God Is A Woman: The Rigid Complexity of Morality in Austen's Mansfield Park

Now this is a snappy title.

Below are summations for each major character. They are based solely on the observations I’ve made during my blogging project. And I got super wordy.

Maria Bertram

Maria is a character who I’ve disregarded on previous reads. It’s only now that I understand the depth of her confusion: she’s spoiled and she holds herself above just about everyone she meets, but that doesn’t mean her emotional turmoil is any less sympathetic. Her duty to marry well both frees her and chafes against that freedom—as it aligns with her set of values, that very set gives her something to rebel against. She wants both of these things because she doesn’t have the capacity to look at herself critically. Of course, there’s that ending to contend with; anyone who’s forced to live out the rest of her days with Mrs. Norris can count on my sympathy, and more to the point, Maria’s fate as a scarlet woman is a different kind of injustice, as noted by the narrator. Did Maria deserve a second chance? True, she ignored several red flags and took Mr. Rushworth for granted. But she also thought she was in love with Henry, who by all accounts was fine in letting her believe that he was in love with her. Getting played by Henry ought to be punishment enough.

Julia Bertram

Then there’s Julia, who even in this wrap-up, can’t escape coming in second to her sister. Though suffering from similar issues (an aunt who fed her sense of pride and a father who was more imposing than outwardly caring), she ends up in a much better position than Maria. She eloped out of fear rather than emotional confusion or pride, which means she didn’t have to get over herself to admit that she did something dumb. Also, she learned her lesson—stay away from Henry—about midway through the novel, pointing to a newfound capacity to think for herself. This didn’t lead to good decision-making, but it did allow room for humility, something all the rest of the Bertrams learn (first time in her life she had something in common with her father, too).

Mrs. Norris

Our most vicious Mean Girl, Mrs. Norris, is fairly self-explanatory. Like many of the characters, she judges people by their monetary worth and rank; what makes her different is how strictly she treats them. With her worship of her Bertram nieces and her routine dismissal of Fanny, it appears that she needed a person to feel superior towards. That superiority morphed quickly into hatred, which defined her for the majority of the novel. She never comes to terms with her own superficiality, twists the rules of propriety to suit her whims, and derives happiness from the most petty actions. The scariest thing about her is that we have all met someone like her, and that’s why Mrs. Norris is perhaps the most effective of all of Austen’s antagonists.

Mary Crawford

Mary is the one who comes closest to changing herself, though she doesn’t get further than step 1: Identifying the Issue. I’m forced to agree with Ed that her feelings for him were real, and for that, I also mourn what could have been (yes, even if it’d mean Fanny couldn’t have Ed). If anything, Mary’s tragic flaw is that she sticks to her own belief system primarily because she cannot conceive that anyone else’s would be worth considering. She makes demands of Edmund without justification. She gets her hopes up over the possibility of someone’s death. People are not real to her if they don’t need to be—if they’re not part of her world—and even those who are real aren’t given much consideration. She gossips about her friends and criticizes their life choices. She went on for months misunderstanding or disregarding everything Fanny says or does.

If you’ve been reading along, you’ll have noticed that I started getting really impatient with Mary Crawford around chapter 22 (which interestingly parallels Mary’s growing boredom with Mansfield). Especially during the last few chapters, she seemed remote and unlikable. Yet, I’m less inclined to be harsh on her. The lingering love she feels for Edmund seems less like a punishment and more like a reminder that there’s more to her than materialism and London-variety cynicism. She regrets losing Edmund, after all, much more than the manor. That there is no indication that she has changed seems to be linked to her environment: London society appears to only reinforce her jaded values system. But the worst part is that Mary didn’t have a choice in where she lived. The restriction placed on young unmarried women is a part of her downfall: it dictates Mary’s limitations to grow and teaches her to value wealth. Her energy is indeed misdirected, as Edmund laments, but it also marks her as complicit in forming her own skewed values system. Mary and Fanny have similar limitations, namely a dependence on relatives, but Mary cannot direct her energy inward. Like the Bertram sisters, she was taught to act and talk prettily, and never chose to question this teaching. Her failure in introspection (maybe you could call it a lack of philosophical curiosity) results in an amoral take on Tom’s potential death that ought to leave even those of us who care about our city girl with a bad taste in our mouths.

Henry Crawford

Henry spends his time bouncing from city to city, juggling Maria’s and Julia’s affections, jumping in and out of play-acting, and even more quickly, dreams of naval fervor. When he reminisces about the past, note how he changes his mind about Maria: she is, at one point, “much too good” for her husband; later, he derides her as Fanny’s inferior. What attracts him is, more than any one quality, a sense of adventure. Making Fanny fall in love with him is as exciting as seducing an affianced woman. He is more fickle than any character in Mansfield Park, but what’s worse is that his fickleness destroys entire relationships.

When he sets his sights on marrying Fanny, it appears that he’s slowed down long enough to think about a possible future: he attends to his duty as a land owner and devotes himself to pleasing Fanny. But he doesn’t do the real work of identifying his flaws, much less correct them. His actions, while commendable, stem from his love of performance rather than a desire to change; he only acts when he assumes that the outcome will be in his favor. Because of this, when faced with the temptation Maria offers him, he gives in because, when he’s in over his head, his default is to react. He never learned how to take the initiative. Until then, he’d arranged his life so that he never had to.

Tom Bertram

It takes a very special kind of eldest child to act like the baby of the family. He just wanted to enjoy his position as heir to the title of baronet without having all that other stuff that comes with it, like responsibility and leadership (and financial sense). Tom felt guilty at times, but he pushed it away, much like how he pushed against his father’s authority and his brother’s level-headed warnings. To be fair, Sir Thomas failed to show him how to show penance (Sir Thomas didn’t know how to admit he was wrong, either) both times Tom screwed up. Much like Julia’s show of contrition, Tom’s last-minute change makes more sense when seen as a completion of Sir Thomas’s character arc. Tom needed to learn that it was okay to slow down, especially when you’re filling your life up with, for example, “a succession of busy nothings.”

Sir Thomas Bertram

I stand by my declaration that the most important relationship in Mansfield Park is the one between Fanny and Sir Thomas. Both have a deep appreciation for family and close ties. One takes such love for granted, the other yearns for its security and assurance. Both also are slow to act and like to deliberate. One has the freedom to act as he chooses, the other knows she does not. Sir Thomas doesn’t always take the opportunity to speak up, such as when Mrs. Norris overwhelms him with inane chatter and when his offspring slink away in the aftermath of Lover’s Vows. Sir Thomas contains the best and worst qualities of Mansfield Park: While he is noble, stately, and responsible, he finds excuses to ignore carrying out small, personal duties—duties relating to the heart. He assumes that Tom and his siblings have learned the error of their ways. He assumes that Maria will feel better about her marriage because she will live close to the home of her family. He assumes that Fanny and Henry have an understanding with one another. Every one of these assumptions are proven wrong, and had Sir Thomas not taken his family for granted, he would have had opportunities to better instruct, inform, and educate his kids.

There is a great balancing act between the character arcs of Sir Thomas and Fanny. Fanny’s removal from Mansfield gives her an opportunity to gain a better perspective on family. But it takes far more for Sir Thomas to learn how he has misread and ignored his family and his children. Austen portrays Sir Thomas as distant and clueless in the first third of the novel to align the reader with Fanny. He remembers Fanny fondly during his homecoming, marking a turning point in their relationship and, importantly, setting us up for his softer side. Examine his relationships with those in his family circle: his wife is disengaged, his sister-in-law is pushy even when she’s showering him with compliments, and his children try their best to avoid him. But Fanny? She challenges him. His belief in his own authority causes him to reject her, and in doing so, put ego before family. Thus, the narrative punishes him by threatening to take away his children: Maria via scandal, Tom via illness, Julia via elopement. His belief in order for the sake of order must be stripped away, allowing for him to a) learn how to be a better father, and b) grant Fanny her happy ending.

Edmund Bertram

Our beautiful idiot boy is often more trying than Fanny’s timidity, isn’t he? In Mary, he mistakes wit for wisdom and willfulness for independence—and he doesn’t even have the grace to be charismatic when he pursues her. No: for better or worse, Edmund is grounded in everything he does, even when he waffles over Mary. Maybe it’s this very quality that causes him to fall for a charismatic, energetic woman in the first place. His speech about opposites attracting is grounded in reality; his flaw is in misapplying it, much like his attempt to explain Henry Crawford’s alleged confusion over his sisters. Here is a young man who doesn’t, in short, understand love … because he doesn’t know who he really loves.

His waffling is also a sign that some part of him knows that Mary isn’t the one for him. Distracted by the new-ness of the city girl, he’s unable to question where his conflicted feelings come from. He sees Fanny’s generosity, virtue, and thoughtfulness in Mary because he is overpowered by lust. His lesson is similar to that of Austen’s heroines: his physical attraction to a character convinces him of that character’s moralistic qualities, and then he must discover the flaw in his assumption. Like Sir Thomas, assumption leads him astray; but also like Sir Thomas, he learns to reject such a regressive mentality. Both characters’ arcs end when they accept Fanny, who operates on a philosophy rooted in consideration and the wisdom of experience.

Fanny Price

I think, with Fanny Price, Austen was trying to say something about the role of the young woman in Regency England. That world could be downright scary to someone who didn’t know her place, especially since “place” was so resolutely defined. Fanny, a timid young woman (a teenager, even), is told that her place is “the lowest and last.” Her journey in realizing that this is false is filled with self-doubt, isolation, and a growing reliance on her unique set of morals. So, yeah, she over-corrects sometimes. She has to make up the answers as she goes along because sometimes Edmund doesn’t provide any guidance, she’s envious of others, and she just doesn’t want to hear what anyone has to say.

She is also a victim of abuse. As I observed again and again the different ways Fanny was abused, ignored, or isolated due to her position and inherent lack of agency, I started thinking about why so many readers are indifferent to or adverse to her. We see her limitations. We struggle with them. But we tend to blame her a little, don’t we? Why can’t Fanny speak up? Why can’t she put up a fight?

Theme & Stuff

Mansfield Park is frustrating (and all the more rewarding) because it’s about inaction. Its very title is an inanimate object. Its characters dawdle and debate with one another and among themselves: Mary cannot decide if she wants Edmund (and vice versa), Lady Bertram goes on napping sprees, Sir Thomas is slow and ponderous in everything he does, and Henry keeps reappearing only because messing with the Bertram sisters is just entertaining enough. Fanny at least has the justification of being boxed in by circumstance and the snobbery of those around her. And when action is taken, what happens? Play rehearsals that allow for a shallow affair to blossom. A proposal is rejected—and no one takes the rejection seriously. A lovesick playboy runs off with the married woman he previously had little interest in. The local busybody is the most direct antagonist for the main character. In Mansfield, action causes pain and trouble.

But there are two kinds of inaction. One comes from boredom and has no direction, offers no insight, and is only temporary. The Bertrams and the Crawfords suffer from this in varying degrees. Some come close to recognizing it, but they cannot overcome it. Their eagerness to play around and ignore the rules and structure that Sir Thomas attempts to enforce is understandable. They are not punished for wanting to have a good time; they are punished because they do not balance their hedonism with a sense of duty and consideration of others. This eludes them because they cannot look inward. They don’t want to see what might be missing. Or, even worse, they may not care.

The other kind of inaction comes from reflection and self-knowledge. Fanny is the only character in the novel who consistently demonstrates this and uses it to try to be a better person. She tries to support Ed and Mary. She tries to adhere to the rules set down by Sir Thomas. She endeavors to understand her stubborn little sister. When she’s at her worst, it’s because her emotional support system has been swept away: when Ed is out riding with Mary, or when the Bertram Family Players badger and bully her. Once she discovers that Ed will twist his principles to suit his desire, she accepts that she cannot rely on him as she once did. She becomes self-reliant. Thus, she never loses her way or caves in to others’ demands of her. When she does choose to act, it has meaning. She doesn’t take her agency for granted. She is grateful for it.

Whew!

Okay, maybe there’s one more thing I haven’t touched on yet. Look for that coming up soon. And thank you for reading!