A Jane Austen Education(36)

When the young people, at one point in the novel, were discussing the “improvement” of estates—renovation, in our language, a fashionable subject at the time—Mary delivered her opinion with urban nonchalance. “Had I a place of my own in the country, I should be most thankful to any Mr. Repton [a famous landscape designer] who would undertake it, and give me as much beauty as he could for my money; and I should never look at it till it was complete.” Beauty for money: Mary was not just advertising her wealth, she was displaying an ostentatiously metropolitan insouciance in the way she handled it. People in London, she was saying, don’t dirty their hands with the details. They snap their fingers, and the world jumps.





Was Mary being a snob? Maybe a little. Mainly she was doing what she always did. She was being charming. Only now did I realize, though, what “being charming” meant. Charming, after all, is a verb—an action, not merely a state. Mary wasn’t charming the way that Elizabeth Bennet and Catherine Morland were—unconsciously, as a simple outgrowth of their personalities. She deliberately set out to win people over. It was a performance, I saw, an act. (And the significance of the play, the brilliance of placing it at the center of the novel, was once again brought home to me: these people were already acting all the time.) The idea was counterintuitive. Why would someone who was so much more fabulous than you were bother to prove—to you, of all people, the toad, the provincial—just how fabulous they were? Because they needed to know that you thought they were fabulous. Apparently, no matter how poised and confident they seemed to be, they weren’t sufficiently convinced of it themselves.

Mary, I realized, was exactly, almost eerily, like my friend’s new wife. I had been utterly charmed from the night I had met her—by her stories, by her repartee, by her sense of daring and fun—but only now, thinking back to that encounter, did I see how calculated the whole thing must have been. Of course I’d been charmed: that’s what she did. And then it hit me. My friend’s wife had done to me exactly what the Crawfords did to the people at Mansfield, but also what they did to us.

And so I finally began to recognize the depth of Austen’s cunning in Mansfield Park. As Mary seduced Edmund and Henry seduced Fanny, their creator was seeing to it that they were also both seducing the reader. The fact that I had been so taken with them was not the novel’s flaw, as if Austen had created characters that she couldn’t control; it was, precisely, its strategy. She had done it again, just as she had in Emma and Pride and Prejudice: orchestrated my responses to teach me a lesson about my responses. She wanted me to fall for the Crawfords, and then she wanted me to figure out why. Only this time, it had taken me a lot longer to catch on.

My friend’s wife had had a particular reason for wanting to win me over that night—I was her new boyfriend’s friend—but as I began to see, she didn’t need a particular reason. In a coincidence that was almost too beautiful, she was an actress herself—or had been, in college, before she gave it up, as she once told me, because “the best I was probably ever going to do was shampoo commercials.” Instead, she went to law school, or as she put it, “I figured I’d get much better parts as a lawyer than I ever would as an actress.” If she boasted about the way she could work a party, she also bragged about her skill at working on a jury, getting them to think exactly what she wanted.

Like the Crawfords, she pushed people’s buttons for the simple pleasure of being able to do so, and the challenge of figuring out how. Mary, too, was an acute reader of people. Or as Edmund gushed to Fanny, “I know nobody who distinguishes characters better. . . . She certainly understands you; . . . and with regard to some others, I can perceive, from occasional lively hints . . . that she could define many as accurately, did not delicacy forbid it.” In the case of my friend’s wife—or my friend, for that matter, an equally cutting observer—delicacy most certainly did not forbid it, and they had long been regaling me with reflections on the rest of the private-school crowd, from “high-maintenance” to the notion that the twelve-dollardessert woman had acquired her gorgeous boyfriend “like she was buying a pretty book.” Only now did I begin to wonder, though, what the two of them must have been saying about me, to everyone else, and how they must have been working on my buttons, too, without my having realized it.

It was the same in Mansfield Park. When Mary comforted the heroine after that vicious attack by Mrs. Norris, I now saw, she may have been motivated mainly by kindness—“the really good feelings by which she was almost purely governed,” as Austen slyly put it—but she was also manipulating two people at once. She knew that the way to get to Edmund’s heart was to go through Fanny, and that the way to get to Fanny’s was by asking her about her brother William, a sailor, the one member of the heroine’s original family to whom she remained attached. And indeed, as Mary went on to ask about him, and express her curiosity to see him, and “imagined him a very fine young man,” Fanny “could not help admitting it to be very agreeable flattery, or help listening, and answering with more animation than she had intended.”

Mission accomplished. But then, Mary was a serial manipulator. She manipulated Sir Thomas, she manipulated Lady Bertram, she even manipulated, for no conceivable purpose, Mrs. Norris. But the novel’s greatest symphony of button pushing was Henry’s attack on the heroine. As he told his sister:I do not quite know what to make of Miss Fanny. . . . Is she solemn? Is she queer? Is she prudish? . . . I never was so long in company with a girl in my life, trying to entertain her, and succeed so ill! . . . I must try to get the better of this. Her looks say, “I will not like you, I am determined not to like you”; and I say she shall.