After a long break from Jane Austen literature, I reentered British high society by diving into one of her under-appreciated and more controversial novels: Mansfield Park.
As a young girl from a poor family, Fanny Price is sent to live on the large estate belonging to her Aunt and Uncle Bertram. Timid and neurotic, Fanny suffers the humiliation of being lower in status compared to the well-bred people around her; nevertheless, she falls in love with her cousin, Edmund. Much to her chagrin, Fanny may not get the match she desires. When Edmund’s affections are captured by the dazzling, London-bred Mary Crawford and Mary’s brother, Henry, begins to send waves of discomfort through the family with his flirtatious nature, the stable social hierarchy preserved within Mansfield Park begins to topple.
Compared to novels like Pride & Prejudice whose protagonists undoubtedly charm readers and whose endings are decidedly satisfying, Mansfield Park takes a more complicated approach to describing human nature. The Crawford siblings are beguiling, yet also ignorant and cruel; the Bertram family is just as snobbish, indolent, and insecure as they are models of a well-run household; and Fanny, for all her timidity, has a depth of feeling and sharp perceptiveness that make her quite wise and empathetic. When confronted with characters who are equal parts “good” and “bad,” we must acknowledge a reality Austen clearly sought to communicate to her audiences while she was embracing her status as an old maid later in life: there is no such thing as a “perfect person” for whom wit, charm, and decent values always exist harmoniously.
With the characters’ flaws and vices front and center, it’s easy to appreciate one of Austen’s greatest talents as a fiction writer: capturing the vivid richness of characters’ internal lives and the contrast between internal life and external interactions. This is particularly true of Fanny, whose sensitivity to social dynamics allows her to easily pick up on Edmund’s uncertainty about Mary Crawford’s feelings or Henry Crawford’s inappropriate attentiveness toward the betrothed Maria. Austen often jumps between two characters in the same conversation, giving readers a fascinating window into each character’s separate (and sometimes conflicting) thoughts.
Austen also presents us with a dichotomy between two different social spheres: the order and tradition represented by Mansfield Park and the sensational cosmopolitanism represented by the Crawford siblings. She then overturns this dichotomy by revealing that Mansfield Park is full of decaying morality and the Crawford siblings are actually somewhat capable of the care, consideration, and sensitivity so highly prized by Fanny and her countryside contemporaries. In other words, the light has a bit of darkness in it and the darkness has a bit of light in it—nobody can be purely good or purely evil.
While no character in Mansfield Park fully captured my sympathies for the reasons I previously mentioned, I am very impressed by Austen’s frankness in describing people in all their glory and debauchery. Like her other novels, Mansfield Park reminds us to drill beneath the surface of the social order and take a closer look at the individuals existing within it.
