If "Mansfield Park" was an outsized opera...the perfect Mary Crawford
41, continued
The best metaphor in the novel, and with it the peak of Austen's style, is when she describes Mrs. Norris as "arranging and injuring the noble fire which the butler had prepared." HERE indeed is a turn of phrase for the ages. Following the theme of scheming and improving, Mrs. Norris's direct attempts (as opposed to her indirect attempts, i.e. persuading the Bertrams to take Fanny in) at carrying out a plan result in harm being done to the object of her design, or at least greatly reduced effects. Mrs. Norris has already injured her doted-on nieces by schooling them in all the arts of self-interest, which will give Maria an attitude more than able to provoke Volume III's tragedies.
"It never occurs to Miss Crawford that Fanny is really in love with Edmund and does not care for Henry." Nabokov felt that the ball was a great arena for all the characters to luxuriate in their most telling characteristics. Here, Mary hopes to delight Fanny with the news that Henry will escort her and William personally to London, but Fanny is less than enthusiastic…and Mary becomes filled with thoughts of ungrateful vexation. Coupled with a quarrel with Edmund about his ordination which leaves her further displeased, Mary reaches an apex of not understanding other people. She is not evil-natured, not even that petty, but there is a certain form of self-interest which she possesses in spades.
For those of you who don't know it, in addition to these academic musings, I write creative fiction in association with Archaia Publishing. While researching a story I was working on, I watched several episodes of The Hills…and am glad I turned it off when I did, as it made me want to throw heavy objects at my computer screen. Apart from Lauren Conrad, who seemed to have a halfway decent head on her shoulders, the denizens of the Hills were a brutally self-absorbed group who thought of all subjects only in relation to how those subjects either affected them or meshed with their view of how the world should be…and failed to give any sign that they'd ever looked up "empathy" in the dictionary. Reading the passages with Mary Crawford recalled these tendencies, though of course in the classy Jane Austen manner. Mary wants to be a wife and society figure, but her idea of the world is based on notions that she can have her pick of men and that men are all like her brother: idle, bored rich who also live for pleasure. Thus a great deal "never occurs" to her. She doesn't comprehend how Fanny could find Henry less than ideal when Henry, in a strictly non-incestual way, represents all Mary could ever want…and she doesn't comprehend the depths of Edmund's passion for her, seeing in his rejection of a totally privileged upper-class existence a "part represents the whole" vision of prudity. She may even think he is incapable of love, not understanding that he loves his duties to the world in an abstract way her concrete, materialistic brain can't wrap itself around…and that he loves her as a great part of his duty. Mary's inability to see beyond herself, as at the ball, results in her throwing away her great chance at happiness, as she sadly comes to realize too late in the final chapter.
(Personal Footnote: I ranked Heidi Montag—a bloated Mary Crawford at her worst—with Barry Bonds, Dick Cheney, Robert Mugabe, and the late Robert Moses on the Facebook quiz, "Five People You Would Like to Punch in the Face.")
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Mary writes like a perfect member of society…she uses graceful, florid language which in the end is full of trite clichés. From the second half of the second volume onward, letters take an increasingly prominent part in the narrative. When I re-read Mansfield Park, one activity I shall pursue will be a closer reading of Mary's letters, which strive to make their intended reader feel like Mary's closest friend in the world but are artfully arranged to be generic in address. Also, since Austen is narrating in hindsight, which letters of Mary's she chooses to publicly document are interesting as well. This is a selective editing I shall explore further when talking about Dickens. For now, Nabokov offers up one instance of Mary's emptiness as a writer: she hopes for Fanny's "sweetest smiles" (J.A.) when we know by now Fanny is "not that type." (V.N.)
Fanny's style has "elements of force, purity, and precision." Volume II ends with Fanny's one-paragraph reply to Mary describing why she has rejected Henry's proposal. It is an appropriate conclusion, for it is a benchmark of how Fanny is growing as a person. For so long she has been giving in to the wishes of others, hiding her own opinions behind a vale of others' poetry, but now, though her letter is still crouched in her self-deprecation ("I am so unequal to anything of the sort"), it carries a ring of firmness. She says directly, simply, and with a firm belief in her judgment of herself and others in relation to her that she is incompatible with Henry and would enjoy the subject never being mentioned again. There is even a small hint of Fanny finally casting a burden off herself—the burden that she is always at fault—when she uses language suggesting that Henry should think about her differently.
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Henry's motivations for proposal are deliberately misconstrued by Fanny. Henry and Sir Thomas, who tries to persuade Fanny to make the match, both recognize the motivation: Henry has been won over by Fanny's simple, graceful, unpretentious personality and open, honest heart. Henry personally would add that this is a total change from the women he has spent his previous life in pursuit of (Maria) and as a man eager for experience, sees life with Fanny, his opposite, as a life to be treasured. The reasoning is a little muddy, and still caught up in the whole "scheme" apparatus—it is Henry's plan to decide on such a different sort of wife—but the genuine attraction and regard are there. Fanny does not want to be thought of so highly by a man whom she respects much less than Edmund, and so in her conversation with Sir Thomas deludes herself that Henry asked for her hand out of gallantry, taking something a little more than pity on a poor relation, and clings to this delusion even after Henry's persistence grows strong enough to convince anyone she is, at the moment, exactly the woman for him.
Henry, on his return, reads from Shakespeare's Henry VIII, which in 1808-1812 was more preferable to average Englishmen than King Lear and Hamlet. Did Nabokov not catch in his interpretation the double Henry in the scene, of Henry combining a work by England's greatest writer which, grounded in reality, was very accessible to all as opposed to the "divine poetry" of the tragedies, with a character who shares his name? A combination which might make him seem more sensitive and grand in Fanny's eyes? Henry's newfound sensitivity impresses Edmund…who of course is still taken with Mary at this point.
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When Henry says he would like to preach occasional sermons to a London mass eager for entertainment value as well as instruction, it is Fanny, not Edmund, who takes offense. This develops Fanny's continuing immunity to the "schemes and improvements." Henry is hinting at the modern conception of large churches, pastors in the public eye, and occasional pronouncements taken as everything. It is a sort of diluted Christianity, C.S. Lewis's "Christianity with water," and Fanny cannot get behind his vision. Edmund, again, holds his tongue because of Henry's fraternal bond with Mary.
Edmund correctly sums up Fanny psychologically in his attempt to persuade her to marry Henry. This might be the crowning "doesn't he get it?" moment. Edmund is so besotted with Mary that he thinks being her emotional brother-in-law might point to his favor, but his sizing up of Fanny as a woman with a great heart and a preference for habit and custom over novelty is SO CORRECT and flies squarely in the face of how he DOESN'T KNOW MARY AT ALL that we have to wonder! Of course, Edmund has a very hard time judging women: part of the characters' problems stems from Edmund thinking that no matter what a woman says, does, or professes at one time, she will eventually come around to an ideal state of mind with persuasion and patience. Thus, although Mary always dismisses his ambition as a clergyman, he persists in seeing her as his potential wife, and although Fanny does not bear a shred of romantic feeling for Henry, he puts down her refusal to the sheer novelty of Henry's declaration and thinks with time and an open heart, Fanny will come to love Mr. Crawford. Edmund believes too strongly in the better angels of our nature and in his own idealistic romanticism, a believable flaw in a sensible man.
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Volume III is entirely based around Henry refusing to let his proposal go. Edmund's argument is just convincing enough for Fanny to listen to him, and so Henry keeps one eye on Mansfield Park, follows Fanny to Portsmouth, and ultimately grows tired of waiting and falls into the arms of Maria. If he had held out just that much longer, or if Fanny had given in…
"The worst way to read a book is to childishly mix with the characters in it as if they were living people." Nabokov makes this comment in response to a complaint that Fanny, "subtle and sensitive," is in love with Edmund, who is "a prig," so nice he lets a rake have his way with the woman he's destined to be with. On the other hand, Nabokov points out that good women marry very boring men all the time, and Edmund is at least an honest, kind human being. The importance of this quote lies in its direct ties to Nabokov's introduction. If we are going to get a real meaning out of a book, we must always accept that a book is not reality but a highly stylized picture of reality where everyone behaves according to a certain invented logic. Mirroring ourselves after characters is mirroring ourselves after an illusion of a person who is not us…which is dangerous.
Mary's insensible argument. Unlike Edmund, Mary still does not understand Fanny, and her tact in this last face-to-face argument is that Henry is the catch of the season and Fanny shouldn't pass him up. Mary is so caught up in her vision that she mixes the best and worse qualities of Henry in a completely unconvincing manner, admitting his tendencies toward near-seduction but insisting that Fanny is the one to calm him down. In a great Austen coda, Fanny only smiles at this.
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On the coach to Portsmouth, Fanny and William do not talk about Henry. Nabokov calls this wise, and it is. Sir Thomas, Edmund, and Mary all have an interest in seeing Fanny specifically marry Henry, but William, who just loves his sister, has no interest in who her husband is as long as she is happy. Psychologically sound.
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