The book: beautiful and dangerous all at once.
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The Sotherton escapade in chapters 8 through 10 gradually engenders and develops the themes which come more to the fore during the play sequence. "This is Structure." Austen has spent seven chapters first introducing the Ward sisters' families—the Bertrams most of all—then the Grants and the Crawfords—character. Then she fulfills two preconditions for the drama to come by getting rid of Sir Thomas and bringing in a three-way triangle between Edmund, Fanny, and Mary…I say "bringing in" and not "stating" because neither woman is fully aware of the depth of her feelings for Edmund, while Edmund only knows he likes and wants to help both of them. A few casual remarks also suggest that both Julia and Maria (who is already attached) are attracted to Henry. Once this bedrock has been laid, the action of the story can commence at Sotherton, then develop in Mansfield Park with the play.
"Jane Austen misses no opportunity for ironic characterization." Did she ever? Few writers ever loved their characters as much as Austen did, and one part of loving someone is acknowledging their faults and foibles. Nabokov uses a tremendous example, where Mrs. Norris, eager to latch on to Mr. Rushworth's lofty talk of "improving" Sotherton (with help from the real-life, solidly middlebrow Humphrey Repton), speaks of her own lavish attempt to improve the Parsonage…which resulted in one apricot tree bearing rather bitter fruit. A "proper" appearance with a very bad taste in the mouth…a fine analogy for Mrs. Norris.
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When Mr. Rushworth describes planting the shrubbery to Lady Bertram, Austen in turn describes his speech instead of using direct quotation. "Not only the contents of that sentence (Austen's narration)but its own rhythm, construction, and intonation convey the special feature of the described speech." So why does Austen do this at all when she could simply use the actual speech? Recall that we just talked about Austen's irony and her love of her characters. By DESCRIBING instead of QUOTING what they say, it gives her a certain narrative control over the story, their words and rhythms coming from her mouth, hers to shape and present to the audience. Description of the speech allows Austen to introduce a first-person point of view into a traditional third-person omniscient narrative, and also select what portions of her characters' points of view will be displayed. Austen asserts power over her story, a power with words as formidable as Nabokov's own. She has Style.
Chapter 6 is the turning point, as the escapade is planned, and "there is something vaguely sinful" about the group going into the Sotherton Woods without supervision, an attitude suggested by how Edmund listens and says nothing. This is pre-Victorian England in all its gentility, and far from London at that. Going for an unchaperoned walk in the woods and then putting on a play are harmless to our point of view, but in a society where sticking to one's proper place meant everything, even the vaguest hint of going beneath your station was disastrous. There's a reason she called her masterpiece PRIDE and PREJUDICE. Even more will be said on this when we get to the play. And do not overlook Edmund's silence…the most proper of the characters always has misgivings but always holds his tongue to avoid being contrary to Mary.
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Fanny loves to read poetry—a much more widespread activity for the young then as opposed to now—and quotes Cowper while listening to Rushworth talk about "improvements." Nabokov further comments that nineteenth-century English poetry could be "long-winded and pedestrian," for there were Matthew Tuppers to match all the Alfred, Lord Tennysons, but he sees Fanny as better off when he thinks of "the vulgarities of the radio, video," and "incredibly trite women's magazines of today." Things haven't changed much since the 1940s. But I wonder if there is more of a link between these two pastimes than Nabokov lets on or would have wanted to think about. I recall a recent Newsweek cover story about how Oprah Winfrey uses her media empire to offer advice to millions of women, and some of her medical advice is dangerous or at least not fully proven. The point is, though, that women take Oprah's advice and it at least temporarily improves their mental outlook and makes them feel empowered, just as a bit of immersion in the fantasies of both "reality" (What an oxymoron!) and scripted media offer a boost, a jolt of inspiration. My own work with the media is focused on the idea that it changes people's lives. Now, Fanny thus far in the novel is the sort who, to borrow a favorite cliché, would never say boo to a goose. But when she hears something which reminds her of a certain poem she admires , it gives her the impetus to raise her voice, even ever so slightly. Throughout the first half of the book, whenever Fanny has a personal objection to a statement, she will usually quote a poem …only when Henry becomes her persistent, unwanted suitor does she speak out in her own voice. We might infer that literature and thought have slowly steeled her for the real world. Patrice Rozema may have…the director turned Fanny into an aspiring Jane Austen-style writer in her acclaimed film adaptation.
(Interestingly, the cast of Mansfield Park: The Movie included the late, great Sir Harold Pinter as Sir Thomas Bertram. The Nobel Prize-winner was as far removed a writer from Jane Austen as you can get, but he shared with her a love of irony and disparity between word and action. How many Pinter plays include moments where that minimalist dialogue carries exponentially more weight or runs counter to what's happening on the stage, i.e. all that talk of family in The Homecoming?)
William Cowper in "The Sofa," the poem Fanny quotes, "combines the didactic tone of an observer of morals with the romantic imagination and nature coloring so characteristic of the following decades."
(It is now about an hour since I started writing. I showed my room to two Australians, picked up a book from the Fairfax Library, and put on Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come…right now I'm listening to "Lonely Woman" and it's something.)
William Cowper was a poet who wrote one very long, immortal poem in 1785, "The Task," which incorporates "The Sofa," and eventually went insane. Nabokov's description of his writing is prefaced by saying it was "familiar to the mind of a young lady of Jane's or Fanny's time." The combination of morality, romance, and nature is interesting. Women were of course, at this stage in civilization, considered the weaker, dreamier sex, but still needed to be (here's that term again) kept in their place. So with all the morality of Golden Age Hollywood, important life lessons were combined with narrative methods geared towards a female fancy. Austen's genteel age needed a suitable venue to mix moral instruction and romance, and untamed but innocent nature fit the bill. It should also be noted that Fanny has the most uncompromising morals in the book, never making a move against her wishes. She is well-versed in whatever moral instruction she garnered in her lifetime.
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"The sunlight pattern of Cowper is nicely balanced by the moonlight pattern of Scott." During the Sotherton escapade, Fanny is not impressed by the family chapel Mr. Rushworth takes pride in, and describes her ideal chapel to Edmund using lines from Sir Walter Scott's "The Lay of the Last Minstrel." It is the first time since her Cowper quotation she has referenced a poem, and she moves from Cowper's "sported light" to Scott's "the moon-beam kissed the holy pane." Sunlight to moonlight. The bright familiarity of Mansfield Park to the wilder, foreign Sotherton, where events unfold which will throw all into disarray, particularly Fanny. Light to darkness. Austen was a master of Structure.
The "reminiscence" in literature is when an author recalls something memorable in the work of another author and unconsciously copies it in their own story. Austen uses a reminiscence in the woods when Mr. Rushworth leaves his fiancée Maria alone with Henry, whom she is attracted to, while he searches for a key to unlock a gate. In their flirtatious conversation, Maria quotes Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, which includes an incident where the hero gets to spend time talking to a beautiful woman while a coach owner searches for a key. Nabokov loved playing intellectual games in his own novels, as I said in the introduction when talking about Lolita. His "reminiscence" is a variation of such games…it certainly exists, is too good to be coincidental, but will only be recognizable to a close observer familiar with the work being reminisced about! Thus it would be easy for some to write off as semiotic nonsense. However, I can agree that a conversation between two potential lovers symbolic of one's unhappiness where a line comes up from a book describing a similar situation with similar circumstances is definitely not mere good fortune. It makes me want to ply back through my Penguin Classics and look for other older quotes and try to find if the plots of both mirror each other.
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