Mansfield Park, ch. 39: Diminishing Returns

Credit to Jessica Cho.

So after a doozy of a chapter last time, here we get a little breathing room. Although Fanny tries to find the silver linings as she writes her first letter to Lady Bertram, she does lie by omission. The narrator says that Sir Thomas would have “been delighted with his own sagacity” in packing her off. Because prolonging a woman’s depression is the surest way to force her to accept an unwanted proposal.

Hey, if Austen’s allowed to be cynical, so am I.

We get a final look at William’s departure from the chapter before: he charges Mrs. Price to “[t]ake care of Fanny.” Now, this isn’t just here to make us miss William all the more; I think Austen slotted this scene here to contrast William’s care and love for Fanny with the neglect his family shows throughout the Portsmouth chapters. If Fanny drew all her hopes about her family from William’s adoring and adorable behavior toward her, then her shock and disappointment are more sympathetic. She had no reason to believe that her parents would neglect her the way they do.*

Unfortunately, that neglect extends to everything. The Price household “is the abode of noise, disorder, and impropriety. Nobody was in their right place, nothing was done as it ought to be.” Mr. Price is narrow-minded and Mrs. Price is a combination of the worst traits of her sisters. Their all-purpose servant gets to call the shots because she knows she has job security. The kids aren’t all right. Fanny is especially disappointed in her mother, “a partial, ill-judging parent, a dawdle, a slattern, who neither taught nor restrained her children.” Tell us how you really feel, Fanny.

Portsmouth Point, 1811. Credit to Thomas Rowlandson

However, Fanny does succeed at one of her original goals: helping out with the kids. She spends a few long days getting some clothes ready for her younger brother Sam, who has to leave (despite warming up to her, and her to him). She appears to have done this on her own initiative, too. Though happy to lend a hand, she nonetheless “could not conceive how they would have managed without her.”

This sketch of the Price household and of Portsmouth in general has come under criticism for being … well, a sketch, essentially. Austen leaves the reader with impressions rather than with a concrete setting, and though she does a good job of showing the isolation, the messiness, and the claustrophobia Fanny experiences, there’s an argument that in so doing, she sacrifices a degree of realism. And while I don’t want to ignore that in this reading, I want to try to tease out the juxtaposition of Portsmouth and Mansfield. Because look at how Fanny remembers Mansfield: “The elegance, propriety, regularity, harmony—and perhaps, above all, the peace and tranquility of Mansfield, were brought to her remembrance … by the prevalence of every thing opposite to them here.”

Wait a minute. Mansfield, peaceful? For Fanny? I can name at least a few times where that wasn’t the case. Hmm, so she’s reflecting very fondly on a place and going to some lengths to ignore the bad stuff she’d normally associate with it. Why, I believe there’s a word for that: romanticizing. She tends to do that when she’s expressing her soul, doesn’t she? And for all its faults, Mansfield was where she discovered who she was. Mansfield is where she was allowed to nurture her soul. (If she’d grown up at the Prices’, she wouldn’t have been exposed to those poets and artists she loves.)

And another thing: is Fanny really that wrong? After all, the East Room offered her a lot of peace. And when “everybody had their due importance; everybody’s feelings were consulted,” it was under Sir Thomas’s watch. Fanny isn’t just wearing rose-tinted glasses here; what she misses most is what Mansfield was like with Sir Thomas in residence. Her favorite version of Mansfield doesn’t even include Ed. It focuses on serenity and stability, two qualities that an abused young woman is most inclined to prize. I almost wonder if Fanny, by comparing Mansfield in such a way to her family home, is subconsciously comparing Sir Thomas to her own father and mother.

Lastly, I think Austen was trying to create a situation in which the meek and humble Fanny, rocked to her core, has nothing to be grateful for. Her parents play favorites and forget that she’s even in the house. Call her a snob if you want, but if your family treated you like a guest at a two-star Airbnb, how do you think you’d react? Sometimes fraternal love is indeed worse than nothing: here, it isolates Fanny in a way she hasn’t experienced before. With so little gratitude in her heart, who is Fanny now?

Coming soon: Mary resumes her infrequent correspondence, updates on our favorite step-sisters cousins, and Fanny sets out to soothe a rivalry between two other sisters.

*This trope of the good, responsible child having neglectful or irresponsible parents is used in every Austen novel. Cf. Jane Bennet (Pride & Prejudice), Henry Tilney (Northanger Abbey), Anne Elliot (Persuasion), Elinor Dashwood (Sense & Sensibility), and Emma Woodhouse (Emma). Narratively it makes no sense, but I wonder if it was a phenomenon Austen witnessed in life at the time.