The First Lecture: “Mansfield Park” by Jane Austen

INTRODUCTION

I am an unabashed Jane Austen fan, ever since I read Pride and Prejudice, that great ancestor of all chick lit and romantic comedies, the summer before senior year at Boardman. Nabokov was not a Jane Austen fan, indeed was not a fan of female authors at all. This is my greatest bone of contention with him…if you look at my "favorite novels of all time" list, George Eliot, Doris Lessing, and Ellen Raskin all wrote novels which rocked my foundation. When you consider Middlemarch in particular, which ranks in the top 0.01% of books ever written, Nabokov's prejudice is too much to bear. I know he had a very loving relationship with his wife Vera, but Lolita suggests a negative attitude towards all women in general, bordering on fear. Having strong female personalities write about strong female personalities might have doubly terrified him, the Elizabeths and Dorotheas and Annas who could go toe to toe with his men, informed with full knowledge of feminine psychology.

His very close friend Edmund Wilson considered Austen one of the best six writers in the English language (with Shakespeare, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, John Keats, and Dickens). When Nabokov dismissed Pride and Prejudice out of hand, Wilson suggested Mansfield Park. Nabokov decided to give it a try…and wrote back to Wilson that he had more fun than his students lecturing on it. Judging by the above, I think it satisfied the best of both of Nabokov's worlds. I personally found it to be not as good as Pride and Prejudice, certainly flawed, thus confirming to a degree Nabokov's estimate of the woman writer…however, the best passages of the book are superb enough for Nabokov to give Austen genuine praise, and for my humble self to once again bow in the presence of genius.

Our thoughts on Mansfield Park will become more clear in this series of blog posts. For right now, though, let me just say that upon seeing the DVD of the recent BBC adaptation…there is a clear picture in my head of what, in general, Fanny Price should look like, and Billie Piper is NOT Fanny Price.

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Nabokov stresses that it took Austen two-and-a-third years to compose the 160,000-word, 48-chapter novel. I have no idea why he chose to make this observation at the beginning. Flaubert spent five years crafting the shorter Madame Bovary, so is Nabokov expressing amazement it took Austen so long to write a lesser novel, or that she didn't take too long a period enough? The time it takes to write a story is a small but intriguing matter of interest for the literary analyst. Flaubert and Proust spent years writing sentences which read like poetry, while my hero, Trollope, wrote to so rigid and efficient a schedule that in his urge to tell the story, develop the characters, and keep pressing forward, he would forget ultra-specific details and contradict minor plot events. From personal experience, I completed 100,000 words of a first draft of a novel in six months…it was bad. I took my graphic novel, of 29,000 words, through about thirteen drafts over a twenty-month stretch. It is the greatest thing I have ever composed in my life thus far. A work of fiction needs some deliberation and careful time for revision. Mansfield Park, as we shall see, falls somewhere in the middle, moving from segments of delicate prose to segments which are very unsatisfying and suggest Austen wanted to get things over with.

Nabokov calls the interplay between the Bertrams and the Crawford-Grant family as the "superficial action." The real action—the activity which truly drives the plot to its finish—is in how the characters define themselves according to their inner conscience and principles. The happy endings come for those who either stick to their positive moral codes throughout (Fanny) or ultimately choose them over offered alternatives (Edmund). The sad endings are for those who stick to their negative moral codes (Mrs. Norris) or ultimately choose them over offered alternatives (Henry).

Fanny Price is described as "the author's pet…through whom the story is sifted." Fanny is an underprivileged girl, the poor niece of Lady Bertram—whose maiden name is Ward. Thus in her bloodline, Fanny is a Ward, and figuratively she is a ward as well, a fact which Nabokov automatically picks up on. Lolita is a landmark of meta-textuality and word games, so Nabokov making this connection is no surprise here.

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The "ward," as Nabokov points out, was a common figure in 18^th-and-19^th-century English Lit—think of how many times Dickens used such a figure. David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Little Nell, Esther Summerson. The character functions as one of the most sentimental devices available for a writer. Nabokov identifies three:

1. Easy provoker of reader's empathy…we all have felt at times like outsiders, even in our own families, so to see someone who is both of a family and an outsider all but forces us to react.
   
2. Romantic interest who can answer the great stumbling block of a question for any love story. Robert McKee describes the main conflict of any romance as "What's to stop the boy and girl from getting together after meeting?" If your interloper of a poor relation or charity case falls in love with your own much more well-off offspring, question answered.
   
3. Representative of the author as a "detached observer and participant": a figure who is both in the story but enough outside it as to be able to bring the same pair of new eyes we, the readers, possess. More empathy! Oddly, if we place Mansfield Park in the overall scheme of Austen's career, Fanny does not match the picture of her more typical heroine…Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Fairfax, the talkative, almost flippant, always dreaming-up-something girl with a sensitive, longing heart at the core. Fanny Price is the very definition of purity and goodness (thought wait until we reach Esther Summerson), and Mary Crawford fits the Austen mold much better. Unlike Elizabeth and Emma, though, Mary does not get a moment of clarity and ultimate romantic redemption.
   

"All novels are, in a sense, fairy tales." Nabokov compares this novel to Cinderella, a neglected heroine passed over in the hearts and minds of everyone who ends up with the hero. If Esther is indeed the audience representative, then having her wildest dreams all come true is our own personal wish fulfillment.

But Nabokov does not mean the novel is a fairy tale in the sense that each novel is directly analogous to Andersen or Grimm or some arcane folklore. Like fairy tales, novels are original worlds of their own, worlds where every living thing, every location, every rule, law and custom, are the creation of an original writer. Mansfield Park may be a wish-fulfillment fantasy comparable to most too-good-to-be-true chick lit on today's market, but it is a fantasy which fully conforms to every bit of logic Austen enforces on her story. "There is no such thing as real life for an author of genius: he must create it himself and then create the consequences." This is why the larger-than-life sagas of Dickens, the outlandish wit of Thackeray, the overt romanticism of Fitzgerald, the weighty philosophy of Tolstoy live on forever and so many best-selling thrillers and such which are written with "ultra-realistic" detail are forgotten with last week's newspapers. Their worlds are artificial…but everything in those worlds makes sense when compared to everything else in those worlds…and when that which we recognize from our world intersects with the fictional, the created, is when we establish the human connection necessary to any truly good story. This is possibly the greatest benefit of the created world: when we recognize a meaning or theme which fully applies to our world, such a truth affects us powerfully, as a real oasis in a desert full of mirages

Example: we can read five or ten major intellectual studies on the psychology of desire and come away with a dressed-up scientific definition, what Nabokov called "eloquence masking for ignorance." Then we can read The Great Gatsby, 200 pages or so of straightforward prose on the surface, and we KNOW desire, we KNOW what it is to ache for something or someone so badly all else in life is subsumed to it. In Mansfield Park, we learn what is to be full of self-knowledge and use it to the best of our abilities in a way some people who take years of self-esteem therapy might sadly never learn.

When Nabokov calls this novel "the work of a lady and the game of a child," it is not incongruous with his subsequent praising of it. He is only comparing it to the emotional intensity of Tolstoy and Flaubert…Austen's characters keep their emotions firmly controlled, and the book is as structured as any good game. This especially comes to light in the "play" sequence.