Gotham Diary:
Lovers’ Vows
24 April 2013
Reading Persuasion earlier this month was such an intense, private, and comforting pleasure that I resolved to read Mansfield Park again soon, and when the Penguin/Bickford-Smith clothbound edition arrived by yesterday’s post, I sat down with it at once and began to read as carefully as I could. I copied out many fine lines, although it felt somewhat arbitrary to do so, as all the lines are fine, in one way or another. The lines that caught my interest yesterday and this morning tended to point out the worthlessness of the Bertram sisters’ apparently fine breeding. The sisters, Maria and Julia, it occurs to me, have the leading roles in the first part of the novel, first as an undifferentiated pair of privileged girls who, while never treating their poor cousin, Fanny Price, with cruelty or contempt, are simply too wrapped up in themselves to “secure her comfort”; and then (but soon enough), as rivals for the attentions of Henry Crawford, an ugly contest made positively foul by the fact that Maria has by this time engaged herself to marry the dull but rich Mr Rushworth.
It also occurs to me that, in her three later novels, Jane Austen takes on the role of witty heroine for herself. Neither Fanny Price, nor Emma Woodhouse, nor even quiet Anne Elliot is a sympathetic heroine in the manner of Elizabeth Bennett or Eleanor Dashwood. I need say nothing about Fanny Price; Emma is a fatuous dimwit, not so very unlike Maria Bertram as you might think in her want of real moral upbrining; as for poor Anne, she is buried alive at the start of a novel that, step by step, disinters her. The comedy is all in Austen’s narration, and it tends to be sharp and black. Take this whizzer about the Bertram girls:
Their vanity was in such good order that they seemed to be quite free from it.
That’s from the beginning of Chapter IV, by which time Sir Thomas Bertram has already taken himself off to his troubled plantations in Antigua. It is not to much to say that the rest of Mansfield Park is devoted to the gradual collapse of that “good order.”
I have read the first volume of the novel’s three, and it seems that everything that one remembers about Mansfield Park, aside from the thundering marital catastrophe at the end, has happened. On the last page of Chapter XVIII, the return of Sir Thomas is announced. During his absence, the questionable alliance with Mr Rushworth has been no sooner entered into than shown to be questionable, in the chapters depicting the visit to Sotherton Court. This episode is swiftly followed by the young people’s ill-advised theatrical project, which Sr Thomas’s arrival aborts. The pace is very brisk at the start, and the drama of event gives way to the drama of extended scenes only with the visit to Sotherton. One would never guess from Volume I just how suspended the action of Volume III will be.
It is undoubtedly a sign of old age to find solace in Mansfield Park, and to find it where one does. For example, “Julia’s penance,” at Sotherton: having thoroughly enjoyed sitting at Henry Crawford’s side on the box during the carriage ride from Mansfield Park to Mr Rushworth’s estate, Julia finds herself wholly neglected at Sotherton. Fanny wonders that Julia does not see Crawford for the trifler that he is. Jane Austen does not.
Poor Julia, the only one out of the nine not tolerably satisfied with their lot, was now in a state of complete penance, and as different from the Julia of the barouche box as could well be imagined. The politeness which she had been brought up to practise as a duty made it impossible for her to escape, while the want of that higher species of self-command, that just consideration of others, that knowledge of her own heart, that principle of right which had not formed any essential part of her education, made her miserable under it.
This is nothing less than a flash of the Inferno.
***
After a not-unpleasant visit to the dentist yesterday, I walked a few blocks to the old storage unit and threw as many of my old journals into a tote bag as I thought I could carry. There seem to be about forty in all. When I got home, I learned that the table that I’d ordered for the balcony had arrived (in a flat box), but that it was too heavy for me to carry up from the package room. While waiting for it to be delivered, I had a look at a journal volume chosen at random. Although, as I’d expected, there was nothing interesting enough to merit mention here, the entries were not absolutely disgusting. They were more diary than journal, and as journal they were vacuous. I seem to have been not only ungrounded but determined to resist being grounded, as if there were something toxic about common sense. Perhaps I am reading this in. I ought not to generalize from a quarter-hour’s perusal of one book out of forty. It will take a good deal of study to decide whether I was feckless by nature, or whether something very important had formed no essential part of my education.