Author Patrice Sarath

I have only ever read Mansfield Park twice. The second time was over the past weekend. Needless to say, I’ve revised my opinion of it.

First, Mansfield Park is not a romance. Once you read it with that understanding, the fact that it’s very unromantic is less of a problem. Austen is best when she writes about families and society. I learned more about Regency era life and times and culture from Mansfield Park than any of her other books, although Emma is a close second. She delineates how people live, eat, and work, what they buy, how they shop, how they talk with each other. MP is also really good at showing us working class people, especially in the extended sequence when Fanny goes to visit her family in Portsmouth.

By the way, Austen really liked sailors. I don’t mean that in a nudge nudge wink wink kind of way at all, but first Captain Wentworth and now William Price really make it clear she had a ton of respect and admiration for men who went to sea. I wonder if she ever dreamed of it herself, the way girls do, before their dreams of adventure are crushed under the merciless heel of society.

Secondly, MP is really modern. It’s densely written because that’s Austen’s style, but it’s eminently readable and the cadence and flow are mostly not archaic. There’s a lot of modern usage as well; my favorite is when Mrs. Norris is said to be “spunging” off a neighbor.

Third: Anyone who thinks Jane Austen led a sheltered life can’t possibly think so after reading Mansfield Park. Holy cow, there’s shocking stuff. The Crawford’s uncle who decides to install his mistress into his house. When Henry runs off with Maria. The underlying flirtation between Henry and Maria. All of this stuff just swirls around MP and it’s all very sophisticated and, yes, modern. Austen is against this behavior, through her proxies Fanny and Edmund, but she is not afraid of writing about it.

One of the reasons MP is not as well liked (I suspect) is not just because Fanny’s a wimp and Edmund is a prig, but because for most of the book Mary and Henry Crawford are not that bad. They are selfish jerks but they aren’t hugely selfish jerks. Henry even starts to get better toward the end. They just weren’t villainous enough. So when it comes to Fanny and Edmund’s conflict with them, I had a hard time working up the same outrage. Yes, Mary didn’t want to marry a parson. Yes, Henry led Maria on and then at the end he ruins her, but since for most of the book Edmund figures he can forgive Mary for being calculating about money and marriage, I just couldn’t see why they were supposed to be so bad.

It isn’t until Henry runs off with Maria, and Julia, in a panic, elopes with Yates (which was the funniest part of the book, actually, that she was so afraid her father would never let her go back to London that she elopes) that we see their true colors. But up until that point, the Crawfords are just selfish, unthinking, charming rich people. I kept thinking, “but they aren’t that bad.”

And that, I suspect, was Austen’s point. I bet her contemporary readers didn’t much like MP either. No one likes being preached to.

I’m glad I gave it another chance. Certainly it allowed me to see how bad the most recent BBC adaptation was. I knew it was bad, but boy. Talk about missing the point.

I am also more convinced that Louisa May Alcott borrowed, consciously or not, something of MP for An Old-Fashioned Girl. That will have to be my next read, just to see if I am right.

Who said:

i’m a recent fan of JaneAusten (i know, the horrors!!!), but at least i’m a fan, right???? i enjoy how as classic as her stories are, they are just as timeless…………i’m just fascinated how Jane inspired other writers to continue or put their own spins on her thoughts……”

Cyn, send me your snail-mail address via the contact form and I will send out a copy of Miss Bennet at once.

Thanks everyone who entered. I loved reading your responses about Jane Austen and I was vigorously nodding my head yes yes yes! to everyone.

Every time I read her books I get something new.

She is timeless — I recognize her characters from school and life, and I suspect that says something about women in Western culture that is not all good but is, for lack of a better word, consistent. We have more options now, more scope for our lives, so maybe we shouldn’t be so caught up in relationships. And it is significant to know that prior to the era in which Austen was writing, Mary Wollstonecraft had written A Vindication of the Rights of Women, so even back then there was awareness that human rights for women were sorely lacking and their lives so cramped and bounded that even their souls wore corsets.

(Patrice, where are you going with this?)

Right. So, when a grown woman in Jane Austen’s time acts like a mean seventh grader, as Anne Eliot’s older sister in Persuasion, I recognize it for what it is and think, I do believe that we have outgrown that. That is, the mean seventh grader attitude is now confined to seventh grade mostly, and most adult women have outgrown it.

(I’m blogging this in the early morning. Hence the general incoherence.)

I also like the fact that the romances in Austen’s novels take back seat to societal observations. Austen is best when she is drawing characters. Her plots are small but she gets relationships of all kinds — maternal, parental, sibling, daughters and sons. When people behave well, they are rewarded; badly, and love is withdrawn (Willoughby in S&S). But no one is martyred. No one suffers the way they are forced to in a Victorian novel or a Gothic one. It is as if she says, emotions (sensibility) can take you so far, but sense is what carries the day.

Thanks for joining in, everyone!

Warning: This post contains discussions of plot points up to and including the most recent episode, which aired February 11 in the US.

What is happening to the writing on Downton Abbey? Julian Fellowes has committed some major storytelling sins, and only the general strengths of the production — the actors, the setting — are able to carry it through. It’s frustrating, because there is a glimmer of the really fantastic work that went into Season 1 but it’s overshadowed by misstep after misstep.

Misstep 1: Forgetting who your characters are.

Remember Season 1? When Lady Mary and Lady Edith so deliciously sabotaged each other’s pending marriages? Awesome trainwreck. Lady Edith was the best wicked ugly stepsister (I was sure we were going to find out that she was actually a stepsister) ever. This season she’s become saintly! But no! She wrecks a farmer’s marriage! But no! She listens to the wounded officers and knows about them! But no — she gets duped by whatisface in the mummy bandages. She’s good! She’s bad! She’s stupid! It was once said about one of Robert Heinlein’s female characters that she was so inconsistent that if she unscrewed her foot and stuck it in her ear, it would not have come as a surprise. I’m just waiting for Lady Edith to unscrew a foot.There is a difference between redeeming a bad character and making them inconsistent. Footman/corporal Thomas suffers from the same writing.

Misstep 2: Lack of conviction.

Hey, (I can imagine the conversation, although in much less of an American accent). Let’s do a series about the cusp of WWI when everything changed in England. You would have it all; the old world passing away, the modern world coming in. Class divisions shaken up. WWI. Political unrest. The flu. Again Season 1 went all out in depicting a world that was about to be upended and no one saw it coming. It was clever writing, good writing, engaging storytelling. This season unfortunately suffers from a failure of nerve.

Branson, the firebrand Communist who is out to change the world — and he plans to dump gross yucky stuff on the visiting general? That’s it?

Structurally the storytelling takes us up to an explosive point and then backs away from it. The imposter. Lady Sybil’s elopement (although Regency readers, didn’t you love the shoutout to Gretna Green?) The flu? The flu was probably the most terrible failure of nerve. Maybe I’ve read too much, and partly this is family history (my grandmother nursed everyone in her household through the flu even while sick with it herself), but the 1918 influenza epidemic was as devastating as WWI in terms of civilian deaths. It is doubtful it would have just hit three people in the house. The village would have been stricken as well. Ethel’s baby probably would have died — or more likely Ethel herself since the flu struck down young healthy people in a disproportionate amount.

Instead, the writers use the flu as a way to get rid of Lavinia, the inconvenient saint. It’s a terrible example of creating a setup and letting everything just fizzle.

Misstep 3. And people say I write fantasy.

Lord Grantham is too nice. Even when he goes to cheat on his wife, he’s too nice. Come on, no one is that nice. No one is that noble or sympathetic or so solicitous of his servants. And it’s no fair showing other people — Major Bryant’s father — being jerks to the servants as if that gets around the question.

Lady Mary presenting Anna with the bedroom for her wedding night. Oh now come on!! No really. Seriously?

If there is no conflict there’s no storytelling. And wishful thinking doesn’t make for good storytelling either. Fantasy requires reality to make it believable; when you go straight for the fantasy, you don’t just suspend disbelief, you destroy belief.

Now the good stuff.

On the flip side, I love Daisy’s arc. Poor kid. She is struggling her hardest to live according to her own sense of rightness, and Mrs. Padmore and William’s dad have both projected their own needs and desires on her. I hope she prevails, and if she has to tell Mrs. Padmore what for, then so be it. I know it’s dangerous talking back to the cook (Saki: “She was a good cook as cooks go, and as cooks go, she went”) but she made matters worse for Daisy and it wasn’t fair.

Thomas is back in livery, which is awesome! Now he can go back to his evil ways. Although I’ve noticed that there is a tendency of the writing to make it clear that bad things happen when servants leave service or get ideas above their station. Which is really ugly, all the more so because it’s probably unconscious. It reminds me of that restaurant we ate at in Fredericksburg — the one with the huge painting of the happy cotton plantation scene complete with slaves that I didn’t notice until I went to the ladies room. Yes, ugly. And all the more ugly because the owners of the restaurant clearly had no idea how inappropriate and terrible it was. Also, Thomas is gay, and gay = evil on the show, so why again am I happy that he’s back in livery? I don’t know, I just think the character is more interesting when he’s being devious.

Clearly I’m conflicted.

I’m also hooked. I want to find out what the finger to the lip tic the imposter did that so interested Lord Grantham. I want Rupert Murdoch to get what is coming to him, and it’s not Huxby or Lady Mary. I want Bates to redeem himself, unless he did kill that terrible woman, in which case, man, couldn’t he have done a better job of it? I want Thomas to find a good man and open an inn together with him far away, like maybe in Cicely, Alaska.

I can’t wait til next Sunday!