That first year in Brooklyn, I sensed my life beginning to grow into a new shape. It was the first time I had had a place of my own, and I could almost feel my arms and legs getting longer with all the psychological space I had to move around in. I got a platform for my futon, bought a nice set of chairs at a stoop sale down the street, even picked up some plants and learned how to keep them alive. (When I asked the clerk at the garden store if my potting soil would go bad if I didn’t, you know, use it up right away, he said, “You wanna know if this dirt is going to get stale? I feel like I’m talking to my little brother!”) My English-muffin-pizza days were over. Instead, I picked up The New Basics Cookbook and started having people over for things like minty roasted potatoes and lemon-garlic-rosemary chicken. A few months in, I even acquired a cat—this was some serious responsibility now—a little gray thing who needed a home and who took to curling up beside me on my desk while I was working.
Living so far from Columbia, I began to see less of my graduate school friends. Instead, I gravitated toward a very different world. Another friend had become involved with a woman who’d been raised on the Upper East Side and gone to a fancy Manhattan private school. Her prep-school crowd was back in the city after college, dabbling in this or that and living the high life, and these were the people I started spending time around. It would have been hard not to. This was the upper crust, the world of Edith Wharton or F. Scott Fitzgerald updated for the nineties: posh, polished young people who gave off a glow of glamour and sophistication that drew me like a moth. I was dazzled, I was seduced. It was an undreamed-of world of privilege, and I was grateful just to be able to watch.
There was the stunning department-store heiress who ran a chic East Village café and went out with a guy who talked about getting into film. There was the scion of a consumer-products fortune who had married his art-school girlfriend. There was the lovely, blue-eyed daughter of an Ivy League president. And there was one young woman who seemed to be richer than all the others put together—even they grumbled when she took us to a “little place around the corner” where the desserts started at twelve dollars—and who had picked up a tall, Dutch, model-beautiful boyfriend somewhere along the way.
I went to their openings and partied with them afterward in downtown lofts. I partook of artful brunches and elegant candlelit dinners at a town house in Cobble Hill. I was ushered into the large East Side apartment building where my friend’s girlfriend grew up, to discover that there were only two doors facing us when the elevator opened: one for her apartment and one for the other one. I spent weekends at her family’s summerhouse on Long Island, with four or five bedrooms and a swimming pool and a lawn that rolled down about three hundred feet to the sound.
Here it was, I thought, that fabulous, glamorous New York world that I had always sensed around me but had never known how to get to. The city is Oz when you grow up, as I had, in the Jersey suburbs, a shining mirage in the distance, and ten years of living there had never really changed that. I could walk the streets and hit the bars on a thousand college nights; I could eat black bean cakes in Chinatown, blini in Brighton Beach, and bowls of flaczki at Christine’s; I could discover the Kitchen, the Knitting Factory, and P.S. 122; but I could never shake the feeling that I was still just wandering somewhere out there in the cold. The real city, as I imagined it, the magic kingdom where beautiful people in shining clothes said clever things in darkened rooms, still lay there on the other side of the velvet ropes.
But now I felt like I’d been slipped a pass, even if it was strictly limited-access. My friend’s girlfriend befriended me—she turned out to be a tremendously magnetic personality, a great storyteller and reader of character—but the rest of them mostly ignored me. I could hardly blame them. I didn’t know how to dress, where to stand, how to order a drink or cross a room at a party. So I stayed on the edges, gazed at the women, and tried to pay for my keep with witty remarks. Yet still I hoped to find a place within the circle, if only by special dispensation. I would become the house intellectual, I imagined, prized for my ability to spice up a gathering with a dash of literary zest. The guys would respect me; the women would notice me. Eventually, one of them—it almost didn’t matter which—would find me intriguing enough to make me her boyfriend.
It wasn’t always easy, after one of those weekends or one of those nights, to go back to plugging away at my Austen chapter. It was the longest of long slogs, writing a dissertation, and I had still only barely begun, and I often wondered where it would finally get me, whether there would be a job out there at the end of it all. Sometimes I even lost patience with Austen herself—specifically, when I thought about Mansfield Park. I had read it a couple of times by then, and I still could not see anything to like about the book, or comprehend how she had ever written it. The novel seemed to pit itself against everything Austen believed in, everything that was delightful about Emma and Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey—against wit and energy and curiosity. Its mood was dour, even bitter, its view of life crabbed and prudish.
Worst of all, it forced me to keep company with an exceptionally unappealing heroine. Fanny Price was a poor little girl who had been adopted into her rich uncle’s family at the age of ten. Terrified by the grandeur of her new surroundings at Mansfield Park and awed by a foursome of confident, attractive older cousins, Fanny developed into a meek, weak adolescent, frail in body and poor of spirit. She had nothing of Emma’s self-confidence, or Elizabeth’s sense of fun, or Catherine Morland’s openness to life, no capacity whatsoever for happiness or joy.
Her passivity may have been understandable given the circumstances, but it seemed to conceal something more like passive aggression. When her cousins and some friends decided to put on a play for their own amusement—exactly the kind of thing, by the way, that the Austens did all the time when Jane was growing up—Fanny refused to take part in so supposedly improper a scheme. But it wasn’t enough for her just to stay out of it. She couldn’t stand the idea that anyone else might be having a good time:
Everybody around her was gay and busy, prosperous and important; each had their object of interest, their part, their dress, their favourite scene, their friends and confederates: all were finding employment in consultations and comparisons, or diversion in the playful conceits they suggested. She alone was sad and insignificant: she had no share in anything; she might go or stay; she might be in the midst of their noise, or retreat from it, . . . without being seen or missed.
To which I felt like saying, “Too bad.” But self-pity was not enough for her. That was already her default mode, a “Don’t worry about me, I’ll just sit in the dark” kind of martyrdom. No, as she crept around watching the rehearsals, “Fanny believed herself to derive as much innocent enjoyment from the play as any of them.” “Innocent enjoyment”: the very note of defensive hypocrisy. She got pleasure from the play, and then she got some extra pleasure from condemning it.
Fanny was already eighteen by then, but she still seemed like a child, willfully stuck in the same place she had been when she’d first arrived at Mansfield Park. Indeed, the so-called East room, her own little domain on an upper floor, had once served as the family schoolroom, and it retained its childish furniture even now. “Innocent” was right. Fanny’s problem with the play, after all, a romance called Lovers’ Vows, was the covert opportunity it afforded her cousins and their friends for flirting with one another. Prim, proper, priggish, prudish, puritanical, Fanny simply couldn’t deal with the threat of adult sexuality. And to top it off, she didn’t even like to read novels. Too racy for her, no doubt, and certainly too frivolous.
On the other hand, no one else at Mansfield Park was any better, and most of them were a lot worse. Fanny, at least, had the virtues of her faults. If she was self-pitying, she was also self-sacrificing. If she was passive, she was also patient, generous, and uncomplaining. But the rest of the household was mainly different flavors of awful. Sir Thomas Bertram, Fanny’s uncle, was a distant, overbearing patriarch whose presence sat on Mansfield like an oppressive weight. (Only his absence overseas made the thought of the play possible.) Lady Bertram, his indolent trophy wife—“a woman who spent her days in sitting, nicely dressed, on a sofa, doing some long piece of needlework, . . . thinking more of her pug than her children”—was as lovely, energetic, and intelligent as an expensive throw pillow.
Maria and Julia, the Bertram daughters, were slick and spoiled. (“Their vanity was in such good order,” Austen told us, “that they seemed to be quite free from it.”) Tom, the older son, was an irresponsible playboy. And then there was Mrs. Norris, Lady Bertram’s sister, probably the most repulsive character in all of Austen: spiteful, miserly, and mean as dirt, a woman who reacted to the death of her husband “by considering that she could do very well without him” and who harried Fanny—“Remember, wherever you are, you must be the lowest and last”—like a wicked stepmother. But indeed the whole family treated the heroine like a glorified servant—that is, when they bothered to notice her at all.
The whole family but one. Edmund, the kind, attentive younger son, was an oasis of decency in a desert of selfishness. But even he was hard for me to take—as proper and priggish as Fanny herself, and in fact, as her mentor and adored older cousin, the one primarily responsible for making her that way. Nor was Edmund any less immune to the lures of hypocrisy. He, too, opposed the play—until he saw the chance to do a little flirting of his own. Not that he regarded it like that, of course. The cast was one short, and Edmund only took the unclaimed part to forestall the greater impropriety of having to give it to someone outside the family circle. It also just happened to involve playing opposite a young woman in whom by then he had developed a somewhat more than innocent interest.
For a new pair of young people had arrived upon the scene. Henry and Mary Crawford, whose half sister was the wife of the Mansfield clergyman, were everything, it seemed to me, that the novel had been needing, a gust of fresh air from beyond the musty confines of Mansfield Park. Henry was dashing and debonair, a sophisticate, a raconteur, a man of the world—cleverer than Tom, more confident than Edmund, and a lot more fun than either one. As for his “remarkably pretty” sister—healthy and high-spirited; witty, playful, and independent—she reminded me of no one so much as Elizabeth Bennet. “I am very strong,” Mary said, bouncing off a horse. “Nothing ever fatigues me but doing what I do not like.” She even came with an extra little dash of sauciness. Henry and Mary had been raised by their uncle, a high-ranking naval officer. “My home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals,” she quipped at one point; “Of Rears, and Vices, I saw enough”—a naughty pun on military ranks and the sexual reputation of the Royal Navy.
The Crawfords were independently wealthy, and their money gave them a freedom of spirit that was previously unknown to the heavy atmosphere of Mansfield Park. Their arrival jolted both the Bertram siblings and the novel itself awake. Walks, rides, outings, the play—suddenly it was all liveliness and movement. Of course, Fanny herself was appalled. These were not her kind of people, or her idea of how to pass the time (which tended to involve a lot of sitting). And when Mary and Edmund began to take a shine to one another—his steadiness of character attracting her almost against her will—the heroine was thrown into a panic of jealousy.
But if she stewed with secret spite, Mary treated her with a gentle consideration that seemed to flow from real goodwill. “I am not going to urge her,” Mrs. Norris barked in front of everyone when Fanny refused to participate in the play, “but I shall think her a very obstinate, ungrateful girl; . . . very ungrateful, indeed, considering who and what she is”:
Edmund was too angry to speak; but Miss Crawford, looking for a moment with astonished eyes at Mrs. Norris, and then at Fanny, whose tears were beginning to shew themselves, immediately said, with some keenness, “I do not like my situation: this place is too hot for me,” and moved away her chair to the opposite side of the table, close to Fanny, saying to her, in a kind, low whisper, as she placed herself, “Never mind, my dear Miss Price, this is a cross evening: everybody is cross and teasing, but do not let us mind them.”
As for Henry, a hardened flirt, he was tougher to like, luring Maria Bertram’s affections, during the time of the play, from the rich but dull-witted young man to whom the oldest Mansfield girl was already engaged—though with no motive more serious, on Henry’s part, than the gratification of his own vanity. Fanny’s turn was next—he boasted to his sister that he only wanted to make “a small hole” in the heroine’s heart—but he soon discovered that the influence was running the other way. Like Mary with Edmund, Henry was surprised to find himself susceptible to Fanny’s finer, quieter qualities. And as he set out to court her in earnest, he began to display some rather fine qualities of his own: patience and tact and sensitivity, a cultivated mind and a susceptible heart.
As Pride and Prejudice ultimately arranged a merging of its hero’s and heroine’s best qualities, a purging of their faults, so I always rooted, each time I read the novel, for a synthesis of Mansfield and Crawford: Edmund and Fanny on the one hand, Mary and Henry on the other. Goodness matched with boldness, stability with spirit. The cousins would grow up, the siblings would settle down. Everybody would be better, and everybody would be happy.
But then, something happened to change my mind, not only about Mansfield Park but also about myself. A year or so after I’d begun to hang around the private-school crowd, my friend and his girlfriend got married. It was more like a coronation than a wedding: a rehearsal dinner the night before at an elegant restaurant overlooking the East River, a stately ceremony in the grand space of an East Side Episcopal church, and an opulent, impeccably tasteful reception at a private club nearby. I fished my best shoes out from the back of the closet and bought my first new suit since my bar mitzvah. Hundreds of people attended, most of them from the bride’s parents’ rarefied sphere of business associates and social contacts. And then, as I was watching the dancing with some of the other single guys—the department-store heiress was wearing a little black dress with a fur-trimmed neckline that none of us could take our eyes off—one of them said, apropos the groom, “Well, he got what he wanted.”
“What do you mean?” I said, looking over to where the newly married man, a big grin on his face, was shaking hands with some of his father-in-law’s friends—cool, confident men who looked like they knew where all the levers were. “He’s on the inside,” came the reply. “He’s been working on this for years.” My friend, it was true, was not of that world. He had grown up in the South, a professional’s son but the grandson of a state trooper, and his mother had been a stewardess. He had gradually worked his way up the chain of academic prestige, through college and graduate school, always traveling in a northeasterly direction, then came to the city, moving from job to job in the same fashion. But I had never imagined that the whole thing had been so calculated.
Sure, I knew in a theoretical sense that people sometimes married for money. I had read The Great Gatsby and understood about coming to New York to bury your past and bluff your way into high society. But I had never dreamed that any of those things applied to my friends. Didn’t we all just go out with people because we liked them? Weren’t we going to marry for love? A phrase popped into my head, understood as if for the first time: “social climber.” And then I remembered something that my friend had said not long after I had met his girlfriend. The two of them had wanted to set me up with one of those old schoolmates of hers, but they had had their reservations. “She’s high-maintenance,” they said. “What’s high-maintenance?” I asked. (I hadn’t seen When Harry Met Sally . . . yet.) “High-maintenance is the worst,” my friend said, searching for a way to express the true awfulness of the concept. “It’s worse than being ugly. It’s worse than being poor!”
It’s funny how that hadn’t really hit me at the time—or had, but I had let it go. They were such a fun couple, and they promised so much fun to come. I hadn’t wanted to hear what he was really saying, or maybe I couldn’t quite believe it. But now, at the wedding, seeing the whole world they’d introduced me to spread out in front of me, seeing its logic laid bare, I was forced to think about what it all meant—the greed beneath the elegance, the cruelty behind the glow—and more to the point, what I myself had been doing in it. Because if my friend was a social climber, then what the hell was I? I had never planned things out the way that he had, or even thought about where it was all heading, but my attraction to that golden crowd, my ache to be accepted by them, what did it amount to if not the very same thing? Who was I becoming? Who had I already become?
I’d like to be able to say that I turned my back on that world that very night, but it wasn’t so simple. The newlyweds were still my friends, and I didn’t find it easy, in any case, to walk away from something that seductive. But I did start to notice all kinds of things—how these people treated others, but also what they did to themselves—that I hadn’t wanted to see before. And it wasn’t long before I realized, as I returned to my dissertation, that someone had already told me everything I needed to know about that world before I’d even encountered it, only I hadn’t been able to listen. For where was I, I finally saw, but smack in the middle of a Jane Austen novel—and one of them, in fact, in particular? What was that realm of luxury and cruelty, glamour and greed, coldness and fun, if not a modern-day version of Mansfield Park?
The recognition almost knocked me down. However much I had learned from Austen about myself, I had never dreamed that our worlds bore much resemblance to each other. I lived in a democracy, she lived in an aristocracy. In my world, people could make their way through talent and hard work; in hers, you were pretty much stuck where you were born. In our day, people married for love (or so I had thought). In hers, marrying for money and status was more or less taken for granted. But now I saw how similar our worlds really were, especially at the level where I currently found myself. Beneath the ideals, which looked so different, the very same attitudes: the same values, the same motives, the same ambitions. Whatever I might have wanted to believe, I realized, we also have an aristocracy in this country, and I was looking at it. So in the months that followed the wedding, as I continued to travel within that world—but now more cautiously, more consciously—a process of mutual illumination began to unfold. Mansfield Park taught me about my experiences, and my experiences taught me about Mansfield Park.
Who was I, ultimately, among those rich Manhattanites, if not another Fanny Price: an outsider, an onlooker—creeping, largely unregarded, along the edges? What an idiot I had been to think that I could ever really belong, and how pathetic to imagine that my education, of all things, would win me a glamorous girlfriend. That the novel expended so much energy on a play—one that its golden youth put on by themselves, for themselves—made perfect sense to me now. The episode simply made visible what had always been true, that Fanny was and only ever could be a spectator. She may have chosen to sit out the play, but the larger drama of money and status that was being enacted around her all the time—the balls and the games, the flirtation and the matchmaking—she had no more choice to sit and watch than I. We didn’t know the lines, and no one would have given us a part even if we had managed to learn them. The play’s title, Lovers’ Vows, was perfectly chosen. Fanny was penniless; at that point in the novel (Henry’s later interest was something of a miracle on Austen’s part), she wasn’t going to find herself reciting those anytime soon.
I also began to understand the unique role that Mansfield itself played in the book. The novel was not the only one of Austen’s that was named after a place, but no other place achieved the kind of presence in its novel that this one did. None of her other stories dwelled so insistently within the confines of a single estate. Mansfield was mentioned in the first sentence, and it was named again in the very last line. We discovered its routines, learned the names of its servants, were shown the sources of its wealth. We acquired a sense of its spaces with a richness of detail that was otherwise unknown in Austen’s work: the drawing room, where the family gathered; the billiard room, where the young people set up their theater; the East room, where Fanny went to lick her wounds; the gardens; the stables; the parsonage; the park. No wonder the novel was named for the estate. Mansfield Park was a more important character than anyone else besides the heroine.
As for why this should be true, I had only to think of the place that I had come to as a seventeen-year-old suburban boy. Mansfield was for Fanny what New York was for me: a place of awe, astonishment, intimidation, and social peril, a labyrinth of mysterious values and of spaces heavy with symbolic and emotional meaning. About Longbourn, where Elizabeth Bennett grew up, or Hartfield, where Emma lived, we learned almost nothing, and just because those heroines could take their homes for granted. If Mansfield Park had been narrated from the perspective of Edmund, say, the estate would have figured as an equally neutral backdrop.
But the novel sees with Fanny’s eyes, wide with provincial wonder. Nothing about Mansfield could ever be neutral for her; nothing would ever be taken for granted. The book was about her encounter with the place as much as it was about anything else. Mansfield was a character in the novel for the same reason that New York was in so many movies and television shows—Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, Sex and the City. The two places were not just locations: they were climates, moods, cultures. They made their own weather, dictated their terms.
Which made the Bertrams and Crawfords I knew, children of Manhattan, all the more powerful to me. Coming from the magic place, they carried, quite apart from their own beauty or poise, the dazzle of its aura. So too, in the novel, did the Crawfords, who represented something even more than Mansfield: London, the place where they’d grown up, New York’s forerunner and equivalent. The Bertrams themselves were provincial compared to them, and it was the glamour of London, I now understood, that the Crawfords sailed into Mansfield on the wind of. It was the source of their worldliness, their knowingness, their confidence.
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.
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.
While Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters were exempt from household responsibilities, and of course Lady Bertram and her daughters were far above anything but the kind of elegant needlework that gentlewomen used to pass the time, Jane and her sister, Cassandra, as girls, had a full roster of household chores: making clothes for themselves and their father and brothers; helping their mother in the kitchen, dairy, garden, and poultry yard (baking bread, brewing beer, boiling jams and jellies); and even picking up a rake when it was time to make the hay.
After the Reverend Austen died, when Jane was twenty-nine, she and her sister inherited, not the thousand pounds the Bennet girls could each look forward to, and certainly not the twenty thousand that Mary Crawford already possessed, but absolutely nothing at all. Everything they had, they were dependent for on others, meaning their mother, who had little enough of her own, or their other family connections—the most important reason they and Mrs. Austen, together with yet a fourth woman, shared a modest house, provided by a relative, to the end of Austen’s life.
Short of marriage or inheritance—and finding a husband itself depended on having property to offer—women simply had very few ways of supporting themselves in Austen’s day. “Single Women,” as she reminded a niece, “have a dreadful propensity for being poor.” The most common alternative for a young woman of Austen’s class was to become a governess in someone else’s family, a condition that Emma’s Jane Fairfax, staring down its barrel, equated with slavery. The money that Austen was finally able to make from her novels, the first of which was not published until she was thirty-five—£140 from Sense and Sensibility, £110 from Pride and Prejudice—was cherished to the last penny. “Tho’ I like praise as well as anybody,” she once said, “I like what Edward calls Pewter too.” She didn’t just write for the fun of it.
But though Austen neither came from the aristocracy nor entered it, luck gave her a front-row seat for observing its ways. That same Edward, her third brother, had the immense good fortune to be adopted by distant relations, a wealthy, childless couple whose property he inherited and whose name, Knight, he took. Edward’s story may well have given his sister the idea for Mansfield Park, especially since his oldest daughter, the novelist’s favorite niece—eighteen, like Fanny Price, when Austen started to write the novel—was also named Fanny. But if Edward contributed the idea of adoption, and Fanny Knight donated her name, the heroine’s experiences—exclusion, alienation, subordination—belonged to none other than Austen herself.
While she visited her brother’s estate of Godmersham Park any number of times, and struck up that friendship with Fanny Knight, she was never regarded there as anything more than a poor relation. Like Fanny Price at Mansfield Park, or me in that circle of rich New Yorkers, she remained an outsider, and an inferior. The fault was not Edward’s, by all accounts an impeccably generous man (it was he who lent the house, on land attached to yet another one of his estates, in which the Austen women settled after the death of Jane’s father). The fault was not even his wife’s, though when it came to summoning a spinster sister-in-law to help with her many lyings-in (she had eleven children altogether), she much preferred Cassandra. According to a different niece, “a little talent went a long way with the Goodenstone Bridgeses,” Edward’s wife’s family, “& much must have gone a long way too far.”
No, the fault was simply the system’s. Austen was treated like an inferior despite being such a close relation, and despite her immense gifts of character and mind, because according to the way that people thought at the time, that was exactly what she was. Fanny Knight herself, over fifty years after Austen’s death and nearly as many since she had become a titled lady in her own right, put the matter with brutal frankness. Her aunt, she remembered, “was not so refined as she ought to have been from her talent.” The Austens as a whole, she continued, “were not rich & the people around with whom they chiefly mixed, were not at all high bred, or in short anything more than mediocre & they of course tho’ superior in mental powers & cultivation were on the same level as far as refinement goes.” Cassandra and Jane, she went on, “were brought up in the most complete ignorance of the World & its ways (I mean as to fashion etc.) & if it had not been for Papa’s marriage, . . . they would have been, tho’ not less clever and agreeable in themselves, very much below par as to good Society & its ways.”
And this, remember, was Austen’s favorite niece. She wasn’t being mean; she was being honest. This was simply how people thought in “Society,” in “the World.” Family was all well and good, but it was no substitute for “refinement” or “fashion” or being “high bred.” Cassandra went to help her pregnant sister-in-law with a willing heart, no doubt, but it wasn’t as if she really had a choice. Edward lent his mother and sisters a house with an equally good will, but that made them no less his dependents. It is no wonder that the closest friend that Austen made at Godmersham—a relationship that lasted the rest of her life—was none other than the family governess: someone equally marginal, inferior, and dependent. And it is also no wonder that she used her lifetime of stealthy observation there to create her cutting portraits of aristocrats like the Bertrams and the Crawfords.
For all that Austen helped me see about the ways the rich and wellborn deal with other people—as objects or instruments, as puppets or toys—her deepest lessons about the dangers of power and luxury had to do with how such people hurt themselves. It’s no fun to have friends who constantly want you to entertain them, but it’s far worse if you’re the one who constantly needs to be entertained. The Crawfords’ mobility, which looked so much at first like energy—Mary galloping about the countryside, Henry dashing about the country—was little more, I finally saw, than restless discontent. Mary was moping one showery day at the Mansfield parsonage, her half-sister and brother-in-law’s house—“contemplating the dismal rain in a very desponding state of mind, sighing over the ruin of all her plan of exercise for that morning, and of every chance of seeing a single creature beyond themselves for the next twenty-four hours”—when a very wet Fanny was spotted nearby and asked to come inside.
“The blessing of something fresh to see and think of was thus extended to Miss Crawford,” Austen commented, “and might carry on her spirits to the period of dressing and dinner.” The moment went by quickly, but what an indictment it was. So poor was Mary in any kind of inner resources, Austen was telling us, any ability to dwell in her own mind—to read, to draw, or simply to sit still and think—that her spirits couldn’t survive a few hours alone indoors. Perpetual amusement, the privilege of the idle rich, leads only, it seems, to the perpetual threat of boredom.
Being able to get whatever you want, Austen was showing me, leaves you awfully unhappy when you cannot get what you want. While the Crawfords’ arrival set Mansfield awhirl with schemes of pleasure—the play, a trip to Maria Bertram’s fiancé’s estate—they always seemed to have a way of going sour. Everyone fought about who was going to get the best parts in the play or the best seats in the carriage, who was going have the chance to flirt with whom. Everyone fought, in other words, over what kind of pleasure they were each going to have, and who was going to have the most.
When Mary’s harp arrived from London in the middle of the harvest, she couldn’t understand why she found it so difficult to hire a cart to bring it from the nearby town:
I was astonished to find what a piece of work was made of it! To want a horse and cart in the country seemed impossible, so I told my maid to speak for one directly; and as I cannot look out of my dressing-closet without seeing one farmyard, nor walk in the shrubbery without passing another, I thought it would be only ask and have. . . . Guess my surprise, when I found that I had been asking the most unreasonable, most impossible thing in the world; had offended all the farmers, all the labourers, all the hay in the parish!
Charmingly put, as always, but the meaning was clear enough. “I told my maid to speak for one directly”: Mary was not accustomed to waiting for a bunch of farmers, and she did not intend to become accustomed to it, either. Like her brother, or most of the Bertrams, she was not the kind of person who was used to hearing “no.”
Edmund—who, as a younger son, had to find a way to make a living—planned to become a clergyman. William, Fanny’s brother, was already on his way to becoming a naval officer. But Tom, the oldest son—he wasn’t going to become anything. He was an heir, after all; he felt himself to be born “only for expense and enjoyment.” And Henry Crawford, what were his plans? Like a lot of the wealthy young people I knew—the café-owning heiress, who later took an unsuccessful stab at law school, or her boyfriend, the film dabbler—Henry was a dilettante.
When Edmund talked of his future, Henry imagined how splendid it would be to deliver a sermon. “But then,” he added, “I must have a London audience. I could not preach but to the educated. . . . And I do not know that I should be fond of preaching often.” When William, Fanny Price’s sailor brother, recounted his stories of adventure, Henry wished that he had joined the navy. “He longed to have been at sea,” as Austen put it, “and seen and done and suffered as much.” The wording was perfect. Henry wished, not to be at sea, but to have been—to have gotten his suffering over with and now stand ready to reap the credit. “The glory of heroism, of usefulness, of exertion, of endurance, made his own habits of selfish indulgence appear in shameful contrast; and he wished he had been a William Price, distinguishing himself and working his way to fortune and consequence!”
The wish, however, was short-lived. Why work hard if you don’t have to? Why restrict your freedom if you have all the money in the world? Henry wanted to do a little of everything but not too much of anything, and so in the end he did precisely nothing. It was not an uncommon predicament among the rich kids I knew, both in that private-school circle and through other connections. Many were chronically aimless, and some were downright miserable, psychologically crushed by the fact that nothing was ever going to be expected of them. At the highest levels of wealth, I heard, doing well meant no more than not having tried to kill yourself. It made me wonder whether people would ever seek to make themselves rich in the first place, if they knew what it was going to do to their children.
The Crawford worldliness, which had always so impressed me, now seemed, in fact, a kind of narrowness. Mary’s crack about the hay, her inability to understand that there might be other priorities than the ones that prevail in London, was evidence not only of a bloated sense of entitlement, but also of the special kind of provincialism that belongs to people who think of themselves as cosmopolitan. Once I realized this, I began to see it all around me, including—or especially—coming out of my own mouth. At least people from smaller places recognize that there are other things out there in the world. But if you live in “the center of the universe”—London in Austen’s day or New York in ours—then nothing else exists. How could you ever want to spend a day outside the city? Why would you even bother with people who live somewhere else?
Before the business with the hay, Mary had also had some trouble hearing that her harp had arrived at the nearby town in the first place:
The truth is, that our inquiries were too direct; we sent a servant, we went ourselves: this will not do seventy miles from London; but this morning we heard of it in the right way. It was seen by some farmer, and he told the miller, and the miller told the butcher, and the butcher’s son-in-law left word at the shop.
It was like those jokes that New Yorkers make about the pizza in Chicago, or the culture in Los Angeles, or those quaint, slow-witted people that they meet on vacation in Vermont.
More than snobbery, I saw, this was an appalling lack of curiosity. Accustomed to a world of “ask and have,” of trading money for pleasure in coldly impersonal transactions, Mary had no interest in trying to appreciate the face-to-face texture of country life, where news was passed from mouth to mouth and everyone cooperated in communal tasks like getting in the harvest. Not having to struggle for anything, I realized, also means not having to think about anything. The Crawfords, at least, were quick and clever, but Maria and Julia Bertram, praised and pampered from birth, were almost aggressively empty-headed—and their mother, of course, made of indolent stupidity a kind of art form.
I had fallen, I realized, for the oldest myth in the book: the idea that upper-class people are all urbane and cultured and intellectually sophisticated. It was probably Austen’s fault as much as anyone’s—all those Elizabeths and Darcys, with their crackling banter—but I only needed to look at what she herself was trying to tell us to see how ridiculous that notion was. Elegant manners and active minds are two completely different things; fat wallets and interesting thoughts have no particular connection. The upper class’s traditional pursuits had a lot more to do with horses than books. As for today, those beautiful people in shining clothes don’t sit around saying witty things; they drop names and talk about real estate. Matthew Arnold, who came about a half a century after Austen and who popularized the term “philistines” to describe the middle class, had an even less flattering name for the aristocracy: “barbarians.” People like Elizabeth Bennet were rare exceptions. Even someone as smart as Mary Crawford preferred to exercise her body, not her brain.
But wealth and comfort, Austen made me see, stunted more than just minds. When one of the Mansfield children fell ill away from home, Fanny, who was also away, was kept informed by Lady Bertram. Yet it was as if her aunt, protected all her life from trouble or hardship or even exertion, couldn’t finally feel what was going on with her own child—couldn’t feel, in other words, what was going on in her own life. Her letters to Fanny, as Austen put it, were but a “medley of trusts, hopes, and fears” (as in “I trust and hope he will find the poor invalid in a less alarming state than might be apprehended”), a frictionless, conventional language that represented nothing but “a sort of playing at being frightened.” Everything seemed to happen to her at one remove, as if she were handling life with gloves on.
It was just the same with the rest. With layers of money to insulate them from the consequences of their actions, nothing really mattered to them: nothing was serious, nothing was sacred, nothing could raise a genuine feeling. The idea of performance, I realized yet again, was perfectly to the point. When Henry set out to conquer Fanny’s affections (a lark for him, a potential heartbreak for her), he was, in essence, mapping out a script and acting as his own director. Austen constructed those scenes—Henry reads from Shakespeare, Henry talks about giving sermons—to feel like little plays. He was playing at sensitivity, playing at cultivation, acting out whatever strategies he thought would work and savoring his performance all the while. He was impersonating himself, a spectator at his own life.
On the outing to Maria Bertram’s fiancé’s estate, early in the Crawfords’ stay at Mansfield, the party was shown the old chapel. “Prayers were always read in it by the domestic chaplain,” Maria explained, “but the late Mr. Rushworth,” her fiancé’s father, “left it off”—that is, discontinued the practice. “Every generation has its improvements,” Mary quipped—only to eather words a minute later, when she learned of Edmund’s career plans. “‘Ordained!’ said Miss Crawford; ‘what, are you to be a clergyman?’” She almost refused to believe it, and she certainly refused to accept it, browbeating the man she hoped to marry, over and over, to get him to change his mind. It seemed to her a kind of joke. How could anyone take religion and morality seriously? How could anyone take words like “duty” and “conduct” and “principle” seriously? After all, she never took anything seriously.
Yet as the Crawfords prolonged their stay and came to know Fanny and Edmund better and better, they began to get an inkling of everything that they’d been missing. Henry saw something in Edward that he wished he could find in himself, and something in Fanny that he wished he could have for himself. As for Mary, when she did at last tear herself away from Mansfield to pay a long-delayed visit to another friend, she had this to say to the heroine: “Mrs. Fraser has been my intimate friend for years. But I have not the least inclination to go near her. I can think only of the friends I am leaving. . . . You have all so much more heart among you, than one finds in the world at large.” “Heart”—Mary’s stammering attempt to name the things she was starting to learn how to value: moral seriousness, depth of feeling, constancy of purpose. Inner riches—things you can’t buy, things you have to earn. The woman who’d thought she had everything was discovering just how destitute she really was.
Yet still—and this was really the saddest thing of all, both in the novel and among the wealthy kids I knew—she couldn’t finally bring herself to overcome her training. She loved Edmund, but she wouldn’t marry him as long as he insisted on becoming a clergyman. He simply wouldn’t be rich enough, though her own money was sufficient to make them both comfortable, and he also wouldn’t be glamorous enough. “For what is to be done in the church?” she asked him. “Men love to distinguish themselves, and in either of the other lines,” law or the military, “distinction may be gained, but not in the church. A clergyman is nothing.” But of course, Mary didn’t really mean that men love to distinguish themselves, though many certainly do. She meant that women love to see their men distinguished—or at least, women like her. And without distinction, apparently—without success, in today’s terms—a man was “nothing.”
Not to be able to marry the person you love, because you love money and success more. Is there any hell worse than this? Yet I saw it all the time in New York. Even the woman I loved that summer I studied for my orals, a person of great intelligence and sensitivity, once admitted, with rueful self-knowledge, that she wouldn’t be able to marry a man who didn’t make a lot of money. She was a doctor’s daughter, and had been raised in high suburban comfort. “I blame my father,” she said as a sort of ironic joke. “He provided me with a certain standard of living, and now I can’t do without it.”
Another woman I knew, equally brilliant and self-aware but even richer and more glamorous, broke up with a man she really liked because, as she confessed, he just didn’t have enough style. This was after a long string of romantic disappointments, no less. He was kind, she told me, he was attractive, he was smart, he was a good lover, he even made a very nice living. But he came from Ohio, and he didn’t know how to dress or groom or distinguish himself at a cocktail party. “It’s awful,” she told me, “but I just can’t do it.”
The next time I saw her, she was being led around by a welldressed boob who droned on about all the important people he knew. She glanced at me if to say, “I know—I’m sorry.” It made me think of Maria Bertram, who also knew exactly what she was getting: “a heavy young man, with not more than common sense; but as there was nothing disagreeable in his figure or address, . . . and as a marriage with Mr. Rushworth would give her the enjoyment of a larger income than her father’s,” “the young lady was well pleased with her conquest.” What a failure this was, of imagination as well as courage. “A large income,” Mary Crawford said, “is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of,” and apparently neither she nor Maria nor many of the smart young people I knew (“It’s worse than being poor!”) could think of a different one.
So was I “nothing,” too? My friend and his wife once introduced me to a young couple. They seemed happy together, but, my friend declared the moment they left, “She’ll never marry him as long as he’s only a junior prosecutor.” I frankly didn’t buy that for a second—I was way past taking his judgments at face value by that point—but it gave me the final clue about his character. He was the one he didn’t think was good enough to marry, good enough to love, unless he managed to make himself successful. Why else had he been so driven to fight his way up the social ladder? Or as his wife once put it to the two of us, consoling us for our lack of romantic cachet and looking forward to the day when our professional accomplishments would make us desirable to glamorous women (if there was anyone who wanted to see her man distinguished, it was her): “You guys are lunch meat now. Wait a few years—you’ll be sirloin steak.”
Well, I didn’t want to treat anyone like a piece of meat anymore, and I didn’t want to be treated like one myself, not even metaphorically. But what was the alternative? It wasn’t just my friends and their glamorous crowd. I had been learning to measure myself in terms of success—academic success, professional success—for as long as I could remember, and everything in the culture around me (New York was only an extreme example) instructed me that money and status were the keys to happiness.
So I kept thinking about that word, “nothing.” Who, after all, was “nothing” if not Fanny Price—“lowest and last,” as her awful Aunt Norris reminded her. Forget Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey: if anyone didn’t seem like she was born to be a heroine, it was Fanny. And yet that was exactly what Austen had made her. Indeed, more than Catherine or Emma or Elizabeth Bennet, she was a heroine in the oldest sense—not just a protagonist but a role model, someone we were being asked, however improbably, to emulate. Her very insignificance, I now saw, was designed to provoke us into trying to figure out what her creator found so admirable about her.
Fanny, I realized, was not just different from the privileged people around her; she was their exact opposite. They had everything and wanted more; she had little and was willing to make do with less. Instead of responding to adversity with petulance and spite, she handled it with fortitude, resilience, and, when necessary, resignation. She had hated having to leave her family and come to Mansfield when she was a little girl, but “learning to transfer in its favour much of her attachment to her former home,” she “grew up there not unhappily among her cousins.” “Learning” was interesting: she had to teach herself to do it, it didn’t just happen by itself. “Not unhappily” was even more interesting. She wasn’t happy, and given the circumstances, she didn’t look like she was ever going to be, but by accepting the situation and making the best of it, she managed at least to avoid being unhappy—which was more than you could say for most of her cousins, most of the time.
Whereas Henry and the rest, always able to command amusement, were constantly dogged by the threat of boredom, Fanny had created a rich inner life for herself. The East room, her little space upstairs, was like a diorama of her mind, a place where she could always find “some pursuit, or some train of thought. . . . Her plants, her books, . . . her writing-desk, . . . her works of charity and ingenuity.” She was quiet and shy, yes, but she had a lot going on beneath the surface. For that was the big surprise about her, one that it took me a very long time to see. Mary, lovely and charming, was far better able to incite emotions, but Fanny felt them much more keenly. She may have been prudish and prim, but she was also, of all things, intensely passionate.
Shame, gratitude, terror, happiness, jealousy, love: her emotions were not always pleasant, but she felt them with her whole body. “Fanny’s feelings on the occasion were such as she believed herself incapable of expressing; but her countenance and a few artless words fully conveyed all their gratitude and delight.” “He saw her lips formed into a no, though the sound was inarticulate, but her face was like scarlet.” Life was simply much more real to her than it was to Mary or Henry or Tom or Maria. Its risks were more threatening, its pleasures more precious. One of Austen’s highest lessons, I realized, is that the only people who can really feel are those who have a sense of what it means to do without.
Which was not an endorsement of poverty, either. The glimpse we got of Fanny’s original family made it quite clear that Austen was not foolish enough to romanticize deprivation. The Price household was loud, chaotic, and dirty, with no more consideration for other people’s feelings than prevailed at Mansfield itself. Austen’s point was subtler. Being a valuable person—a “something” rather than a “nothing”—means having consideration for the people around you. Too much money renders that unnecessary; too little makes it very difficult. Fanny was a heroine, finally, because she was able to put herself aside for other people.
One of the novel’s most important words was “exertion” (meaning exertion on behalf of others), and another one was “duty”—two concepts we don’t hear very much about anymore, in this age of do-your-own-thing and every-man-for-himself. Fanny exerted herself for Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris all the time—patiently, uncomplainingly—but she also coached Maria’s dull-witted fiancé when he was trying to learn his lines for the play (even though she frowned upon the project) and, a far more painful sacrifice, swallowed her feelings to help Edmund rehearse his scenes with the dreaded Mary.
As for “duty,” the word connected the obligations that Fanny understood herself to have as a niece, cousin, and friend with the responsibilities that Edmund looked forward to assuming as a clergyman and that William embraced as a naval officer—exactly the ideal of selfless conduct that Austen saw among the professional men in her own family (her clergyman father, her sailor brothers). The Crawfords, of course, had a different and more modern interpretation of the concept. “It is everybody’s duty,” Mary said, “to do as well for themselves as they can.”
But the novel’s most important word of all was “useful.” “It is not in fine preaching only,” Edmund told Mary, “that a good clergyman will be useful in his parish.” Henry had sense enough to put “usefulness” next to “heroism” (the “glory” of usefulness, no less) in his admiration of William Price. Lady Bertram, not surprisingly—it was the worst thing that Austen could say about her—“never thought of being useful to anybody.”
I resisted accepting this, for a long time, as a standard of behavior. It seemed so, well, utilitarian—so petty and practical. Is that the best we could do for one another, be “useful”? What about support and compassion and love? But eventually I started to see the point. Usefulness—seeing what people need and helping them get it—is support and compassion. Loving your friends and family is great, but what does it mean if you aren’t actually willing to do anything for them when they really need you, put yourself out in any way? Love, I saw, is a verb, not just a noun—an effort, not just another precious feeling.
Because Fanny had to work hard, set aside her feelings, and sacrifice herself for others—to be, in a word, useful—only she possessed the moral strength to rise to the challenge when circumstances arrived—it was the climax of the novel—that put everyone to the test. As for the others (always excepting her cousin Edmund), their money had given them too much freedom. They had never had to make the kinds of tough choices that build character, and in the crunch they were, precisely, useless.
Such circumstances, Austen knew, will always eventually arrive. They came for her own family when the wife of that same wealthy brother Edward died a few days after giving birth to their eleventh child. The oldest, Fanny Knight, her favorite niece, was still only fifteen. “Edward’s loss is terrible,” Austen wrote her sister Cassandra, who had gone once more to Godmersham for the lying-in,
& must be felt as such, & these are too early days indeed to think of Moderation in greif, either in him or his afflicted daughter—but soon we may hope that our dear Fanny’s sense of Duty to that beloved Father will rouse her to exertion. For his sake, & as the most acceptable proof of Love to the spirit of her departed Mother, she will try to be tranquil & resigned.
What Austen recommended to us, she urged upon her nearest and dearest, too. Love means effort and self-control—for the sake of others, and thus, ultimately, for your own:
Dearest Fanny must now look upon herself as his prime source of comfort, his dearest friend; as the Being who is gradually to supply him, to the extent that is possible, what he has lost.—This consideration will elevate & cheer her.
And so it proved to be. Writing to Cassandra a few months later—her sister was still at Godmersham, being useful herself, while Austen cared for Edward’s oldest boys, who had been away at school when their mother died—she was able to say this:
You rejoice me by what you say of Fanny. . . . We thought of & talked of her yesterday . . . & wished her a long enjoyment of all the happiness to which she seems born.—While she gives happiness to those about her, she is pretty sure of her own share.
Duty, exertion, resignation, and ultimately, happiness: the same ideas that Austen would later embody in the story of that other Fanny, the one she created and sent to a place that looked a lot like Godmersham Park.
But there was one last form of usefulness (though I never would have thought of it that way) that Austen was keen to teach—so much so that she put it right up front, at the very start of the novel. The ten-year-old heroine had been at Mansfield for a week, sobbing herself to sleep every night, when her cousin Edmund, six years her senior, came upon her in tears on the attic stairs. “And sitting down by her, he was at great pains to overcome her shame, . . . and persuade her to speak openly.” She missed her family, he soon perceived, and so he said, “Let us walk out in the park, and you shall tell me all about your brothers and sisters.” And that was enough to win him a friend for life, the simple act of inviting Fanny to tell her story. No one else had thought to do it; no one else had thought about her at all.
How different this was, I realized, from the kinds of stories I had trained myself to tell my friend and his wife, those polished little anecdotes that had to have a laugh at every turn. “You shall tell me all about your brothers and sisters.” All about: no impatience, no competitiveness, no interruptions, no need to worry about being entertaining, no having to watch your listeners’ eyes glaze over while they thought about what they were going to say when you finally stopped talking already. Did Edmund really care about her brothers and sisters? Probably not. But he cared about her, and she cared about them, and that was enough for him. To listen to a person’s stories, he understood, is to learn their feelings and experiences and values and habits of mind, and to learn them all at once and all together. Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else’s stories—entering into their feelings, validating their experiences—is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness.
There’s no doubt about it: fun people are fun. But I finally learned that there is something more important, in the people you know, than whether they are fun. Thinking about those friends who had given me so much pleasure but who had also caused me so much pain, thinking about that bright, cruel world to which they’d introduced me, I saw that there’s a better way to value people. Not as fun or not fun, or stylish or not stylish, but as warm or cold, generous or selfish. People who think about others and people who don’t. People who know how to listen, and people who only know how to talk.
I could drift away from the private-school crowd—which, now that I had gotten my head screwed on a little straighter, is exactly what I did—I could leave New York altogether, as I knew I might someday have to do, but these lessons, I realized, would always apply. Few of us travel in the kinds of upper-class circles of which I’d had a glimpse, but we all live in a world where money and status and celebrity are cherished too highly, and we’re all susceptible to the temptation to value people for things like wealth and glamour and success—to value ourselves for them, and sacrifice what’s really important in order to get them.
The truth is, I never did grow to like Fanny Price, and I never could bring myself to dislike the Crawfords as much as I knew I should. By the same token, I didn’t find it easy to spend less time with my friend and his wife. Fun is fun, and charm is charming, and we can’t really prevent ourselves from feeling drawn to them. But the lesson of Northanger Abbey still applied: “Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves.” Thinking can’t stop us from feeling, but it can stop us from acting. It can prevent us from being taken in by our feelings.
I wasn’t even sure that Austen expected us to like Fanny Price. She knew quite well that Fanny would be tough to love, but she wanted to draw the contrast with people like the Crawfords in the starkest possible terms. By not giving her heroine any kind of wit or charm to distract us, she forced us to focus on the things that really mattered about her. Elizabeth Bennet also had a generous heart, was also capable of being thoughtful and selfless, but with her glorious lovability, who even bothered to notice? Reading about her, it was all too easy to imagine that Austen only cared about sparkle and wit.
That was why she had to make her heroine in Mansfield Park so dull. This time, she took Elizabeth and split her personality in half: Mary got the charm, Fanny got the goodness, and we had to decide which one was better. Austen wasn’t really condemning brightness and energy, I realized; she was just showing us that they aren’t the most important things in life. “Wisdom is better than Wit,” she wrote to Fanny Knight the very year that Mansfield Park was published, “& in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.” Choosing Fannyness over Mary-ness does not come naturally and is not always particularly pleasant, but, Austen was telling us, it is what we need to do.
And so, it is what I began to try to do. I knew perfectly well that I fell far short of the standards that Austen was holding up, so I started to watch myself, and I started, yes, to exert myself. I made a deliberate effort to be useful to the people around me, whether it was something small, like showing up on time for dinner, or something bigger, like proofreading a friend’s dissertation. Most of all, I practiced sitting still and listening—really listening. To friends, to students, even just to people I met, as their stories came stumbling out in the awkward, unpolished way that people have when you give them the freedom to speak from the heart. People’s stories are the most personal thing they have, and paying attention to those stories is just about the most important thing you can do for them. I never did come to like Fanny’s story, but that’s the deepest lesson that finally listening to it had taught me.