I recently listened to Karen Savage’s excellent reading of this book on Librivox, and it reminded me that I have opinions about this flawed, messy novel by Jane Austen.

-The absolute most important thing to understand is that Austen thinks Fanny and Edmund are a couple of intelligent, well-meaning introverts with an adorkable lack of self-knowledge and social “polish.” Take Mia Goth’s Harriet Smith from the 2020 Emma, make her more intelligent but still humble, earnest and insecure, still someone who makes you chuckle indulgently at her awkward moments. Take one of the more dignified and less half-witted versions of Charles Bingley (the 1980 guy is good, for instance) and make him more introverted and religious, but still faintly absurd and still oblivious about stuff that’s not Right Under His Nose. That is how the omniscient narrator sounds about the two romantic leads in Mansfield Park.

-They’re also ridiculously, boringly compatible and (to the narrator’s mind) obviously destined for each other. The whole drama about him pining after Maria Crawford and Fanny pining after him and then it all wraps up in a highly abstract, fourth-wall-breaking handful of paragraphs in the last chapter…it’s something of a bitter joke. The fact that Edmund is emotionally dependent on Fanny (note his reactions when he’s all peopled out at the end of the ball) while he’s obsessing over Mary is part of the joke. The fact that he thinks he molded all Fanny’s opinions and personality while the author drops hints that nature as well as nurture was involved…also part of the joke. The fact that they’re first cousins? That, too, I regret to say, is part of the joke.

-On a related note, Fanny’s biological family become more interesting and less awful (although still selfish and slobbish), when you realize her Horribly Dramatic Feelings about them are supposed to be funny:

–The rambunctious younger siblings suddenly feel funny-annoying-cute, like distant ancestors of Kevin McAllister from Home Alone. Susan Price would I think have understood Kevin very well.

–Fanny’s mother…is the Walmart version of her languid, ditzy Aunt Bertram, but at least she values her sons and her youngest daughter more than a dog.

–Fanny’s father is a jerk with no manners where women are concerned but he’s not stupid, nor incapable of being polite when he thinks it’s needed. He’s also the only character in the book who explicitly says that a married woman’s lover should be punished as harshly as the adulteress (unfortunately, he thinks beatings for both are in order.)

–The people who thinks he’s “creepy” to Fanny are entitled to their wrong opinions, I guess: he makes one Mrs. Jennings style comment about Fanny wanting a husband, and some unspecified comments about Fanny which she, with her Comically Dramatic Feelings, describes as “coarse jests.” I’m not saying he’s a good guy (see indiscriminate beatings for adulteresses and their lovers, above), but there’s no evidence he’s creeping on his own daughter or being anything other than generically crass in her presence.

–I can’t help curling my lip a little over Austen’s obvious contempt – probably imbibed from her Navy brothers – for the Marines who maintained discipline aboard ship and protected the officers-and-gentlemen from being murdered by the pressganged seamen who actually did all the work. Again, not blaming her, since she had no direct experience of this stuff, but the prejudices of the men who would have been her main sources are very clear.

-The main reason people find this book boring is the lack of what the British used to call “incident.” It’s mostly about an introverted “poor relation,” on the fringe of polite society, who is allowed to do nothing but fetch and carry for her aunts, and observe and brood over the conduct of her cousins and their friends.

-The seeds of the relationship drama are mostly planted in the subplot about the young people trying to put on Lover’s Vows, and without a decent idea of what happens in that play, you’re not going to get why Edmund and Fanny are uncomfortable with it, what Maria and Henry are doing wrong, etc.

-Self-delusion is a huge part of the story: these characters can talk themselves into justifying anything. Even Fanny, who’s comparatively clear-sighted about alot of things, tries to persuade herself that she’s unhappy about returning to Mansfield after her cousin’s elopement, when she’s feeling grateful for a). being needed at Mansfield; b). proven right; c). Mary probably out of Edmund’s circle for good and d). being allowed to bring her sister Susan with her.

-There is so much emphasis on the paths not taken in Mansfield Park that I feel like some kind of elaborate Sliding Doors treatment would be the only way to really convey that aspect in a visual medium. Or maybe It’s a Wonderful Life, with Fanny Price as George Bailey? Sir Thomas waiting too long to ask Maria about breaking her engagement with Rushworth, and dropping the idea too readily when she blows him off, Julia’s and Maria’s different long-term reactions to Henry ghosting them, Mary’s inability to commit to Edmund as he is now rather than as he might be in a different occupation, Henry backsliding after meeting the now married Maria…the possibility of these things turning out differently hangs over the actual events of the story like a series of forlorn ghosts, and perhaps contributes to the tendency to summarize stuff that would get at least brief vignettes in, say, Pride and Prejudice or Emma.

-In Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers talks in quasi-theological terms about the fact that she can invent characters, but she can’t force them to do just any old thing. I think something like that was at work for Jane Austen in this book; it really feels Henry deciding to reconquer Maria’s heart (and ultimately throw away his chance at Fanny’s love) was as much of a surprise to his author as it was to anyone inside the story. Certain people will of course say that Jane Austen was just a big ol’ meanie who forced a bad ending on the story for moralistic reasons, but if her sister, close friend and general sharer-of-values Cassandra Austen (the OG Fanny/Henry shipper) could not convince her to change this plot point, I have to assume Jane Austen’s motives were artistic rather than moralistic.

-I am skeptical about how seriously to take the “slavery subtext” in Mansfield Park. There are people who think that Fanny is boycotting sugar for abolitionist reasons, when it’s just as likely that Mrs. Norris has convinced her that she’s not entitled to have sugar in her tea. There are people who think that Mary comparing Edmund to a Methodist preacher is a serious comment about his beliefs and values being evangelical and possibly even abolitionist, when it is much more likely that Miss “Rears and Vices” is just making a snarky putdown, comparing a gentleman’s son and cleric of the state religion to preachers from much less “genteel” religions. Below are the slavery-related points which I think have something to them:

–Mansfield Park, the book and the estate, appear to be named for Lord Mansfield, a judge who handed down key legal decisions in the fight against the slave trade, while stopping short of ordering full emancipation, which he felt was not a decision to be taken by one judge in the court system. Lord Mansfield also adopted a biracial niece born out of wedlock, named Dido Belle, and treated her, apparently, about as well as any white illegitimate relative would have been treated, ultimately giving her work as his secretary and a small annual stipend. It is difficult not to see vague, imperfect parallels to Sir Thomas and Fanny Price.

–Sir Thomas Bertram owns a property in Antigua. It is never referred to as a plantation (a word only applied to the Mansfield gardens), although most critics of the book see the Antigua property as a sugar plantation (invariably a slave-powered operation, and one that involved particularly hard, nasty, dangerous work; for more details, see some of the later Benjamin January novels by historian and author Barbara Hambly). A minority view argues for Sir Thomas’s property being a lumber plantation, which apparently often involved freeman labor rather than enslaved labor, but would have been selling wood to sugar plantations and other slave-powered businesses, and thus indirectly involved in a slave-powered economy.

–Fanny raises a question about the slave trade to Sir Thomas. The others fall silent, Sir Thomas answers, and Edmund indicates afterwards that Sir Thomas approved of her question and would have been willing to talk about it more with her. So far as we can tell, all three characters – whom Austen portrays as people who basically have good principles and try, not always successfully, to apply them – are on the same page about the slave trade, or at least there isn’t enough daylight between their positions for things to get acrimonious.

–Austen read Clarkson and other abolitionists sympathetically. Given this, the Lord Mansfield reference, and her general sternness towards characters who didn’t share her values, I am inclined to think that Austen saw Sir Thomas as only indirectly involved in a slave-powered economy (see lumber plantation, freeman labor, above), and as “personally opposed, but…” on the subject of slavery. In this interpretation, his son and niece either take the same position or are rather more strongly opposed to slavery than he is.

–Related to this, I think Sir Thomas’s mixture of patronizing pity and controlling behavior towards Fanny in the later stages of the book is more interesting, more ironic and Austenian, if he is someone who is at least ambivalent about slavery, than if he’s the slave-raping, niece-leering monster of the 1999 film.