Persuasions #2, 1980                                                                                                                                            Pages 27-28

 

SUPPRESSED DESIRES IN MANSFIELD PARK

by Maggie Hunt Cohn
Clarendon Hills, Illinois

Do Jane Austen’s own personal life and feelings appear in her novels? What can we deduce from these fantasies about her own personal conflicts and how she resolved them? I delight in this speculation.

I assume as a psychoanalyst does in dream interpretation that each fictional character shows part of the writer’s personality, and off I go.

What do we know of Jane Austen’s life as she wrote Mansfield Park? Whether that was before or after 1800, it was certainly after the first bloom of youth, the first thrill of being “out” had passed. This novel asks what happens when a father is absent. It deals with how a young woman survives without a father and without a husband. It fantasizes different adaptations.

Consider Mrs. Norris and the difference in her playing the role of aunt from Jane Austen’s. Jane was an ideal aunt. Mrs. Norris a seriously bad one. She usurped the mother’s place and helped ruin the Bertram children because her lot made her bitter and niggardly. Jane’s lot was very similar. Fantasizing Mrs. Norris’s games was a release for Jane’s unacceptable feelings.

Another disowned part of Jane Austen: Maria Bertram. If Jane had not felt the bonds of her own situation, could she have brought to such poignant life restless Maria Bertram’s self-destructive grabs for life’s obvious sweets? Jane writes with deeper emotion of Maria than of Lydia Bennet Wickham, a happier grabber. Was the temptation to act similarly so much more intense when she wrote Mansfield Park? Is this why the punishment must be greater? The rejection, more profound?

Next, whom does Mary Crawford resemble in Jane’s life? Sophisticated Eliza de Feuillide, Jane’s cousin and sister-in-law, linked with Steventon dramatics. (Imagine Jane watching theatrics between Eliza and Jane’s adored older brother, [whom Eliza much later married] with darkly fearful thoughts of unfulfilled adolescence? This tone pervades Mansfield Park.) Eliza inspired, but Jane, herself, was Mary’s source. Both were happy, quick, kind and energetic, and Jane, like Mary, did treat moral codes lightly on occasion. “I have a good eye for an adulteress,” she wrote once. How she must have longed in those days at Chawton “on the shelf” for the insensitivity which would permit her to marry into an establishment; for the freedom to discard her clergyman father’s morality. The joy for us is her escape through her pen. Of course, to atone to her conscience, Jane must make her stubborn charmer at last discover that in slighting morality and attempting to dominate, she has lost.

Dream work ignores gender. You express yourself in either sex. There is an important part of Jane Austen in Henry Crawford. She was a writer: a beast with an appetite for attention. The great writer possesses the ability to inhabit others’ souls and play their roles. (Reference: unpublished doctoral dissertation by Phillip Powell, University of Chicago.) I see in Jane Austen, Henry Crawford’s drive to learn people’s weaknesses, seduce and desert. Her fear of it in others, also seen consistently in her earlier works, is proof to the psychologist of its existence in herself. Henry Crawford’s fate shows her judgment of its danger to self as well as to victim. Was her later family isolation a phobic defense against enjoying this Faustian indulgence?

In summary, perhaps you have noticed that these characters all act a general theme: wilful, disregarding child and/or spoiling parent. Why does this fascinate her? Her family position, younger daughter, often means a subtly enslaving family role. Parents may collude to maintain the babyhood of at least one of their children, to have a thoughtless, darling enchantress for their personal joy. Was this an undercurrent to Jane Austen’s life, a gritty trouble that she turned into pearls for us, as she worried: Why, why? Personalitites are highly complex. Other factors certainly contributed to holding her in her narrow realm. Perhaps fear of isolation? Perhaps genius’ fight for her own special space?

For now, let me add I take a fiendish pleasure in the marginal health of Fanny Price. Victor she is at last, but I hear Jane Austen saying sotto voce that no strong healthy woman (Susan Price for instance) would ever endure the early life Fanny led so patiently.

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