Thus the house is not experienced from day to day only, on the thread of a narrative, or in the telling of our own story. Through dreams, the various dwelling places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days. – Gaston Bachelard
Throughout my reading life, Jane Austen was always a figure of comfort and constancy: her wittiness, charming characters and picturesque settings present a world to me where everything is right, at least on the surface. I found myself returning to her when I needed affection and warmth, like seeking a good aunt's petting when your mother has been harsh to you. Not only was she responsible for introducing me to the wonderful world of classic literature, but she also created three of my favourite novels (Emma, Pride & Prejudice and Persuasion). This year, I reached an important milestone as a reader: I read all of Austen’s novels, Mansfield Park being the last one left.
I always postponed this book because, based on the general opinion and my own intuition, it seemed to be the one I'd like the least. Some say it’s misunderstood, others say it’s insufferable – I’m somewhere in the middle. Certainly a subtle work, I believe it to be the most thematically vast of her creations, but I also found it boring. It lacks a vivacity so characteristic of the author – indeed it’s her most serious work. Still, a couple of months after reading it, a few thoughts remained, and I wanted to share them with you, specifically on the relationship between characters and the space around them, a device much used by Austen.
Nabokov once said, when it comes to analysing books, that his plan is ‘to deal lovingly, in loving and lingering detail’. I really liked this idea since I despise the sort of criticism that seeks superiority by belittling a book, especially if it’s a classic. As I said, Mansfield Park didn't work much as entertainment for me, but I found it intellectually engaging, and I will try my best to approach it lovingly, on behalf of the love I have for its author.
The Poetics of Domestic Life
As a woman born in the late 18th century, Jane Austen was confined to the limits of domestic life. In such context, if she wanted to write ‘realist fiction’ about what she knew, then the result would be exactly what we have left of her today: novels that treat us to insightful details of the mundane and in which the backgrounds are invariably houses, estates, mansions, parlours, shrubberies, living rooms, dining rooms and, occasionally, a ballroom. The most iconic review of Pride & Prejudice on Goodreads, which was raised to the status of a literary meme, is from a person complaining that the book is ‘just a bunch of people going to each other’s houses', and they are not wrong.
...all the literary training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room. People’s feelings were impressed on her; personal relations were always before her eyes. Therefore, when the middle-class woman took to writing, she naturally wrote novels. (A Room of One’s Own, p. 99)
Austen’s poetic imagination was too great to be hindered by being enclosed in domesticity – in fact, she thrived at it. For those of us who can appreciate the greatness of commonplace events in her novels – the nuances of decoration, of how the Lady of the house makes use of her income, how the family entertained themselves, and how guests were received – Austen is no less than a genius, and her domestic condition wasn’t necessarily a setback to her creativity, at least it doesn’t seem so by the tone of her writing.
Virginia Woolf attributes this to her lack of anger. We can never go beyond conjecture on Austen’s feelings, but I agree with Woolf, especially when compared to Charlotte Brontë:
But perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not. Her gift and her circumstances matched each other completely. But I doubt whether that was true of Charlotte Brontë, I said, opening Jane Eyre and laying it beside Pride and Prejudice. [...] One might say… that the woman who wrote those pages had more genius in her than Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted? (A Room of One’s Own, p. 100)
From this example, let’s consider the striking difference in the characterisation and symbolism of the domestic environment in a Brontean novel and an Austenian novel. In the former, the house is suffocating, cold, and dark, and its endless doors, attics, and narrow passages represent the barriers between the characters and the constraint of the individual. In the second, there’s always a model house (like Mansfield as opposed to Portsmouth) that is lively, warm, and decent – a place where family life is a blessing, and its author doesn't seem to want to escape it.
Naturally, Brontë succeeds in places where Austen doesn’t, not least because I believe they had different goals with their work. One uses architectural space as a mirror for internal turmoil and mystery, such as the red room in Jane Eyre or the enclosed garden in Villette; the other uses it to display tempers, such as Fanny’s room, full of little memorabilia and old furniture, indicating her tendency to nostalgia and old-fashioned morals. Ultimately, the room is always something noteworthy in the works of lady novelists like the ones Woolf mentioned in A Room of One’s Own.
The Fanny question: money, morals, memory
To understand the main character’s delicate position in the novel, some context is due. Fanny Price is a middle-class girl from Portsmouth, with too many siblings for the available income; to relieve her parents and get some prospects, she is sent to live with her mother’s sister, Lady Bertram, who is married to Sir Thomas Bertram, a Baronet, and lives in a manor named Mansfield Park.
From the beginning, Fanny's story reminded me of Cinderella, with her plot revolving around her elevation in rank and status, starting with the development of her education and manners, the attention she comes to receive from the Crawfords, her prestige with Lady Bertram, and finally her marriage to Edmund. It’s the classic story of ‘rags to riches’ – we can even spot two evil stepsisters in cousins Maria and Julia, and a cruel matron who acts like an evil stepmother in the figure of Mrs Norris.
However, Fanny’s transformation is merely external, as she arrives at Mansfield timid, submissive, inert, yet morally perfect, remaining so until she is rewarded for it. If Fanny has always been right, there's no room for psychological growth; her internal narrative arc ends up being a flat line. Just as Cinderella's new look is just an outward change caused by illusionist magic, Fanny's ‘new’ look is also a type of illusion due to a shift in perception, since, by the end of the novel, she is still the same, just seen through a new light.
The relationship between Fanny’s character and the three elements listed in the title above are crucial guides to the story of Mansfield Park. She has impeccable feminine virtuosity, her class status is an enigma, and she is a sort of living memory of what Mansfield represents. In several moments of deviation and crossing of boundaries, Fanny serves as a reminder of the embedded values of her uncle’s house, always opposing her cousins’ amoral plans. In short, the relationship between Fanny and Mansfield is key to understanding the ethics of space found in the novel.
The class issue in this book is more pronounced than in all the other Austenian novels for Fanny is the heroine with the most precarious economic situation. She is constantly reminded of how she is ‘lesser than’ her cousins, and the fact that she has been assigned to the remotest quarters of the house next to the governess's room is extremely symbolic – Fanny lives in limbo within Mansfield’s status quo, so much so that Mary Crawford is confused, and asks Edmund and Tom if Fanny is ‘out’ yet. They fail to give her a straight answer.
Nevertheless, despite those bitter reminders, Fanny is inevitably above her siblings and parents due to her external metamorphosis in Mansfield. As niece to a baronet, and daughter of Mr. Price, a marine officer, she is kind of ‘half-gentry’. Her peculiar and uncertain position in the Bertram household highlights the precarious socio-economic situation of women at the time, especially in the attempt to define Fanny's social position according to notions of ‘propriety’.
Regarding Fanny’s social limbo, there is an important scene where the gulf between the Bertrams and the Prices is best exemplified. After refusing Henry Crawford’s advantageous marriage offer, Sir Thomas decides to send Fanny back to her birthplace after 12 years as a ‘poverty reminder’. The difference between Mansfield and her Portsmouth home is alarming: chaos, impropriety, rudeness, messiness, violence, noise, and confusion. In manner and temperament, she no longer belongs there, but socio-economically she does.
The visit offers a glimpse of the terrible future that may befall Fanny if she doesn't make a good marriage – the only way to effectively elevate her status. It's a harrowing scene because, after years of being raised as a lesser lady, Fanny returns home expecting to belong but finds herself utterly inadequate and unwanted. And so she finally discovers that, despite the small sufferings at Mansfield, this is her true home, and the Bertram family can no longer function without her. At last, by marrying Edmund, she fulfils her transformation from Price to Bertram.
My biggest issue with this novel is Fanny herself and her lack of substance, as Nina Auerbach said: ‘That dynamic misreader Emma Woodhouse is forced by her own misconstructions into the limited position of actor in the comedy she is trying to control from without, while Fanny's role as omniscient outsider thrives on her continued abstention.’ (p. 449). Emma, due to her misreadings, has an interesting character development, while Fanny stays dully the same – her judgement and attitude are already immaculate in the novel’s moral standards.
Reading the Room
Fanny interprets her being in the world through the space she occupies in Mansfield (literally and figuratively). Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space goes from a ‘standpoint of a philosophy of literature and poetry’ to interpret houses, buildings or architectural spaces in literary terms. He talks of ‘writing a room’ or ‘reading a house’ — Austen indeed wrote rooms, and we read Mansfield Park. Kathy Mezei and Chiara Briganti wrote in Reading the House: A Literary Perspective:
The house — and architecture — have served as foundational, powerful, and recurring analogues throughout the history of literary interpretation: thus Walter Pater proposes the term literary architecture, Henry James his house of fiction, Gaston Bachelard the poetics of space, and Edith Wharton her House of Mirth
In her book Living Space in Fact and Fiction, Phillippa Tristram exposes a crucial idea on the relationship between architectural space and literature:
From the beginning, the house and the novel are interconnected, for the 18th century, which saw the rise of the novel, was also the great age of the English house. Because the novel is invincibly domestic, it can tell us much about the space we live in; equally, designs for houses and their furnishings can reveal hidden aspects of the novelist’s art. It is no accident that many of the terms used in critical discourse — structure, aspect, outlook, even character — are related to domestic architecture.
As illustrated by Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel, such elements as the rise of the bourgeoisie, the privatisation of society and cultural trends that praised domesticity and the picturesque, formed an ideal context for the novel of manners to appear. Professor Alistair Duckworth claims that ‘throughout Jane Austen's fiction, estates function not only as the settings of action but as indexes to the character and social responsibility of their owners.’
Then, understanding the symbolic and moral importance of Mansfield Park as a house is no trivial matter. The relationship between space and character can hardly be called a novelty, but it may go unnoticed. It’s not in vain that the book title is given after the house.
The Bertrams’ home is almost a character in its own right because it has a distinguishable personality, being a place of routine, order, serenity and, above all, what the English call ‘propriety’. Part of Mansfield's personality is tied to Sir Thomas's aura of patriarchal authority, which, in his absence, would be almost completely lost were it not for Fanny, always faithful to the customs of what she later discovers to be her true home.
However, Mansfield is not always a paradise of virtues for Fanny, so much so that she is often alone against the folly of its inhabitants, but as Anne says in Persuasion: ‘one does not love a place the less for having suffered in it’. Furthermore, Mansfield can be seen symbolically as a nostalgic England for Austen, a last refuge and stoic resistance to the life of the small landed gentry before the factories and railways put an end to it all.
At the time the story is set, England is on the brink of monumental change, and not only there but ‘the whole western world — with a violence, a suddenness, and a heedlessness, which would soon make Jane Austen’s world seem as remote as the Elizabethan Age’ (TANNER, p. 145). I cannot help but recall that scene in Middlemarch where the farmers in Mr Brooke’s estate wreak havoc when the constructors come to see where the railroad would pass. Middlemarch begins about 15 years after the events in Mansfield Park, and the changes depicted in Eliot’s novel are preluded in Austen’s work through a cosmopolitan ‘invasion’ of the countryside.
Moral Landscaping
Let’s observe the novel’s antagonists: The Crawford siblings. They are rootless (and ruthless) – contributing to their lack of principles, for they have no stability, familial tradition, or patriarchal authority to keep them grounded. Henry Crawford is an ‘avid improver’ as Tony Tanner calls him – always interfering in the status quo of Mansfield's circumspect society, ‘the improver of the estate is also the disturber of conventional life’. In the garden scene, Henry helps Maria over the locked gate into the woods, which can be read as a foreshadowing of their outcome.
As for Mary Crawford, she is obsessed with movement and variety, she tries to manipulate Edmund into going along with her fickle ways, and the first obstacle she needs to get rid of is the Church. The first time Mary tries to dissuade Edmund from becoming a clergyman is at the Rushworth estate, specifically when they are walking through the estate’s woods, and during the conversation, they leave the ‘great path' and enter ‘a very serpentine course’. This is one example of how the author constantly mirrors the interior of the characters with the exterior space in several episodes of the narrative.
Sir Thomas could also be considered an antagonist, but I find his role to be more complex. He is, in a way, the soul of Mansfield (house), being the representative of rural values. No wonder that it's during his absence that chaos begins to take hold in the mansion. It is symbolically meaningful that Sir Thomas' exit coincides with the arrival of the fashionable Londoners Mary and Henry – this event denotes the decline of country tradition due to the rising influence of cosmopolitan tendencies; it’s the death of Old England and the birth of modernity.
The solid frame of rural stability was starting to crack in Austen’s time, and I think she felt that acutely by the tone of the novel. One of the main symbolic conflicts is city life vs. country life, and it is clear that the traditional and quiet way of the country is the desirable one, presented by the Author in a favourable light to the detriment of the restlessness of everything (and everyone) the city represents.
In a book where houses and places come to represent ethical values, the identification of the self with a type of home is incredibly revealing. When Fanny identifies her home with Mansfield, despite all of the small sufferings and humiliations, she actually identifies with the values edified by that estate, which is why she is the true heiress of Sir Thomas.
Just like Fanny, Mansfield itself undergoes an endurance test against hostile, urban influences. The fact that it is Henry Crawford and his friend Rushworth who are obsessed with estate improvements is no coincidence: it was all the rage during the Georgian era, a fashionable hobby for gentlemen of means; the dismantling and modernization of century-old mansions reflect their careless characters and disregard for tradition, as opposed to Fanny who, rather romantically, remembers William Cowper’s The Garden, a poem in which he denounces landscape improvements by pointing how ‘Down falls the venerable pile, th’ abode of our forefathers’.
Mary, just like her brother, is favourable to improvements: ‘Had I a place of my own in the country, I should be most thankful to any Mr Repton who would undertake it, and give me as much beauty as he could for my money’. She constantly draws open references to money, a vulgar practice in Austen’s time indicating her vanity, ambition and fashionable pursuits. Of course, nowadays she is much more understood and beloved than Fanny (I adore her myself), but let’s try to see her through Georgian propriety lenses.
Professor Duckworth argues that Rushworth, while well aware of the aesthetic deficiencies of his estate, is ignorant of far worse ills: his improvements will clearly have nothing to do with his run-down cottages. (p. 441). Bad landlords are a recurring theme in 19th-century English fiction – how could one forget Mr Brooke’s disgraceful administration contrasted to Mr. Garth’s practical sense in Middlemarch, or Mr Harding’s financial controversy with the parsonage’s almshouse in The Warden? In these examples, one’s domestic management and land administration are also indicators of character.
Another deliberate use of space is the setting in Fanny’s bedroom – a quiet, remote, and nostalgic place where she goes to reflect and to shelter from the disruptive attacks of the Crawfords and her cousins. Thus, the home offers not only a physical refuge, but also a mental one: theoretically, at home one is at ease, safe, and genuine. It provides a retreat for intimacy and private thoughts. It’s worth mentioning that Woolf also utilised the privacy of domestic spaces as a mirror for psychological space; for example, Mrs Dalloway’s bedroom is a refuge from the social anxieties of the party downstairs, and a place that inspires nostalgia — it's where Clarissa reminisces on her juvenile summers.
Domestic Virtue Rewarded
In his analysis of Mansfield Park, Nabokov pointed out how Edmund and Fanny are a perfect match because they are ‘equally formed for domestic life, and attached to country pleasures’, demonstrating once more how the relationship between character and space determines their outcome. Since the Georgian era was such a domestic society, the preference for a provincial or cosmopolitan lifestyle is a key factor in choosing friends and lovers, and this can also be seen in Austen's other works.
Neoclassical ideals were still in vogue at the beginning of the 19th century and Austen's aesthetic education was certainly oriented towards them. The influential Alexander Pope, in his Essay on Criticism, established proportion, order, harmony, decorum, and simplicity as ideals. These are values that Mansfield Park, as a physical space, either represents or aims to represent at its best, and Fanny, with all her self-righteous judgement, acts as a guardian of those esteemed principles.
She is the tiresome but necessary string holding morality together, even when she lacks a voice of command; her moral firmness is connected to a tradition materialised in the house, and that attitude of remembrance is what maintains the order and makes her worthy of one day becoming the mistress of the place.
On Mansfield Park’s conclusion, Shawn Normandin said: ‘The ending of the novel becomes an allegory of virtue rewarded rather than a symbolic union of reader and protagonist in a shared joy’, and I agree. Not that every book has to end in a joyous celebration – it would be exceedingly dull – but usually that’s what we are looking for when we escape into Austen’s world.
Despite my criticisms of Fanny, after writing this essay I came to understand her better, and isn't sympathy one of the noblest outcomes of literature? George Eliot taught me that. While I still dislike the protagonist, my admiration for the author remains intact and, as Julie Park argues, ‘the absolute complexity and power of Austen’s novel has to do with her choice of creating a heroine who lives her life in this way, who lives as much in the internal reflections of her mind as in the controlling structures of moral principles’.
What I enjoy most about Austen’s books is the poetry of everyday life, because it makes me feel that there is no better place to be than the living room (or drawing room), surrounded by those who are dear to us. I don’t understand people who criticise her books by saying that ‘nothing happens’ in them. If a person considers all the small tumults and businesses of routine as ‘nothing’ and cannot appreciate the minuteness of her world-building, they are dreadfully missing out on life – because life, in its most delightfully true picture, is what Austen writes about.
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I belong to the minority who not only liked Mansfield Park but also loved Fanny, finding a personal connection with her. Your essay provided a welcomed perspective, making me think deeper about the intricate links between the Mansfield Park manor and its inhabitants inner emotions and feelings, as well as the underlying conflict of values between traditional rural England and the emerging industrial society. Thank you!