Mansfield Park (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF
Author: Jane Austen
to the rigid patternings said to exemplify the absolute monarchy in France. In Austen’s lifetime, Humphry Repton (1752-1818) had taken Brown’s place as the most influential landscape gardener of the day, but the politics of his gardening style are more difficult to characterize. On the one hand, Repton warned, in An Enquiry into the Changes of Taste in Landscape Gardening (1806), against “moderniz [ing] old places... and [then] alter[ing] them again on the morrow” (p. 27), a recognizably Burkean caution against excessive change; on the other hand, his actual designs tended toward rather radical “innovations.” As the critic Alistair Duckworth has demonstrated in The Improvement of the Estate, Austen knew both sides of Repton, for she not only read widely in theories of landscape and the picturesque, but she also saw, at first hand, the changes Repton had made to Stoneleigh Abbey, the estate of her mother’s cousin. Repton had, as was his wont, opened new vistas by tearing down trees and walls, even going so far as to redirect the nearby river Avon, and there is reason to believe that Austen felt that these changes had gone too far.
In the episode at Sotherton, however, Austen is less interested in judging either Repton’s theories or his practices than she is in condemning those landowners who choose to hire an improver, any improver, to do work that would better be done by themselves. Sotherton, that is to say, dramatizes both the need for the country house to be renovated if it is to remain vital and the imperative that the responsibilities of authority be borne by those who exercise its powers. In Sotherton, we see a country house that has fossilized from lack of change: The furniture is fifty years out of date, and its portraits no longer mean anything to anyone; the family chapel has fallen into disuse and the laborers’ cottages into total disrepair. And in Rushworth, we see a landowner totally unequipped to make the necessary changes. His plans for Sotherton begin and end with the idea of calling in Repton, and his wish to consult with others rather than making plans himself is merely the first sign of a thoroughgoing abrogation of authority. For the failures at Sotherton can all be attributed to absent or inadequate guardians: The death of the elder Mr. Rushworth has forced his widow to turn to the family housekeeper for knowledge of the family traditions; the younger Mr. Rushworth is ready to chop down that familiar Austen trope for continuity, a flourishing stand of trees; and his future wife, Maria Bertram, rejoices that the church is far enough away from the manor house that she will not be troubled by its bells. The inheritance of the past, the requirements of the future, and the moral and religious duties of the present—all are betrayed at Sotherton. And the betrayals at Sotherton throw into relief that far subtler betrayal the Crawfords threaten at Mansfield. The day at Sotherton gives rise to much talk about improvements, and it quickly becomes clear that improving is, for Mary, something that one hires others to do, while it is for Henry a kind of hobby worth indulging until the pleasure begins to pall: The sister would have improvements undertaken only when she is away from home, and the brother would undertake them for the sheer love of “‘doing’” (pp. 50-51). Edmund, on the other hand, would “‘rather have an inferior degree of beauty, of [his] own choice, and acquired progressively’” (p. 50), but he alone speaks for the Burkean values of familial responsibility and incremental change.
These, then, are the values that will come under attack as the Crawfords begin seducing first one than another of the residents of Mansfield. And this is the struggle that the rest of the novel will unfold: the struggle to preserve the local, the reciprocal, and the continuous in an increasingly cosmopolitan, cash-mad, fashion-driven world; the struggle to find a stable place in a world of
In the episode at Sotherton, however, Austen is less interested in judging either Repton’s theories or his practices than she is in condemning those landowners who choose to hire an improver, any improver, to do work that would better be done by themselves. Sotherton, that is to say, dramatizes both the need for the country house to be renovated if it is to remain vital and the imperative that the responsibilities of authority be borne by those who exercise its powers. In Sotherton, we see a country house that has fossilized from lack of change: The furniture is fifty years out of date, and its portraits no longer mean anything to anyone; the family chapel has fallen into disuse and the laborers’ cottages into total disrepair. And in Rushworth, we see a landowner totally unequipped to make the necessary changes. His plans for Sotherton begin and end with the idea of calling in Repton, and his wish to consult with others rather than making plans himself is merely the first sign of a thoroughgoing abrogation of authority. For the failures at Sotherton can all be attributed to absent or inadequate guardians: The death of the elder Mr. Rushworth has forced his widow to turn to the family housekeeper for knowledge of the family traditions; the younger Mr. Rushworth is ready to chop down that familiar Austen trope for continuity, a flourishing stand of trees; and his future wife, Maria Bertram, rejoices that the church is far enough away from the manor house that she will not be troubled by its bells. The inheritance of the past, the requirements of the future, and the moral and religious duties of the present—all are betrayed at Sotherton. And the betrayals at Sotherton throw into relief that far subtler betrayal the Crawfords threaten at Mansfield. The day at Sotherton gives rise to much talk about improvements, and it quickly becomes clear that improving is, for Mary, something that one hires others to do, while it is for Henry a kind of hobby worth indulging until the pleasure begins to pall: The sister would have improvements undertaken only when she is away from home, and the brother would undertake them for the sheer love of “‘doing’” (pp. 50-51). Edmund, on the other hand, would “‘rather have an inferior degree of beauty, of [his] own choice, and acquired progressively’” (p. 50), but he alone speaks for the Burkean values of familial responsibility and incremental change.
These, then, are the values that will come under attack as the Crawfords begin seducing first one than another of the residents of Mansfield. And this is the struggle that the rest of the novel will unfold: the struggle to preserve the local, the reciprocal, and the continuous in an increasingly cosmopolitan, cash-mad, fashion-driven world; the struggle to find a stable place in a world of