Reading for Health. Erika Wright
marrying the wrong woman or merely “cure[d]” of what the narrator calls “unconquerable passion” (387)? After all, the Crawfords have been described as needing “cure,” and, moreover, because they do not “wan[t] to be cured” (40), Mary’s status as potentially infectious remains open. We might even give Mary credit for inoculating Edmund—his limited contact with the morally tainted Mary helps to fortify Edmund against future “disease” and keep him healthy for Fanny. Austen’s language in the pivotal exchange between Edmund and Fanny—that his “nature” resisted the truth and that he only recognized Fanny’s worth when it was “natural” for him to do so—suggests that Edmund was never really “sick,” that Fanny’s preventive project (her presence) worked: it preserved Edmund’s naturally healthy disposition and has protected him from future wretchedness.
Indeed, Edmund’s epiphany implies that Fanny has been his guide and protector all the while he imagined himself to be hers. The narrator explains, “With such a regard for her, indeed, as his had long been, a regard founded on the most endearing claims of innocence and helplessness, and completed by every recommendation of growing worth, what could be more natural than the change? Loving, guiding, protecting her, as he had been doing ever since her being ten years old, her mind so great a degree formed by his care, and her comfort depending on his kindness, an object to him of such close and peculiar interest, dearer by all his own importance with her than any one else at Mansfield” (387). Edmund’s claim to have been “loving, guiding, [and] protecting” Fanny since she was ten does not account for the unintentional neglect she suffered at his hands, giving her horse to Mary or leaving her on the bench at Sotherton. His version of the story is slightly inaccurate. We know, too, that without Fanny’s “hint,” his nature could not have detected Mary’s “real character”; it would have only fantasized about her excellence and his loss. Austen means for us to speculate about what could have been, as the narrator states explicitly that “had [Henry] done as he intended, and as he knew he ought, . . . he might have been deciding his own happy destiny” (385). Mary takes a slightly different view, blaming Fanny for Henry’s bad behavior. She tells Edmund that Fanny “would have fixed” Henry, and “[h]ad she accepted him as she ought, they might now have been on the point of marriage” and Henry would not have eloped with Maria Bertram, now Maria Rushworth (376). But however much Mary or the reader may wish for this alternative ending, the narrative has never been interested in curing Henry Crawford because it was never interested in the Fanny-Henry plot—it was never interested in cure. Nor has it been interested in protecting the other Bertram children, whose stories, as Beddoes might say, only “pretend to teach people how to restore [health].”25 Rather, the narrative has always been concerned with advancing Fanny’s desire for Edmund and the preventionist stance that such desire represents.
To answer the question of how we achieve closure through prevention, I return to the physicians. Buchan has difficulty addressing prevention’s narrative constraints about an end. And for all his emphasis on prophylaxis, he concludes by offering a list of cures, beginning with balsams and ending with wines. Beddoes, in contrast, concludes his final installment by explaining that there is no conclusion. He maintains, “There yet remain many subjects in preventive medicine,” and he goes on to express what we know or hope to be true of our favorite writers—namely, that they will have more to offer. “I find myself,” he says, “far from spent with the toil, and I can say with as good a heart as many who have lain by, all the time, in the shade—‘To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.’”26 We must always be vigilant about maintaining health.
The novelist provides the rest of the answer. The curt, and what one critic calls “controversial,”27 ending of Mansfield Park disrupts the kind of tidy restoration generally offered by cure. The narrator blunts the certainty of closure by rushing to assure us that “[m]y Fanny indeed at this very time, I have the satisfaction of knowing, must have been happy in spite of every thing. She must have been a happy creature in spite of all that she felt or thought she felt, for the distress of those around her. She has sources of delight that must force their way” (380). The narrator is, perhaps, too emphatic about Fanny’s happiness. The repetition of “must” is as much an assertion of what will occur as it is a question about what should happen—Fanny must be happy after all that she has endured, mustn’t she? Of course she must. But not immediately. The narrator “purposely abstain[s]” from telling us when Fanny became happy, instead “intreat[ing] every body to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Mary Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny, as Fanny herself could desire” (387). What some see as an uncharacteristically rushed and overly personal conclusion, Tony Tanner sees as a transfer of the “obligation of the author to the discretion (or fantasy) of the reader”; the absence of specificity becomes an invitation to “write this part of the novel.”28 Though Tanner refers here to Austen’s refusal to depict Edmund and Fanny in conjugal bliss or something quite like it—“they are after all cousins”29—I see this gesture toward the development of the reader’s imaginative capacity as coincident with the project of prevention.
Cure and restoration are important to narrative, but as Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park show us, the stories that come before and beyond cure, the ones that carry us outside of a recovery model, are equally valuable, though perhaps not quite as exciting. Prevention, as I have been suggesting, is a way of reading; it is a lesson in patience more than it is a lesson in being a patient. Elinor Dashwood is arguably Austen’s first preventionist heroine, while Fanny Price, the sickly central heroine who is not trying to get well, is perhaps her most complex. Even her final complete novel, Persuasion, suggests that prevention more than cure guides our reading. The invalid Mrs. Smith registers the kind of anticipatory regret that prevention seeks to instill. But in Persuasion, we also get a turn away from prevention, for Anne Elliot, who lost her bloom before the novel begins and regains it before our very eyes, seems to argue against preventionist thinking, not because it lacks the narrative force of cure but because it is too much like it. Having followed Lady Russell’s advice and turned down Wentworth’s proposal eight years before the novel begins, Anne, though longing to regain her lost love, does not blame herself for following this advice. She does, however, feel that “were any young person, in similar circumstances, to apply to her for counsel, they would never receive any of such certain immediate wretchedness, such uncertain future good” (20). In Anne’s situation, prevention, instead of mitigating wretchedness, becomes the only way to ensure it.
Telling the story of prevention is not easy. In real life, we are left to recognize the signs and structure of preventive thinking and to do our best to avoid what we are sure might cause us harm. In fiction, we get a bit more insight, a bit more certainty, as the narrator can tell us (if she so chooses) what might have been. But even in fiction, prevention is still a shadow, an imagined story of averted future regret that hovers over all the stories we tell.
Chapter Two
Health, Identity, and Narrative Authority in Jane Eyre
Q. 10. The blessings of health then must be very great?
A. They are indeed. Health is the most precious good, and the most certain means of enjoying all other blessings and pleasures of life.
Q. 11. What says the son of Sirach of health?
A. . . . “Better is the poor being sound and strong of constitution, than a rich man that is afflicted in his body. Health and good estate of body are above all gold, and a strong body above infinite wealth. There are no riches above a sound body, and no joy above the joy of the heart.”
—Bernhard Christoph Faust, M.D.,
The Catechism of Health (1794)
“And what is hell? Can you tell me that?”
“A pit full of fire.”
“And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning for ever?”
“No, sir.”
“What must