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 he
r 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 t
he 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.
A Jane Austen Education Page 13