Jane Austen's World

In Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park,” published originally in 1814, fine society is the properly mannered wealthy, by birthright and practiced education.

Mansfield Park, the vast English estate of a very rich man, Sir Thomas Bertram, and his family, is captured in “Mansfield Park” the book as home to privilege, home to wealth born of slave-holding plantations in the Caribbean, not unlike those of the American South of the Civil War. Mansfield Park is playground to people who see themselves as favored humans, as people who are educated in the finest traditions, but maybe they are not really educated at all.

Through the device largely of the kind and subdued, even timid, protagonist Fanny Price, eventual moral heroine of this novel, we get to peek first into life at the extensive Mansfield Park estate, where Fanny has been living from ten years of age to becoming a preternaturally aware teen of eighteen. Then, we get to peek at the other, earlier, and grimy life that taints her blood forever, or so she is viewed by the self-thought superior humans of Mansfield Park estate.

Three previous-generation sisters, one Fanny’s mother, have had very different fortunes from one another. Penny-pinching aunt, Mrs. Norris, treats Fanny quite unfairly at Mansfield Park, always. The second, more privileged aunt by marriage is the otherwise uninspiring Lady Bertram of Mansfield Park. Fanny, as a supposed lesson in humility, is sent back by Sir Thomas to that other life in hardscrabble Portsmouth for what turns out to be three months, to reside again with her birth mother, the third sister, and her family. She must eat, or not, from dirt-streaked dishes every day and be just another warm body in the unkempt household for her unengaged parents. Her father is given to drink. Not much care is given Fanny by either, or to any other.

The birth “home” is the counter story to that of the evolving misdirection of Sir Thomas’s four young adult birth children, two sons and two daughters, each playing his/her own society roles along with other young characters. There are potential marital matches in the air, one involving Fanny, dismayingly resisted by Fanny. Hence, the lesson-trip back to her roots in Portsmouth. How dare she be repulsed by the proposed match.

Mansfield Park is an eagle’s nest of the “properly” fledged.

Sir Thomas, with all good intents for his own blood by his own measures, finally reflects and sums a timeless lesson near the end of the unraveling story. “They [his children] had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice. To be distinguished for elegance and accomplishments - the authorized object of their youth - could have no useful influence that way, no moral effect on the mind. He had meant them to be good, but his cares had been directed to the understanding and manners, and not the disposition, and of the necessity of self-denial and humility he feared they had never heard from any lips that could profit them.”

These words are only a part of a longer reflection upon Jane Austen’s story in “Mansfield Park,” and the outcomes in such a world of privilege. It is a world that Austen knew well. The human story is familiar. It is eternal.