Woodhouse to be an adorable old darling with a shawl over his knees and a twinkle in his eyes; but as the novel progresses it becomes ever clearer that he’s the sheerest horror. He represents a kind of tremulous nihilism, a nervous entropy; he’s like a bubbling tar pit, trying to entrap everyone in the vicinity and fossilize them before they can grow, change, breathe. He’s terribly funny, of course, but he’s a genuine danger; if he and Fanny Price ever came within a dozen yards of each other, their combined frigidity would snuff out the sun. When he sighs over how much he’ll miss “Poor Miss Taylor,” Emma reminds him that the Westons only live a half-mile off.

“…We shall be always meeting! We must begin; we must go and pay our wedding-visit very soon.”

“My dear, how am I to get so far? Randalls is such a distance. I could not walk half so far.”

“No, papa; nobody thought of your walking. We must go in the carriage, to be sure.”

“The carriage! But James will not like to put the horses to for such a little way;—and where are the poor horses to be while we are paying our visit?”

“They are to be put into Mr. Weston’s stable, papa. You know we have settled all that already. We talked it all over with Mr. Weston last night…”

You can bet she’ll have to “settle all that” about six hundred times more before anybody gets anywhere near a carriage. You get the sense that Mr. Woodhouse is a temporal anomaly; he can slow time, stop it, and on good days even set it creeping in reverse.

He and Emma live in a great house called Hartfield, whose palatial grounds abut a small village, Highbury, in which the most of the novel’s other characters live in the kind of rustic cheerfulness that makes them no match at all for Emma. She’s basically a queen on a chessboard where the only other players left are pawns. And as we’ll see, that’s pretty much how she treats them.

But she does long for someone who isn’t abject or overawed in her presence—someone with whom she can have an actual conversation. And here he comes now, dropping by to relieve the tedium in which Mr. Woodhouse has been so happily marinating: Mr Knightley, “a sensible man about seven or eight and thirty,” a longtime friend of the family and, since Emma’s sister’s marriage to his own brother, a member of the extended family himself.

Emma is delighted to see him, though Mr. Woodhouse is concerned that he’s come at so late an hour; “I am afraid you must have had a shocking walk” — as though a stroll through the chill night air were the equivalent of being beset by gypsies. Mr. Knightley assures him of having been assaulted by nothing more discomposing than beautiful moonlight.

“But you must have found it very damp and dirty. I wish you may not catch cold.”

“Dirty, sir! Look at my shoes. Not a speck on them.”

“Well! That is quite surprising, for we have had a vast deal of rain here. It rained dreadfully hard for half an hour, while we were at breakfast. I wanted them to put off the wedding.”

With just a little more youth and vigor, Mr. Woodhouse would be the kind of character you find in gothic horror fiction, burying children in the basement to save them from the cruel world. As if to reinforce this, he now hangs his head, for talk has turned—inevitably—to the day’s festivities. “Ah! Poor Miss Taylor! ’tis a sad business,” he says, lamenting that the lady in question has got away from him before he could have her walled up in the linen pantry. Mr. Knightley tries to make him see that the change is a happy one for the bride, it being “better to have only one to please than two.”

“Especially when one of those two is a fanciful, troublesome creature!” said Emma playfully. “That is what…you would certainly say if my father were not by.”

“I believe it is very true, my dear, indeed,” said Mr. Woodhouse with a sigh. “I am afraid I am sometimes very fanciful and troublesome.”

“My dearest papa! You do not think I could mean you…I meant only myself. Mr. Knightley loves to find fault with me, you know—in a joke—it is all a joke. We always say what we like to each other.”

After three novels, we know instantly what Austen is setting up here. In the oeuvre of this supposedly proto-romantic writer, lovers are marked as predestined for each other not by deranging fits of attraction, or attacks of galloping passion, but by spiky, brittle, stinging bouts of conversation—in fact, by mockery and sarcasm. Emma and Knightley’s snarky verbal jousting is just Austen’s version of a full-throttle Puccini duet, with trills and crescendos and a chorus of sixty on the bridge.

And if you need any further proof, this early in the novel, that the romance quotient going forward will be hovering at just about zero, here’s Emma’s retelling (to Knightley, who wasn’t there) of the of the nuptial ceremony itself, in all its giddy, flowery, transcendent sentimentality:

“Well,” said Emma…“you want to hear about the wedding; and I shall be happy to tell you, for we all behaved charmingly. Every body was punctual, every body in their best looks: not a tear, and hardly a long face to be seen. Oh, no; we all felt that we were going to be only half a mile apart, and were sure of meeting every day.”

For Austen, who usually dashes out descriptions of weddings in a single line, with all the ardor of a Post-It note reminder to buy mouthwash, the fragment above really is an outpouring of detail.

Emma then adds that, much as she’ll miss her governess, she takes pride in the marriage being of her own devising. “I made the match, you know,” she brags, “four years ago; and to have it take place…when so many people said Mr. Weston would never marry again, may comfort me for any thing.” At which her father begs her never, ever to do any such thing again, “for whatever you say always comes to pass. Pray do not make any more matches.”

“I promise to make none for myself, papa; but I must, indeed, for other people. It is the greatest amusement in the world!”

And there it is, right there: the rest of the novel all laid out for us. Because we can see what Mr. Knightley sees: that despite Emma’s long (very long) account of her campaign to land Miss Taylor and Mr. Weston at the altar together, the resultant wedding can scarcely be claimed as her “success.”

“Success supposes endeavour. Your time has been properly and delicately spent, if you have been endeavouring for the last four years to bring about this marriage. A worthy employment for a young lady’s mind! but if, which I rather imagine, your making the match, as you call it, means only…your saying to yourself one idle day, ‘I think it would be a very good thing for Miss Taylor if Mr. Weston were to marry her,’ and saying it again to yourself every now and then afterwards,—why do you talk of success? where is your merit? What are you proud of? You made a lucky guess; and that is all that can be said.”

Emma shoots back that “a lucky guess is never merely luck. There is always some talent in it,” which Knightley waves away with, “A straight-forward, open-hearted man, like Weston, and a rational unaffected woman, like Miss Taylor, may be safely left to manage their own concerns. You are more likely to have done harm to yourself, than good to them, by interference”…

…and yes, I confess, I could happily sit and listen to them snipe at each other like this until my spine permanently curved. As I noted earlier (in my discussion of Lizzy and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice), Austen’s acerbic, sarcastic, unwitting lovers belong to a tradition that goes back at least to Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick, and on through Tracy and Hepburn, right up to…well, choose your sitcom, basically. But nobody has ever done it better than our gal J.A. and her baaaad attitude.

Emma then brazenly flouts Knightley’s judgment of her by announcing that she’s already settled on the new clergyman, Mr. Elton, as the next beneficiary of her matchmaking skills. He’s been at Highbury a full year and it’s high time he was saddled with a wife, and besides, when he was officiating at the wedding earlier that day, “he looked so much as if he would like to have the same kind of office done for him! I think very well of Mr. Elton, and this is the only way I have of doing him a service.”

So right away, we know Mr. Elton is in trubbah. And so does Knightley, who says, “Invite him to dinner, Emma, and help him to the best of the fish and the chicken, but leave him to choose his own wife. Depend upon it, a man of six or seven and twenty can take care of himself.” But this bit of wisdom doesn’t quite reflect as handsomely on Knightley as it might, because if he were really wise he’d realize that saying it aloud will have precisely the opposite effect of the one intended. Unless he wants Emma to go rushing out into the larger world, grabbing people by their collars and making a first-class idiot of herself. Which, now that I think of it…hmm.

The succeeding chapter switches gears in order to give us the back-story of the bridegroom. Here’s where Austen’s juvenile years, penning three- and four-page epics in which people meet, love, and die amidst all manner of tumult and tragedy, show their bounty; because the story of Mr. Weston functions almost as a little novella all on its own.

The youngest of three brothers, he eschewed their “homely pursuits” in order to enter the militia; then, as Captain Weston, he met a certain Miss Churchill “of a great Yorkshire family,” and the two fell in love. Miss Churchill’s brother and his wife, “full of pride and importance, which the connection would offend,” opposed the match; but Miss Churchill defied them and married him anyway, and her relations threw her off. Alas, the resulting union was not a happy one.

[Miss Churchill] had resolution enough to pursue her own will in spite of her brother, but not enough to refrain from unreasonable regrets at that brother’s unreasoning anger, nor from missing the luxuries of her former home. They lived beyond their income, but still it was nothing in comparison to Enscombe; she did not cease to love her husband; but she wanted at once to be the wife of Captain Weston, and Miss Churchill of Enscombe.

If we must have modern writers undertaking Jane Austen sequels and “prequels,” you’d think one of them would at least be enterprising enough to tackle this intriguing creature, instead of yet more intensive scrutiny into the navel of Fitzwilliam Darcy.

Anyway, the former Miss Churchill bears a son and dies, leaving Captain Western a whole lot poorer and burdened with a baby. But the brother and sister-in-law step in to relieve him; having had their tempers softened by their sister’s illness, and “having no children of their own, nor any other young creature of equal kindred to care for, [they] offered to take the whole charge of little Frank soon after her decease.”

Suddenly liberated from all responsibility, Captain Weston left the militia, went into trade, prospered, moved to Highbury, and “the next eighteen or twenty years of his life passed cheerfully away”, apparently so very cheerfully that we can’t be sure which it was, eighteen or twenty, but what’s a couple of lost years between friends?  Little Frank, in the meantime, so ingratiated himself in his uncle and aunt’s affections that they bestowed their name on him as well. He has grown up “a very fine young man,” as Mr. Weston is able to report to all his neighbors, for he sees his son every year in London, and they’re on very good terms. In a small provincial town with a limited pool of inhabitants and a higher-than-average ratio of middle-aged biddies, this kind of material proves tinder for a whole firestorm of gossip.

Mr. Frank Churchill was one of the boasts of Highbury, and a lively curiosity to see him prevailed, though the compliment was so little returned that he had never been there in his life. His coming to visit his father had been often talked of but never achieved.

Now, upon his father’s marriage, it was very generally proposed, as a most proper attention, that the visit should take place.

Then, as if to swell the excitement to full-on nuclear proportions, we find out that Frank Churchill has written to his new mother to congratulate her on the marriage.

For a few days every morning visit in Highbury included some mention of the handsome letter Mrs. Weston had received. “I suppose you have heard of the handsome letter Mr. Frank Churchill had written to Mrs. Weston? I understood it was a very handsome letter, indeed. Mr. Woodhouse told me of it. Mr. Woodhouse saw the letter, and he says he never saw such a handsome letter in his life.”

Aside from being a wonderfully funny evocation of the head-banging monotony of what passes for interest in village life, it’s also our first indication that in fact Mr. Woodhouse is really one of the novel’s cast of clucking old hens; but after the first twinge of surprise, it does seem entirely right.

The handsome letter provides Mr. Woodhouse a distraction from his continuing distress over the loss of Miss Taylor to the rapacious world in which people insist on actually doing things. We hear of occasions on which he and Emma “left her at Randalls in the centre of every domestic comfort, or saw her go away in the evening attended by her pleasant husband to a carriage of her own”—and each time Mr. Woodhouse heaves a sigh and says, “Ah, poor Miss Taylor! She would be very glad to stay.” But soon enough the novelty of the wedding subsides, and Mr. Woodhouse enjoys some welcome relief.

The compliments of his neighbors were over; he was no longer teased by being wished joy of so sorrowful an event; and the wedding-cake, which had been a great distress to him, was all ate up.

That’s right—in addition to being a control-freak and a gossip, Mr. Woodhouse is also a crank. “His own stomach could bear nothing rich, and he could never believe other people to be different from himself.” Austen riffs on this for a while, turning the wedding cake into the prop for a whole comic monologue, but while we’re laughing we’re wondering what new ghastly trait Mr. Woodhouse will exhibit next. Maybe he’s parsimonious, or flatulent, or beats the household dogs with a crop.

We have a chance to see him now in a new setting, as the scene shifts to an evening party at Hartfield—this being a regular occurrence at the great house, because “Mr. Woodhouse was fond of society in his own way. He liked very much to have his friends come and see him,” for which reason “there was scarcely an evening in the week in which Emma could not make up a card-table for him.”

Alas, not all is pleasure for the paterfamilias on these occasions.

He loved to have the cloth laid, because it had been the fashion of his youth; but his conviction of suppers being very unwholesome made him rather sorry to see anything put on it; and while his hospitality would have welcomed his visiters to every thing, his care for their health made him grieve that they would eat.

Not that anyone can really tuck in anyway, with Mr. Woodhouse hovering over them and parceling out crumbs as though they might be radioactive:

“Mrs. Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs. An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome. Serle understands boiling an egg better than any body. I would not recommend an egg boiled by any body else,—but you not need be afraid, they are very small, you see,—one of our small eggs will not hurt you. Miss Bates, let Emma help you to a little bit of tart—a very little bit…Mrs. Goddard, what say you to half a glass of wine? A small half glass, put into a tumbler of water? I do not think it could disagree with you.”

I like to picture him attempting this kind of thing at one of my Italian family’s free-for-alls. Interpose yourself between a guest and the pasta platter there, and you risk having your arm devoured along with the pappardelle.

The Miss Bates to whom Mr. Woodhouse addresses himself here is one of several new characters we meet in this chapter, and the only one who can match him for sheer comic brio. She is the single daughter of an ancient mother—“the widow of a former vicar of Highbury…a very old lady, almost past every thing but tea and quadrille”—and the two live alone very humbly (or, since most of Highbury lives humbly, I should maybe say very very humbly).

Miss Bates stood in the very worst predicament in the world for having much of the public favor; and she had no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself, or frighten those who might hate her, into outward respect. She had never boasted either beauty or cleverness. Her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle of life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible. And yet she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without good-will.

But beyond this, she is a talker; perhaps the most voluble and indefatigable of any talker Jane Austen ever invented. She doesn’t say much in this first chapter of our acquaintance with her—or rather, Austen doesn’t report much of what she says, because you can bet both your ass and your assets she’s off in the margins somewhere firing away like a gatling gun—but we’ll become exhaustively familiar with her epic chattering before too long.

The other new characters—who join Mrs. and Miss Bates, the Westons, and Mr. Knightley as the dinner guests this evening—include Mr. Elton, the young cleric Emma has chosen to play Cupid for (“a young man living alone without liking it,” for whom “the privilege of exchanging any vacant evening of his own blank solitude for the elegancies and society of Mr. Woodhouse’s drawing-room and the smiles of his lovely daughter” is just the ticket, thanks).

Then there’s Mrs. Goddard, the mistress of a school; she’s one of Austen’s blander creations, but provides the opportunity for one of her more spirited snarks:

Mrs. Goddard was the mistress of a school,—not a seminary, or an establishment, or any thing which professed, in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality, upon new principles and new systems,—and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity,—but a real, honest, old fashioned boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way, and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.

And finally we have Harriet Smith, a pretty young girl who happens to be one of those aforementioned non-prodigies. She is “the natural daughter of somebody. Somebody had placed her, several years back, at Mrs. Goddard’s school, and somebody had lately raised her from the condition of scholar to that of parlour boarder. This was all that was generally known of her history.” Miss Smith has fallen into easy intimacy with some tenants of Mr. Knightley, named Martin, but Emma, impressed by Harriet’s looks and demeanor, thinks she deserves better, and needs only a little notice and encouragement to rise higher. Which is of course just the thing Emma loves better than a hound loves a hambone.

She would notice her; she would improve her; she would detach her from her bad acquaintance, and introduce her into good society; she would form her opinions and her manners. It would be an interesting and certainly a very kind undertaking; highly becoming to her own situation in life, her leisure, and powers.

At this point you may actually find yourself thinking a little bit ahead; and if the train of your thought is along the lines of, “Aha! Emma wants to marry off Mr. Elton, and she wants to improve Miss Smith’s situation. Two birds, one stone, maybe?”—well, then, give yourself a big gold star and as many goddamned boiled eggs as you want, you great big genius, you.

And come on back here next time to see how it all starts going horribly awry.

~

For the remainder of my analysis of Emma, see Bitch In a Bonnet Volume 2, which you can purchase from Amazon and other fine sites.

Mansfield Park, chapters 1-3

Is there anyone who doesn’t have a problem with Mansfield Park?...Having just given the world one of its most irresistible literary characters, Jane Austen faced the same dilemma as a bowler returning to the lanes for the first time after scoring ten straight strikes: How the hell do you follow up a perfect game?  Most probable answer: You choke.

Though of course we’re taking literature, not tenpins, so the reality is likely to be more complicated.  My own take is that Austen was feeling a little guilty after Pride and Prejudice; in creating Elizabeth Bennet, she’d shamelessly pulled out all the stops, loading her character with every imaginable attraction, from sparkling impertinence to righteous recklessness.  There’s nuance in Lizzy, but it’s all brightly lit; everything about her is incandescent.  Here is a character pitched to reach the cheap seats, and successfully so; nearly 200 years later, we’re still hanging on her every word, our jaws parted in readiness for adoring laughter.

So perhaps Austen thought, this time I won’t make it so easy for myself.  This time I’ll try to construct a heroine with more shade—someone whose charm will be of the hidden variety, as opposed to the wagging-her-tail-and-doing-tricks kind.  Possibly she even thought of this as artistic atonement; and if so, she took it too far, like those 14th Century saints who scourged themselves with whips and licked the open wounds of lepers, because what she came up with was Fanny Price, a creature famously described by the great Kingsley Amis as “a monster of complacency and pride…under a cloak of cringing self-abasement”.  I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it is more than a little maddening that everything Fanny gains (and over the course of the novel she gains a lot) is obtained by withholding, withdrawal, refusal.  She embodies negation.  Her default setting is OFF.

Mansfield Park begins with the usual dollop of Austenian backstory, here concerning three sisters, all beauties, the eldest of whom marries a baronet (“All Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the match, and her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim to it”), the second of whom marries respectably (a clergyman), and the youngest of whom marries, “in the common phrase, to disoblige her family, and by fixing on a Lieutenant of Marines, without education, fortune, or connections, did it very thoroughly.”

This latter match results in a breach between the sisters.  The eldest, Lady Bertram, being “easy and indolent,” would be content with “merely giving up her sister, and thinking no more of the matter;” but the middle sister, Mrs. Norris, has, we’re told, “a spirit of activity,” and can’t rest till she’s written a thundering “J’accuse!” to the newly minted Mrs. Price, essentially condemning her to hellfire and brimstone and…well, even more hellfire.  To which Mrs. Price replies, essentially, You are not the bosses of me so you can both go suck the same egg.  With which epithet Mrs. Norris scampers to Lady Bertram, forcing Lady Bertram to raise her ire, which is the only actual exertion she’ll undertake during the entirety of the novel.

I love that Austen introduces Mrs. Norris as possessing “a spirit of activity,” which is apparently Regency code for “highly developed sociopathic egocentrism,” or in other words, extreme douchebaggery.  Mrs. Norris is a compendium of the worst traits of every Austen villain up till now: she comprises Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s bullying, Mr. Collins’s shameless sycophancy, Mrs. Bennet’s delusions of humility, and Fanny Dashwood’s martyr complex.  And to these she adds a fault all her own: triumphal miserliness.  By rights she should be a kind of Frankenstein monster, a mangle of elements that don’t mesh at all, but in fact she works beautifully, all these ghastly attributes integrating like cogs in an infernal machine, interlocking with each other and keeping them in perpetual motion.

One of the most delightful things about her, is the way she always has her eye on the main chance.  As we’ve seen, she was the one who basically orchestrated the breach with Mrs. Price (because, what did she think that lady was going to do, faced with all her scorn and derision?  Write back with, “Yes, you’re right, I’m so sorry”?), which gave her several years’ bragging rights at being the one who exposed the true depths of her sister’s perverseness and ingratitude.  But eventually Mrs. Price writes to mend the breach, having in the ensuing decade been humbled by a career of serial pregnancy, on top of “an husband disabled for active service, but not the less equal to company and good liquor”.  The newly contrite sister asks whether there isn’t something her grander relatives can do to promote the fortunes of one or two of her approximately eighty-six children.  And Mrs. Norris, sensing that righteous indignation, enjoyable as it is, has about exhausted itself in her repertoire, hits upon the scheme of responding instead with forgiveness and largesse—and thus convinces Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram that it would be an excellent idea to take one of Mrs. Price’s daughters off her hands.

Sir Thomas is initially wary of the idea, thinking “of his own four children—of cousins in love, &c.”, but Mrs. Norris, fixed now on setting herself up as an icon of magnanimity, talks him through that particular worry. 

“You are thinking of your sons—but do not you know that of all things upon earth that is the least likely to happen; brought up, as they would be, always together like brothers and sisters?  It is morally impossible.  I never knew an instance of it.  It is, in fact, the only sure way of providing against the connection.”

She carries the day, and puts the seal on her sanctity by assuring him that “I will write to my poor sister to-morrow, and make the proposal; and, as soon as matters are settled, I will engage to get the child to Mansfield; you shall have no trouble about it.  My own trouble, you know, I never regard.”

Since this plan has been from the start hers and hers alone, Mrs. Norris might be supposed to be the one who will take responsibility for the mail-order niece; after all, she has no children of her own, so a helpmeet of this kind would be just the thing.  But oh, no.

…Mrs. Norris had not the least intention of being at any expense whatever in her maintenance.  As far as walking, talking and contriving reached, she was thoroughly benevolent, and nobody knew better how to dictate liberality to others; but her love of money was equal to her love of directing, and she knew quite as well how to save her own as to spend that of her friends…though perhaps she might so little know herself, as to walk home to the Parsonage after this conversation, in the happy belief of being the most liberal-minded sister and aunt in the world.

And so it’s settled that the child will reside in the magnificence of Mansfield Park with Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram and their brood; though Sir Thomas observes that they must strive “to preserve in the minds of my daughters the consciousness of what they are, without making them think too lowly of their cousin”.  Mmmmm-hm.  That’ll happen.  No one in the narrative has yet twigged to the fact that they’ve set up the perfect conditions for a classic Wicked Stepsisters scenario.  Wicked Stepmother, too, except for Lady Bertram’s invincible inertia; you might as well ask for a Wicked Sofa, or Wicked Daybed. 

But never mind, Aunt Norris is happy to play the role instead.  “I only wish I could more useful,” she says obligingly; “but you see I do all in my power.”  What we see, actually, is that she desires—demands—the thanks of a grateful nation, and she wants it just for showing up.  This is the kind of woman who, on a good day, can inflict on you a lifetime of indebtedness for allowing you to serve her a cup of decaf. 

Yeah, it’s pretty easy to tell who my favorite character is, going into this baby.

Young Fanny Price now enters the novel, being met at Northampton by her aunt Norris, “who thus regaled in the credit of being foremost to welcome her, and in the importance of leading her in to the others, and recommending her to their kindness.”  Because, see, otherwise they might have just tied her to a post out by the burn pit.

Fanny at this point is ten years old and not much to look at, though certainly possessed of “nothing to disgust her relations.”  Austen is fond of this gambit: introducing her heroines by laying a stress on how unremarkable they are, though this is usually followed by the gradual amplification of their attractions by wit, courage, or integrity.  Not so with Fanny, who will remain a small, cringing, flinching thing for pretty much the full span of the story.  Even after she gets over her initial terror of Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram and her awe at her cousins, she still seems to scurry along the baseboards like a mouse.

She spends a good part of these early chapters curled up in secluded dark corners crying, which I suppose is meant to move us to pity, except excuse me, most of us modern readers are paying about 80 percent of our take-home pay on apartments the size of Lincoln town cars, so it’s tough to feel sorry for a kid who’s landed herself in a pad large enough to have an abundance of dark secluded corners. 

Eventually, the law of averages being what it is, someone eventually trips over her while she’s in the throes of one of these sob fests.  Fortunately it’s her cousin Edmund, the kindly second son.  The elder brother, Tom, is inclined to poke Fanny with the toe of his shoe and taunt her, as though trying to turn her into a fear-biter; while the Bertram girls can’t get over how thick-headed she is for not possessing such basic knowledge as “the Roman emperors as low as Severus” (these days it would be the Zodiac signs of the Jonas Brothers).  So yes, it’s lucky indeed that Edmund is the one to find her in distress on the attic stairs, and not one of the other children or, God forbid, the adults (though of course the only way Lady Bertram would come near the attic stairs is if someone lit dynamite beneath her chaise longue). 

Edmund is kind to Fanny, and draws her out of her sorrow by asking her about the family she left behind, who he’s sharp enough to realize she must miss; and by this means he discovers her special affection for her brother William, whose absence she feels most keenly.  When Edmund observes that surely William will write to her, Fanny agrees, but alas he’s instructed her to write first to him.

“And when shall you do it?”  She hung her head and answered, hesitatingly, “she did not know; she had not any paper.”

At this point you are forgiven if you put down the book, chuff in exasperation, and exclaim, “Sweet creeping jebus, kid, grow a goddamn pair.”

Edmund takes her into the breakfast-room where he not only supplies her with paper but rules her lines for her, “with all the good will that her brother could himself have felt, and probably with somewhat more exactness.”  Those of us who have read Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice now realize exactly where this is headed, and are free to settle back and wait for Mrs. Norris to push her way back into the plot.

It doesn’t take long.  Aunt Norris is taking her duties as Wicked Stepaunt seriously, and we find her encouraging the worst character traits of the Wicked Stepsisters, answering their reports of Fanny’s stupidity with the assurance that, “though you know (owing to me) your papa and mama are so good as to bring her up with you, it is not at all necessary that she should be as accomplished as you are;—on the contrary, it is much  more desirable that there should be a difference.”  In other words, let Fanny’s dullness and dumpiness make you look all the more hawt by comparison.  Which is just the kind of advice these girls eat up with a spoon.  The author then notes:

…it is not very wonderful that with all their promising talents and early information, they should be entirely deficient in the less common acquirements of self-knowledge, generosity, and humility.  In every thing but disposition, they were admirably taught.

In Austenspeak, this is some serious slammin’. 

Meanwhile, Edmund takes on Fanny’s education, and of course she’s a willing pupil—she reacts to every kindness like a dog that’s spent its whole life being beaten.  He “recommended the books which charmed her leisure hours, he encouraged her taste, and corrected her judgment; he made reading useful by talking to her of what she read, and heightened its attraction by judicious praise.”  Maybe it’s too harsh to say that he’s building his own personal Stepford Wife, but dang, isn’t he?...If there were one recorded instance of Fanny exhibiting independent thinking—daring to disagree with him on some matter, and thereby proving that what he’d made of her mind was more than just a reflection of his own, I’d be contented.  But what we get instead is what we’ll be getting for the foreseeable future: grateful Fanny…unworthy Fanny…grateful, unworthy, grateful, unworthy. 

I have to wonder what Austen was thinking here—what, exactly, she made of her new heroine.  The Austen I know and love—the keenly intelligent, fiercely independent, poison-tongued mock-maker—would have had Fanny Price for breakfast.  I’m certain, in fact, that she must have met many such girls at dances and balls, and at the sight of these dutiful, humble little dormice she must have sharpened her metaphorical knives, and had a simply wonderful evening carving them into ribbons.  Yet here, she’s giving us this quivering blancmange as our presumed point of reference.  Jane, honey…you got some issues you wanna tell us about?

Anyway, we come to our next plot point.  Mrs. Norris’s husband expires (dying just as he lived: offstage), which leaves his living vacant.  Edmund, who’s meant for the clergy, was intended to have it, but his older brother Tom has run up so many gaming debts that Sir Thomas has to sell the living to another candidate to make up for it, leaving Edmund without any prospects.  Sir Thomas, deeply feeling the injustice to Edmund, rips Tom a new one over this, but alas, his son’s the kind of charming rogue who has a built-in bounce-back feature.

Tom listened with some shame and some sorrow; but escaping as quickly as possible, could soon with cheerful selfishness reflect, 1st, that he had not been half so much in debt as some of his friends; 2dly, that his father had made a most tiresome piece of work of it; and 3dly, that the future incumbent, whoever he might be, would, in all probability, die very soon.

When the living eventually goes to one Dr. Grant, his being “a hearty man of forty-five” seems at first to negate Tom’s third point; but no—“he was a short-neck’d, apoplectic sort of fellow, and, plied well with good things, would soon pop off.”

Hard not to like Tom, though I know we’re not supposed to.

Another repercussion of Mr. Norris’s demise, is the general expectation that Fanny will now leave Mansfield Park to live with his widow.  Her chief objection to taking Fanny in the first place had been Mr. Norris’s poor health, which couldn’t stand the activity and noise of a young girl in the house (because you know, Fanny is such a hellion), but now that Mr. Norris is beyond the reach of teenage torment, the way is clear for Fanny finally to join her aunt in her new household.  Fanny spends several pages panicking over the idea, to the point that even Edmund can’t comfort her; but she might’ve spared herself.  Because Aunt Norris again reveals herself to be a strategist of almost Napoleonic wiliness:

…Mrs. Norris had not the smallest intention of taking her.  It had never occurred to her, on the present occasion, but as a thing to be carefully avoided.  To prevent its being expected, she had fixed on the smallest habitation which could rank as genteel among the buildings of Mansfield parish; the White house being only just large enough to receive herself and her servants, and allow a spare room for a friend, of which she made a very particular point;—the spare-rooms at the parsonage had never been wanted, but the absolute necessity of a spare-room for a friend was now never forgotten.

Outmaneuvered, the Bertrams resign themselves to keeping Fanny, despite the waning of their fortunes—which, we learn, isn’t due only to Tom’s recklessness, but also to troubles in Sir Thomas’s estates in Antigua, from whence most of his income derives.  His wife has one last go at her sister, commenting that anyone would think Mrs. Norris would be glad of some young company and household help, which provokes an absolutely hilarious outpouring of self-styled victimhood, in which Mrs. Norris—whose will and energy might be sufficient to shift the entire foundation of London by thirty degrees if she thought it might earn her a few pence—paints herself as too broken in spirits and in health to look after a robust teen.  She concludes in high style:

“Dear Lady Bertram! what am I fit for but solitude?  Now and then I shall hope to have a friend in my little cottage (I shall always have a bed for a friend); but the most part of my future days will be spent in utter seclusion.  If I can but make both ends meet, that’s all I ask for.”

Mrs. Norris has scored a victory over her relations, but she doesn’t have long to enjoy it; because when Dr. Grant moves into the parsonage, it soon becomes evident that his wife is a very liberal housekeeper.  She “gave her cook as high wages as they did at Mansfield Park, and was scarcely ever seen in her offices.  Mrs. Norris could not speak with any temper of such grievances, nor of the quantity of butter and eggs that were regularly consumed in the house.”  She complains bitterly about this prodigal behavior to her sister, but Lady Bertram has her own reasons to resent Mrs. Grant:

She could not enter into the wrongs of an economist, but she felt all the injuries of beauty in Mrs. Grant’s being so well settled in life without being handsome, and expressed her astonishment on that point as often, though not so diffusely, as Mrs. Norris discussed the other.

For a brief, exhilarating moment we get a feeling we’re being set up for a venerable English comedy of manners—a tug-of-war for supremacy between three indomitable ladies.  Sort of like Mapp and Lucia with special guest-star Lady Bracknell.  Then we remember we’ve still got Fanny hanging onto the narrative, like a wad of gum to the sole of a shoe, and there goes that.

Then, unexpectedly, a sliver of genuine darkness descends.

Sir Thomas found it expedient to go to Antigua himself, for the better arrangement of his affairs, and he took his eldest son with him in the hope of detaching him from some bad connections at home.  They left England with the probability of being nearly a twelvemonth absent. 

There’s a narrative reason for taking Sir Thomas offstage at this point.  His daughters have grown about as horrible as they can, given the restraint his presence imposes on them; with him gone—and with no compensating authority in their somnambulant mother, and with an aunt who so far from checking their arrogance, actively encourages it—they can now become really worthy foils to Fanny Pureheart.  Austen is just taking Aunt Norris’s principle and reversing it: for Fanny to look even more angelic, all that’s required is for her cousins to go completely Moll Flanders.

And, given that Sir Thomas has to go, it seems only natural that he be dispatched in a manner consistent with gentlemen of his time and place.  Many among the aristocracy of 18th century England grew rich from trade in sugar, coffee and tobacco plantations in the West Indies; Austen would surely have known that.  It must have seemed to her the most natural thing in the world, that Sir Thomas Bertram would have such an interest, and be called on to manage it.

But what’s less clear is the extent to which Austen understood how such operations were run.  She may have known, and in fact almost certainly did know, of the slave trade that supplied the labor for such places; but did she know—could she even have conceived—of the appalling brutality of the conditions forced on those human beings kept there in servitude against their will?...Austen, like most of polite Regency society, is silent on the issue; slavery was, to a great extent, the elephant in the room for her contemporaries in what was then the emerging imperial power in western Christendom.  I’d like to think that Austen—the chaste daughter of a provincial nobody—had never encountered anything that would allow her to grasp even the minutest horror of the inhumanity suffered by the people “owned” by Sir Thomas Bertram’s real-world corollaries. 

But we can grasp it.  We know full well what the lives of these people were like; and their endless wretchedness, the shrieking injustice of their condition, reverberates down the centuries.  We can’t not know it; there’s no excuse for ignorance of it—the hideous details are only a point-click away.  When Sir Thomas Bertram departs England for Antigua to address the problems plaguing his enterprise there, we modern readers are immediately assailed by appalling images: of slave uprisings, violent reprisals, corporal punishments.  From this moment on, it’s impossible for us to feel any warmth or sympathy for Sir Thomas; he’s become deeply, criminally suspect in our eyes.  Worse, it’s now become difficult—almost impossible—to think of Mansfield Park itself with any of the romantic longing we allow ourselves when we contemplate, say, Pemberley; because we know that the great house sits on a foundation of human blood and bone.  This, as much as Fanny Price’s insipidity, is the reason so many of us just can’t warm to Mansfield Park.

However…I will try.  My aim in this blog is to document the development of Jane Austen’s prowess as a social satirist on the level of Swift and Voltaire.  To that end, I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt; I’ll presume (as indeed I do anyway) that she writes in ignorance of the horrific excesses of the slave economy that allowed landed gentry like Sir Thomas Bertram to flourish; I’ll presume that for her, persistent troubles in Antigua are merely a convenience for her narrative.  And I’ll keep my focus where I think she would’ve wanted it: on the frictions, frissons, and fireworks that occur between her cast of characters.

And when Sir Thomas does eventually reenter the narrative, I will attempt to take him at face value as well.  This current post is to be my only foray into the economic underpinnings of Mansfield Park; in any case, they’ve been written about much more piercingly elsewhere.  But while I may be setting them aside for this particular endeavor…let me just assert that, in general, they shouldn’t be set aside at all.  We owe those who suffered at least that much.

~

For the remainder of my analysis of Mansfield Park, see the collected Bitch In a Bonnet, which you can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or other fine sites, or dowload as an ebook for Kindle or Nook.