Innate or acquired?

First off, a little confession. I love Jane Austen. No, really… LOVE her. I have loved her novels since I read Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility in my high school AP English classes. I have read and re-read her novels since then. Jane Austen and the Brontë’s are responsible for my decision to major in English. Just to clarify, I don’t mean that I am one of the bandwagon Austen-philes that read the mass-marketed fanfic that provide sequels for Mr. Darcy and Lizzie’s life together or that tell what would happen if zombies infiltrated Pemberley. I’m old school. I enjoy her novels for the way she depicts characters and gently laughs at all of them. I love the detail she incorporates in the text and how she makes me feel as though I’m sitting with her in the drawing room, discussing those around us.  

With that said, this is the first time that I’ve ever read Mansfield Park. I remember picking it up once in my late teens but I can’t remember why I didn’t read it at that time. I’m glad now that my first time reading Mansfield Park is as a part of this class. As much as I adore my Austen, I think I would have been bored stiff by, or quite possibly have abandoned the book altogether. However, with the readings from this class percolating in the background of my brain I found myself involved in the text through the concepts of Nature/nature. Throughout my reading I found myself looking at the ways that Austen it playing with or pointing out different features of human nature. I was particularly interested in how the characters act out this question of whether human nature is in fact, natural, or if it is fabricated. There seems to be an assumption of innate nature rather than actual definitive actions of nature when the nature we’re discussing is of the human sort. The Bertram girls are assumed to be ladies, they are assumed to have genteel minds and fine perceptions but as the story progresses we see how “nature” really plays out. On the other hand there is Fanny who is assumed to be low and coarse because of the type of people her parents are but she ends up being the most morally upright person in the novel.

One other authorial move that I especially enjoyed in the novel was how the action revolves around families. The novel begins by discussing the marriages of the three Ward sisters. One marries well, one moderately, and one “to disoblige her family” (1). Since many of the people in the book are related to or spring from the three Ward sisters it could be expected that they would share similar traits or possibly have similar personalities. It seemed strange to me that through marriage a woman’s personality and her offspring could be so materially different from her beginnings. I did enjoy seeing the difference between the children of one Ward sister and Sir Bertram and another Ward sister and a Lieutenant in the Marines. This same idea is echoed in the Grant-Crawford family. It was intriguing to see the idea of nature played out through the characters, where they begin and what is expected of them compared to where they end up and how they actually behave.