Mansfield Park

I’ve had an aversion to Austen since studying Pride and Prejudice for my GCSEs. This time, I objected less to her language, in much the same way as I will now eat a steak without bothering to cut off the gristle. It’s unpleasant, but it doesn’t ruin a mouthful. Besides, I’m used to writing where every character speaks in the style (if not the character) of the author – as in Shakespeare and Wilde. However, The Picture of Dorian Gray, while a bit of a dull book, works because of the sober narrative voice. Here it’s like one of the faecetious characters is narrating the whole work, and must describe everything in long-winded excess. I simply find Austen’s prose style smug, monotonous and extremely tiresome.

This is not to say her characters are poor. They certainly have individuality, partially revealed through speech, partially because Austen directly informs us of how we should think of them. In addition, she is so heavy handed and obvious about each moment of character definition that it soon gets frustrating. Fanny has her faults – she is excessively timid and self-deprecating, and actually quite selfish despite the compunction she feels when acknowledging this. But where at first I thought her quite sweet in her giving, gentle and easily-embarrassed way, after the umpteenth illustration of this, she merely appeared utterly useless, an extremely frustrating person to be around, which I am quite sure was not Austen’s intention. Mrs. Norris was worse: initially, it seemed that she was a larger-than-life character, but believably so: controlling, self-centred and always wanting to receive more than her share of credit, she reminded me of Grandma. But again came the bludgeoning ways of Austen’s composition, and Norris becomes more and more draconian, less and less believable – a wicked aunt much like a fairy tale wicked stepmother, which is apt, because between her, the unpleasant sisters, the sweet, trodden-down heroine and the near-flawless prince, the thing that comes most immediately to mind is Cinderella, the characters only a little more fleshed out. They were rather Dickensian – only Austen’s world does not accommodate grotesques in the way Dickens’ do.

Fanny Price is born to a family pecuniary difficulties, but she is given a head-start when she is sent to live with her uncle, Baron Bertram of Mansfield Park. She is shown little kindness except by her cousin, Edmund, and as she grows up she realises she is in love with him. The family befriends the Crawfords, a brother and sister who have lived mostly in London and are terribly daring and modern. The dull lives of these characters are related at length: they discuss landscaping, try and pair off during scenic walks, put on a play only for the Baron to come home and angrily put a stop to it – all the stuff of children’s stories, but told at excessive length. After that, the tangled love lives motivate the story, and Fanny suffers great agonies as she watches the courtship of Edmund and Mary Crawford, but luckily for her it develops about as fast as the technology of a cannibal tribe in the jungle. She takes an inconsequential trip home and we see her family, whose world actually is Dickensian, which is rather a jolting change. To my modern sensibility, the sketch of the family seemed rather condescending. A scandal soon erupts, showing the true nature of the Crawfords, and everything soon comes right for Fanny as, somehow Edmund decides he loves the girl he thought of as his sister. In this unsettling style, the story draws to a close.

It occurs to me, looking at my own reviews that I tend to like honesty, like earnestness, and like the awe-inspiring, and dislike anything that tries to be something it cannot be, or presents itself as something it is not. Mansfield Park tries to be far more intelligent, eloquent, amusing and insightful than, in fact, it is. This, to me, is a far worse failing than something which simply tries to be lowbrow and achieves it.