Gotham Diary:
A Hole in Her Heart
25 April 2013
Mansfield Park stands alone in Jane Austen’s small oeuvre for many reasons. Best-known reason: “Nobody likes Fanny Price.” Nothing funny (or ridiculous) happens in Mansfield Park. (Poor Mr Rushworth — who can really laugh at him?) My favorite reason, today: Depravity. Later English novels would be replete with villainy far less idle than Henry Crawford’s, but Crawford is a cad without equal in Austen. There are other cads, Wickham and Willoughby, who do worse things, but they do them offstage, to poor girls we don’t know. Henry Crawford sits right down in front of us and declares his intention “to make Fanny Price in love with me.”
His sister, Mary, is surprised.
“Fanny Price! Nonsense. No, no. You ought to be satisfied with her two cousins.”
“But I cannot be satisfied without Fanny Price, without making a small hole in Fanny Price’s heart. You do not seem to be aware of her claims to notice.”
Were Henry a genuine seducer — a Wickham or a Willoughby — we should not be hearing this conversation. But if there is nothing carnal about Crawford’s designs, that merely underlines their depravity. Operating without real desire, they feed on more than vanity. Crawford’s genuine admiration of Fanny drives him to engineer an affection for himself that can lead nowhere. Romantic longings that lead nowhere can be very beautiful (see Brief Encounter), but not when it is discovered, as here it is in advance, that those longings have been seeded.
We know that Fanny does not think very highly of Crawford, but Austen takes the trouble to warn us that, if her heart were not already given elsewhere (to her cousin Edmund — hopelessly), Fanny would be vulnerable to Crawford’s campaign.
… although there doubtless are such unconquerable young ladies of eighteen (or one should not read about them) as are never to be persuaded into love against their judgment by all that talent, manner, attention, and flattery can do, I have no inclination to believe Fanny one of them, or to think that with so much tenderness of disposition, and so much taste as belonged to her, she could have escaped heart-whole from the courtship (though the courtship only of a fortnight) of such a man as Crawford, in spite of there being some previous ill-opinion of him to be overcome…
But Crawford’s scheme will hurt Fanny otherwise than as intended, as we shall see. His behavior and his declarations end up covering her with shame, after all — in the somewhat astigmatic eyes of Sir Thomas Bertram, a paterfamilias unable to allow Fanny the liberty to reject the hand of so “fortunate” a suitor as Crawford.
***
We are all familiar with the cliché of the child who not only must be read the same stories at bedtime, night after night, and who interjects corrections when parents nod. Having familiar tales repeated, word for word, is understandably reassuring to budding imaginations. I am finding it no less reassuring in my dotage. But my taste cannot develop like a child’s — it is at any rate unlikely to have opportunities for doing so. Hitherto unknown but remarkably congenial authors cannot be expected to emerge from exotic recesses of literature. (As if to dispute that very remark, I think of Joseph O’Neill and Edward St Aubyn, two remarkably congenial writers of whom I was unaware only a few years ago. And let’s not forget Elizabeth Taylor.) Like a child, I want to hear certain kinds of stories, and not others. I have no use for what I call “men with issues” — put Ahab and Ishmael at the top of that list. I don’t much care for novels that center on the unsavory confusions of adultery. The list of things that I don’t want to read about it actually pretty long, and it gets longer as my life does.
What I want to read are stories of social gravity — accounts of characters influencing, sustaining, and thwarting one another by the sheer Newtonian effect of their own mass. In the end, Madame Bovary is an empty book for me because the story is about a narcissist’s failure to connect with anyone beyond her daydreams. Francis Steegmuller’s amazing Flaubert and Madame Bovary is immensely more interesting, not only for showing how Flaubert put his inner Emma to good use, but for setting the author in a context of friends and relations from whom, unlike his creation, he is not closed off.
Last year, I re-read Trollope’s Orley Farm, to see how it differed from a novel to which it was compared when it came out, Wilkie Collins’s No Name. (Hugely.) Orley Farm was a pleasant summer read, but I had to recognize that Trollope will never appeal to me now as he did when I was in my prime. Now, his resolutions seem both unimaginative, or unvarying, and medicinal. Trollope is too pious about the sacredness of landed property not to sacrifice his characters to its rules. And, with a few exceptions, his women are dim or wicked. Trollope used to make me laugh. Now, I sigh.
Overexposure is always a danger. Having discovered that you like something very much, you may, without caution, idolize and so kill it. (I find that I have to be very careful about Mozart — or should be if I did not have a battery playlists that dispenses Mozart with a plenteousness that falls well short of excess.) I don’t know what I’m going to read when I come to the end of Mansfield Park, but it will probably be about Jane Austen (about her work), not by her. One way in which I think of her novels collectively is as of an extraordinary fountain that becomes more extraordinary every time I visit it. I want to keep it that way. I want to resist the strong temptation to claim that it is the fountain of life. What could be more extraordinary than that?