Reading for Health. Erika Wright
“I compare it with what it ought to have been; I compare it with yours” (293). This comparison is what Austen has been encouraging her readers to make all along. But although we can read Marianne’s contrite “what it ought to have been” as a reference or comparison to Elinor, we can also read it in terms of prevention. A semicolon interrupts Marianne’s claim that she should have compared her behavior to her sister’s. Certainly, the syntax of the sentence asks us to read the pause between “ought to have been” and “yours” as Marianne’s recognition of Elinor’s superior—healthier—conduct. However, we might also read the semicolon as an “and,” separating the two claims. For underneath the comparison between Marianne and her sister lies the more tragic one between Marianne and the truly wretched women who haunt this novel, the two Elizas. The reader, if not Marianne, recognizes that through almost no will of her own, Marianne has survived an ordeal that two women before her did not—theirs ought to have been her fate, too.
PREVENTION AS NARRATIVE: Mansfield Park
In Sense and Sensibility, Austen articulates the difference between cure and prevention—between “happily ever after” and what “ought to have been”—through the parallel plots of Marianne and Elinor and through the cautionary tale of the two Elizas. In her “mature” work, Austen embeds prevention into the deep structure of her narrative, and within a single and singular heroine, Fanny Price. Mansfield Park (1814),16 more than Sense and Sensibility, is interested in exposing root causes as a means of avoiding future effects; it is a novel about rendering the imagined story of what “comes before” in order to prevent what could be. Not that there is nothing to cure in Mansfield Park: Fanny’s mother hopes she will become “materially better for change of air” (11); Tom Bertram’s drinking causes him to suffer a life-threatening fever; Mary Crawford’s cynical views of marriage prompt her aunt to worry that Mary is too much like her brother, Henry, and to claim that “Mansfield shall cure [them] both.” “Stay with us,” Mrs. Grant advises, “and we will cure you” (40). But for all its talk of cures, Mansfield Park is not fully governed by cure’s narrative properties. In fact, Austen offers and then rejects at least two cure plots: the one that Mary Crawford imagines for her brother to which we shall return, and the more significant one that we as readers imagine for Fanny, one in which the “puny” and invisible heroine will grow into the belle of the ball. For although Fanny does become, as Lionel Trilling points out, “taller, prettier, and more energetic,”17 she does not improve as much as or in the way that we might expect of a heroine. Fanny never achieves the physical or mental strength of an Anne Elliot or an Emma Woodhouse, as generations of cure-minded readers and critics have observed.18
That is not, however, because this is a bad novel: it is because Austen is doing something different here, teaching us something else. She is instructing us not to improve but to sustain, not to look ahead to the “multiple possible outcomes of a single moment in history”19 or to forget a traumatic past,20 but to look forward and backward simultaneously, not to cure but to prevent. For prevention in Mansfield Park, as in the medical discourse, is built on the tension between longing and fearing, between an idealized past and a threatening future; Fanny Price, with her wretched past and her vigilance about the future, is ideally suited for this preventionist project of protecting characters, revealing plots, and inoculating readers.
In a pivotal scene of prevention, one that critics like Marilyn Butler describe as the “ideological key to the novel” (224), Fanny sits on the sidelines, worrying as usual and cautioning her cousin Maria Bertram “not to slip” into the ha-ha. We witness more than just disapproval of Maria—who, after all, does not slip, though she will get seriously hurt. Fanny fails to stop the engaged Maria from following Henry Crawford instead of waiting for her fiancé. Nevertheless, she does succeed in the other intervention of this scene: keeping Edmund from following Mary Crawford into disaster. We mistake the larger purposes of the novel, however, if we read only for Fanny’s incidental successes and failures. She cannot prevent Maria’s “fall”; she cannot entirely preserve the Bertram estate; she barely manages to save Edmund. What she does do effectively is restore prevention as the source of good, for both characters and readers. For prevention proceeds along both of these tracks in the novel: not only must Edmund be preserved, but also readers must be educated. If for Edmund prevention is a course of abstinence—in which he must not marry Mary Crawford—so, too, is it for readers, who must retrain themselves in the value of delay, learning not to “slip.” Just as Edward holds back, so must we, and it is through both its characters’ travails and its temporal displacements that the novel teaches the art of prevention. And as with Sense and Sensibility, this lesson begins at home.
The Bertrams and the Prices, though separated by class and geography, are united in their lack of “health sense.” Both households are home to spoiled, misbehaving children and distracted, disengaged parents, and the narrator describes the mismanagement of both: Portsmouth is a “scene of mismanagement” (324) just as Mansfield Park is a place of “grievous mismanagement” (382). Initially, the Prices are more easy to condemn, as the narrator criticizes them in the first chapter for being out of control and bursting at the seams, while allowing the Bertrams, particularly Sir Thomas, to sound like careful domestic managers. Mrs. Price must reconcile with her sisters after an eleven-year rift because as she “prepar[es] for her ninth lying-in,” she fears for “the future maintenance” of the eight other children (6). The Bertrams and Mrs. Norris do appear snobbish and self-congratulatory (we are never meant to assume that they are morally superior to the Prices), but they seem more capable of raising healthy children. The vigilant patriarch, Sir Thomas, looks out for the harm Fanny’s residence might cause his own family, warning Mrs. Norris that “[s]hould [Fanny’s] disposition be really bad, . . . we must not, for our own children’s sake, continue her in the family” (10). This concern about her “disposition” refers initially to Fanny’s presumed “bad” manners (a result of her lower class) and the potential problems a bad disposition may cause for the household. It assumes, as well, that things at Mansfield Park are fine as they are.
Disposition is tricky, though, because it evokes both “a frame of mind” and a “state of bodily health” (Oxford English Dictionary). The term aligns the moral and the medical, a pairing that underwrites the preventionist interest in domestic management. When Sir Thomas uses disposition to describe what Fanny could be (but probably is not) like, he invokes the specter of prevention, imagining what might need to be avoided at a future date. He explains to Mrs. Norris that they are likely to encounter “gross ignorance, some meanness of opinion, and very distressing vulgarity of manner.” Such conduct, he determines, is neither “incurable” nor “dangerous” to those around her, and although he refers here to “curing” her habits, he does so in a preemptive manner, thinking of keeping his children disease-free rather than of helping Fanny to improve (10). His language shifts our focus from the social to the physical, from her behavior to her body, and Mrs. Price’s letter reaffirms this dual meaning.21 She offers “assur[ance] of her daughter’s being a very well-disposed, good-humoured girl” but then confirms the alternative meaning of disposition when she shares her hope that her daughter’s health will improve as a result of her contact with Mansfield Park’s salubrious “air” (11). The novel’s interest in Fanny’s improvement, however, never fully materializes, as key episodes that appear to feature her as the heroine of a cure plot turn, instead, on her preventionist perspective.
In fact, we are encouraged from very early on to see Fanny as a struggling preventionist. When the “old grey poney[sic]” she has been used to riding dies, the narrator tells us that Fanny “was in danger of feeling the loss in her health as well as her affections” (31). Nobody thinks to replace her pony until Edmund, the only one to attend to Fanny’s physical well-being, notices the loss’s “ill effects” (32) and trades his road horse for a suitable mare. The lack of both a horse and the family’s interest in getting Fanny a horse contributes to her potential decline. Medically speaking, horseback riding, or some comparable activity, was often prescribed as therapeutic during this period. For example, Buchan observes that “exercise is not less necessary than food for the preservation of health” and that “[i]t seems to be a catholic law throughout the whole animal creation, that