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Mansfield Park (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
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Product Description
From its sharply satiric opening sentence, Mansfield Park dealas with money and marriage, and how strongly they affect each other. Shy, fragile Fanny Price is the consummate "poor relation." Sent to live with her wealthy uncle Thomas, she clashes with his spoiled, selfish daughters and falls in love with his son. Their lives are further complicated by the arrival of a pair of witty, sophisticated Londoners, whose flair for flirtation collides with the quiet, conservative country ways of Mansfield Park.
Written several years after the early manuscripts that eventually became Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park retains Austen’s familiar compassion and humor but offers a far more complex exploration of moral choices and their emotional consequences.
Amanda Claybaugh is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She also wrote the Introduction and Notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #19879 in Books
- Published on: 2005-08-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 464 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9781593081546
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Editorial Reviews
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Mary Crawford is, or so it seems, the very model of a Jane Austen heroine. Spirited, warm-hearted, and, above all else, witty, she displays all the familiar Austen virtues, and she stands in need of the familiar Austen lessons as well. Like Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice (1813), she banters archly with the man she is falling in love with, and, like Elizabeth, she must learn to set aside her preconceptions in order to recognize that love. Like Emma Woodhouse, the heroine of Emma (1816), she speaks more brilliantly and speculates more dazzlingly than anyone around her, and, like Emma, she must learn to rein in the wit that tempts her at times to impropriety. But Mary Crawford is not the heroine of Mansfield Park (1814)—Fanny Price is, and therein lies the novel's great surprise. For Fanny differs not merely from Mary, but also from our most basic expectations of what a novel's protagonist should do and be. In Fanny, we have a heroine who seldom moves and seldom speaks, and never errs or alters.
"'I must move,'" Mary announces, "'resting fatigues me'." Before her arrival at Mansfield, she had made a glamorous circuit of winters in London and summers at the country houses of friends, with stops at fashionable watering places in between, and at Mansfield she is no less mobile. A vigorous walker, she soon takes up riding, cantering as soon as she mounts. Fanny, by contrast, has hardly left the grounds of Mansfield since her arrival eight years before, and she is further immobilized by her weakness and timidity. A half-mile walk is beyond her, a ball, she fears, will exhaust her, and she is prostrated by headache after picking roses. She must be lifted onto the horse she was long too terrified to approach, and her exercise consists of being led by a groom.
"'Now, do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat,'" says Mary to her listeners, who have not, in fact, caught the joke at all. So dazzling a talker is Mary that she must serve as her own best audience, amusing herself with witticisms the others cannot hear. With a keener eye and a sharper tongue than those around her, Mary sets her words dancing alongside the inanities, vulgarities, and hypocrisies that make up the other characters' speech. Fanny, by contrast, barely speaks at all, and when she does, it is in the silencing language of moral certainty. "'Very indecorous,'" Edmund says of Mary's far more captivating discourse, and Fanny is quick to agree and contribute a judgment of her own: "'and very ungrateful.'" There is little that can be said after that.
"'I will stake my last like a woman of spirit,'" Mary proclaims in the midst of a card game that Fanny had been reluctant to play at all. Mary wins the hand, only to find that it has cost her more than it was worth, and, in doing so, she reminds us that to act is necessarily to risk being wrong. Fanny, by contrast, is always right. "'Fanny is the only one who has judged rightly throughout'"—this is Edmund Bertram speaking to Sir Thomas in the aftermath of the theatricals, but it could just as properly be the narrator at the novel's end. The language of Fanny's right judgment suggests, however, that her moral certainty is a function of her passivity: "'No, indeed, I cannot act,'" she had insisted, and the double meaning of "acting" suggests that Fanny knows not to "act" in a theatrical sense because she never really "acts" at all.
It is in the contrast between Fanny and Mary that we can most clearly see that Mansfield Park is, in the words of the critic Tony Tanner, "a novel about rest and restlessness, stability and change-the moving and the immovable" (Jane Austen, p. 145; see "For Further Reading"). Mansfield Park is hardly the only Austen novel to take as its subject matter a pair of opposed terms, but typically these terms stand in a dynamic relation to one another, each altering the other until a proper synthesis or balance is achieved. In Sense and Sensibility (1811), for instance, the rational Elinor Dashwood and her romantic sister Marianne must each learn from the other to moderate her mode of feeling; similarly, Mr. Darcy must modify his pride and Elizabeth, her prejudice before marriage can unite them. Other of Austen's novels draw careful distinctions within a single term, as when Persuasion (1818) establishes a continuum from the most laudable to the most lamentable instances of conforming to the wishes of others. Mansfield Park stands alone in this regard, for it unequivocally endorses one set of terms and unequivocally condemns the other. Rest has, in this novel, nothing to learn from restlessness, and restlessness can in no way be redeemed.
Customer Reviews
Excellent
I think this is my favorite Jane Austen book so far, although I still have Persuasion and Northanger Abbey to read. Most Austen fans would not count Mansfield Park as a favorite, though, at least from what I've heard. It's not that it's a profoundly different book from the more popular Pride & Prejudice or Sense & Sensibility, but many people seem to dislike the main character, or at least are not as impressed by her, as by P&P's Elizabeth Bennet or Emma's Emma Woodhouse. It's true that Fanny Price is a very different heroine than Lizzy or Emma, but her circumstances are profoundly different, too. She doesn't have Lizzy's spunk or Emma's forthrightness, but Lizzy and Emma both have the advantage of being more secure in their surroundings, both financially and emotionally. Fanny has a lot working against her from the start.
A generation before Fanny's birth, three sisters chose their paths of marriage: one to a respectable parson, one to a wealthy landowner, and the other to a basically worthless sloth. Fanny had the misfortune to be one of the numerous products of the latter. Her aunt, Mrs. Norris (married to the parson), convinces their other sister, the wealthy Mrs. Bertram, to take Fanny in as a ward. While this sounds like a kindness, it's really only an ego booster for Mrs. Norris. She has no love for Fanny and from the day the poor girl comes to live with the Bertrams at Mansfield Park, she is never allowed to forget that she is the beneficiary of charity and should grovel, beg and prove her gratitude every waking second. Not only are there constant verbal reminders from her aunts, uncle and cousins, but Fanny's status as a poor relation is made clear by her clothing, her rooms, the social functions she's allowed to attend (or not), and even whether or not she has a horse to ride. It's not that anyone is outwardly unkind to Fanny (except Mrs. Norris, at times) per se; she's just a non-entity entirely dependent on the whims of her superior relations, and she's always painfully aware of it.
The main event is the arrival of Henry and Mary Crawford, a brother and sister who proceed to turn things topsy-turvy in the circle of families around Mansfield Park with their somewhat laissez-faire, urban view on the rituals of courtship. The bittersweet backdrop to all this entanglement and game-playing is Fanny's genuine, unrequited love for her cousin Edmund, one of the few people who treat her as an equal. Other reviewers have expressed disdain and frustration with Fanny, labeling her a boring, moralistic, judgmental prig, but I didn't feel that way about her at all. I felt she handled herself and her situation the best she could, and the fact that she's a plain, ordinary girl with none of Elizabeth Bennet's wit or Emma Woodhouse's beauty only makes her more human to me. I enjoyed it and will definitely read it again.
Atypical Austen
If you're looking to read an Austen novel for the first time, this one isn't it. Mansfield Park is neither typical for Austen, nor her best work. Unlike several of her more well-known books, Mansfield Park does not feature a strong and spunky heroine. Fanny Price is compassionate, smart, and morally spotless, but she isn't the most exciting character to read about. Though many of her emotions are relatable, I sometimes found myself becoming annoyed with her total inability to stand up for herself. Her happiness is entirely dependent on the whims of others from start to finish, and she was too submissive to stand out in comparison to Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth or Emma's Emma Woodhouse. In typical Austen style, the writing was beautiful and flawless. However the plot dragged. This is primarily because the protagonist did absolutely nothing to advance it herself, and so all of the development had to be carried by the other characters. Additionally, though the romantic opposite of Fanny is repeatedly praised as kind and level-headed, his actions show him to be easily blinded and to lack a deal of the taste that he is credited with. Austen had an excellent chance to depart from her usual plot formulation in the existence of the character Henry Crawford, but in failing to follow through made the ending entirely anti-climactic.
In my opinion, the one real strength in this piece was Austen's characterization. Unlike prior novels in which she was content to attribute the actions of certain characters to pure rottenness of character (Wickham comes to mind), in Mansfield Park we see Austen exploring the motivations and justifications of all her characters, good and bad. As a result they were all more real and relatable and the distinctions between bad and good were less clearly cut, leading to a more subtle and complex read. Overall, it is definitely worth a look, particularly for long-standing Austen fans, but it wouldn't be my first recommendation. Read Pride and Prejudice or Emma first.
Don't make this an Austen First
I have read all of Jane Austen's novels and while I like Mansfield Park, it's my least favorite. Mansfield Park is more out of line with her others because the heroine is not a spunky, witty girl but rather shy and reserved. But I don't think that was my issue with the book so much as the pace. This is a longer book and is so not because of more action or intrigue but because some of the scenes (like the preparation for a play) drag on and on. Perhaps more frustrating is that while fairly pointless scenes are expanded too much the resolution to the love games is very brief and I wished she'd played up the eventual falling in love more. I would recommend the book but not as an Austen first because I don't think it does justice to her ability.
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