William Deresiewicz Read online

  usten’s encounter with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, and Byron revolutionized her art by revolutionizing her understanding of the self as it exists in time. But even as the novels of the major phase exhibit generic similarities that distinguish them from Austen’s earlier work and align them with the work of the Romantic poets, each also constitutes an extended exploration of one particular psychic mechanism or mode of relatedness that is likewise the bequest of these poets. In Mansfield Park, the mechanism in question is one I will call, taking the word from the novel itself, “substitution,” a set of psychic processes whereby individuals adjust to deprivation or loss by accepting alternative objects of desire. Thus, as will become clear, like the explorations in Emma and Persuasion, that in Mansfield Park is deeply rooted in Austen’s new understandings of mental and relational processes. In fact, the first form of substitution to consider is memory itself, for it is in the novel’s most concentrated exploration of memory, and specifically of memory as substitution, that its key Wordsworthian allusion appears. I have already glanced twice at the scene, the one that takes place in Fanny Price’s East room presided over by a transparency of Tintern Abbey. Mansfield Park is the novel in which Austen first discovers the new, largely Wordsworthian perspectives of her major phase,

  A

  and that scene, a rewriting of Wordsworth’s greatest lyric of memory and loss, is the announcement of that momentous discovery. The parallels between poem and scene are abundant and readily discovered.1 Just as the stretch of the Wye a few miles above Tintern Abbey is deeply intertwined with Wordsworth’s personal history, so is the East room with Fanny’s. Having been the Mansfield schoolroom at the time of her arrival, the room was abandoned by the Bertram girls and ceded to her use some six years later, two years prior to the start of the novel’s main action. It was at that point—Fanny was then sixteen—that she began to communicate with herself, like a contemporary teenager hanging posters in her bedroom, by surrounding herself with objects that gave outward form to her awakening impulses and understandings: “[h]er plants, her books … her works of charity and ingenuity” (126). But the things in the East room betoken more than present feelings. Unlike the Bertram sisters, free of sentiment and memory alike, Fanny desires to remain in communication with past feelings, as well, and so discards nothing that evokes them. Here she has accumulated a collection of powerfully evocative mementos: “work-boxes and nettingboxes,” “transparencies,” “family profiles,” “a small sketch of a ship sent four years ago from the Mediterranean by William,” and so forth (127). In short, “she could scarcely see an object in that room which had not an interesting remembrance connected with it” (126). Fanny has gradually transformed the East room into a palimpsest of personal history, a theater of memory that makes the past visible to present awareness and so grounds the self in time. This is very similar, of course, to the way the Wye valley functions for Wordsworth. In each case, the space in question becomes a physical projection of its beholder’s inner self and, as such, the place where that self is uniquely nourished and uniquely whole. Indeed, each space becomes animated with the affective and imaginative energies its beholder—or we might rather say, its possessor, its lover—brings to it. Of Fanny’s mementos we are told that “[e]very thing was a friend, or bore her thoughts to a friend” (126). As does Wordsworth, Fanny half-perceives, halfcreates the scene before her, animating and personifying the otherwise dead world of objects, making things into “friends,” merging the human and nonhuman, inner and outer, into a single realm. There are other parallels. The stages of personal history lived in relation to each place are the same: childhood, youth, and maturity—for Fanny, as

  Mansfield Park

  57

  we will see, is far closer to womanhood than she suspects—albeit the ages that mark each transition are far younger in her case, as accords with the significantly younger age at which women were expected to marry, and their experiential content for her, a sheltered young lady, and for Wordsworth, a worldly young man, are necessarily very different.2 Nor are the two spaces, the one a domestic interior, the other a verdant natural scene, as physically different as they first appear. The site of Wordsworth’s poem is, as has been noted, a fundamentally interior space, one of enclosures and “seclusion[s]” that make up an inner landscape (8), an “inland” or “in-land” space (4).3 And the East room, with its houseplants, is also verdant, or makes a gesture toward the verdant—a silly idea, this would be, were these not the only houseplants in all of Austen, appearing just here, of all places. Nor does memory function in the scene merely to recall the past, but rather to transform it. This is memory at its most Wordsworthian: “though there had been sometimes much of suffering to her … though she had known the pains of tyranny, of ridicule, and neglect, yet almost every recurrence of either had led to something consolatory … and the whole was now so blended together, so harmonized by distance, that every former affliction had its charm” (126). Memory functions here in just the way that distinguishes Wordsworth’s conception of it from that of the eighteenth century: not flatly recording the past, but transforming it, refiguring it, reinterpreting it, and in particular, as I noted in the previous chapter, redeeming experiences of suffering and loss by recognizing them as part of the texture of the self and its history.4 Memory can do all this, both poem and scene suggest, because it is an aesthetic faculty, one that “blend[s]” and “harmonize[s]” formerly discordant feelings into present “whole[s].” Austen’s “harmonized” echoes two moments in “Tintern Abbey”: “with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony … We see into the life of things” (ll. 4749) and “Thy memory [shall] be as a dwelling-place / For all sweet sounds and harmonies” (ll. 139142). Neither occurrence is perfectly lucid in Wordsworth, but he seems to mean very much what Austen does, though more clearly in the second instance, where the apparent redundancy of “sounds and harmonies” asks us to discover the difference between the two words. “Harmony,” the phrase suggests, is what memory creates out of the primary data of “sounds.” It is the integrated, charming, consolatory whole into which memory’s esemplastic power fuses whatever is jarring or untamed in immediate experience, be it Austen’s “suffering” and “pains” or Wordsworth’s “wild ecstasies” (l. 138). It is surely no accident that right after Austen tells us

  58 Mansfield Park

  about memory’s harmonizing power she shows us a whole array of pictorial representations: the transparencies, the profiles, the sketch of the ship— emblems of the mind’s representational capacity. It is from this harmonizing power that arises memory’s ability to act as what I am calling a substitute: something one seizes upon as ostensibly equivalent when one cannot have what one really wants. For Austen’s whole picture of the East room as a place of memory is developed in reference to the circumstance under which Fanny typically retreats there: “She could go there after any thing unpleasant below, and find immediate consolation” (126). Consolation in what? “[S]ome pursuit, or some train of thought at hand.—Her plants, her books … her works of charity and ingenuity.” These are solaces, not substitutes, but as the long passage winds itself out, it becomes clear that the most important, the most deeply felt form of compensation Fanny habitually turns to is that of memory itself, acting precisely as a substitute: [O]r if undisposed for employment, if nothing but musing would do, she could scarcely see an object in that room which had not an interesting remembrance connected with it.—Every thing was a friend, or bore her thoughts to a friend; and though there had been sometimes much of suffering to her—though her motives had been often misunderstood, her feelings disregarded, and her comprehension under valued; though she had known the pains of tyranny, of ridicule, and neglect, yet almost every recurrence of either had led to something consolatory; her Aunt Bertram had spoken for her, or Miss Lee had been encouraging, or what was yet more frequent or more dear—Edmund had been her champion and her friend;—he had supported her cause, or explained her meaning, he had told her not to
cry, or had given her some proof of affection which made her tears delightful—and the whole was now so blended together, so harmonized by distance, that every former affliction had its charm. I quote the passage at such length because its very syntax mimics the associative movement of Fanny’s mind, the seemingly endless sentence that comprises the bulk of it groping its way along as she gazes and muses her way back into memory, uncovering first one grief after another, then one consolation after another, until grief and consolation are finally fused together in a single memory. And what has become, meanwhile, of that “unpleasant thing below” that had sent her to the East room in the first place? It has been entirely forgotten.

  Mansfield Park 59

  Something very complex indeed is going on here. Fanny is not recollecting previous acts of consolation to serve in place of the consolation she wishes she were receiving in the present instance. Rather, a single composite memory of both pain and consolation displaces the present instance altogether. Consolation—the counterbalancing of present pain by present comfort—is not finally what happens here at all. Instead, memory—a harmonious aesthetic whole created by consciousness—entirely substitutes as an object of desire for whatever Fanny has been deprived of in the world outside her consciousness, be it liberty, esteem, or love. Wordsworth himself does something remarkably similar, for “Tintern Abbey” pivots on a declaration of just such a substitutional act: “for such loss, I would believe, / Abundant recompense” (ll. 8788). Attainable objects of desire displace ones that are no longer attainable. And what are these new objects, these substitutes? Surely, first, the powers the poet goes on to enumerate: his ability to “look on nature” in a new way and to feel in it a transfiguring presence. But the poem’s self-reflexive nature—the fact that, like The Prelude, it narrates the conditions of its own emergence, telling the story of how the poet became the person who writes it—suggests that Wordsworth’s most important form of recompense is the poem itself: an aesthetic unity that is also an act of recollection, a product of consciousness that fuses pain and consolation into a single harmonious whole. Wordsworth has lost the youthful energies memorialized in “Tintern Abbey,” but what he gets in return is “Tintern Abbey.” The poem thus exemplifies a principle central to all of Wordsworth’s poetry. As a number of critics have noted, the writing of every poem is, for Wordsworth, a substitutional act, an attempt to compensate for loss with the very thing that records that loss.5 But the very language with which Wordsworth announces this principle in “Tintern Abbey” points to the kind of self-deception substitution necessarily involves. Just as Fanny must conjure away her present reality before her substitutional strategy in the East room can be effective, so Wordsworth strikingly qualifies his central declaration. “I would believe”: in other words, I would like to believe, I choose to believe—a nearoxymoron that, as we will see again and again in our examination of Austen’s exploration of the intricacies of this great Wordsworthian intuition, perfectly captures substitution’s half-willed, half-instinctive operation. But perhaps all this is beside the point. After all, isn’t the image that supposedly signals the connection between Austen’s scene and Wordsworth’s poem merely an innocent reference to Gilpin and the picturesque: “three transparencies, made in a rage for transparencies, for the lower panes of one

  60 Mansfield Park

  window, where Tintern Abbey held its station between a cave in Italy, and a moonlight lake in Cumberland” (127)? As I argued in my first chapter, Austen does intend us to think of Gilpin—just as Wordsworth does—but only as the first half of a double allusion that incorporates both authors.6 And if Fanny herself regards these images as Gilpinesque, that only sharpens the irony; she may think she sees like Gilpin, but she really sees like Wordsworth, a kind of seeing that is indeed “a few miles above Tintern Abbey.“7 Gilpinesque vision bears about the same relationship to its Wordsworthian counterpart as Johnsonian memory, as discussed in the previous chapter, does to its. It is purely objective, purely “retinal,” with no admixture of memory or feeling, no deepening by the imagination, no dynamic quality. What is more, as we saw in the previous chapter when noting Catherine Morland’s rejection of Bath “as unworthy to make part of a landscape” (NA 99), it does not seek to enjoy a natural scene so much as to judge it against a set of preconceived ideas about the beautiful. Gilpin demonstrates the absurdities to which such a tyranny of expectation over experience can lead in the case, as it happens, of Tintern Abbey itself: “It has been an elegant Gothic pile; but it does not make that appearance as a distant object, which we expected. Tho the parts are beautiful, the whole is ill-shaped … and a mallet judiciously used (but who durst use it?) might be of service” in correcting these defects.8 Beauty as such is ultimately irrelevant to Wordsworthian vision, or rather, takes on a new meaning in relation to it. It was indeed its “beauteous forms” that first enamored the poet of the Wye valley, but the far deeper joy the locale now gives him is rooted in the scene’s place within his inner life (l. 22). Just so, of the East room the narrator tells us that Fanny “would not have changed its furniture for the handsomest in the house, though what had been originally plain, had suffered all the ill-usage of children” (126127). It may be true of Austen that “[a]t a very early age she was enamored of Gilpin on the Picturesque,” but neither she nor her heroine is a little girl anymore.9 Nor is the scene in the East room the only time we find memory performing a substitutive function in Mansfield Park. The other most important instance becomes recognizable only in retrospect, at the moment that function ceases to be necessary. It is also profoundly, startlingly counterintuitive. Her brother William has returned to Mansfield after an absence of seven years, but for all of Fanny’s “agitating happiness” at his arrival, “it was some time even before her happiness could be said to make her happy, before the disappointment inseparable from the alteration of person had vanished, and she could see in him the same William as before” (194195). The shock of

  Mansfield Park 61

  this unmild surprise is more than gentle. So effective a substitute object of attachment has Fanny’s mental image of her brother been during those seven years of his absence that she now distressingly finds herself preferring the substitute to its original. And the living William regains his place in her affections only because she is able to discern in him a resemblance to that mental image. Again, as in “Tintern Abbey” and the East room, we find that substitution involves the subordination of the external to the internal world. The artifices of memory, however, are only one of Mansfield Park’s many modes of substitution. Austen introduces us to any number of others right at the start, through the person of Mrs. Norris, one of the work’s great substituters. The novel’s introductory sketch sets out the story of the sisters Ward as a history of desires fulfilled and frustrated. Her younger sister having made a brilliant match, Miss Ward, advantaged by Maria’s new position and quite as handsome as she, expects to do almost as well. But six years pass, barren of eligible offers. Miss Ward must now be in her late twenties, that last-chance zone for Austenian women, and so finds herself “obliged to be attached” to the virtually fortuneless Rev. Norris (5). The choice of words here precisely exemplifies the idea of substitution: not “obliged to marry” or “obliged to accept” but “obliged to be attached”—to love, or at least desire, or least pretend to herself that she desires. It is not just that her will must submit; her affections must be coerced, cajoled, hoodwinked. The sequel is not hard to understand. The narrator’s reference to the Norrises’ “career of conjugal felicity” is, of course, bitterly ironic; their marriage is, in fact, loveless, as evidenced both by Mrs. Norris’s eventual reaction to her husband’s death (“[she] consoled herself … by considering that she could do very well without him” [21]) and by their failure to produce offspring. The prolificness of a fictional marriage often signals its degree of happiness, and that is certainly the case here: Mrs. Norris, who marries for money, bears no children; Mrs. Price, who marries for love (or at least f
or sexual attraction), bears ten; Lady Bertram, who marries for a combination of the two, bears four. It is no wonder that Mrs. Norris is such a bitter woman. Is there nothing she loves? Two things, in fact: “her love of money was equal to her love of directing.” Indeed, Austen explicitly tells us that money substitutes for the offspring she does not have, becoming “an object of that needful solicitude, which there were no children to supply.” As Mrs. Price bears a child a year, so Mrs. Norris “make[s] a yearly addition to an income which [she and her husband] had never lived up to” (9). Substitution rules Mrs. Norris’s life, and substitution motivates her to

  62 Mansfield Park

  bring Fanny to Mansfield. It is her idea, after all, not Sir Thomas’s. Fanny will become the child she never had—not the child to love, but the child to direct, to tyrannize. But a deeper motive seems to be at work, as well. It was Fanny’s mother, another Fanny, who married for love—who, just when Mrs. Norris was making her first, determining substitution, rubbed salt in her wounds by refusing to do the same. And it is Mrs. Norris who made sure that the breach between Fanny Ward and the rest of her family became as deep as possible, Mrs. Norris who hatches the scheme of bringing one of the Price children to Mansfield, and Mrs. Norris who decides that the child taken should be, not the oldest boy, William—the one whom Mrs. Price had put forward in her letter of supplication—but the oldest girl, the one whose name just happens to be the same as her mother’s. Mrs. Norris does not have Fanny Ward around to vent her spleen on, so she arranges for a substitute Fanny to be obtained for victimization. This act of substitution leads to the next, as Fanny Price herself is introduced to the psychic mechanism that will rule her existence at Mansfield. I mentioned more than once in the previous chapter that Fanny must undertake a gradual, grinding readjustment of feeling upon being transplanted from Portsmouth to Mansfield. She must force herself, that is, to substitute one home for another. The language could not be plainer: “Fanny … was fixed at Mansfield Park, and learning to transfer in its favor much of her attachment to her former home, grew up there not unhappily among her cousins” (18). “Not unhappily” (the phrase is an example of litotes, a figure of speech to which I will return) is a good sample of the degree of felicity that substitution tends to involve. Five years later we find Fanny declaring, “I love this house and every thing in it”—evidence both of substitution’s inexorable workings and the self-deception it invariably necessitates, for “every thing” would have to include not only Maria and Julia, about whom we have been told that Fanny “was often mortified by their treatment of her,” but even Mrs. Norris (23, 18). And that declaration of love involves a further irony, for she makes it in response to yet another threatened removal and thus threatened need for substitution, her impending transfer to Mrs. Norris’s house. The declaration comes while Edmund is trying to persuade her “constant little heart” that the change will conduce to her “ultimate happiness” (24, 25). That is, he is giving her a lesson in substitution. Or rather, yet another lesson, for Fanny had approached him with news of the plan because, she says, “you have often persuaded me into being reconciled to things that I disliked at first” (23). In fact, the whole conversation turns out to be moot, since Mrs. Norris has never had