A Jane Austen Education

As for Henry, a hardened flirt, he was tougher to like, luring Maria Bertram’s affections, during the time of the play, from the rich but dull-witted young man to whom the oldest Mansfield girl was already engaged—though with no motive more serious, on Henry’s part, than the gratification of his own vanity. Fanny’s turn was next—he boasted to his sister that he only wanted to make “a small hole” in the heroine’s heart—but he soon discovered that the influence was running the other way. Like Mary with Edmund, Henry was surprised to find himself susceptible to Fanny’s finer, quieter qualities. And as he set out to court her in earnest, he began to display some rather fine qualities of his own: patience and tact and sensitivity, a cultivated mind and a susceptible heart.

As Pride and Prejudice ultimately arranged a merging of its hero’s and heroine’s best qualities, a purging of their faults, so I always rooted, each time I read the novel, for a synthesis of Mansfield and Crawford: Edmund and Fanny on the one hand, Mary and Henry on the other. Goodness matched with boldness, stability with spirit. The cousins would grow up, the siblings would settle down. Everybody would be better, and everybody would be happy.





But then, something happened to change my mind, not only about Mansfield Park but also about myself. A year or so after I’d begun to hang around the private-school crowd, my friend and his girlfriend got married. It was more like a coronation than a wedding: a rehearsal dinner the night before at an elegant restaurant overlooking the East River, a stately ceremony in the grand space of an East Side Episcopal church, and an opulent, impeccably tasteful reception at a private club nearby. I fished my best shoes out from the back of the closet and bought my first new suit since my bar mitzvah. Hundreds of people attended, most of them from the bride’s parents’ rarefied sphere of business associates and social contacts. And then, as I was watching the dancing with some of the other single guys—the department-store heiress was wearing a little black dress with a fur-trimmed neckline that none of us could take our eyes off—one of them said, apropos the groom, “Well, he got what he wanted.”

“What do you mean?” I said, looking over to where the newly married man, a big grin on his face, was shaking hands with some of his father-in-law’s friends—cool, confident men who looked like they knew where all the levers were. “He’s on the inside,” came the reply. “He’s been working on this for years.” My friend, it was true, was not of that world. He had grown up in the South, a professional’s son but the grandson of a state trooper, and his mother had been a stewardess. He had gradually worked his way up the chain of academic prestige, through college and graduate school, always traveling in a northeasterly direction, then came to the city, moving from job to job in the same fashion. But I had never imagined that the whole thing had been so calculated.

Sure, I knew in a theoretical sense that people sometimes married for money. I had read The Great Gatsby and understood about coming to New York to bury your past and bluff your way into high society. But I had never dreamed that any of those things applied to my friends. Didn’t we all just go out with people because we liked them? Weren’t we going to marry for love? A phrase popped into my head, understood as if for the first time: “social climber.” And then I remembered something that my friend had said not long after I had met his girlfriend. The two of them had wanted to set me up with one of those old schoolmates of hers, but they had had their reservations. “She’s high-maintenance,” they said. “What’s high-maintenance?” I asked. (I hadn’t seen When Harry Met Sally . . . yet.) “High-maintenance is the worst,” my friend said, searching for a way to express the true awfulness of the concept. “It’s worse than being ugly. It’s worse than being poor!”

It’s funny how that hadn’t really hit me at the time—or had, but I had let it go. They were such a fun couple, and they promised so much fun to come. I hadn’t wanted to hear what he was really saying, or maybe I couldn’t quite believe it. But now, at the wedding, seeing the whole world they’d introduced me to spread out in front of me, seeing its logic laid bare, I was forced to think about what it all meant—the greed beneath the elegance, the cruelty behind the glow—and more to the point, what I myself had been doing in it. Because if my friend was a social climber, then what the hell was I? I had never planned things out the way that he had, or even thought about where it was all heading, but my attraction to that golden crowd, my ache to be accepted by them, what did it amount to if not the very same thing? Who was I becoming? Who had I already become?

I’d like to be able to say that I turned my back on that world that very night, but it wasn’t so simple. The newlyweds were still my friends, and I didn’t find it easy, in any case, to walk away from something that seductive. But I did start to notice all kinds of things—how these people treated others, but also what they did to themselves—that I hadn’t wanted to see before. And it wasn’t long before I realized, as I returned to my dissertation, that someone had already told me everything I needed to know about that world before I’d even encountered it, only I hadn’t been able to listen. For where was I, I finally saw, but smack in the middle of a Jane Austen novel—and one of them, in fact, in particular? What was that realm of luxury and cruelty, glamour and greed, coldness and fun, if not a modern-day version of Mansfield Park?

The recognition almost knocked me down. However much I had learned from Austen about myself, I had never dreamed that our worlds bore much resemblance to each other. I lived in a democracy, she lived in an aristocracy. In my world, people could make their way through talent and hard work; in hers, you were pretty much stuck where you were born. In our day, people married for love (or so I had thought). In hers, marrying for money and status was more or less taken for granted. But now I saw how similar our worlds really were, especially at the level where I currently found myself. Beneath the ideals, which looked so different, the very same attitudes: the same values, the same motives, the same ambitions. Whatever I might have wanted to believe, I realized, we also have an aristocracy in this country, and I was looking at it. So in the months that followed the wedding, as I continued to travel within that world—but now more cautiously, more consciously—a process of mutual illumination began to unfold. Mansfield Park taught me about my experiences, and my experiences taught me about Mansfield Park.





Who was I, ultimately, among those rich Manhattanites, if not another Fanny Price: an outsider, an onlooker—creeping, largely unregarded, along the edges? What an idiot I had been to think that I could ever really belong, and how pathetic to imagine that my education, of all things, would win me a glamorous girlfriend. That the novel expended so much energy on a play—one that its golden youth put on by themselves, for themselves—made perfect sense to me now. The episode simply made visible what had always been true, that Fanny was and only ever could be a spectator. She may have chosen to sit out the play, but the larger drama of money and status that was being enacted around her all the time—the balls and the games, the flirtation and the matchmaking—she had no more choice to sit and watch than I. We didn’t know the lines, and no one would have given us a part even if we had managed to learn them. The play’s title, Lovers’ Vows, was perfectly chosen. Fanny was penniless; at that point in the novel (Henry’s later interest was something of a miracle on Austen’s part), she wasn’t going to find herself reciting those anytime soon.

I also began to understand the unique role that Mansfield itself played in the book. The novel was not the only one of Austen’s that was named after a place, but no other place achieved the kind of presence in its novel that this one did. None of her other stories dwelled so insistently within the confines of a single estate. Mansfield was mentioned in the first sentence, and it was named again in the very last line. We discovered its routines, learned the names of its servants, were shown the sources of its wealth. We acquired a sense of its spaces with a richness of detail that was otherwise unknown in Austen’s work: the drawing room, where the family gathered; the billiard room, where the young people set up their theater; the East room, where Fanny went to lick her wounds; the gardens; the stables; the parsonage; the park. No wonder the novel was named for the estate. Mansfield Park was a more important character than anyone else besides the heroine.

As for why this should be true, I had only to think of the place that I had come to as a seventeen-year-old suburban boy. Mansfield was for Fanny what New York was for me: a place of awe, astonishment, intimidation, and social peril, a labyrinth of mysterious values and of spaces heavy with symbolic and emotional meaning. About Longbourn, where Elizabeth Bennett grew up, or Hartfield, where Emma lived, we learned almost nothing, and just because those heroines could take their homes for granted. If Mansfield Park had been narrated from the perspective of Edmund, say, the estate would have figured as an equally neutral backdrop.

But the novel sees with Fanny’s eyes, wide with provincial wonder. Nothing about Mansfield could ever be neutral for her; nothing would ever be taken for granted. The book was about her encounter with the place as much as it was about anything else. Mansfield was a character in the novel for the same reason that New York was in so many movies and television shows—Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, Sex and the City. The two places were not just locations: they were climates, moods, cultures. They made their own weather, dictated their terms.

Which made the Bertrams and Crawfords I knew, children of Manhattan, all the more powerful to me. Coming from the magic place, they carried, quite apart from their own beauty or poise, the dazzle of its aura. So too, in the novel, did the Crawfords, who represented something even more than Mansfield: London, the place where they’d grown up, New York’s forerunner and equivalent. The Bertrams themselves were provincial compared to them, and it was the glamour of London, I now understood, that the Crawfords sailed into Mansfield on the wind of. It was the source of their worldliness, their knowingness, their confidence.

When the young people, at one point in the novel, were discussing the “improvement” of estates—renovation, in our language, a fashionable subject at the time—Mary delivered her opinion with urban nonchalance. “Had I a place of my own in the country, I should be most thankful to any Mr. Repton [a famous landscape designer] who would undertake it, and give me as much beauty as he could for my money; and I should never look at it till it was complete.” Beauty for money: Mary was not just advertising her wealth, she was displaying an ostentatiously metropolitan insouciance in the way she handled it. People in London, she was saying, don’t dirty their hands with the details. They snap their fingers, and the world jumps.





Was Mary being a snob? Maybe a little. Mainly she was doing what she always did. She was being charming. Only now did I realize, though, what “being charming” meant. Charming, after all, is a verb—an action, not merely a state. Mary wasn’t charming the way that Elizabeth Bennet and Catherine Morland were—unconsciously, as a simple outgrowth of their personalities. She deliberately set out to win people over. It was a performance, I saw, an act. (And the significance of the play, the brilliance of placing it at the center of the novel, was once again brought home to me: these people were already acting all the time.) The idea was counterintuitive. Why would someone who was so much more fabulous than you were bother to prove—to you, of all people, the toad, the provincial—just how fabulous they were? Because they needed to know that you thought they were fabulous. Apparently, no matter how poised and confident they seemed to be, they weren’t sufficiently convinced of it themselves.

Mary, I realized, was exactly, almost eerily, like my friend’s new wife. I had been utterly charmed from the night I had met her—by her stories, by her repartee, by her sense of daring and fun—but only now, thinking back to that encounter, did I see how calculated the whole thing must have been. Of course I’d been charmed: that’s what she did. And then it hit me. My friend’s wife had done to me exactly what the Crawfords did to the people at Mansfield, but also what they did to us.

And so I finally began to recognize the depth of Austen’s cunning in Mansfield Park. As Mary seduced Edmund and Henry seduced Fanny, their creator was seeing to it that they were also both seducing the reader. The fact that I had been so taken with them was not the novel’s flaw, as if Austen had created characters that she couldn’t control; it was, precisely, its strategy. She had done it again, just as she had in Emma and Pride and Prejudice: orchestrated my responses to teach me a lesson about my responses. She wanted me to fall for the Crawfords, and then she wanted me to figure out why. Only this time, it had taken me a lot longer to catch on.

My friend’s wife had had a particular reason for wanting to win me over that night—I was her new boyfriend’s friend—but as I began to see, she didn’t need a particular reason. In a coincidence that was almost too beautiful, she was an actress herself—or had been, in college, before she gave it up, as she once told me, because “the best I was probably ever going to do was shampoo commercials.” Instead, she went to law school, or as she put it, “I figured I’d get much better parts as a lawyer than I ever would as an actress.” If she boasted about the way she could work a party, she also bragged about her skill at working on a jury, getting them to think exactly what she wanted.

Like the Crawfords, she pushed people’s buttons for the simple pleasure of being able to do so, and the challenge of figuring out how. Mary, too, was an acute reader of people. Or as Edmund gushed to Fanny, “I know nobody who distinguishes characters better. . . . She certainly understands you; . . . and with regard to some others, I can perceive, from occasional lively hints . . . that she could define many as accurately, did not delicacy forbid it.” In the case of my friend’s wife—or my friend, for that matter, an equally cutting observer—delicacy most certainly did not forbid it, and they had long been regaling me with reflections on the rest of the private-school crowd, from “high-maintenance” to the notion that the twelve-dollardessert woman had acquired her gorgeous boyfriend “like she was buying a pretty book.” Only now did I begin to wonder, though, what the two of them must have been saying about me, to everyone else, and how they must have been working on my buttons, too, without my having realized it.

It was the same in Mansfield Park. When Mary comforted the heroine after that vicious attack by Mrs. Norris, I now saw, she may have been motivated mainly by kindness—“the really good feelings by which she was almost purely governed,” as Austen slyly put it—but she was also manipulating two people at once. She knew that the way to get to Edmund’s heart was to go through Fanny, and that the way to get to Fanny’s was by asking her about her brother William, a sailor, the one member of the heroine’s original family to whom she remained attached. And indeed, as Mary went on to ask about him, and express her curiosity to see him, and “imagined him a very fine young man,” Fanny “could not help admitting it to be very agreeable flattery, or help listening, and answering with more animation than she had intended.”

Mission accomplished. But then, Mary was a serial manipulator. She manipulated Sir Thomas, she manipulated Lady Bertram, she even manipulated, for no conceivable purpose, Mrs. Norris. But the novel’s greatest symphony of button pushing was Henry’s attack on the heroine. As he told his sister:I do not quite know what to make of Miss Fanny. . . . Is she solemn? Is she queer? Is she prudish? . . . I never was so long in company with a girl in my life, trying to entertain her, and succeed so ill! . . . I must try to get the better of this. Her looks say, “I will not like you, I am determined not to like you”; and I say she shall.





And when his sister tried to warn him away from hurting so fragile a creature, he protested:No, I will not do her any harm, dear little soul! I only want her to look kindly on me, to give me smiles as well as blushes, to keep a chair for me by herself wherever we are, and be all animation when I take it and talk to her; to think as I think, be interested in all my possessions and pleasures, try to keep me longer at Mansfield, and feel when I go away that she shall be never happy again.





The speech itself was a little masterpiece of manipulation, disguising its intentions as it led us along step by step until we wound up somewhere that we never meant to be.





Did Henry ever really fall for Fanny, later in the novel? I was sure that he thought he did, but now I wondered what she really meant to someone like him, or, as a friend, to someone like his sister. “Give me as much beauty as he could for my money”: the Crawfords were accustomed to traveling in a world of objects made for them to purchase and enjoy, and it occurred to me that they were used to treating people the same way. The rich Manhattan kids I knew, of course, were not any different. “Like she was buying a pretty book”: not a kind remark, but an accurate one.

The idea was made more chilling by the sort of beauty that Henry now wished to buy. Fanny had grown into a pretty girl, but what really hooked him was the sight of her reunion, a couple of months after the play, with that same brother William whom Mary had asked her about. “The glow of Fanny’s cheek, the brightness of her eye, the deep interest, the absorbed attention. . . . It was a picture which Henry Crawford had moral taste enough to value.” “Moral taste”: what a perfectly slimy phrase that was, the most important matters of character reduced to the status of a fine wine or toothsome dish, to be bought, sold, swallowed, and judged.

More than the values I discovered beneath the veneer, more than the certainty that my character was being treated to the same kind of vivisection that I witnessed happening to others’, it was that sense of objectification that really began to sour me on my friends and their world. For I had started to realize that I was being treated the same way. Not only were my friends tremendously entertaining people, they gave you the unmistakable impression that they expected to be tremendously entertained—that like Henry, who had “a great dislike” “to anything like a permanence of abode, or limitation of society,” they wouldn’t tolerate a moment’s boredom. And so—it seemed so odd, after all the time we’d spent together—it began to dawn on me that I had never really been able to relax around them, would feel as if I’d been holding my breath the whole time whenever I was in their company. I realized that I always felt as though I had to be on—had to be forever ready with a witty remark or a funny story.

My dating life, with all its perils and pratfalls, became a series of comic vignettes retold for their amusement—which was fine, to a certain extent, because it took away the sting of romantic disappointment, but it also never allowed for any real commiseration or shared feeling. It’s true that I colluded, unconsciously, in my own objectification, wanted to play the raconteur when I saw that it would let me keep a place at the table, but it’s not as if there’d really been a choice. These were not people you wanted to be vulnerable around (they’d probably start calling you “high-maintenance” behind your back), or even just flat in an ordinary way. In fact, since weeks would sometimes go by when I wouldn’t hear from them at all, I started to feel as if I was being treated like a toy: picked up and played with when they wanted whatever it was they thought I had to offer, then dropped again whenever they got bored.

It was just the same in Mansfield Park—as Mary implied when Henry first told her about his designs on the heroine’s heart. Maria Bertram had finally married her wealthy oaf, and her sister Julia, Henry’s first conquest at Mansfield, had gone with them on the honeymoon (as was not unusual in Austen’s day). “You ought to be satisfied with her two cousins,” Mary told her brother about Fanny, but “the truth is, . . . you must have a somebody. . . . If you do set about a flirtation with her, you never will persuade me . . . that it proceeds from anything but your own idleness and folly.” Fanny, for Henry, was nothing more than a hobby at this point, something to do when he wasn’t riding or shooting. Or as he put it himself, “How do you think I mean to amuse myself, on the days that I do not hunt?”





The Bertrams, the Crawfords—why did Austen say such terrible things about the aristocracy, if that was the class she came from and loved so much? Because she didn’t, on either count. Contrary to popular belief, she was neither an aristocrat herself nor, as her books made perfectly clear—Mansfield Park above all—did she even much like the aristocracy. Her heroines, while sometimes rich, were never the richest characters in their books, and they usually didn’t marry the richest ones, either, who were generally rather vile—and the richer they were, the viler they tended to be.

As for Austen herself, her father was a clergyman, and most of her other connections—uncles, brothers, family friends—were clergymen, lawyers, or military officers: gentlemen, yes, but certainly not aristocrats. The Austens were comfortable, but they were far from rich and very far from being, like the families she wrote about, either landed or titled. The Bertrams would have condescended to mix with them, if at all, only in the most distant way—at best, an occasional invitation to a ball, in company with the rest of the district’s respectable families.

While Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters were exempt from household responsibilities, and of course Lady Bertram and her daughters were far above anything but the kind of elegant needlework that gentlewomen used to pass the time, Jane and her sister, Cassandra, as girls, had a full roster of household chores: making clothes for themselves and their father and brothers; helping their mother in the kitchen, dairy, garden, and poultry yard (baking bread, brewing beer, boiling jams and jellies); and even picking up a rake when it was time to make the hay.

After the Reverend Austen died, when Jane was twenty-nine, she and her sister inherited, not the thousand pounds the Bennet girls could each look forward to, and certainly not the twenty thousand that Mary Crawford already possessed, but absolutely nothing at all. Everything they had, they were dependent for on others, meaning their mother, who had little enough of her own, or their other family connections—the most important reason they and Mrs. Austen, together with yet a fourth woman, shared a modest house, provided by a relative, to the end of Austen’s life.

Short of marriage or inheritance—and finding a husband itself depended on having property to offer—women simply had very few ways of supporting themselves in Austen’s day. “Single Women,” as she reminded a niece, “have a dreadful propensity for being poor.” The most common alternative for a young woman of Austen’s class was to become a governess in someone else’s family, a condition that Emma’s Jane Fairfax, staring down its barrel, equated with slavery. The money that Austen was finally able to make from her novels, the first of which was not published until she was thirty-five—￡140 from Sense and Sensibility, ￡110 from Pride and Prejudice—was cherished to the last penny. “Tho’ I like praise as well as anybody,” she once said, “I like what Edward calls Pewter too.” She didn’t just write for the fun of it.

But though Austen neither came from the aristocracy nor entered it, luck gave her a front-row seat for observing its ways. That same Edward, her third brother, had the immense good fortune to be adopted by distant relations, a wealthy, childless couple whose property he inherited and whose name, Knight, he took. Edward’s story may well have given his sister the idea for Mansfield Park, especially since his oldest daughter, the novelist’s favorite niece—eighteen, like Fanny Price, when Austen started to write the novel—was also named Fanny. But if Edward contributed the idea of adoption, and Fanny Knight donated her name, the heroine’s experiences—exclusion, alienation, subordination—belonged to none other than Austen herself.

While she visited her brother’s estate of Godmersham Park any number of times, and struck up that friendship with Fanny Knight, she was never regarded there as anything more than a poor relation. Like Fanny Price at Mansfield Park, or me in that circle of rich New Yorkers, she remained an outsider, and an inferior. The fault was not Edward’s, by all accounts an impeccably generous man (it was he who lent the house, on land attached to yet another one of his estates, in which the Austen women settled after the death of Jane’s father). The fault was not even his wife’s, though when it came to summoning a spinster sister-in-law to help with her many lyings-in (she had eleven children altogether), she much preferred Cassandra. According to a different niece, “a little talent went a long way with the Goodenstone Bridgeses,” Edward’s wife’s family, “& much must have gone a long way too far.”

No, the fault was simply the system’s. Austen was treated like an inferior despite being such a close relation, and despite her immense gifts of character and mind, because according to the way that people thought at the time, that was exactly what she was. Fanny Knight herself, over fifty years after Austen’s death and nearly as many since she had become a titled lady in her own right, put the matter with brutal frankness. Her aunt, she remembered, “was not so refined as she ought to have been from her talent.” The Austens as a whole, she continued, “were not rich & the people around with whom they chiefly mixed, were not at all high bred, or in short anything more than mediocre & they of course tho’ superior in mental powers & cultivation were on the same level as far as refinement goes.” Cassandra and Jane, she went on, “were brought up in the most complete ignorance of the World & its ways (I mean as to fashion etc.) & if it had not been for Papa’s marriage, . . . they would have been, tho’ not less clever and agreeable in themselves, very much below par as to good Society & its ways.”

And this, remember, was Austen’s favorite niece. She wasn’t being mean; she was being honest. This was simply how people thought in “Society,” in “the World.” Family was all well and good, but it was no substitute for “refinement” or “fashion” or being “high bred.” Cassandra went to help her pregnant sister-in-law with a willing heart, no doubt, but it wasn’t as if she really had a choice. Edward lent his mother and sisters a house with an equally good will, but that made them no less his dependents. It is no wonder that the closest friend that Austen made at Godmersham—a relationship that lasted the rest of her life—was none other than the family governess: someone equally marginal, inferior, and dependent. And it is also no wonder that she used her lifetime of stealthy observation there to create her cutting portraits of aristocrats like the Bertrams and the Crawfords.





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!