Mansfield Park (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

restlessness. This is a struggle over the fate of the country house, but Mansfield Park suggests that the country house might have already been lost. For only once is Mansfield celebrated as Donwell and Pemberley are celebrated—and then only with significant qualifications. Toward the end of the novel, Fanny returns to Portsmouth to visit her family, and the contrast between their home and the Bertrams’ prompts Fanny to recognize Mansfield’s virtues at last:
    The elegance, propriety, regularity, harmony, and perhaps above all the peace and tranquillity, of Mansfield, were brought to her remembrance every hour of the day, by the prevalence of everything opposite to them here.... At Mansfield no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence, was ever heard; all proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness; everybody had their due importance; everybody’s feelings were consulted. If tenderness could be ever supposed wanting, good sense and good breeding supplied its place (pp. 340-341).
    Tenderness had indeed often been wanting, and Fanny’s tacit acknowledgment of this fact is the loose thread that unravels the passage as a whole. It reminds us that while other country houses in Austen compel love at first sight, Mansfield can be loved only from a distance, only through a veil of faulty memory. And the more closely we look at this passage, the more clear it becomes that Mansfield remains what it had long been: a place of “propriety” from without and invidious distinctions from within, of apparent “harmony” and actual dissent, of “good sense and good breeding,” but bad morality.
    The failures of Mansfield seem to be beyond improvement, and it is in this context that we can best understand the novel’s shift in focus from country house to parsonage. Austen famously described Mansfield Park as “a complete change of subject—Ordination,” but the novel proves to be less of a change in subject than we might at first expect. For what interests Austen about the duties of a clergyman is their close resemblance to the duties of a landowner; what interests her about “ordination,” that is to say, is its possible implications for other forms of order. As a younger son, Edmund cannot hope to inherit Mansfield, but his understanding of what it means to be a clergyman is held up as a model for what the heir to Mansfield should and must be. And what it means to be a clergyman, for Edmund, is to settle in one’s parish. Edmund must explain to the Crawfords that he will not, as they expect him to do, visit his parish church on Sundays and spend the rest of the week at Mansfield. For he understands that “‘a parish has wants and claims which can be known only by a clergyman constantly resident.... that if he does not live among his parishioners, and prove himself by constant attention their well-wisher and friend, he does very little either for their good or his own’” (pp. 214-215). With this passage, Austen joins the contemporary chorus attacking the rampant abuses in the Church of England, such as the relatively common practice of clergymen hiring curates to perform the duties of a parish while themselves continuing to receive its tithes. But the passage also implies that residence is a virtue for landowners as well as clergymen, and it reminds us of the “very little good” that was done during Sir Thomas’s two-year absence from home. The fact that it is Sir Thomas himself who has spoken this passage, with his customary sententiousness, further emphasizes the total separation between the appearance and reality at Mansfield.
    By retreating from country house to parsonage, Mansfield Park acknowledges that the landed elite is often incapable, or unworthy, of upholding the country-house ideal. But the novel also suggests that this ideal is more problematic than Burkean conservatives are willing to admit.
    More specifically, Mansfield Park critiques the landed estate