May 31, 2022
[This writing contains spoilers for Mansfield Park.]
I came to Mansfield Park from Pride and Prejudice, which was my first Jane Austen read. As I progressed through the book, I was pleasantly surprised: everything was so much more intricate than I had expected, and I was, suffice to say, agreeably engrossed. It was an employment of not little felicity (as Jane Austen would probably say). However, as I neared the end of the book, I was filled with wretchedness and disappointment: Mansfield Park swerved sharply, and pulled a Pride and Prejudice. This book too ends with an elopement, public scandal, and ultimate domestic felicity. I will grant that Maria's and Julia's elopements were surprising to the highest degree. However, the manner in which it all was presented was, I feel, recycled from Austen's previous book. I wonder now: how much of Pride and Prejudice is Sense and Sensibility, Austen's first published book? I must venture to suppose a great degree.
The foregoing paragraph might suggest my being in a state of regret over reading Mansfield Park. However, I must say that everything that comes before the unfortunate ending incontestably redeems the book, all in all. Fanny and Edmund--Ah! Where else could I have found such estimable characters: so much to learn from, objects so deserving of endearment--Fanny's temperament, her solicitude for others' well-being, her self-effacement; Edmund's kindness toward his cousin, his principles, his solicitudes for all related to him . . . I particularly liked the variety of characters--the indolent Lady Bertram, the officious Mrs. Norris, the noble Sir Thomas, the loving Mrs. Grant, and the vain and spirited Mr. Crawford--which was far richer than what Pride and Prejudice provided. Moreover, it was not all domestic felicity at the end: we can only imagine Mr. Crawford's and Maria's plights. I might have also been unfair to the conclusion: along with all that comes before it, it was greatly edifying--particularly its lessons on wealth and morals, the role of the religion in establishing a society's morals, parenting (in the form of Sir Thomas' regrets), and so on.
All that said, I think I've had enough of Jane Austen: while I enjoy her writing style, her plots are still a little too "zoomed in" for my taste. I have been reading Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, which, while having parts that are as zoomed in as most of Jane Austen's plots, talks about the world in a "grander" sense--in fact, it seems as though the zoomed-in parts have an ultimate purpose: to provide context to the bird's-eye view of the world. Some would argue that Jane Austen's works contain an implicit indictment of the society she lived in--and this is especially true in the case of Mansfield Park: for instance, Mr. Rushworth's ability, after Maria's intrigue, to quickly obtain a divorce and lead a normal life again, while possibly being equally wrong in having married Maria even after being privy to her lack of affection toward him, was particularly telling. However, the kind of "grandness" I am referring to lies only partly in societal problems: it also consists of the very meaning of life, death, human connection, and, most importantly, how we think the world works at large--these are areas in which I must seek another author. I will, however, still read Jane Austen from time to time--if you can't already tell, her flowery prose has left an imprint on my own.