Can you tell me that Billie Piper is supposed to be Fanny Price?
From now on, so I don't have to keep referring to "Nabokov says" and endless variations thereof at the start of each paragraph, I am going to underline everything from the mouth of the master.
12
Austen uses the phrase "good luck to captivate" to refer to the Maria Ward-Sir Thomas Bertram marriage, which suggests a middle-class point of view. It's a VERY Austen remark. This is the woman who built an entire career on the notion of the marriage market, and upward mobility is part of human nature.
Austen was a philistine who was focused on people's finances and rational behavior in fields prone to irrationality: romance, religion, nature. Nabokov takes more pains to point out that she used her philistinism in fun when she wanted to up her sarcasm level…Mrs. Norris, he says, is a great caricature of philistinism. Mansfield Park was published in 1814, the final but terrifying year of Napoleon's spectre and just before what Paul Johnson called "the birth of the modern," the first stirrings of a world culture, science, and politics which would all truly build off the Enlightenment and humanism. Austen, one of the keenest observers of people to ever set pen to paper, must have had stirrings of what was to come…the references to the slave trade in MP are merely one sign of her cosmopolitanism. In a world growing in organization and intelligence, I see here as not so much a philistine but as a realist. This may be a mark of Nabokov's admitted prejudice against female authors.
Austen began writing the novel in 1811, so when she says it begins "thirty years ago," the Bertram marriage took place in 1781. Going by the chronology of events, this sets the ball at Mansfield Park as December 22, 1808. Since the chronology does not extend to 1811, much less 1813 when she finished, Austen writes the narrative after all of her characters have foMund either matrimony or oblivion.
I read this passage of the lecture while sitting in the jurors' waiting room at the Los Angeles Superior Courthouse, and nearly fell out of my chair. Here was one of those simple thoughts, exceedingly simple on the surface, which is so profound as to affect everything else you will ever think about a subject. Of course, few readers possess the eye Nabokov has for details, but still…
If a narrator begins to tell the narrative at a time after the events of the final scene or page have concluded, this means that from the very beginning, they know EVERYTHING which will happen to their characters from the moment those characters are introduced. The more knowledge we have of a person, the more we think about them and understand them and form opinions about them, and knowledge and opinion drastically shape how you describe a person or relate a story of that person's actions. I am not going to speak or write about a stranger I help at the bookstore the other day as I would speak or write about Adam, Chad, Mike, and Tyler, my housemates, or a co-worker I know fairly well who I am not fond of at the moment for one reason or another. Experience and other evidence color a narrative.
I had always been taught about the third-person omniscient narrator, and thought that with omniscience came objectivity. This is a fallacy. When a writer, a creator of a world, knows how that world will logically turn out, their telling or re-telling of events cannot help but be influenced. From now on, as I re-read books as Nabokov urges, I shall be paying close attention to the way major scenes progress, to how personal traits and appearance and speech patterns for characters are depicted, to see how what information the writer CHOOSES to share or EDITS may have come back to affect our reactions to the end and the theme.
"The winds of history are hardly felt in the seclusion of Mansfield Park." A work of literature does need what Nabokov would call the "time element," but the lack of historical detail except for the aforementioned Lesser Antilles mentions is not a flaw. Nabokov would agree. I think novels and stories set in a non-science-fictional or fantastic world should be grounded in their setting, but once that part of the setting is established, a writer may choose to emphasize it to whatever degree they see fit, as long as it plays a role in the story's overall construction. Why throw in immense loads of historical detail if such loads do not advance the plot one iota?
13
"The beauty of a book is more enjoyable if one understands its machinery, if one can take it apart." This is a prelude to Eagleton's insistence that the true "literary theory" is that of rhetoric. Once we understand the machinery behind storytelling, we appreciate and can critically analyze the ultimate effect such stories have on us and the effect they would have had on their original audience (if we do not fall into that category, as is the case with Austen and Nabokov's other writers).
Austen uses four methods of characterization. First, direct description, is usually used for "foolish and dull people" and relies on "ironic wit." Few writers were better at poking the bubbles of the pretentious than Jane Austen with her irony. As a third-person narrator, she has the freedom to ridicule which Fanny or Mary would not if she had used one of their voices…Fanny from her ingenuity, Mary from her social grace.
Second, directly quoted speech, which gives an idea of character through both what they say and the mode and manner by which they say it. With this characterization, it sometimes does not matter WHAT a character says if HOW they say it tells us a lot about them. Nabokov's great example is Sir Thomas, a long-winded man who utters "ponderous" sentences with four or five implied commas. His son Edmund inherits this trait, as his looping, sermonizing dialogues with Fanny will attest. My own personal example is Mr. Rushworth, whose speech has almost no meaning whatsoever…but how he says it makes us feel his buffoonery, and without that, MP would be much less enjoyable.
14
Sir Thomas is a heavy man in dialogue and proves to be a heavy father. As Sir Thomas's children and Fanny have grown up with him as the authority figure, they become accustomed to this to the point where they hope he will not return so soon from the Lesser Antilles.
A character's dialogue influences the way other characters interact with them and think about them. On Lost, for example, the characters have been thrown in such close quarters for so long that they understand each other's manners of thinking and speaking, and this influences the way they speak and what they share with certain people. Austen's characters act in completely different ways and speak differently depending on their situation at the moment: witness Mary's respectful behavior around her seniors give way to intimate flippancy in her letters or conversations with Edmund. Any good writer will not have his characters speak the same way to everybody.
Third, reported speech, a description of earlier dialogue by a character. This method also allows for plenty of irony, as the narrator can put a slant on a character by quoting them in ways which bely the sort of person they think they are or try to be.
Mrs. Norris loves plenty and hospitality—but only at the expense of other people. When Nabokov calls Austen a philistine, his reasons for such a judgment suggest what we in the 21st-century would call a conservative point of view, a preoccupation with finances, humans engaged for themselves, and a conventional, "good" morality which promotes proper and rational action. If Austen was such a conservative—and I think she is because of this point—I can only imagine how much fun she had writing the character of Mrs. Norris, who acts like the most demonic liberal as Limbaugh and Co. would portray one. Mrs. Norris is full of schemes on how to make a situation extraordinarily good, and then gets others to do all the work while she takes the credit and never shuts up about it. Fanny's coming to Mansfield Park is her idea, but Mrs. Norris always weasels her way out of ever playing a direct role in Fanny's welfare, AND never stops reminding Fanny of her good fortune in an indirect goal of keeping her "in her place." Mrs. Norris further insists on the best of everything and that her personal favorites, Maria and Julia above all, be given every advantage and position of favor—toadying to special interests—while she never puts up any expense herself and looks to others again. The result of her influence is the sad turn-out of Maria and Julia, who like their aunt possess a sense of superiority as "proper" people and have heads full of "intellectual" facts and the way things should be, but lack the ability to respond to individual humans and their emotions. Mrs. Norris only cares that what she thinks should be so IS so, as long as she never has to make a strenuous effort or sacrifice to get there.
This is in some ways akin to spending $787 billion of other people's money and using part of it to prop up a select few.
And I know, as a moderate, this is a gross oversimplification. But to a conservative, it would have more the ring of truth. And Austen, as I said, might have been a prime candidate for a modern-day Republican…
She certainly believed in pulling yourself up with hard work and luck.
Fourth, imitating a character's speech when speaking of them, used only in straight conversation, as when Edmund tells Fanny of how Mary has praised her. The clever narrative bent in this method is it takes a scene of intimacy between two people and introduces a third party (Mary, in this case) without ever having to make them physically present…and yet it is enough to shift the tone of the scene. Fanny always feels riled whenever Mary is even mentioned.
Mrs. Norris "is not completely heartless, but her heart is a coarse organ," and she dotes on Maria and Julia "while despising Fanny." See above. Mrs. Norris's heart is beating only for personal reasons. There is not a shred of empathy in her unless empathy will advance her views.
Mrs. Norris is meddlesome—unable to "keep to herself" what Mrs. Price says about Sir Thomas—but her meddling is what brings Fanny to Mansfield Park. The fact that Mrs. Norris shares derogatory private correspondence with one sister concerning their third sister's husband speaks both to that lack of empathy and a lust for power…the power to see her ideas carry the day and use every weapon at her disposal to make these situations so. As Nabokov goes on to point out when referring to Austen's description of Mrs. Norris, she gets Fanny to Mansfield Park because it allows her to utilize power the way she would like to…she instigates and arranges for Fanny to have a better future, then lets Sir Thomas take care of the expenses and all the effort raising her.
I wonder if Austen might have felt more sympathy for Mrs. Norris than I previously suspected. This was over fifty years before the first suffrage rallies and John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women. Austen's heroines, as brilliant and clever as they were, really had no power over their lives and who would ultimately choose to marry them or what their station would be…the decision was never theirs except for refusal. They had to hope for the best. Mrs. Norris may be vulgar and despicable, but there is something movingly pathetic in her constant striving to hold on to some sort of power in her life, of getting some form of control over a situation.
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