William Deresiewicz Read online

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  blessings” (370). Substitution itself, the larger principle of which the ideal of comfort forms a part, seems similarly authorized as a good, specifically an ethical good—for it is one of the novel’s highest lessons that only those can feel who know what it means to do without. Those who do nothing but pursue pleasure—Henry, Admiral Crawford, Dr. Grant—become monsters; those who refuse to accept the limitations their situation in life imposes on their pleasure—Maria, Julia, Yates—become miserable. Pleasure-seeking establishes a psychic economy in which “dullness” ever threatens and “amusement” becomes an addiction (96). It is empty and cruel and, in its constant stoking of desire, inherently self-defeating. During the period of the theatricals, “[s]o far from being all satisfied and all enjoying, [Fanny] found every body requiring something they had not, and giving occasion of discontent to the others” (136137). The only hell the wicked require, it seems, is one another’s company. So yes, Mansfield Park makes a strong case that substitution, the acceptance and even embrace of diminished expectations, is better than its alternative, the pursuit of one’s true objects of desire—but only in the world of Mansfield Park. It is the best thing under the circumstances, but what does that say about the circumstances? Implicit in Austen’s stoic endorsement of an ethic of making-the-best-of-it is a deep despair at a world that demands such an ethic in the first place, a world of scarcity economics and jealously guarded economic prerogatives.16 In discussing the social conditions that make substitution so central a psychic process in Mansfield Park, I have been considering issues peculiar to Austen’s fictional world. But in turning now to the novel’s most complex and disturbing forms of that process, we will see, as we did with that first scene in the East room, just how deeply informed by the Wordsworthian thematics of loss and compensation is Austen’s exploration of it. Far from being specific to “Tintern Abbey,” substitutional logics and mechanisms would have greeted Austen throughout Wordsworth’s poetry. Indeed, the closest link between Austenian and Wordsworthian substitution concerns the presence in Mansfield Park of what I will call “fetishes”: objects invested with extraordinary emotional power, and even felt, totemically, as possessing a life or spirit of their own, through their association with an individual in some way absent or unattainable. The most obvious, though least powerful examples are those very “work-boxes and nettingboxes” and other objects in the East room. More potent fetishes are to be found in the trio of gifts Fanny wears to the ball—William’s cross, Henry and Mary’s necklace,

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  Edmund’s chain; in the scrap of paper on which Edmund had been writing the note that would have accompanied that chain; and in the much-foughtover silver knife that makes an otherwise inexplicable appearance as a narrative focus in the Portsmouth section. The investment of psychic energy in some place or thing, some image that the mind can fix on and imaginatively manipulate: what is this but the idea of the omphalos developed by Geoffrey Hartman in his seminal work on the poet?17 It is true that Hartman’s “omphalos feeling” necessarily attaches to a place, some structure or spot of ground, but in discussing Lyrical Ballads in particular, he widens this notion of psychic clinging to include other kinds of fixation: “This physical or imaginative cleaving … results from a separation … They cleave,” he says of the protagonists of Lyrical Ballads and similar poems, “to one thing or idea in order to be saved from a still deeper sense of separation.“18 That deeper sense of separation, for Hartman, is from Nature as a whole, but clearly such poems can be read as dealing exclusively with the trauma of that first separation, the loss of some supremely beloved object, be it a child, a native place, or something else. The cleaved-to thing—Michael’s unfinished sheep-fold, the sailor’s mother’s bird—betokens the lost beloved. Like a memory, it stands in for what it represents, but being, unlike a memory, a physical object, it makes itself available all the more readily as a substitute focus for the emotional energy that can no longer be lavished on the beloved. Hence the fetish’s elevation to ritual or even magical status. The sailor’s mother, holding the bird beneath her cloak—that is, against her breast— bestows on it the maternal affection she can no longer give her son, shielding it from the “raw,” “wet,” “foggy,” day as she was unable to shield him on the high seas (ll. 12). The picture is a pathetic one, undercutting the poet’s first view of the woman as “majestic” and full of “strength” and “dignity,” for it suggests an inability to accept her loss, to distinguish emotionally between son and bird, and thus a desire magically to assert control over that which has already slipped out of her control (ll. 5, 10). As for Michael, he swings between the need to deny the loss of his son by carrying on with his half of the covenant that Luke has already broken (an activity, the building of the sheep-fold, that, like the sailor’s mother’s guarding of the cage, involves the emblematic sheltering of innocent animal life) and the baffled halfacceptance of that loss suggested by his inability, on many days, so to carry on, his contrary need to commune in stillness with the wreck of his hopes. Two forms of ritual action, the building and the sitting, both tied to the psychic focus of the sheep-fold. In both poems, crucially, the grieving parent is

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  denied the chance to see the physical remains of the lost son (Luke is not even dead), a circumstance that makes possible the denial we have just looked at and opens the way for the fetish object to serve as a substitute—in a sense, as a substitute for the body. In choosing the term “fetish” I am of course importing Freudian overtones, willy-nilly, into my argument. Freud can help us here, but not in the most obvious way. His theory of the fetish as a perversion of the sexual instinct—that it is a replacement for the maternal phallus—is not particularly useful, but he also notes that “[a] certain degree of fetishism is … habitually present in normal love, especially in those stages of it in which the normal sexual aim seems unattainable or its fulfillment prevented.“19 This clearly describes Fanny’s attachment to the cross, chain, and scrap of paper; in Freudian terms, substitution is often close to and sometimes identical to sublimation. But Freud’s example of this normal kind of fetishism is interesting in itself. It comes from Faust, part I: “Get me a kerchief from her breast, / A garter that her knee has pressed.“20 Faust I is almost exactly contemporaneous with Mansfield Park. The point is not that Goethe may have influenced Austen—he almost certainly did not—but that both authors wrote at a time when ornaments and other luxury goods were coming to assume a role of unprecedented importance in the social and imaginative lives of the European middle and upper classes.21 As someone very well acquainted with Bath, the first modern town designed exclusively as a place of consumption, Austen would have been highly aware of this new sensitivity to consumer goods—a sensitivity that is indeed registered throughout her letters and novels.22 It is no coincidence that, other than Edmund’s scrap of paper, all the fetishes in Mansfield Park are luxury items. A better guide to these matters than Freud is David Simpson, who outlines the late-eighteenth-century debate over the taste for ornament in his book on fetishism and the imagination. Of special concern to this debate— which embraced social, moral, economic, and political questions and engaged such thinkers as Ferguson, Smith, Godwin, Rousseau, and Hegel— was the tendency of this taste for the tokens of wealth, status, and rank to set up such “trinkets and luxuries” as objects of veneration in their own right— that is, as fetishes, images which their worshipers have themselves created and empowered.23 But Simpson’s main interest here is to use this debate to contextualize Wordsworth’s concern with the fetishistic dangers of the mind’s own figurative power—its tendency so to believe in the reality of its creations as to allow them finally to supplant the objects they arise to represent. As Simpson puts it in an earlier study, “the mind’s figurative faculty,”

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  for Wordsworth, “exists to make bearable the experience of loss” and thus to reintegrate the self into the world.
But if it performs this task too completely—as it does in so many of his poems and pointedly avoids doing in others—it risks “the death-in-life of fetishism (fixation on one exclusive object, to which all mental energies are directed).“24 We return here to Hartman, with a sharpened sense of the ubiquity in Wordsworth of the substitutional act.25 Of course, there are marked differences between the fetishes in Mansfield Park and those in Wordsworth. Most of the former betoken individuals unattainable rather than dead; like most of the novel’s substitutions, they redress deprivation rather than loss in the purest sense. Nor are any of these fetishes clung to with the single-mindedness or intensity Hartman and Simpson describe. But all this only means that Austen pursued the start Wordsworth had given her imagination in her own direction, adapting what she found in his poems to the purposes of her own novelistic world. It is a world much more densely social than that of Wordsworth’s lyrics, one that makes compromises and adjustments continually necessary. Wordsworth’s figures, including that of the poet himself, live solitary or virtually solitary lives; their passions burn with a hard, gemlike flame. Austen’s characters live in a tight web of social relations, obligations, and expectations. Fanny is an extremely passionate young woman—to my mind, the most passionate figure Austen ever created—but her passions are necessarily divided: among many impulses, many people, many objects. The first of those objects are the ones in the East room, each of which, we may recall, either bears Fanny’s thoughts to a friend or is itself a “friend.” A strange personification, this second possibility, one made more pointed by the inclusion among these objects of a collection of family profiles, as if the Bertrams themselves were present as spirits inhabiting the things they have given her. Indeed, those two possibilities can be understood as shading into each other: those things are friends, we might say, which so forcefully bear Fanny’s thoughts to friends that she has developed an independent emotional relationship with them. We can see how this situation would have arisen. Those “friends” in the East room are a lot more reliable than the ones downstairs. Since the latter so often offer her nothing but tyranny and ridicule and neglect, Fanny has taken to managing her relationships with them imaginatively, silently improvising happy endings to unpleasant scenes with the help of her little Maria-puppets and Julia-puppets and Edmund-puppets. What reality will not offer she can try to coax her fetishes into providing.

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  Retreating to her sanctum during the theatricals, she hopes “to see if by looking at Edmund’s profile she could catch any of his counsel”—an attempt at imaginative manipulation pointedly undercut by the appearance of the young man himself just a paragraph later to inform her that he, too, plans to take part in the theatricals. In the meantime, as we have seen, her other fetishes have turned on her with a vengeance, the sight of her cousins’ presents so reinforcing their givers’ claims to obedience that it is as if she can literally hear those embodied Bertrams spirits rebuking her. Her imagination, it turns out, has indeed endowed these fetishes with a life and power of their own. Needless to say, there is something terribly sad about this befriending of things, suggesting the lonely girl in need of true friends. That this mediation of human relationships through relationships with objects—this substitution of things for people—has become one of the most deeply ingrained habits of Fanny’s psychic repertoire we soon see, as she seeks to manage her feelings during the most emotionally fraught time of her life. Though never named as such, Fanny’s ball is an event she undoubtedly hoped would never have to happen, her “coming out” into society. The young woman who shrinks from notice, who has only very recently begun to adjust to “the idea of being worth looking at” (165), will for the first time be on display as an object of observation and desire. Other pressures are bearing on her as well. Henry’s attentions have been too pronounced to escape notice. Edmund and Mary’s courtship has been gaining momentum. William’s arrival, as we have seen, has brought disappointment as well as delight. But her brother has also brought with him what is to be her symbolic defense against the threats of the ballroom in general and Henry in particular. As painfully uncertain as she is about how to dress for the event, the one thing she has decided is that she will wear the amber cross that William bought her in Sicily. It is to be a kind of magic amulet, symbolizing her desire to be shielded from the gaze of men, to remain inviolable, presexual, for it is both, in its association with William, an emblem of childhood and, in its association with Catholicism, an emblem of virginity. It is precisely because Fanny is so attuned to the symbolic and emotional power of such tokens that she is suspicious—correctly, as it turns out—of Mary’s offer of the necklace. Mary herself not only has so many “trinkets and luxuries” that none of them attracts much feeling, she is so cavalier about feeling itself, so mobile in her attachments, that feelings become as transferable as those trinkets themselves. “[W]ith the necklace,” she tells Fanny, “I make over to you all the duty of remembering the original giver” (214). But Fanny, of all people, understands that gifts not only confer obligations

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  but carry the ghostly, controlling presence of their giver. Possessing—for her, at least—all too easily slips over into being possessed. As preparations for the ball, that nexus of desire and display, pick up pace, the fetishes start to come fast and thick. With the next one, Edmund’s note, Fanny begins to win back some control over her situation, though, like that exerted by the sailor’s mother, it is purely imaginative and imaginary. Because the note is the novel’s one fetish that has no material value—the one, in other words, over which no one will contest possession or meaning—it is the one most docile to Fanny’s manipulative intentions. The gods have dropped in her lap an object upon which she can unload all her suppressed romantic feelings for her cousin. The note is “a treasure beyond all her hopes”; even better than an object, it is a text, and thus affords apparently endless opportunity for imaginative overreading. “My very dear Fanny,” it reads, “you must do me the favor to accept” (219)—and we can almost hear her completing the unfinished sentence with the word “me.” So excessive is Fanny’s response—“there was a felicity in the flow of the first four words, in the arrangement of `My very dear Fanny,’ which she could have looked at for ever”—that as with the analogous incident in Emma, Harriet’s ceremonial burning of her “Most precious” court plaister and pencilstub, Austen treats the moment with a touch of comedy (E 280281).26 But there is nothing comic about her treatment of what soon follows; indeed, her symbolism becomes uniquely overt and uniquely sexual, as she collaborates with her heroine to create a fetish of supreme significatory power. While Henry’s necklace will not go through the ring of the cross, Edmund’s chain will, a circumstance that expresses both Fanny’s desired and Austen’s eventual answer to the question of which of the two men will earn the right to chain her up in marriage, to put his long, hard thing through the hole in the cross of her still childish (still virginal) body—or to make that hole, we might say, remembering Henry’s project of “making a small hole” in Fanny’s heart, with its overtones of dehymenization (191). I am not suggesting that Fanny recognizes this symbolic dimension of the circumstances Austen has created, but she does capitalize on those circumstances to create a symbolic system of her own, finally repossessing the tokens—and thus, imaginatively, the people—that had slipped out of her control: “having with delightful feelings joined the chain and the cross, those memorials of the two most beloved of her heart, those dearest tokens so formed for each other by every thing real and imaginary—and put them around her neck, and seen and felt how full of William and Edmund they were, she was able without an effort to resolve on wearing Miss Crawford’s necklace too” (224).