The Sound of the Page

It’s been said that the fate of world history for generations turned on Dwight D. Eisenhower’s decision of where and when to launch the invasion of Europe in 1944, yet once he launched the 12,000 planes, 7,000 vessels, and 180,000 troops that comprised the largest amphibious assault in world history, he was powerless to affect the outcome. The female protagonists of Jane Austen’s novels could relate to  the general’s situation. While she is being courted by a suitor, her family waits on her decision with bated breath; but once she says I do, she can look forward to a life of doing very little. And so in one form or another Austen’s novels revolve around the courting game. Where else would a female writer during Austen’s time find the narrative grist to sustain a novel?

To say that Mansfield Park is about love and marriage, however, is like saying that Hamlet is about murder and revenge. Well, they are but they aren’t. Like Shakespeare, Austen gives her readers plenty of subtext to digest. She is perhaps a century ahead of her time in portraying the interiority of her heroes through modernist devices like indirect discourse: “She was at home. But alas! It was not such a home, she had not such a welcome as. . . (300).” At other times Austen allows her characters’ actions speak for themselves, such as when the Bertram daughters and Mrs. Norris concur on the innate deficiency of Fanny’s intelligence because she cannot name the rivers of Russia. Although Mrs. Norris, who is such a humorously horrible character that you just want to hug her, does not administer the girls’ formal education, she does set the moral tone in the Bertram household, enabled by the mental absence of Lady Bertram. To those of you who argue that the two sisters, Maria and Julia, prove the efficacy of nature over nurture, think about who it was that dispensed their moral education.

This is not to say that Mrs. Norris provides the only comic relief. Mr. Price is no slouch either. As the spiritual counterpart to Lady Bertram, he too is oblivious to what goes on in his noisy and unruly household; the irony is that he thinks he runs a tight ship. Thus he disses Sir Bertram when he learns about Maria’s scandalous behavior as if he (Bertram) is a gentleman fop who runs a permissive household that he (Mr. Price) would never countenance. Meanwhile, Price is lucky if he can remember the names of his nine children.

Although world history may not turn on the decisions made by Austen’s characters, the author ranks as one of the world’s great novelists by virtue of her ability to turn a phrase. Scott Ross referred me to a fascinating analysis of her style in an article on Mansfield Park by Vladimir Nabokov.* Nabakov uses the term knight’s move for Austen’s method of capturing the intricacy of Fanny’s emotions when she first hears of Sir Thomas’s departure for Antigua. The key is in the sudden shift of language. Quoting from the novel, Nabakov writes, “Fanny’s relief, and her consciousness of it, were quite equal to her cousins’, but a more tender nature suggested that her feelings were ungrateful, and [knight’s move:] she really grieved because she could not grieve” (Nabakov 57). Nabokov doesn’t mention this but Austen also uses more balanced dichotomies in her physical description of Fanny: “She was small of her age, with no glow of complexion, nor any other striking beauty, exceedingly timid and shy, and shrinking from notice; but her air, though awkward, was not vulgar, her voice was sweet, and when she spoke, her countenance was pretty” (Austen 10). Kind of reminds you of hedge-rows that are hardly hedge-rows. No? 

Nabokov also points out how Austen writes descriptive sentences of characters that in their rhythm and construction mirror their speech. This device works especially well with clumsy characters like Rushworth, who, in the discussion of Sotherton’s landscaping, “was eager to assure her ladyship [Lady Bertram] of his acquiescence [about planting shrubbery], and tried to make out something complimentary, but, between his submission to her taste, and his having always intended the same himself, with superadded objects. . .” and so on. Those of us who took ENGL 441 can recall Bakhtin’s description of this device as heteroglossia—when a speech of another is introduced in concealed form. Bakhtin showcases Dickens writing and cites several other English authors who also use it, but Austen's name is absent.

One final thought: It makes you stop and wonder when you realize that the rarefied society of Mansfield Park was predicated on the slave society of Antigua. My reaction is probably the same as those German WWII POWs being held in the U.S. South. They were eating in a roadside diner with the MPs who were supervising them on a roadwork detail. From where the prisoners sat they could see,, to their shock, black American soldiers walking around to the back door to pick up their food. 

*Lectures on Literature. Harcourt (1980).