Reviews

Cinderella Meets Hamlet: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
by Marilyn Green Faulkner

Jane Austen is a reader’s writer. By reader I don’t mean those who pick up a best seller on vacation and breeze through it, or news junkies who read the paper from cover to cover every morning. I mean serious readers of fiction, you know, the types that live partly in the real world and partly in an imaginary world peopled with the characters from myriads of books devoured through the years. This kind of reader sometimes has difficulty remembering whether Emma Woodhouse is a character in a novel or a girl he dated in college. Jane Austen’s novels, with their wealth of detail and finely drawn characters, offer a feast of delights for those who love a well-written novel.

In her lifetime Austen’s books were not tremendously popular. Though she is often lumped with Bronte, Dickens and Gaskell, she preceded the great Victorian authors by several decades, and thus her stories reflect a world as yet untouched by the industrial revolution. Austen’s novels are gentle rambles through great estates where the gentry have dinners, balls, and various family crises. Emma does her match making, Elizabeth Bennett spars with Mr. Darcy, and the Dashwood sisters debate the merits of various poets. In other words, not much happens. Charlotte Bronte had little patience for Austen’s restrained, ironic style, and complained to a friend,

“Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands, and feet. What sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death – this Miss Austen ignores…”

Bronte’s contemporaries disagreed with her assessment of the gentle lady’s work. Tennyson ranked Austen “next to Shakespeare.” Sir Walter Scott read her novels several times each and envied her descriptive powers, and Mrs. Gaskell (eminent Victorian author and Bronte’s biographer) was an ardent admirer. Though it is true that Austen’s emotions are as tightly circumscribed as her plots, hemmed in by invisible barriers of class, wealth and convention, she reaches the human heart by a route unfamiliar to a passionate soul like Bronte. It is through the very details of mundane existence that Austen leads us to central truths about life and love. Her restraint can be deceiving. It is not Austen’s aim to blast apart convention and custom, but rather to reveal a world of emotion through irony, humor and suggestion. Like many women authors of that century, Austen’s novels were published anonymously, and it is only in the last one hundred years that she has been recognized as one of the greatest writers in the world.

Mansfield Park was published just after Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice in 1814. It is the story of a poor girl who is brought into a great family as an act of charity, and ends by inheriting the central position as mistress of the estate. Fanny Price is an unusual heroine, defined more by her inaction than her actions. In an artistic masterstroke, Austen borrows Shakespeare’s device of the play within a play. Fanny’s wealthy cousins and their guests prepare to stage a play, Lover’s Vows, in their father’s absence, and through this process truths are revealed about their duplicitous natures that influence the remainder of the drama. Like young Hamlet, Fanny refuses to act, either in the play or in the backstage dramas that surround it, but keenly observes the actions of those around her, and forms her opinions about whom to trust.

Modern critics have found much to discuss in Mansfield Park, from Lord Bertram’s involvement in slavery to the troubling relationships in Fanny’s natural family. As always, Austen touches upon difficult issues without hammering them. Take, for example, her examination of the effect of Fanny’s years at the Bertram estate on her feelings for her family. When, after several years’ absence from her humble home, Fanny returns to her parents and siblings in Portsmouth, she expects to find real happiness. Instead, she is appalled by their coarse manners. This is no romanticized English peasant cottage, but a dirty, depressing hovel that literally nauseates its former inhabitant:

“She sat in a blaze of oppressive heat, in a cloud of moving dust; and her eyes could only wander from the walls marked by her father’s head, to the table cut and knotched by her brothers, where stood the tea-board never thoroughly cleaned, the cups and saucers wiped in streaks, the milk a mixture of motes floating in thin blue, and the bread and butter growing every minute more greasy than even Rebecca’s hands had first produced it.” (pp. 362-3)

Wealth and education have created a new Fanny Price, who, like Eliza Doolittle, is poor but now unfit for a life of poverty. She must determine a new sense of self. For a woman at the turn of the eighteenth century this could only be accomplished through marriage. Like Cinderella, Fanny must be rescued by the handsome prince, and Austen does not disappoint us. Mansfield Park is a fascinating study of English life and manners, with wonderful insights into the role of the English clergy in that society. It examines the role of money in our lives, showing how the opportunity for wealth and education change our expectations and even our emotional ties. The clever use of playacting in the story reveals the hypocritical character of Henry Crawford (ironically one of the most likeable characters) and illustrates the breadth of Austen’s literary powers. Finally, for those of us who are just plain addicted to novels, it’s a great story that ends with our heroine living happily ever after. For a serious reader, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Mansfield Park is the Best Books Club selection for September. Join the discussion by clicking on [email protected]. October’s selection will be: How Green Was My Valley, by Richard Llewelyn

Readers comment on Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn:

Some thoughts on Mark Twain

The time has come the walrus said

To speak of many things, of ships and shoes,

And sealing wax, of cabbages and kings,

And why the sea is boiling hot,

And whether pigs have winds.

Mark Twain did not write this, Lewis Carroll did. But Mark Twain could well have written it because he shared with Lewis Carroll that wonderful logic of craziness, that only a keen eye and a deep and loving appreciation of the weaknesses of man can bring. I never think of Mark Twain without thinking of Lewis Carroll. From the beginnings of their careers, although so very different, they thought in much the same way, Only a mathematician of Carroll’s caliber would have devised a pen name by translating his own name into Latin, reversing it and then translating it back into English! and only a writer and lover of steamboats would have chosen the leadsman’s call which signified the shallow water that leads to danger. Their pen names became people in their own right.

Both men shared a sense of humor that shows in all their writings. Their humor was very different, Twain’s was wry, dry, and could be biting in its wording and approach; Carroll on the other hand was whimsical, childlike (and I mean this as a compliment), and contained great logic disguised as nonsense! Although they lived in different countries, they lived essentially through the same period of upheaval; Carroll in the last of the Industrial Revolution, the Victorian Era and the building of Empire, and Twain through the violent flowering of the United States, and the first hints of coming greatness.

For all their similarity of writing they lived very different types of lives, Carroll a retiring bachelor, Fellow at Oxford’s Christchurch college, and a brilliant mathematician; Twain, an internationally known person of enormous cultural, literary, and political influence, but they are linked in immortality by an overweening sense of fun, discerning perspective, and a satirical sense of craziness. I wish they could have met, I know that they would have enjoyed each other. Toujours la difference, toujours la meme chose. Phil

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A few nights ago, after I tucked my two littlest kidlets into bed, I lay down for some precious reading time. Soon, my husband was looking at me in amazement, as giggle after giggle kept bursting out, until tears were falling down my cheeks. I was near the end of “Huckleberry Finn” and the snakes, rats, and spiders Tom and Huck collected for Jim, were the cause of my discomposure. I enjoy Mark Twain’s humor, but even more, I love his heart.

I am lucky to have a biography of Mark Twain written for young adults, by Clinton Cox and published by Scholastic. I bought it several years ago for my oldest son. I’ve discovered that to understand someone as complex as Mark Twain, and why he wrote and said the things he did, it’s important to “step into his shoes”, and see the world as he saw it.

“Huckleberry Finn” isn’t a perfect book–personally, I would have liked to see a more dignified way for Jim to gain his freedom in the end–but Mark Twain wrote the truth, as he saw it.

All of his life, Mark Twain denounced the acceptance of violence, ignorance, and bigotry. He attacked church, state, school, and even parents for their hypocrisy. Mark Twain had been taught as a boy that helping a run-away slave was “a low-down thing” God would punish “with everlasting fire.” In his heart, like Huck, he knew it wasn’t truth. Mark Twain used his gift of humor to teach truth, and aren’t we grateful that he did?! Elizabeth

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I asked the members of the book club if there is a way to mix humor and religion:

I think that there is a difference between doctrine and tradition when one is talking about religion. When traditions or lesser rules become the guiding force in a religious belief, then it is subject to humor because it loses its focus. Things that are false or arbitrary seem to attract a humorous approach, at least by those who can see clearly. It isn’t just a rejection of that which is established, but of that which is not true to the original message. Cindy

—–

Very, very interesting exploration. The first observation is that of course humor is part of the religious experience, especially if the comedian is a presenter. John Bytheway is practically every kid’s icon, and he didn’t win their hearts by hammering doctrine at them. Yet look at the doctrine he has instilled! I think any successful presenter will tell you the material has to be at least 1/3 entertaining in order to be engaging enough to have any impact. It would be interesting to study whatever body of thought or discipline is “out there” regarding the Holy Ghost. We know a little bit, sort of, about what does and does not invite the spirit, and humor seems not to be one of them–at least at first flush. Yet I remember a cousin commenting that she remembered very clearly every testimony born at a meeting that took place 4 years ago because the spirit was so strong there it enhanced her ability to learn (maybe the same phenomenon as the School of the Prophets.) But this also happens with a really good joke. As I think about this more, I don’t think I know very many people who are truly “bright” who are not also witty. Are there exceptions? Kathy

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If you can’t laugh at religion never go on a Church mission!! You would never survive.

It would be interesting to share with your readers the origin of Mark Twain’s nom de plume – also his greatest quote from his autobiography ” A truly brilliant man is a man who makes a damn fool of himself only once a day” Phil

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I do agree that we can benefit from the ridicule of a skeptic–I am much more thoughtful about blessings on the food as a result of the little dig in Huck Finn about grumbling over the vittles. But it also does bother me because I know that at times I have been shaken by this same type of ridicule and caused to question the very foundation upon which my life is built. I guess if we didn’t want to be tried in this manner, we should have voted for the other plan. PHD

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Finally, one last comment on our wonderful July selection, The Keys of the Kingdom, by A.J. Cronin:

I had a bit of a search, finding “Keys of the Kingdom”. I was hoping to find my own copy, rather than one from a library, and now, after having just completed it, I REALLY wish that I had my own copy. This book was a Life changer! To experience the integrity of such a priest as Father Chisholm is to make one resolve to be a better, more compassionate and courageous leader. And, of course, I am wanting to read more of A.J. Cronin. Thank you for including this extraordinary book on your Book List. Linda

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