William Deresiewicz Read online

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  any intention of taking her in, and in retrospect, Austen’s sole purpose in devising it seems to have been precisely to show just how central in Fanny’s life is the principle—we might even say, the ethos—of substitution. Before continuing my discussion of the forms and implications of substitution, I would like to explore its causes. What is it about the world of Mansfield Park that makes substitution so important a psychic process there? We already began to glimpse the answer in considering Mrs. Norris’s initial substitutional act: scarcity economics—more desire floating around than objects to satisfy it—and in particular, the scarcity economics of the marriage market. The novel opens with a merciless dissection of the way that market functions.10 Men bring wealth—the ability to provide pleasure—and women bring wealth as well as beauty, a way of providing pleasure more directly. (This may seem an excessively utilitarian way of thinking about beauty, but Austen has Fanny, speaking of Mary, make the connection explicit: “she is so extremely pretty, that I have great pleasure in looking at her” [54].) How much you get depends on how much you can give. Wealth and pleasure purchasing wealth and pleasure, with the exchange rates calculated to a nicety: “[Maria Ward’s] uncle … himself, allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim” (5). For the reader of Austen’s previous novels, the statement has a familiar ring; this is a world governed by the values of John Dashwood, who had judged Marianne’s illness to have dropped her market-price down to “five or six hundred a year” (SS 192). Mansfield Park puts a magnifying glass to what Austen’s early novels may have acknowledged but did everything they could to avoid dealing with. I argued in my first chapter that Austen had largely put Pride and Prejudice into the form we know as early as 1797, but she still came to Mansfield Park fresh from having condensed it and seen it through the press. Pride and Prejudice is that work of hers most fully ruled by the pleasure principle, a novel in which a virtually portionless young lady rejects one of the richest men in the kingdom only to be finally rewarded with him nonetheless. “The work is rather too light & bright & sparkling,” Austen famously wrote upon its publication, “it wants shade,“11 and from the very opening of Mansfield Park, the novel could hardly be a more direct corrective, more obviously a work in which reality returns to claim its own. “Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon,” the first sentence tells us, “had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park.” “Captivate,” that wicked double entendre, points to the thematics of slavery that have been so well discussed of late in the critical literature, but it points first of all to the fact that marriage in this

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  world is, at least initially, a mutual enslavement, a buying and selling of human beings on both sides.12 It is no wonder that the language of courtship here is so much the language of commerce: “Miss Bertram’s engagement made [Henry] in equity the property of Julia” (38); “Miss Price had not been brought up to the trade of coming out” (220; emphasis in the original). Nor is it a wonder that some suspect the game is fixed. Marriage, Mary says, “is, of all transactions, the one in which people expect most from others, and are least honest themselves.” Mrs. Grant’s reply, the novel’s most explicit statement of the principle of substitution, is breathtaking in its cynicism: “if one scheme of happiness fails”—that is, if you were cheated out of the marriage you thought you were getting—“human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better; we find comfort somewhere” (40). “Somewhere,” indeed—substitution in its simplest mode. But Mary, ever the clever young woman, has a better “scheme.” Rather than teaching herself to desire something else should she be deprived of her first object, she makes sure that her initial “calculation” is the right one. We might call this more insidious form of substitution by the appropriately oxymoronic name of “prudential desire”: “[Mary] had felt an early presentiment that she should like the eldest best. She knew it was her way” (41; emphasis in the original). Nor are the young man and woman the only ones involved in the marriage market’s transactions. Sir Thomas, practicing some prudential desire of his own on behalf of his elder daughter, “intend[s] to value [Mr. Rushworth] very highly” (156). And if young women must choose a husband, younger sons, for their livelihood, must choose a career. How fortunate, then, that Edmund had “no natural disinclination” to overcome (litotes, again) in deciding to be a clergyman, since his father has kept a very good living—two, actually, at first—for him to come into (91). Scarcity economics: there may not be “so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them,” but there also are not so many estates and well-paying positions as there are fine young men to deserve them (5). We are shocked when Mary wishes out loud for Tom’s death, less so, for some reason, when William Price wishes for that of his first lieutenant. What happened to that other living, by the way, the one that was also to have been Edmund’s? His brother had consumed it. Tom, “feel[ing] himself born only for expense and enjoyment,” had become extravagant, and so “the younger brother must help to pay for the pleasures of the elder” (16, 21). How much must he pay? “You have robbed Edmund,” his father tells Tom, “for ten, twenty, thirty years, perhaps for life, of more than half the income

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  which ought to be his” (21). In retrospect, he may have robbed him of Mary, as well. Scarcity economics: what one eats, the other cannot eat. This ugly business points to two more important things about Mansfield Park: how preoccupied its characters are with pleasure, and how unequal they each are in the getting of it. In none other of Austen’s novels does the word “pleasure” appear so frequently or so prominently—to cite only a couple of the more prominent instances, the young people stroll through Rushworth’s “pleasure-grounds” and Mary teases Henry about the yearly cost of his “menus plaisirs” (75, 188)—and in none other does pleasure figure so largely among the characters’ concerns. All of Austen’s novels take place among what we would have to call the idle rich, but these are the idlest and the richest. The first volume is largely taken up with two elaborate schemes of pleasure on the part of the young people, the visit to Sotherton and the theatricals. True, Emma also features a number of such schemes in quick succession—the ball, the visit to Donwell Abbey, the excursion to Box Hill—but the contrast is instructive. There, in Austen’s most communitarian novel, the primary purpose of such schemes is not so much the pleasure they provide as the excuse they afford to collect everyone together. In Mansfield Park, their primary purpose is most certainly the pleasure itself, and everyone spends a lot of time arguing about who is to have the most, or at least the kind they like best—who is to sit where during the drive to Sotherton, who is to get which role in the play, and so forth. Those with the most money tend to do best. Henry, having been brought up “in a school of luxury and epicurism,” is our man of pleasure par excellence (387). Even a good sermon is valued by him as “a capital gratification” (282). As for his sister, whose idea of improving an estate is to hire someone to “give me as much beauty as he could for my money” (the logic of the male position in the marriage market), she declares that “[n]othing ever fatigues me, but doing what I do not like” (49, 58). This is life in the jungle, dressed up with fine manners and wit. And the beasts must feed: Dr. Grant is little more than a running joke about appetite; as for Henry, Fanny, schooled in the ways of Mansfield, rejoices in Portsmouth that he won’t be exposing himself to her mother’s servant’s cooking, but rather treating himself to “the best dinner that a capital inn afforded” (341342). But the choicest example of the paramount importance of the pleasures of the table has to be what Lady Bertram says to her sons as they argue over the propriety of the theatricals: “Do not act anything improper my dear … Sir Thomas would not like it.—Fanny, ring the bell; I must have my dinner” (118). Yet while men of property and independently wealthy women or those

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  already we
ll-married do relatively well, the less advantaged—Edmund, Maria, Julia, Mrs. Norris, Yates (a younger son)—do less well, and Fanny does least well of all. In a social world that revolves around the getting of pleasure, desire will always be particularly keen, its frustration particularly bitter. And in a social world so very particular about how much pleasure each person, depending on their class, rank, gender, and birth-order, is entitled to (“[Edmund] is certainly well off for a cadet of even a Baronet’s family,” Henry tells us [189]), those at the lower reaches of the pecking order will do well to develop the habit of wanting what they can get—that is, of engaging in substitution. In Fanny’s case, wanting what she can get largely comes to mean not wanting at all. In the world of Mansfield, those who have no power of choice are conveniently regarded as having no desires or preferences in the first place. “[I]t will be just the same to Miss Lee,” Mrs. Norris helpfully notes of the Mansfield governess, “whether she has three girls to teach, or only two” (10). Since Fanny is little more than a glorified servant (“Fanny, ring the bell”), she becomes “totally unused to hav[ing] her pleasure consulted, or to hav[ing] anything take place at all in the way she could desire” (232). So ingrained are the “habits of submission” in her personality as to have become virtually physiological (296). When satisfaction does occasionally come her way—“he found her trembling with joy”—her body can barely contain it (193). Her mouth, that orifice of appetite and self-assertion, is a particular problem. We often find her unable to speak her gratitude even for small favors or, in this novel of eaters, to swallow—to take pleasure, to develop desire. Her characteristic word is “no,” her use of it an emblem not of will but of self-denial: from her first words (“no, no—not at all—no, thank you” [14]), to her meek disavowal of her desire to ride the horse that had been placed at her disposal (“No, I don’t know, not if you want the mare” [59]), to that central (and fraudulent) disavowal of desire, the word she pronounces—or rather, cannot quite get herself to pronounce—when Sir Thomas asks her if she is rejecting Henry because her affections are already engaged: “He saw her lips formed into a no, though the sound was inarticulate, but her face was like scarlet” (261). That rejection points to the one, merely negative, expression of desire Fanny has left her: refusal. Like a Richardsonian heroine, but very much unlike an Austenian one, all she can say is “no.” Fanny’s position as an utter dependent and her virtual lack of desire come together in still another psychological dynamic—really another form of substitution, but one peculiar to Fanny—that Austen patterns into her heroine’s

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  life at Mansfield. We might call this one “emotional economics,” because it makes Fanny’s feelings into a kind of currency that she must use to repay her debt to the Bertrams.13 (Since she can never fully repay it, though, the system places her emotions in perpetual hock.) The principle is laid down before she even crosses the Mansfield threshold, and it is laid down, not surprisingly, by Mrs. Norris: “Mrs. Norris had been talking to her the whole way from Northampton of her wonderful good fortune, and of the extraordinary degree of gratitude and good behavior which it ought to produce … of its being a wicked thing for her not to be happy” (13). No matter what feelings Fanny might want to feel, love, gratitude, obedience, and cheerfulness are the ones she must substitute for them. What might otherwise be loathed must be loved; what might otherwise be rejected must be embraced. We understand now with greater precision how Fanny “learn[s] to transfer in [Mansfield’s] favor much of her attachment to her former home,” how she comes to “love this house and every thing in it,” even Maria, Julia, and Mrs. Norris. The Bertram children already understand, no doubt for good reason, that money and feelings are interchangeable currencies, that presents of cash or things represent love and ought to be reciprocated with gratitude. Maria and Julia immediately make Fanny “a generous present of some of their least valued toys,” and Edmund overwhelms her by enclosing half a guinea in her first letter to William (14). Of course, all the many “work-boxes and nettingboxes” that accumulate in the East room are products of the same logic. And in that same scene of the half-guinea, the scene that cements her everlasting love for him, Edmund also gives Fanny some further instruction in emotional economics, offering “a great deal of good advice” about “being as merry as possible” (16). As in the scene in which he tries to persuade her that moving in with Mrs. Norris would really be quite a happy thing, Edmund here acts as the acceptable face of Mansfield’s harshest imperatives—as a younger son, no inapt apostle of substitution. Austen does nothing to conceal the operations of emotional economics; the language of emotion, like that of marriage, becomes the language of commerce: “she regarded her cousin … as entitled to such gratitude from her, as no feelings could be strong enough to pay” (33). It should be no surprise that Fanny so often experiences more gratitude than her body can handle. It is in its ability to mobilize Fanny’s feelings of obedience that emotional economics provides its real payoff for her creditors. While we looked at the scene in the East room in terms of the habitual role the place plays in Fanny’s emotional life, the description of that generic situation functions as a prelude to the narration of one specific episode. It is an episode in which,

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  as I will discuss more fully below, substitution eventually fails to function, but not because the imperatives of emotional economics make themselves felt with anything less than full force. Fanny has just refused to participate in the theatricals, the first time she has ever asserted her will against the Bertrams’. “I shall think her a very obstinate, ungrateful girl,” her Aunt Norris has declared, “if she does not do what her Aunt, and Cousins wish her—very ungrateful indeed, considering who and what she is” (123). Already by the time she reaches her sanctum, Fanny “had begun to feel undecided as to what she ought to do” (127; emphasis in the original). When she does get there, the various objects with which she has been wont to condole as with friends come instead to accuse her: “as she looked around her, the claims of her cousins to being obliged, were strengthened by the sight of present upon present that she had received from them” (127). It is almost enough to break her resolution, and it prefigures a scene of essentially the same structure but of even greater import. The setting is again the East room, where Sir Thomas has sought Fanny out to deliver the glad news of Henry’s proposal. But the exchange quickly degenerates into her uncle’s attempt to dictate to Fanny what her feelings ought to be on the occasion, and his long speech of rebuke, which utterly crushes her spirit, culminates in that most terrible of words, “ingratitude” (263; emphasis in the original). This, Sir Thomas clearly feels, is Fanny’s big chance to repay what she owes him, or at least, as much of it as she will ever be able to. If there is any time to teach herself to want what is being offered, it is now. As for Sir Thomas, he is himself a creature of substitution, though not in an obvious way. If one thing stands beside pleasure as the supreme value in the world of Mansfield Park, it is comfort. The word and its derivatives appear as frequently as do “pleasure” and its, and in positions of as great a prominence. Fanny’s return to Mansfield after the cataclysm of the elopement extorts from Edmund the exclamation, “My Fanny—my only sister— my only comfort now,” and from Lady Bertram, the rather odd one, doubly emphasized by being placed at the end of a chapter, of “Dear Fanny! now I shall be comfortable” (367, 369). Being comfortable is indeed Mansfield’s highest ideal—Mansfield as distinct from the Crawfords. What is so exciting for the Bertram children about the arrival of Henry and Mary, in fact, is precisely that they bring with them a more intense and, for all but Tom, a hitherto unsuspected type of gratification, pleasure as opposed to comfort. In plainer language, they know how to have fun, and as long as Sir Thomas is absent and the Crawford ethos rules Mansfield, fun is what everyone has, or at least tries to.

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  But when Sir Thomas returns, what does he immediately declare but his “value for domestic tranqu
illity, for a home which shuts out noisy pleasures” (156)? “A home which shuts out”: the Mansfield ideal, a purely negative one of happiness as that which causes no “agitation” or “vexation” or “trouble,” Mansfield’s great evils (and precisely those attendant on the young people’s schemes of pleasure during Sir Thomas’s absence). To cite only one of many examples, the Bertrams are distressed to find, upon Fanny’s arrival, that her “little rusticities and awkwardnesses” make “grievous inroads on the tranquillity of all,” but soon Sir Thomas and Mrs. Norris are relieved to find that she “seemed likely to give them little trouble” (16). “Tranquillity”: halfasleep at her station on the sofa, Lady Bertram epitomizes the life of comfort as Henry does the life of pleasure. As “little trouble” as possible: what Sir Thomas, to his eventual sorrow, most wants his children to be. This purely passive, negative ideal of comfort, as opposed to the active, positive one of pleasure, pervades Mansfield’s very language, for it stands behind the trope we have already stumbled upon twice, litotes. It is Mansfield’s characteristic turn of phrase, signifying not the presence of the wanted but the absence of the unwanted.14 Dozens of examples may be cited: “not unamused,” “not unwilling,” “not undesirable,” “less unpleasant,” “less unreasonable,” and the word Sir Thomas twice uses to describe Henry’s proposal, “unexceptionable.” “Not un-“: the very spirit of Mansfield, that so terribly “not un-” kind of a place. No wonder the kids are so bored. Comfort, as we just said, is a lot less fun than pleasure. In fact, it is the position one falls back on when one finds pleasure to be too threatening—too agitating, too volatile, above all, too expensive. Sir Thomas, middle-aged and instinctively conservative, as we saw in the previous chapter, fears the pleasure-seeking passions of youth, and as a man whose position in the world rests on the relatively insecure foundation of mercantile wealth, he also has strong practical reasons for being averse to expense and risk.15 Pleasure is what he might hunger for had he the landed wealth of a Henry Crawford. Instead, he has unconsciously adjusted his desires in favor of a pallid substitute, comfort. Does Austen think of it as pallid? As about many of the most important issues raised by her later work, she appears to be ambivalent. On the one hand, the novel makes comfort its explicit authorial ideal. “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery,” the final chapter begins. “I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort” (380). So too, just a few pages earlier, the narrator had named “an escape from many certain evils” as the “best of