" '... But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct.--No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays, without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.'

'... His celebrated passages are quoted by everybody; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare, use his similies, and describe with his descriptions; ...' "

Mansfield Park, Chapter III, Volume 3

Sir Thomas is the King Lear of Mansfield Park and Fanny Price is his Cordelia. I don't mean that in any strict sense. Please don't think me so foolish as to propose that Jane Austen borrowed so very much from the Shakespeare tragedy. I merely want to evoke some sense of that - there are some elements of Cordelia and Lear in the Mansfield characters. Fanny saw all that was dishonorable and persisted in doing the honorable thing herself. And Fanny maintained her integrity while under a great deal of pressure from Sir Thomas to act differently. It was the fate of Sir Thomas to learn the guilt of his two natural daughters, and that his own values were to be carried into the next generation, instead, by that adopted-daughter/niece for whom he had had limited expectations, and against whom he had raged his disapproval and disappointment.

Sir Thomas would have been saved from this fate if he had had an alert and communicative wife. For it had been Lady Bertram who was always with the children and best positioned to observe their development, attachments, and actions. But Jane Austen sealed Sir Thomas in his role when our Lady provided a most lethargic and self-involved Lady Bertram - more Jane Austen logic. Lady Bertram was not a bad women and she loved Fanny, perhaps more than she loved her two daughters; but, in her case, that was not the same thing as having taken much notice of Fanny.

Sir Thomas was as a river to the Price family, but he was not a perfect man - hey, this is a Jane-Austen character. He staid aloof from Fanny, and he said some unintentionally hurtful things and made her weep. For example, just before he left for the West Indies, he informed Fanny that she may invite her brother William to Mansfield. The happiest of news because, by that time, Fanny had not seen her brother for eight years.

"... --and would he only have smiled upon her and called her 'my dear Fanny' while he said it, every former frown or cold address might have been forgotten. But he ended his speech in a way to sink her into sad mortification, by adding, 'If William does come to Mansfield, I hope you may be able to convince him that the many years that have passed since you parted, have not been spent on your side entirely without improvement--though I fear he must find his sister at sixteen in some respects too much like his sister at ten.' She cried bitterly over this reflection when her uncle was gone; and her cousins, on seeing her with red eyes, set her down as a hypocrite."

Chapter V, Volume 1

How could such a good man have made such a blunder? But Jane Austen is right you know - good men blunder too.

Something happened on that journey to the West Indies. We are not told what, and are only made aware of some reflection, some turning of mind when entering the room with Fanny to greet her uncle on his return, we overhear him say, "But where is Fanny?--Why do not I see my little Fanny?". And this before he would learn from Edmund just how much respect he owed his little Fanny Price.

A first, Sir Thomas was pleased with Maria's engagement to Rushworth, who was far richer than himself. But then, after a chance to become better acquainted with Rushworth, Sir Thomas became puzzled, closely questioned Maria on the matter, and made clear that he would not object if she were to cancel the engagement. Maria lied and convinced her father that she wanted the marriage, and the father was happy to be convinced because the desirabilty of the match overcame his better judgment. He would pay for this failed courage of conviction.

Along with his rapidly growing awareness of Fanny's qualities, Sir Thomas noticed Crawford's attentions to Fanny - what happiness! what a match! Sir Thomas noticed no particularity on Fanny's part, but thought that well bred of her. The patriarch then did as much to promote that relationship as good manners would allow. We can imagine the old man's joy when Crawford came to him and announced his intentions. And Crawford misled Sir Thomas - as he had misled himself - by suggesting that Fanny must be willing to make the match herself. The delighted Sir Thomas then hurried to the East Room to tell Fanny of this happy news, and then to bring her to Crawford and join her hand to his.

A series of shocks was to greet the old man in the East Room. First he was startled to find that Fanny had no fire, had never had a fire. Inquiry led him to understand that this was the doing of Aunt Norris. He excused the aunt to Fanny; we are led to understand that he blamed himself in part because, when they had first discussed taking in Fanny, Sir Thomas had said that some "distinctions" should be made in the case of the niece. (He was saddened that his call for distinctions would be taken to this extreme.) But then, he was even more dumbfounded to learn that Fanny had refused Crawford in no uncertain terms and she was not about to relent.

Sir Thomas was reeling. There is painful passage in which the old man asked for assurance that Fanny did not love Edmund. It was too painful a thought for him; he could not be explicit. Fanny lied to him when she allowed him to think her affections did not lie in that forbidden direction. It was all between the lines, but it was a lie nevertheless. And she would be forced to mislead again - or not fully inform when Sir Thomas searched in another direction.

"... 'Have you any reason, child, to think ill of Mr. Crawford's temper?'

'No, Sir'

She longed to add, 'but of his principles I have;' ..."

Chapter I, Volume 3

But she could not so reply, because to do so, she would have to implicate her cousins, the daughters of Sir Thomas.

And then, King Lear raged at his Cordelia:

" ...'It is no use, I perceive to talk to you. ... I will, therefore, only add, as thinking it my duty to mark my opinion of your conduct--that you have disappointed every expectation I had formed, and proved yourself of a character the very reverse of what I had supposed. For I had, Fanny, as I think my behaviour must have shewn, formed a very favourable opinion of you from the period of my return to England. I had thought you peculiarly free from wilfulness of temper, self-conceit, and every tendency to that independence of spirit, which prevails so much in modern days, even in young women, and which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offense. But you have shewn me that you can be wilful and perverse, that you can and will decide for yourself, without any deference for those who would guide you--without even asking their advice. You have shewn yourself very, very different from anything that I had imagined. ...' "

At this point, Sir Thomas played an ace:

" '...The advantage or disadvantage of your family--of your parents--your brothers and sisters--never seems to have had a moment's share in your thoughts on this occassion. How they might be benefited, how they must rejoice in such an establishment for you--is nothing to you. You think only of yourself;...' "

There had been that arrangement of Crawford's that resulted in an officer's commission for Fanny's brother - proof enough of what Crawford could do for the Price family. Sir Thomas was not finished. He expressed the view that he would have been very surprised if either of his daughters had turned down Crawford with so little regard for opinions of family.

" '... I should have thought it a gross violation of duty and respect. You are not to be judged by the same rule. You do not owe me the duty of a child. But, Fanny, if your heart can acquit you of ingratitude--'

He ceased. Fanny was by this time crying so bitterly, that angry as he was, he would not press that article farther. ..."

He began to relent and to understand that a different, kinder, gentler attack was called for. A little time and patience (and a little impatience) might do the trick.

Fanny would never again be without a fire in the East Room.

But the Austen Lear was to learn the same lesson as Shakepeare's. He was to understand that Cordelia had it right after all. There was this difference, Sir Thomas's Cordelia would live, and would present him with his grandchildren. This is Jane Austen after all.

Dear Ashton,

Interesting discovery: Edmund Burke may have been the first formally to recognize the Sublime. His book came out 18 years before Turner was born.

What I felt when looking at the Turners in the Tate is, it seems, exactly what Turner intended. He had done his job; better aesthetics training could have enabled me better to do mine as a viewer-participant.

While reading the Austen canon, I felt, often, that there was a presence of something in which the stories were set, something that now looks like the Sublime, the evoking of the Divine (through "shade"?).  I wonder how many months or years will pass before I can identify the causes of that feeling.

I wonder: Could the world-wide web of the Male Voices genius shorten that time period? Could this be a theme for general discussion? Now that I feel the approaching forces in movement towards the coming Mansfield-Park Waterloo, perhaps through this novel something may be seen of the Sublime.
John

SUBLIME: Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) identified the Sublime (usually capitalized today) as something so vast, grand, or dangerous that it could only inspire awe, fear or veneration. Accordingly, artists immediately supplied a demand for windswept landscapes and storms at sea (Ruisdael, Turner), enormous cityscapes (Cole, Martin), struggles between man and beast (Delacroix, Rubens), and all manner of variation -- most with the tacit assumption that the forces of the Divine were immanent in Nature (Bierstadt, Friedrich). Traditionally, sublimity was best evoked by irregular and dark forms, so it was long taken as essentially Romantic and antithetical to classical forms. In modern times, however, the Sublime is as likely to be evoked by non-objective art, but less in the form of the terrifying than in the notion of complete abstraction as a trope to represent the unrepresentable (i.e., the Divine). The works of Malevich and Mondrian have been so described, as have been the paintings of Canadian Otto Rogers.

Dear John,

Your posting strikes a chord with me and I hope the community takes this up as a topic of general interest. Others have broached the subject before in different ways. For example, refer to the winter/spring archives 1999 and look up Julie's posting of 4/29/99, The pleasing plague. The responses to Julie's posting were interesting as far as they went. Also, see the summer archives 1999 for Ray Mitchell's posting of 9/13/99, The elusive Miss Austen, (in response to The Meister's posting of 9/1/99). Ray's contribution might be considered the counterpoint to this type of discussion.

I think about Ray's posting a good deal, and I hope all of us will begin to deal with his as well as your sense of these things.

I back Cheryl.  The Crawfords don't plot and plan, even to the extent of plotting to seduce women.  Henry wants to make Fanny fall in love with him, to entertain himself and flatter his vanity.  If she also agrees to sleep with him, so much the better, but that's not part of his plan.  Neither does he visit Maria with the intent of seducing her.  The book is clear about this (although I'm too lazy to look up the quote).

Same with Wickham.  To think that his every moment is obsessed with seducing every woman he knows is simply to misunderstand rakes.  Wickham likes Elizabeth, he enjoys her admiration, he'd flirt with her even if he was 99% sure he would never sleep with her.  It is true, as Oscar Wilde points out, that uncertainty is the essence of romance, and that if the certainty that a romance will never be consumated is !00% (rather than 99.9%), some of the sparkle vanishes from a flirtation.  However, the rake is fully willing to flirt with every woman he meets, and take his chances with the percentages.

Willoughby is nuts about Marianne.  No doubt, like any man, he'd like to make love to her, but to think that sex is the be all and end all of the relations between the sexes is to misunderstand both men and women, however rakish their past behavior.

Dear Bruce,

You seem to have missed a paragraph of my reply to Cheryl, so I will repeat it here.

" 'Conspiracy' is the wrong word here; what Mary was about was aiding and abetting, which does not mean that she verbalized an explicit plan with her brother. The Crawfords were as partners in the game of bridge - each, instinctively, knew what would help the other."

Crawford didn't need a plan when he went to the Rushworth's; he only needed a dishonorable nature, an appetite, an alertness, and skill. Not having a plan does not make him less of a scum bag. By the way, why would he go to the Rushworth's in the first place, knowing the situation as he did? The answer is that he had a dishonorable nature and he was an opportunist.

Your mild description of "rakes" and the probability of scum-bag success has no correlation with my experience. You make Wickham, Willoughby, and Crawford seem almost playful. In fact, men like that do a lot of damage and spread more pain than is inflicted back on them. They are well mannered and charming and that allows them to be successful at what they do and lessens the severity of the punishment if, indeed, they ever are punished. You know, Jane Austen always provided chaperones to her young women; I doubt that regency parents would have taken such precautions if the success rate was anything like 0.0%. Is your view based upon the worst kind of men that you have known? I suppose my interpretation of men and women seems too coarse to you; certainly, yours is too naive for me.

I challenge you in the same way that I challenged Cheryl; give your reason why Jane Austen denied Edmund to Mary Crawford and Fanny Price to Henry.

Lines 13 to 72 of A Ballad Upon a Wedding may have suggested a good deal to Jane Austen in her creation of Henry Crawford and Fanny Price. Henry's attraction to all the young women and Fanny's purity and beauty could well have been inspired by this Suckling ballad. We know that Jane knew Suckling's poetry.

I have Yahoo! to thank for instantly taking me to this site.  Very impressive search engine.

This Suckling poem seems even more a good fit for Fanny's description than the wedding ballad.

SONG If you refuse me once, and think again

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Suckling 1646: Original Text Reference.
Publication Date: 1646.
Ed. (text): E. J. Endicott; (e-text): I. Lancashire.
Rep. Poetry: 3RP.1.332.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

1     If you refuse me once, and think again,
2             I will complain.
3     You are deceiv'd, love is no work of art,
4             It must be got and born,
5             Not made and worn,
6     By every one that hath a heart.

7     Or do you think they more than once can die,
8             Whom you deny?
9     Who tell you of a thousand deaths a day,
10           Like the old poets feign
11           And tell the pain
12   They met, but in the common way?

13   Or do you think 't too soon to yield,
14           And quit the field?
15   Nor is that right, they yield that first entreat;
16           Once one may crave for love,
17           But more would prove
18   This heart too little, that too great.

19   Oh that I were all soul, that I might prove
20       For you as fit a love
21   As you are for an angel; for I know,
22   None but pure spirits are fit loves for you.

23   You are all ethereal; there's in you no dross,
24       Nor any part that's gross.
25   Your coarsest part is like a curious lawn,
26   The vestal relics for a covering drawn.

27   Your other parts, part of the purest fire
28       That e'er Heav'n did inspire,
29   Makes every thought that is refin'd by it
30   A quintessence of goodness and of wit.

31   Thus have your raptures reach'd to that degree
32       In love's philosophy,
33   That you can figure to yourself a fire
34   Void of all heat, a love without desire.

35   Nor in divinity do you go less;
36       You think, and you profess,
37   That souls may have a plenitude of joy,
38   Although their bodies meet not to employ.

39   But I must needs confess, I do not find
40       The motions of my mind
41   So purified as yet, but at the best
42   My body claims in them an interest.

43   I hold that perfect joy makes all our parts
44       As joyful as our hearts.
45   Our senses tell us, if we please not them,
46   Our love is but a dotage or a dream.

47   How shall we then agree? you may descend,
48       But will not, to my end.
49   I fain would tune my fancy to your key,
50   But cannot reach to that obstructed way.

51   There rests but this, that whilst we sorrow here,
52       Our bodies may draw near;
53   And, when no more their joys they can extend,
54   Then let our souls begin where they did end.

What would Anielka make of this connection, I wonder. Sounds plausible to me.
John

Dear Ashton,

I guess I see a far more sophisticated writer than you.  P&P, S&S, and Mansfield Park are three separate novels with three separate  intentions.  I won't grant that Wickham is Willoughby is Crawford, and on a purely practical level, I will not grant that a seducer would expect the same lack of consequences from Sir Thomas that he might expect from John Dashwood or Mr. Bennet.  You're putting up some straw men here... I didn't say I thought women in the Regency were never seduced or that Jane Austen was an innocent. But generalizations about men  do not make every man a cad.

I'd hate to be invited to a party at your house if you were to interpret every meaningless compliment as evidence that I was a scheming hussy.   You've picked one of the incidents that demonstrate the best in Mary and one of the few in which she thinks of the feelings of other people.

No, Edmund did not love Mary Crawford , as he tells Fanny himself, "...I had never understood her before," and "as far as related to mind, it had been the creature of my own imagination, not Miss Crawford, that I had been too apt to dwell on for many months past."  This is why Jane doesn't allow him to marry Miss Crawford. The question to my mind is why she makes it clear that Edmund doesn't realize that he's loved Fanny all along, but forms a spontaneous attachment dating from her return to Mansfield Park.   I think this might be because Edmund, in his own way, is as selfish and unfeeling as the Crawfords and his brother Tom.  Otherwise, how can we explain the way he so miserably failed both his sisters?

I don't like having to defend the Crawfords, but I feel compelled to see them treated fairly. I'd certainly wouldn't trust either of them as far as I could throw them but they'd be the life of a cocktail party.  The problem is that I despise Fanny Price, absolutely.  She is the personification of everything I hate most in women and in Christianity.  Her hypocrisy (and to a lesser extent Edmund's, possibly only because he's on stage less) just makes my skin crawl.  And to know that her fate is to be rewarded with that which she desires most while all who offended in any way are laid low left and right just, well, pisses me off to no end.  I would never go so far as to say Our Lady made a mistake with the ending of MP, I'll just say that I'm most seriously disappointed.

P.S. "Extra cookies" appears in my dictionary as an example of the word "oxymoron."
Cheryl

From the Meister: Oo-oo, baby, oo-oo; I love
oxymorons! Do you make yours with m&ms
and grits? Mm-mm!

To everyone,

I would like to compliment Ash on his excellent posting on 12/7 about the mature Jane Austen and say that I agree 100%.  During the time Austen lived, a man's goal as far as marriage was concerned was to marry as rich of a woman as possible and produce an heir with her.  If the woman was beautiful, so much the better, but love didn't really enter into it.  Marriage was generally seen as a contractual obligation formed between the man in question and his prospective wife's father. It was generally understood that if anything else was desired, the man would keep a mistress.  And let's face it, being a mistress was not neccessarily a bad thing to be if you couldn't be someone's wife.  You were set up in your own house with your own staff and given essentially everything you could desire, as long as your lover didn't tire of you.  Elizabeth Bennet and Fanny Price were basically seen as poor gentleman's daughters and while there was an off chance for them to make a brilliant match, much as Elizabeth herself did, they were more likely to be desired as sexual objects or as mistresses than as wives.  Neither one of them even had the saving grace of being the daughter of a titled family.

As for the question posed at the end of Ashton's posting about why Edmund and Mary Crawford weren't allowed by Jane Austen to be together, I really have no idea.  The only thing I can come up with is that perhaps Mary was also disgraced by the actions of her brother in eloping with Edmund's sister Maria.  She certainly wouldn't have been accepted into the family after that. Besides that, there would have been no one left for the heroine, Fanny Price. Edmund was the only person who Fanny would have been comfortable being married to.  She was painfully shy and if she wouldn't have married Edmund, she would have been stuck being a governess or some such occupation.

Dear Laurie,

Thank you for your vote - (sniff).

Seriously, I am glad of any encouragement. I wonder, though, if I haven't misled you. I will say something here that I should have said to both Cheryl and Bruce; I am not talking about "men and women" in my posts, I was talking about specific characters in Jane Austen novels. I was not attempting sweeping generalizations about the sexes. There are those who very much want Jane Austen to have done such a thing - and to conform to their own way of thinking - but our Lady was never so foolish. And when Jane Austen allowed one of her characters to speak like that, it was only during a moment of foolishness. For example, a passage you will find quoted on the internet is Emma's pert comment to Knightley that any man expects any women to accept his offer. What you will not see on the web is Knightley's reply: "Nonsense, Emma! a man thinks no such thing." What can be said of Crawford does not apply to Edmund Bertram or Darcy. Darcy could very well have formed a liaison with Miss Bingley, but he does not. A man is guided more by his sense of honor than by the arrangement of his chromosomes.

I think I begin to detect the influence of your research for your paper on "Women in Politics". I hope that is coming along very well for you, and that you will share your ideas with us. I must warn you though that I am very uncompromising with theorists who would over-generalize about "the way things were". My own prejudice is that very little changes except outward forms. Tell me - I sincerely don't know - are some girls at your school treated like sex objects or mistresses by some boys (and not by others)? From my distance, I have the impression that they are, and, perhaps, things might be worse in that regard now then they were in Jane Austen's time. Lest you get too exercised about the marriage contract, let me remind you of the prenuptial agreements of our times. Kennedys, sport stars, rock stars, etc. protect themselves in that way. Also, can you point to a single marriage in a Jane Austen novel where the woman did not determine exactly who she would marry and when? The only one that might fit in that category is Lady Catherine's daughter who was told by her mother who she was to wed. I know that you come across such analyses - such generalizations about the "old days" in your research, but should you accept them so uncritically?

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