It does not sparkle like Pride and Prejudice, thrill like Persuasion, or even produce laughter like Northanger Abbey, but Jane Austen's Mansfield Park has a weight to it that makes it stand alone. Three aspects of this work combine to make it not only the greatest of the six finished novels, in my opinion, but also our fullest testament to the author's genius. These three facets are: Austen's theme, the character of Fanny Price, and Faërie.
A Significant Novel About Ordination
A wedding is not the culmination of Mansfield Park. Of course, Fanny and Edmund do marry, but romantic love is the book's undertone, living mainly in the heroine's quiet heart. The couple is brought together after being battered about by the world. Edmund chooses, first the Church, and then Fanny, instead of worldliness. The two of them make a kind of escape into a religious partnership that will be made up of devotion, Church, almsgiving, and duty.
We are not going off to Thornton Lacey at the close of the book to eat hothouse nectarines and drive about in a phaeton, like Elizabeth Darcy. The culmination of Mansfield Park is the security of a retired life in a modest parsonage house. To more fully understand the future the couple chooses, I highly recommend Brenda S. Cox's excellent book, Fashionable Goodness: Christianity in Jane Austen's England.
Austen wrote Mansfield Park as an exploration of the theme of ordination. Though Edmund takes orders offscreen, so to speak, the entire novel gives us the author's critique of the state of religion in Regency England. Mary Crawford voices the fashionable attitudes of a society that is becoming unmoored from religious beliefs. Edmund answers with his determination to restore his small part of the establishment by becoming an active servant of his parish. For the 21st-century reader, Austen opens a window into the problems of pluralism, the rote ordination of younger sons who lack a calling, urban attitudes towards the clergy and Christianity, and many other valuable details. As a clergyman's daughter whose connexion included many men of the cloth, Jane Austen had a great deal to say on the subject of religion, and Mansfield Park is her chosen canvas.
It isn't that the themes of coming-of-age, discernment, self-knowledge, sisterly devotion, or romance that feature in the author's other works are less fascinating, but they are less solemn than what is being presented in Mansfield Park. Properly seen, this masterpiece deserves to be classed with Tolstoy's War and Peace for its earnest grapplings with seeking, finding, and choosing meaning in life.
In Defense of Fanny Price
Just as Miss Crawford's set holds clergymen in a kind of scorn, the fashionable critics of many generations have had no taste for Miss Price. She is too grave and convicted to be sociable company for any but those eccentric folk who genuinely relish rhapsodies on the beauties of evergreens and whose rich interior world accompanies them on their introverted path in life. Fanny loves books, nature, goodness, and God. She was as out-of-step with the Georgians as she is today.
I love Fanny for her dignity. I empathize with the pains she experiences in looking out solemnly at a world that seems to have lost its way. As everyone about her wanders off into peril, she stands firm. Her confrontation with Sir Thomas in the East Room should resonate with anyone who sees the flaws in the patriarchy of every age.
Moreover, Fanny knows herself more than any other Austen heroine. She may be meek, but she has more strength than any of her sister protagonists. She is iron-strong. It is Edmund who, like Elizabeth Bennet, has to confront his own self-deception and experience the mortification of admitting to errant judgment. I think Edmund would need to live an exemplary life in future to continue to deserve Fanny's regard. He could not continue to fail morally and remain the one who reminds her of "kings, princes, and knights".
Austen's Best Faërie
While some scholars point to a Cinderella-like plotline in Mansfield Park, given that a dowerless young woman marries up, even more compelling comparisons have been made to Edmund Spencer's The Faerie Queene. If we understand Mary Crawford as a wicked fairy whose enchanting harp and refusal to be rational leads Edmund off into the Perilous Wood - both metaphorically and at Sotherton - we find ourselves in a fairy tale. England's greatest mythologist, J.R.R. Tolkien, would have felt the Grimmian mood at once.
There is intense tension afoot between a moral relativism which refuses to consult a yardstick or a watch, or to condemn sin, and a rationalism which champions the Enlightenment. In Mansfield Park, we not only find ourselves in Faërie, but wandering into the territory of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, who might prompt us to ask where the mystery of faith fits into this picture. Where, amid utter wool-gathering and chilly rationalism, can we place the healthy dose of imagination needed to embrace the mysteries of Christianity?
No answer to such a question is offered by Mansfield Park. Yet, the fact that one of Austen's novels even tends toward this path of deep inquiry ought to be enough to rebuke any critic who has ever dismissed her writing as mere parlour gossip.
In sum, while I dance with delight at Netherfield, forget to breathe whilst reading Captain Wentworth's letter, and cheer for a young lady who has only just learnt to love a hyacinth, I encounter Mansfield Park with a kind of awe. There is so much going on in this book! Jane was so brilliant and, like Fanny, so undervalued. In painting from this favorite novel, I hoped to convey my esteem and heartfelt wish to be worthy of the friendship of both ladies. I warmly invite my fellow Mansfield Park admirers to enjoy this video short, created with respect and love.