A Jane Austen Education (16 page)

It was the same in
Mansfield Park.
When Mary comforted the heroine after that vicious attack by Mrs. Norris, I now saw, she may have been motivated mainly by kindness—“the really good feelings by which she was almost purely governed,” as Austen slyly put it—but she was also manipulating two people at once. She knew that the way to get to Edmund’s heart was to go through Fanny, and that the way to get to Fanny’s was by asking her about her brother William, a sailor, the one member of the heroine’s original family to whom she remained attached. And indeed, as Mary went on to ask about him, and express her curiosity to see him, and “imagined him a very fine young man,” Fanny “could not help admitting it to be very agreeable flattery, or help listening, and answering with more animation than she had intended.”

Mission accomplished. But then, Mary was a serial manipulator. She manipulated Sir Thomas, she manipulated Lady Bertram, she even manipulated, for no conceivable purpose, Mrs. Norris. But the novel’s greatest symphony of button pushing was Henry’s attack on the heroine. As he told his sister:

And when his sister tried to warn him away from hurting so fragile a creature, he protested:

The speech itself was a little masterpiece of manipulation, disguising its intentions as it led us along step by step until we wound up somewhere that we never meant to be.

 

 

Did Henry ever really fall for Fanny, later in the novel? I was sure that he thought he did, but now I wondered what she really meant to someone like him, or, as a friend, to someone like his sister. “Give me as much beauty as he could for my money”: the Crawfords were accustomed to traveling in a world of objects made for them to purchase and enjoy, and it occurred to me that they were used to treating people the same way. The rich Manhattan kids I knew, of course, were not any different. “Like she was buying a pretty book”: not a kind remark, but an accurate one.

The idea was made more chilling by the sort of beauty that Henry now wished to buy. Fanny had grown into a pretty girl, but what really hooked him was the sight of her reunion, a couple of months after the play, with that same brother William whom Mary had asked her about. “The glow of Fanny’s cheek, the brightness of her eye, the deep interest, the absorbed attention. . . . It was a picture which Henry Crawford had moral taste enough to value.” “Moral taste”: what a perfectly slimy phrase that was, the most important matters of character reduced to the status of a fine wine or toothsome dish, to be bought, sold, swallowed, and judged.

More than the values I discovered beneath the veneer, more than the certainty that my character was being treated to the same kind of vivisection that I witnessed happening to others’, it was that sense of objectification that really began to sour me on my friends and their world. For I had started to realize that I was being treated the same way. Not only were my friends tremendously entertaining people, they gave you the unmistakable impression that they expected to be tremendously entertained—that like Henry, who had “a great dislike” “to anything like a permanence of abode, or limitation of society,” they wouldn’t tolerate a moment’s boredom. And so—it seemed so odd, after all the time we’d spent together—it began to dawn on me that I had never really been able to relax around them, would feel as if I’d been holding my breath the whole time whenever I was in their company. I realized that I always felt as though I had to be
on
—had to be forever ready with a witty remark or a funny story.

My dating life, with all its perils and pratfalls, became a series of comic vignettes retold for their amusement—which was fine, to a certain extent, because it took away the sting of romantic disappointment, but it also never allowed for any real commiseration or shared feeling. It’s true that I colluded, unconsciously, in my own objectification, wanted to play the raconteur when I saw that it would let me keep a place at the table, but it’s not as if there’d really been a choice. These were not people you wanted to be vulnerable around (they’d probably start calling you “high-maintenance” behind your back), or even just flat in an ordinary way. In fact, since weeks would sometimes go by when I wouldn’t hear from them at all, I started to feel as if I was being treated like a toy: picked up and played with when they wanted whatever it was they thought I had to offer, then dropped again whenever they got bored.

It was just the same in
Mansfield Park
—as Mary implied when Henry first told her about his designs on the heroine’s heart. Maria Bertram had finally married her wealthy oaf, and her sister Julia, Henry’s first conquest at Mansfield, had gone with them on the honeymoon (as was not unusual in Austen’s day). “You ought to be satisfied with her two cousins,” Mary told her brother about Fanny, but “the truth is, . . . you must have a somebody. . . . If you do set about a flirtation with her, you never will persuade me . . . that it proceeds from anything but your own idleness and folly.” Fanny, for Henry, was nothing more than a hobby at this point, something to do when he wasn’t riding or shooting. Or as he put it himself, “How do you think I mean to amuse myself, on the days that I do not hunt?”

 

 

The Bertrams, the Crawfords—why did Austen say such terrible things about the aristocracy, if that was the class she came from and loved so much? Because she didn’t, on either count. Contrary to popular belief, she was neither an aristocrat herself nor, as her books made perfectly clear—
Mansfield Park
above all—did she even much like the aristocracy. Her heroines, while sometimes rich, were never the richest characters in their books, and they usually didn’t marry the richest ones, either, who were generally rather vile—and the richer they were, the viler they tended to be.

As for Austen herself, her father was a clergyman, and most of her other connections—uncles, brothers, family friends—were clergymen, lawyers, or military officers: gentlemen, yes, but certainly not aristocrats. The Austens were comfortable, but they were far from rich and very far from being, like the families she wrote about, either landed or titled. The Bertrams would have condescended to mix with them, if at all, only in the most distant way—at best, an occasional invitation to a ball, in company with the rest of the district’s respectable families.

While Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters were exempt from household responsibilities, and of course Lady Bertram and her daughters were far above anything but the kind of elegant needlework that gentlewomen used to pass the time, Jane and her sister, Cassandra, as girls, had a full roster of household chores: making clothes for themselves and their father and brothers; helping their mother in the kitchen, dairy, garden, and poultry yard (baking bread, brewing beer, boiling jams and jellies); and even picking up a rake when it was time to make the hay.

After the Reverend Austen died, when Jane was twenty-nine, she and her sister inherited, not the thousand pounds the Bennet girls could each look forward to, and certainly not the twenty thousand that Mary Crawford already possessed, but absolutely nothing at all. Everything they had, they were dependent for on others, meaning their mother, who had little enough of her own, or their other family connections—the most important reason they and Mrs. Austen, together with yet a fourth woman, shared a modest house, provided by a relative, to the end of Austen’s life.

Short of marriage or inheritance—and finding a husband itself depended on having property to offer—women simply had very few ways of supporting themselves in Austen’s day. “Single Women,” as she reminded a niece, “have a dreadful propensity for being poor.” The most common alternative for a young woman of Austen’s class was to become a governess in someone else’s family, a condition that
Emma
’s Jane Fairfax, staring down its barrel, equated with slavery. The money that Austen was finally able to make from her novels, the first of which was not published until she was thirty-five—£140 from
Sense and Sensibility,
£110 from
Pride and Prejudice
—was cherished to the last penny. “Tho’ I like praise as well as anybody,” she once said, “I like what Edward calls
Pewter
too.” She didn’t just write for the fun of it.

But though Austen neither came from the aristocracy nor entered it, luck gave her a front-row seat for observing its ways. That same Edward, her third brother, had the immense good fortune to be adopted by distant relations, a wealthy, childless couple whose property he inherited and whose name, Knight, he took. Edward’s story may well have given his sister the idea for
Mansfield Park,
especially since his oldest daughter, the novelist’s favorite niece—eighteen, like Fanny Price, when Austen started to write the novel—was also named Fanny. But if Edward contributed the idea of adoption, and Fanny Knight donated her name, the heroine’s experiences—exclusion, alienation, subordination—belonged to none other than Austen herself.

While she visited her brother’s estate of Godmersham Park any number of times, and struck up that friendship with Fanny Knight, she was never regarded there as anything more than a poor relation. Like Fanny Price at Mansfield Park, or me in that circle of rich New Yorkers, she remained an outsider, and an inferior. The fault was not Edward’s, by all accounts an impeccably generous man (it was he who lent the house, on land attached to yet another one of his estates, in which the Austen women settled after the death of Jane’s father). The fault was not even his wife’s, though when it came to summoning a spinster sister-in-law to help with her many lyings-in (she had eleven children altogether), she much preferred Cassandra. According to a different niece, “a little talent went a long way with the Goodenstone Bridgeses,” Edward’s wife’s family, “& much must have gone a long way too far.”

No, the fault was simply the system’s. Austen was treated like an inferior despite being such a close relation, and despite her immense gifts of character and mind, because according to the way that people thought at the time, that was exactly what she was. Fanny Knight herself, over fifty years after Austen’s death and nearly as many since she had become a titled lady in her own right, put the matter with brutal frankness. Her aunt, she remembered, “was not so
refined
as she ought to have been from her
talent.
” The Austens as a whole, she continued, “were not rich & the people around with whom they chiefly mixed, were not at all high bred, or in short anything more than
mediocre
&
they
of course tho’ superior in
mental powers
&
cultivation
were on the same level as far as refinement goes.” Cassandra and Jane, she went on, “were brought up in the most complete ignorance of the World & its ways (I mean as to fashion etc.) & if it had not been for Papa’s marriage, . . . they would have been, tho’ not less clever and agreeable in themselves, very much below par as to good Society & its ways.”

And this, remember, was Austen’s favorite niece. She wasn’t being mean; she was being honest. This was simply how people thought in “Society,” in “the World.” Family was all well and good, but it was no substitute for “refinement” or “fashion” or being “high bred.” Cassandra went to help her pregnant sister-in-law with a willing heart, no doubt, but it wasn’t as if she really had a choice. Edward lent his mother and sisters a house with an equally good will, but that made them no less his dependents. It is no wonder that the closest friend that Austen made at Godmersham—a relationship that lasted the rest of her life—was none other than the family governess: someone equally marginal, inferior, and dependent. And it is also no wonder that she used her lifetime of stealthy observation there to create her cutting portraits of aristocrats like the Bertrams and the Crawfords.

 

 

For all that Austen helped me see about the ways the rich and wellborn deal with other people—as objects or instruments, as puppets or toys—her deepest lessons about the dangers of power and luxury had to do with how such people hurt themselves. It’s no fun to have friends who constantly want you to entertain them, but it’s far worse if you’re the one who constantly needs to be entertained. The Crawfords’ mobility, which looked so much at first like energy—Mary galloping about the countryside, Henry dashing about the country—was little more, I finally saw, than restless discontent. Mary was moping one showery day at the Mansfield parsonage, her half-sister and brother-in-law’s house—“contemplating the dismal rain in a very desponding state of mind, sighing over the ruin of all her plan of exercise for that morning, and of every chance of seeing a single creature beyond themselves for the next twenty-four hours”—when a very wet Fanny was spotted nearby and asked to come inside.

“The blessing of something fresh to see and think of was thus extended to Miss Crawford,” Austen commented, “and might carry on her spirits to the period of dressing and dinner.” The moment went by quickly, but what an indictment it was. So poor was Mary in any kind of inner resources, Austen was telling us, any ability to dwell in her own mind—to read, to draw, or simply to sit still and think—that her spirits couldn’t survive a few hours alone indoors. Perpetual amusement, the privilege of the idle rich, leads only, it seems, to the perpetual threat of boredom.