A Jane Austen Education(37)
And when his sister tried to warn him away from hurting so fragile a creature, he protested:No, I will not do her any harm, dear little soul! I only want her to look kindly on me, to give me smiles as well as blushes, to keep a chair for me by herself wherever we are, and be all animation when I take it and talk to her; to think as I think, be interested in all my possessions and pleasures, try to keep me longer at Mansfield, and feel when I go away that she shall be never happy again.
The speech itself was a little masterpiece of manipulation, disguising its intentions as it led us along step by step until we wound up somewhere that we never meant to be.
Did Henry ever really fall for Fanny, later in the novel? I was sure that he thought he did, but now I wondered what she really meant to someone like him, or, as a friend, to someone like his sister. “Give me as much beauty as he could for my money”: the Crawfords were accustomed to traveling in a world of objects made for them to purchase and enjoy, and it occurred to me that they were used to treating people the same way. The rich Manhattan kids I knew, of course, were not any different. “Like she was buying a pretty book”: not a kind remark, but an accurate one.
The idea was made more chilling by the sort of beauty that Henry now wished to buy. Fanny had grown into a pretty girl, but what really hooked him was the sight of her reunion, a couple of months after the play, with that same brother William whom Mary had asked her about. “The glow of Fanny’s cheek, the brightness of her eye, the deep interest, the absorbed attention. . . . It was a picture which Henry Crawford had moral taste enough to value.” “Moral taste”: what a perfectly slimy phrase that was, the most important matters of character reduced to the status of a fine wine or toothsome dish, to be bought, sold, swallowed, and judged.
More than the values I discovered beneath the veneer, more than the certainty that my character was being treated to the same kind of vivisection that I witnessed happening to others’, it was that sense of objectification that really began to sour me on my friends and their world. For I had started to realize that I was being treated the same way. Not only were my friends tremendously entertaining people, they gave you the unmistakable impression that they expected to be tremendously entertained—that like Henry, who had “a great dislike” “to anything like a permanence of abode, or limitation of society,” they wouldn’t tolerate a moment’s boredom. And so—it seemed so odd, after all the time we’d spent together—it began to dawn on me that I had never really been able to relax around them, would feel as if I’d been holding my breath the whole time whenever I was in their company. I realized that I always felt as though I had to be on—had to be forever ready with a witty remark or a funny story.
My dating life, with all its perils and pratfalls, became a series of comic vignettes retold for their amusement—which was fine, to a certain extent, because it took away the sting of romantic disappointment, but it also never allowed for any real commiseration or shared feeling. It’s true that I colluded, unconsciously, in my own objectification, wanted to play the raconteur when I saw that it would let me keep a place at the table, but it’s not as if there’d really been a choice. These were not people you wanted to be vulnerable around (they’d probably start calling you “high-maintenance” behind your back), or even just flat in an ordinary way. In fact, since weeks would sometimes go by when I wouldn’t hear from them at all, I started to feel as if I was being treated like a toy: picked up and played with when they wanted whatever it was they thought I had to offer, then dropped again whenever they got bored.
It was just the same in Mansfield Park—as Mary implied when Henry first told her about his designs on the heroine’s heart. Maria Bertram had finally married her wealthy oaf, and her sister Julia, Henry’s first conquest at Mansfield, had gone with them on the honeymoon (as was not unusual in Austen’s day). “You ought to be satisfied with her two cousins,” Mary told her brother about Fanny, but “the truth is, . . . you must have a somebody. . . . If you do set about a flirtation with her, you never will persuade me . . . that it proceeds from anything but your own idleness and folly.” Fanny, for Henry, was nothing more than a hobby at this point, something to do when he wasn’t riding or shooting. Or as he put it himself, “How do you think I mean to amuse myself, on the days that I do not hunt?”
The Bertrams, the Crawfords—why did Austen say such terrible things about the aristocracy, if that was the class she came from and loved so much? Because she didn’t, on either count. Contrary to popular belief, she was neither an aristocrat herself nor, as her books made perfectly clear—Mansfield Park above all—did she even much like the aristocracy. Her heroines, while sometimes rich, were never the richest characters in their books, and they usually didn’t marry the richest ones, either, who were generally rather vile—and the richer they were, the viler they tended to be.
As for Austen herself, her father was a clergyman, and most of her other connections—uncles, brothers, family friends—were clergymen, lawyers, or military officers: gentlemen, yes, but certainly not aristocrats. The Austens were comfortable, but they were far from rich and very far from being, like the families she wrote about, either landed or titled. The Bertrams would have condescended to mix with them, if at all, only in the most distant way—at best, an occasional invitation to a ball, in company with the rest of the district’s respectable families.