When I told my friend Bernard Mageean that I was rereading, of all Austen, Mansfield Park, he smirked a bit and gave me a gently pitying sidelong look. And of course I knew why. Mansfield Park has a not entirely underserved reputation for being the dull one. Certainly Fanny Price is the least charismatic of Austen’s heroines. The glib summary writes itself: a painfully timid young woman is scandalised by amateur theatre, then finds happiness when she marries her cousin, a clergyman. Not exactly Richard Curtis romcom material. But precisely because of its unsexiness, it attains a subversive quality.
Fanny’s love for Edmund is based upon familiarity, and habitual kindness. This is set against both the habitual cruelty of Mrs. Norris and the whimsical (and ultimately selfish) generosity of the Crawfords. Mansfield Park lacks any of the will-they-won’t-they energy that sustains other Austen novels and their countless emulators. And it’s because of this lack, and the very different relationship put in its place, that Mansfield Park is more truly a novel about marriage than about courtship. It’s this that makes it a genre outlier and underwrites stranger readings than you get with the other novels, such as Lionel Trilling’s felicitous misreading of a letter of Austen’s that led him to assert that the whole of Mansfield Park was “about ordination”.
And an ordination is, after all, like a wedding, in as much as a life in the priesthood is like married life. Why not a romance, a comedy, that’s not just about falling in love and having a wedding but about falling in love and taking on, till death, a beautiful and demanding duty?
Come to think of it, Emma and Persuasion partake of the same subversive spirit. Their heroines, too, find happiness with a man who is much closer to an old, already dear friend than an excitingly novel crush. Perhaps all of Austen’s novels portray, and Mansfield Park most emphatically, courtships whose rightness and flourishing result precisely from their anticipating the simple but powerful consolations of the married state.
Someone’s bound to be guffawing now, with different marital “consolations” in mind. Let me close this note with (something short of the defence of propriety Fanny Price would make) a recommendation and an observation, both of which should go some way to countering whatever debaucheries secular custom encourages on this day.
It’s an embarrassment, at least, that a generation-defining event, namely the spread of legal and subsidised abortion across the world, has been reckoned with so meagrely by writers living in its wake, even Catholic ones. The brilliant people at Lydwine are doing something to remedy that with their documentary podcast series “Praise Her in the Gates - Dispatches for a Pro-Life Nation”.
While you’re there, you would do well to read everything Brian Kennedy has published at Lydwine. It turns out America’s most exhilaratingly original Catholic writer doesn’t live in New York or Boston, in South Bend or Steubenville. He lives in Guthrie, Oklahoma.
My observation would mean more coming from someone like Brian Kennedy, someone deeply versed in American music. Maybe it’s commonplace, maybe it’s sentimental, but if I can’t get away with that on Valentine’s Day…
Bob Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love” has become a standard. You might be familiar with one of its many cover versions. I’ve no idea what the consensus is about it, or what the Dylanologists have to say. But whenever I listen to it, only one reading is possible.
It is the song of a father, sung to his children.