Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (59 page)

Crawford abandons one project—the courtship of Fanny—to resume

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another unfinished project—the seduction of Maria Bertram. Had

he “persevered” instead, “Fanny must have been his reward—and a

reward very voluntarily bestowed—within a reasonable period from

Edmund’s marrying Mary” (317). His impatience allows the narra-

tor to have done. Will, not principle, is causal in this novel, and the

congruence between principle and will is always happenstance.

44. The phrase describes Henry Crawford, who, despite his profligacy,

has “moral taste enough to value” Fanny’s undisguised devotion to

her brother and to “honour[] the warm hearted, blunt fondness of

the young sailor” (161).

45. Mary Jean Corbett points out the inconsistency of Edmund’s alarms

about strangers in the house, when “Just a few chapters later . . . he

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extends the perimeter so as to include” the Crawfords, who, he tells

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Fanny, “ ‘seem to belong to us’ ” (
Family Likeness
48).

46. Mary differs from Edmund in her ability to recognize and reflect

on her motives with an irony that is usually the province of the nar-

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rator: “She had felt an early presentiment that she
should
like the

eldest best. She knew it was her way” (35). The italics emphasize the

double meaning of “should” as either the future subjunctive or an

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expression of obligation, echoing her idea that “[i]t is every body’s

duty to do as well for themselves as they can” (198). She can exercise

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this ability at will and sometimes chooses to put it aside, as when

her desire for Edmund conflicts with this obligation: “There was a

charm, perhaps, in his sincerity, his steadiness, his integrity, which

Miss Crawford might be equal to feel, though not equal to discuss

with herself” (47–48).

47. As D. A. Miller puts it, “Fanny’s moral judgment effectively pre-

serves her full response—paradoxically—by refusing to take it into

account” (56).

48. Paula Marantz Cohen points out that this even exchange of plea-

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sure for pain is a necessary condition for her allegiance to her

adoptive family and home: “it is not pleasure alone, but pleasure

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as the consolation for pain that combines to produce the ‘charm’

that binds Fanny to Mansfield Park” (
The Daughter’s Dilemma

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71). The narrative irony for which the schoolroom passage pre-

pares us—this is the moment when Edmund fails to support her

cause (he has already refused to explain her meaning); his proofs

of affection no longer make her tears delightful—is not so much a

yright material fr

betrayal of the pattern of neglect and consolation as it is that pat-

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tern writ large. Fanny’s abandonment by Edmund and Sir Thomas

is a necessary prelude to her final incorporation into Mansfield

Park: “the dynamic in which Edmund makes Fanny suffer, then

suffers guilt for her pain so that he can be free to make her suf-

fer again . . . proves to be precisely the pattern calculated to attach

Fanny to the family” (Cohen 70).

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49. The closest second, not surprisingly, is
Northanger Abbey
, where vari-

ants of “horror,” always either hyperbolical or ironic, appear twenty

times.

50. The play the Bertrams and Crawfords nearly put on is Elizabeth

Inchbald’s 1798 translation of August von Kotzebue’s
Lovers’ Vows
.

The subject of the play is both courtship and seduction, and charac-

ters in
Mansfield Park
use the occasion of its production as a means

of both.

51. As usual, Edmund explains Mary’s use of the inapt term “folly” as

the fault of her surroundings: “She was speaking only, as she had

been used to hear others speak” (309). For Miller, Mary’s speech is

guided by the “main principle of construction” of a preference for

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what looks like epigram but is rather “the perpetual promise and

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deferral of knowledge and right nomination” (27). “It is not exactly

that Mary calls things by their wrong names (although this is how it

must look when the novel’s moral ideology is imposed). Simply, her

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talk doesn’t recognize there being right names” (27).

52. Paula Marantz Cohen observes that “[t]he imagery Fanny uses to

express her revulsion suggests that Maria has engaged in incest, pre-

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cisely the ‘crime’ that Fanny will eventually commit with impunity.

Although Maria’s adultery seems the very opposite of incest—a turn-

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ing away from the family rather than toward it—Fanny’s reaction

helps expose the link between them” (78).

53. Much of recent criticism on
Mansfield Park
focuses on the incest

theme as a feature of the novel’s modernity, locating it in the moment

of shift from a “traditional” to a “nuclear” understanding of family

(Cohen 78). Mary Jean Corbett suggests that the novel’s celebration of

endogamous over exogamous unions “invites us to privilege ‘the fam-

ily’ over ‘the marriage’, the latter construed not as an end in itself but

as a means to an end” (41). For Clara Tuite and Cohen, this distinction

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between marriage and family turns upon a modern understanding of

both. Tuite observes that the novel chronicles “the transition of the

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aristocracy from patriarchy to domesticity, and the revision of the aris-

tocratic marriage-plot from alliance and improvement (exogamy) to

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incorporation (endogamy)” (112). “The text naturalizes the dynastic

strategy of cousin-marriage (a strategy of incorporation and retrench-

ment) precisely by staging it as the renunciation of dynastic aspira-

tions” (127). Cohen sees the initial exchange of Fanny within rather

yright material fr

than between families as an indicator of the novel’s particularly mod-

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ern investment in endogamous relationships: “Fanny’s passage from

her mother’s house to her aunt’s is historically significant and expresses

that shift in the nature of family life actually occurring at the time

Austen wrote. The Bertrams, Fanny’s new family (though really an

extension of her old one), are the kind of insular and inbred (nuclear)

family fated to replace outer-directed families like the Prices” (64).

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54. Corbett identifies the elopement as “an unexpected, illegitimate

outcome of forming ‘tie upon tie’ with strangers.” Even as it “illus-

trates the risk that outsiders pose to the Mansfield family as well as

Mansfield’s internal susceptibility to that risk,” however, the elope-

ment “also prevents any further injury from occurring by stopping

the double marriage plot dead in its tracks, severing the ties between

the Crawfords and the Bertrams” (49).

55. Corbett points out that Edmund excepts the Crawfords from the

category of outsiders who have no “claim” to be admitted into the

family circle, when he tells Fanny that “[t]hey seem to belong to

us—they seem to be a part of ourselves” (135). Fanny’s reaction

to the elopement, “even if she does not want to think of either

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Mary or Henry as family . . . still betrays her internalization of the

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rhetorical constructions and institutionalized connections that

have made these erstwhile strangers into something approaching

kin” (48).

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56. According to Pollak, “[T]hat the marriage of Edmund and Fanny

that resolves
Mansfield Park
’s comic plot should posses the same

ambiguous character as Maria’s adultery, being predicated as it is on

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going out
and
going in
at the same time (the family interloper having

become acceptable as a conjugal partner for her cousin only because

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she has taken on the status of a sister), is one of the novel’s brutal

ironies” (183).

57. “Here Fanny . . . involuntarily shook her head, and Crawford was

instantly by her side again, intreating to know her meaning.”

Crawford uses the possibility of clarification as an opportunity to

push his suit further: “What had I been saying to displease you?—

Did you think me speaking improperly?—lightly, irreverently on the

subject? Only tell me if I was.” And further: “ ‘Do I astonish you?’—

said he. ‘Do you wonder? Is there any thing in my present intreaty

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that you do not understand? I will explain to you instantly all that

makes me urge you in this manner, all that gives me an interest in

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what you look and do’ ”(232).

58. Fanny initially responds to the pressure to join the theatricals by

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asserting (and repeating), “I cannot act.” Her insistence that “[i]t

would be absolutely impossible for me” (103) is often cited as an

instance of the perfect conformity between feeling and expression.

Unlike every other character in the novel, Fanny cannot deviate from

yright material fr

her “true” self (Tanner 164). She cannot prevaricate—except, of

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course, with herself.

59. In her first full statement in support of the separation, Lady Byron

claimed, “In his endeavours to corrupt my mind he has sought to

make me smile first at Vice” (quoted in Elwin 349).

60. Perhaps even the same vice? “Of
Rears
and
Vices
, I saw enough. Now,

do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat” (44). Jill Heydt-Stevenson

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notes that Mary’s “pun points directly to sodomy in the navy”

(
Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions
138).

61. Doris Langley Moore quotes from this passage in an appendix to

Lord Byron: Accounts Rendered
. In a footnote she explains that it

was part of “an uncompleted Preface to her projected autobiography,

dated March 1854” (443n2).

62. “Indeed, it is fair to ask whether there really is any fundamental dif-

ference of opinion between Lady Byron and her husband, for there is

an apparent symmetry between his thesis that all behavior is subject

to convention and her recourse to a standard that, however single

and immutable it is, is based only in her belief” (Christensen 79).

Her naïve association of Byron with his poems, moreover, means that

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“to accept Byron’s skeptical doctrine would be to abandon the very

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structure of identification” on which she has based her argument for

the necessity of separation (81). Her “inspired strategy is to leave in

darkness that ‘ground of difference’ she wants branded evil” (83).

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63. Miller points out that Edmund’s narrative of the scene is “charged

with emotional revulsion and disgust, bespeaking by negation his

attraction and desire.” His “anxious fears of her powers of perfor-

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mance” convert Mary “into a vulgar Delilah, openly gesturing sexual

solicitation. One must wonder whether such a perspective does not

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invite us—on the evidence of its own self-betraying bias—to imagine

a different version of the scene, more ambiguous and less obvious