Fanny's removal to Portsmouth affects the unity of the novel, which up to now, except for a natural and necessary early exchange of messages between Fanny and Mary Crawford, has been pleasantly free from that dismal feature of eighteenth-century English and French novels, information conveyed by letters. But with Fanny isolated in Portsmouth, we are approaching a new change in the structure of the novel in which the action will be developed by correspondence, by the exchange of news. From London Mary Crawford hints to Fanny that Maria Rushworth was much put out of countenance when Fanny's name was mentioned. Yates is still interested in Julia. The Crawfords are going to a party at the Rushworths on 28 February. She remarks that Edmund "moves slowly," perhaps detained in the country by parish duties. "There may be some old woman at Thornton Lacey to be converted. I am unwilling to fancy myself neglected for a young one."
Unexpectedly, Crawford turns up in Portsmouth to make a last attempt at winning Fanny. To her relief her family improves under the stimulus and behaves tolerably well to the visitor. Fanny sees a great improvement in Henry. He is taking an interest in his estate: "He had introduced himself to some tenants, whom he had never seen before; he had begun making acquaintance with cottages whose very existence, though on his own estate, had been hitherto unknown to him. This was aimed, and well aimed, at Fanny. It was pleasing to hear him speak so properly; here, he had been acting as he ought to do. To be the friend of the poor and oppressed! Nothing could be more grateful to her, and she was on the point of giving him an approving look when it was all frightened off, by his adding a something too pointed of his hoping soon to have an assistant, a friend, a guide in every plan of utility or charity for Everingham, a somebody that would make Everingham and all about it, a dearer object than it had ever been yet.
"She turned away, and wished he would not say such things. She was willing to allow he might have more good qualities than she had been wont to suppose. She began to feel the possibility of his turning out well at last "
At the end of his visit, "she thought him altogether improved since she had seen him; he was much more gentle, obliging, and attentive to other people's feelings than he had ever been at Mansfield; she had never seen him so agreeable—so near being agreeable; his behaviour to her father could not offend, and there was something particularly kind and proper in the notice he took of Susan. He was decidedly improved.... it was not so very bad as she would have expected; the pleasure of talking of Mansfield was so very great!" He is much concerned with her health and urges her to inform his sister of any further deterioration so that they can take her back to Mansfield. Here and elsewhere, there is an intimation that if Edmund had married Mary and if Henry had persevered in his tenderness and good behavior, Fanny would have married him after all.
The postman's knock replaces more delicate structural devices. The novel, which shows signs of disintegrating, now lapses more and more into the easy epistolary form. This is a sure sign of a certain weariness on the part of the author when she takes recourse in such an easy form. On the other hand, we are approaching the most shocking event of the whole story.
From a chatty letter by Mary, we learn that Edmund has been in London "and that my friends here are very much struck with his gentleman-like appearance. Mrs. Fraser (no bad judge), declares she knows but three men in town who have so good a person, height, and air; and I must confess, when he dined here the other day, there were none to compare with him, and we were a party of sixteen. Luckily there is no distinction of dress nowadays to tell tales, but—but—but." Henry is to go to Everingham on some business of which Fanny approves, but not until after a party that the Crawfords are giving: "He will see the Rushworths, which I own I am not sorry for—having a little curiosity—and so I think has he, though he will not acknowledge it." It is clear that Edmund has not yet declared himself; his slowness becomes something of a farce. Seven weeks of the two months at Portsmouth were gone before a letter from Edmund at Mansfield arrives. He is upset by Miss Crawford's high spirits in treating serious matters and by the tone of her London friends. "My hopes are very much weaker.... When I think of her great attachment to you, indeed, and the whole of her judicious, upright conduct as a sister, she appears a very different creature [than among her London friends], capable of everything noble, and I am ready to blame myself for a too harsh construction of a playful manner. I cannot give her up, Fanny. She is the only woman in the world whom I could ever think of as a wife." He cannot resolve his mind whether he should propose by letter or wait until her return to Mansfield in June. On the whole, a letter would not be satisfactory. At Mrs. Fraser's party he saw Crawford. "I am more and more satisfied with all that I see and hear of him. There is not a shadow of wavering. He thoroughly knows his own mind, and acts up to his resolutions—an inestimable quality. I could not see him, and my eldest sister in the same room, without recollecting what you once told me, and I acknowledge that they did not meet as friends. There was marked coolness on her side. They scarcely spoke. I saw him draw back surprised, and I was sorry that Mrs. Rushworth should resent any former supposed slight to Miss Bertram." The disappointing news is conveyed that Sir Thomas will not fetch Fanny until after Easter, when he has business in town (a delay of a month beyond the original plan).
Fanny's reactions to Edmund's infatuation are conveyed in the intonation of what we now call stream of consciousness or interior monologue, to be used so wonderfully a hundred and fifty years later by James Joyce. "She was almost vexed into displeasure, and anger, against Edmund. 'There is no good in this delay,' said she. 'Why is not it settled?—He is blinded, and nothing will open his eyes, nothing can, after having had truths before him so long in vain.—He will marry her, and be poor and miserable. God grant that her influence do not make him cease to be respectable!'—She looked over the letter again.' "So very fond of me!" 'tis nonsense all. She loves nobody but her self and her brother. Her friends leading her astray for years! She is quite as likely to have led them astray. They have all, perhaps, been corrupting one another; but if they are so much fonder of her than she is of them, she is the less likely to have been hurt, except by their flattery. "The only woman in the world whom he could ever think of as a wife." I firmly believe it. It is an attachment to govern his whole life. Accepted or refused, his heart is wedded to her for ever. "The loss of Mary I must consider as comprehending the loss of Crawford and Fanny." Edmund, you do not know me. The families would never be connected, if you did not connect them! Oh! write, write. Finish it at once. Let there be an end of this suspense. Fix, commit, condemn yourself.'
"Such sensations, however, were too near a kin to resentment to be long guiding Fanny's soliloquies. She was soon more softened and sorrowful."
From Lady Bertram she learns that Tom has been very sick in London and, although in serious condition, from the neglect of his friends, has been moved to Mansfield. Tom's illness prevents Edmund from writing a letter of declaration to Miss Crawford; nothing but obstacles, which he seems to keep in his own path, cross their relationship. A letter from Miss Crawford suggests that the Bertram property would be in better hands if it were Sir Edmund's instead of Sir Thomas's. Henry has been seeing quite a bit of Maria Rushworth but Fanny is not to be alarmed. Fanny is disgusted at the greater part of the letter. But letters continue to pour in on her about Tom and also about Maria. Then Miss Crawford writes a warning letter about an awful rumor: "A most scandalous, ill-natured rumour has just reached me, and I write, dear Fanny, to warn you against giving the least credit to it, should it spread into the country. Depend upon it there is some mistake, and that a day or two will clear it up—at any rate, that Henry is blameless, and in spite of a moment's etourderie thinks of nobody but you. Say not a word of it—hear nothing, surmise nothing, whisper nothing, till I write again. I am sure t will be all hushed up, and nothing proved but Rushworth's folly, if they are gone, I would lay my life they are only gone to Mansfield Park, and Julia with them. But why would not you let us come for you? I wish you may not
repent it. Yours &c."
Fanny stands aghast, not quite understanding what has happened. Two days later she is sitting in the parlor, where the sun's rays "instead of cheering, made her still more melancholy; for sun-shine appeared to her a totally different thing in a town and in the country. Here, its power was only a glare, a stifling, sickly glare, serving but to bring forward stains and dirt that might otherwise have slept. There was neither health nor gaiety in sun-shine in a town. She sat in a blaze of oppressive heat, in a cloud of moving dust; and her eyes could only wander from the walls, marked by her father's head, to the table cut and notched by her brothers, where stood the tea-board never thoroughly cleaned, the cups and saucers wiped in streaks, the milk a mixture of motes floating in thin blue, and the bread and butter growing every minute more greasy than even Rebecca's hands had first produced it." In this dirty room she hears the dirty news. Her father reads a newspaper report that Henry and Maria Rushworth have eloped. One should note that being informed of this by a newspaper article is essentially the same as being informed by letter. It is still the epistolary formula.
The action is now fast and furious. A letter from Edmund in London informs Fanny that the adulterous pair cannot be traced but that a new blow has fallen: Julia has eloped for Scotland with Yates. Edmund is coming to fetch Fanny from Portsmouth on the morrow and, with Susan, they will go to Mansfield Park. He arrives and is "particularly struck by the alteration in Fanny's looks, and from his ignorance of the daily evils of her father's house, attributing an undue share of the change, attributing all to the recent event, took her hand, and said in a low, but very expressive tone, 'No wonder—you must feel it—you must suffer. How a man who had once loved, could desert you! Butyour's—your regard was new compared with——Fanny, think of me!' " It is clear that he feels he must give up Mary Crawford because of the scandal. The moment he arrived in Portsmouth "she found herself pressed to his heart with only these words, just articulate, My Fanny—my only sister—my only comfort now.' "
The Portsmouth interlude—three months in the life of Fanny—is now over, and the epistolary form of the novel is also ended. We are back where we were, so to speak, but the Crawfords are now eliminated. Miss Austen would have had to write practically another volume of five hundred pages if she had wished to narrate those elopements in the same direct and detailed form as she had done in relating the games and flirtations at Mansfield Park before Fanny left for Portsmouth. The epistolary form has helped to prop up the structure of the novel at this point, but there is no doubt that too much has happened behind the scenes and that this letter-writing business is a shortcut of no very great artistic merit.
We have now only two chapters left, and what is left is no more than a mopping-up process. Shattered by her favorite Maria's action and the divorce that shortly brings an end to a marriage that she has prided herself on having instigated, Mrs. Norris is, indirectly, said to have become an altered creature, quiet, indifferent to everything that passes, and she departs to share a remote house with Maria. We are not shown this change directly; hence we remember her only as the constantly grotesque creature of the main part of the book. Edmund is at last disillusioned by Miss Crawford. She gives no sign of understanding the moral issues involved and can speak no more than of the "folly" of her brother and Maria. He is horrified. "To hear the woman whom—no harsher name than folly given!—So voluntarily, so freely, so coolly to canvass it!—No reluctance, no horror, no feminine—shall I say? no modest loathings!—This is what the world does. For where, Fanny, shall we find a woman whom nature had so richly endowed?—Spoilt, spoilt!—"
"It was the detection, not the offence which she reprobated," says Edmund with a muffled sob. He describes to Fanny Miss Crawford's exclamation: "Why would [Fanny] not have him? It is all her fault. Simple girl!—I shall never forgive her. Had she accepted him as she ought, they might now have been on the point of marriage, and Henry would have been too happy and too busy to want any other object. He would have taken no pains to be on terms with Mrs. Rushworth again. It would have all ended in a regular standing flirtation, in yearly meetings at Sotherton and Everingham." Edmund adds, "But the charm is broken. My eyes are opened." He tells Miss Crawford of his astonishment at her attitude, and especially at her hoping that if Sir Thomas will not interfere, it is possible that Henry may marry Maria. Her reply brings the ordination conflict to a close: "She turned extremely red.... She would have laughed if she could. It was a sort of laugh, as she answered, 'A pretty good lecture, upon my word. Was it part of your last sermon? At this rate you will soon reform every body at Mansfield and Thornton Lacey; and when I hear of you next, it may be as a celebrated preacher in some great society of Methodists, or as a missionary into foreign parts.' " He bids her farewell and turns to go. "I had gone a few steps, Fanny, when I heard the door open behind me. 'Mr. Bertram,' said she. I looked back. 'Mr. Bertram,' said she, with a smile—but it was a smile ill-suited to the conversation that had passed, a saucy playful smile, seeming to invite, in order to subdue me; at least, it appeared so to me. I resisted; it was the impulse of the moment to resist, and still walked on. I have since—sometimes—for a moment—regretted that I did not go back; but I know I was right; and such has been the end of our acquaintance!" At the end of the chapter Edmund thinks that he will never marry—but the reader knows better.
In the last chapter crime is punished, virtue receives its just reward, and sinners change their ways.
Yates has more money and fewer debts than Sir Thomas had expected, and is received into the fold.
Tom's health and morals improve. He has suffered. He has learned to think. There is a last allusion to the play theme here. He felt himself accessory to the affair between his sister and Crawford "by all the dangerous intimacy of his unjustifiable theatre, [this] made an impression on his mind which, at the age of six-and-twenty, with no-want of sense, or good companions, was durable in its happy effects. He became what he ought to be, useful to his father, steady and quiet, and not living merely for himself."
Sir Thomas sees how his judgment has failed in many things, especially in his plan of education for his children: "principle, active principle, had been wanting."
Mr. Rushworth is punished for his stupidity and may be duped again if he remarries.
Maria and Henry, the adulterers, separate, both wretched.
Mrs. Norris quits Mansfield to "devote herself to her unfortunate Maria, and in an establishment being formed for them in another country [i.e., county]—remote and private, where, shut up together with little society, on one side no affection, on the other, no judgment, it may be reasonably supposed that their tempers became their mutual punishment."
Julia has only been copying Maria and is forgiven.
Henry Crawford "ruined by early independence and bad domestic example, indulged in the freaks of a cold-blooded vanity a little too long.... Would he have persevered, and uprightly, Fanny must have been his reward—and a reward very voluntarily bestowed—within a reasonable period from Edmund's marrying Mary." But Maria's apparent indifference when they met in London mortified him. "He could not bear to be thrown off by the woman whose smiles had been so wholly at his command; he must exert himself to subdue so proud a display of resentment; it was anger on Fanny's account; he must get the better of it, and make Mrs. Rushworth Maria Bertram again in her treatment of himself." The world treats the man of such a scandal more lightly than the woman, but "we may fairly consider a man of sense like Henry Crawford, to be providing for himself no small portion of vexation and regret—vexation that must rise sometimes to self-reproach, and regret to wretchedness—in having so requited hospitality, so injured family peace, so forfeited his best, most estimable and endeared acquaintance, and so lost the woman whom he had rationally, as well as passionately loved."
Miss Crawford lives with the Grants, who have moved to London. "Mary had had enough of her own friends, enough of vanity, ambition, love, and disappointment in the course of the last half y
ear, to be in need of the true kindness of her sister's heart, and the rational tranquillity of her ways.—They lived together; and when Dr. Grant had brought on apoplexy and death, by three great institutionary dinners in one week, they still lived together; for Mary, though perfectly resolved against ever attaching herself to a younger brother again, was long in finding among the dashing representatives, or idle heir apparents, who were at the command of her beauty, and her 20,000l. any one who could satisfy the better taste she had acquired at Mansfield, whole character and manners could authorise a hope of the domestic happiness she had there learnt to estimate, or put Edmund Bertram sufficiently out of her head."
Edmund finds in Fanny the ideal wife, with a slight suggestion of incest: "Scarcely had he done regretting Mary Crawford, and observing to Fanny how impossible it was that he should ever meet with such another woman, before it began to strike him whether a very different kind of woman might not do just as well—or a great deal better; whether Fanny herself was not growing as dear, as important to him in all her smiles, and all her ways, as Mary Crawford had ever been; and whether it might not be a possible, an hopeful undertaking to persuade her that her warm and sisterly regard for him would be foundation enough for wedded love.... Let no one presume to give the feelings of a young woman on receiving the assurance of that affection of which she has scarcely allowed herself to entertain a hope."
Lady Bertram now has Susan to replace Fanny as "the stationary niece," and the Cinderella theme continues. "With so much true merit and true love, and no want of fortune and friends, the happiness of the married cousins must appear as secure as earthly happiness can be.—Equally formed for domestic life, and attached to country pleasures, their home was the home of affection and comfort; and to complete the picture of good, the acquisition of Mansfield living by the death of Dr. Grant, occurred just after they had been married long enough to begin to want an increase of income, and feel their distance from the paternal abode an inconvenience.
Lectures on Literature Page 9