Mansfield Park

Since I last posted about Jane Austen I have finished both "Mansfield Park" and "Emma." What follows is written without doing any real research, just my reactions and observations. To me it seemed that Austen after enjoying some success with her first two books, was now moving or trying to move into the next level of her writing career. Both books are significantly longer than what came before and my sense is that she was trying for more fully developed plots and characters.

What held my attention about "Mansfield Park" was what I saw to be the drama in who Fanny would ultimately marry. Although the Edmund/Fanny possibilities are made clear throughout the book and certainly seem to be written to attract our sympathy, Austen also gradually starts to make Henry Crawford more sympathetic. I found this especially true when he visits Fanny and her family in Bristol, the last place where Fanny would want anyone from her life at Mansfield Park to visit. During those scenes Austen makes Crawford appear to be growing/improving so that if continued it seemed possible that a Crawford/Fanny marriage might be the outcome.

All of this breaks down, of course, when Crawford reverts to the bad Henry, running away with Maria the older of the two Bertram daughters. It felt to me that Austen used this much in the same way she used the Lydia/Wickham elopement in "Pride and Prejudice" as a sort of Deus Ex Machina to move the story to a final solution. The Crawford/Maria relationship had been very strongly suggested earlier in the book, but still the whole thing seemed a little contrived to me.

Austen had created a situation with two possible outcomes (marriages) for her heroine. Her decision to have the one give into the worst angels of his nature also seems too neat and clean. Those who sin are punished for their sins, those who don't are rewarded. This is also the case with the Mary Crawford/Edmund relationship, Henry's sins set the stage for Mary's inappropriate reactions leading Edmund to turn away from that possibility and ultimately turn to Fanny who is, of course, even more available before. An outcome where someone is disappointed even though they did nothing wrong would be more ambiguous, but to me, at least on first thought, more satisfying.

I enjoyed "Mansfield Park," as I said Austen's development of William Crawford to be an almost eligible (from Fanny's perspective) suitor created drama that more than held my attention. There seems to be a pattern in her endings, however, that I find to be disappointing. I will write more about this when I write about "Emma" which will come after I post something about the Henry Clay biography. I should also say that I am thinking a lot about Austen overall which I will probably write about once I have had more time to think about it.