Mansfield Park Rangers
A little more about Dame Margaret's new class + a TOASTIE guest appearance!
Hello again, Dames Nationals!
We learned of three bruising losses this week— Roberta Flack, Michelle Trachtenberg, and Gene Hackman. Karen will have more to say about Gene Hackman in the coming week, but in the meantime, this newsletter would hardly be ours if we failed to share ’s Hit Parade episodes dedicated to Roberta Flack, Dionne Warwick, Patti LaBelle, and Chaka Khan: “Killing Me Softly, Pt. 1” and “Killing Me Softly, Pt. 2”.
Losing both Harriet the Spy and Royal Tenenbaum in one month might necessitate a Two Bossy Dames viewing party, or even two, but that’s a decision that requires a Dames Quorum. Watch this space for more information.
Mansfield Park Rangers: Some Exciting News!
As you may have read last week, I am teaching a virtual class on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park that begins on Monday, with Dame Sophie serving as my teaching assistant. To this established report I can now add two further pieces of information:
I am be offering free access to the first class session to anyone who signs up for the newsletter on my new website. Unlike the discursive missives you find through this subscription, that newsletter will be more brisk and businesslike— just news about courses I offer, events I lead, and special discounts on both. So, if you’d like to sample the class before committing, please sign up!
Even more exciting, I get to announce a featured guest lecturer! For our March 24th class on using adaptation as a means of developing empathy for unsympathetic characters, the inimitable will be joining me to make a case for Edmund Bertram. As Two Bossy Dames probably would not exist without Danny’s influence, from his early days on The Awl and The Hairpin, to his storied reign on The Toast, you can see why this news would have me CROWING.
To learn more about all of this, including information about scholarships and asynchronous participation, just head to my website: mhwillison.com!
To celebrate Danny’s involvement in the course, we’re doing a two-part interview on Mansfield Park, and you can enjoy part one right here, right now!
Daniel Lavery on Why Mansfield Park Secretly Whips
Margaret: So, the second you saw me announce this Mansfield Park class, you slid into my DMs to volunteer yourself as a guest lecturer. What about this novel renders you so, pardon my pun, LIT?
Danny: I was so keen! Part of this is because I recently reread Austen after the birth of my son last year, so it was still fresh in my mind. And part of it is because Mansfield Park often gets short shrift, which is in many ways understandable, because it can be difficult to get very excited about someone who, like Fanny Price, is right all of the time. She's not just right all the time, she's almost suffocated by being right – it almost totally isolates her.
Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility have the pleasure of really affectionate family relationships between Jane and Elizabeth and Marianne and Elinor, and Emma has this wonderfully warm and prickly flirtation between Emma and Knightley throughout, and Anne Elliot has a lot of inner resources (not to mention at least two friends), but Fanny has hardly anyone to confide in or who she can really trust, so it's not just that the central romance is difficult or unsatisfying, it's that it's hardly ever relieved in the narrative by the sight of other flourishing relationships.
But the characters are so complex and the development of the story is so rewarding, I think, that it really is an incredible achievement. It's a book about ordination and the Church, but nobody ever goes to church, or prays in it, so it's all dealt with in other, secondary ways, which results in really interesting moments, I think.
M: In these early DMs, you specifically identified yourself as an Edmund defender. Why does Edmund NEED your defense and, even more importantly, why does he DESERVE it?
D: You know, I'll defend almost anybody in this book. I can't do much for Mrs. Norris. I'm only human. People have a tendency to take sides in Mansfield Park — if you like Mary Crawford, it's usually at Fanny's expense, and same with Henry and Edmund. But I like everybody. Edmund and Fanny can be priggish, and Mary and Henry do flip back and forth across the line of "totally charming" and "completely indifferent to the suffering of others" — they're often wrong about themselves and each other but they're totally real-seeming, human, sympathetic characters, and I find the way they misunderstand and damage each other totally fascinating. I could read another 400 pages just of the four of them trying to arrange a dinner party.
I wrote this around the time I reread MP most recently:
Emma is a really fun book about an incredibly thoughtless woman who marries her conscience. It’s like if Pinocchio married Jiminy Cricket. The reason everyone gets mad at Mansfield Park is because it’s like if Jiminy Cricket married his own Jiminy Cricket.
I like Edmund for a few reasons. I like that he's at odds with himself, often without realizing it, and that we get to see him try to lie to himself while having a constitutionally honest personality, and how difficult that makes things for him. I like how he's always trying to put a bright spin on hopeless things. He's a little bit of a Stepford Wife in that way. Fanny has this sort of mystical inward journey, her own dark night of the soul, but her story is fundamentally about having the courage to stick to her convictions, and to continue to love the same person she's loved the whole time.
Edmund's story is that he sort of inadvertently places a curse on himself: About a third of the way through the book, he tells Fanny that "it often happens that a man, before he has quite made up his own mind, will distinguish the sister or intimate friend of the woman he is really thinking of more than the woman herself." He's saying this about Henry Crawford and the Bertram sisters, and is perfectly wrong, of course, but it's entirely true about himself, and he goes on to suffer for another 200-some-odd pages as a result of it. He's rerouted away from real human connection by charm, which is such an interesting and, I'm sorry to use the word here but relatable problem, and he's often very funny in an agonizing way.
I suppose I want to defend him most of all because the Henry Crawford charm offensive always, always works on me. Every time I reread Mansfield Park, by the time Fanny hears him reading Shakespeare, I've joined the side of Sir Thomas and everyone else, who want to override her taste, her judgment, her inclination, her values, and say, "Just like him, the way that we like him, and all of your problems will be over," and I value Austen so, so highly for disappointing me on that front, and with such skill. She writes disappointment so beautifully.
Who can be satisfied with Edmund? And who can be satisfied with Edmund after such a short, offscreen change of heart, such a truncated proposal? He's the Ann Veal of Jane Austen: "Her?"
"Being Alive" from Company always gets me because it feels like the reverse of the Mansfield Park ending -- I never buy that Bobby has actually come to desire a long-term partner, but I do buy that he's enjoying the relief that comes from knuckling under after years of resistance, about the pleasure of joining a consensus, in convincing yourself that you really do want everyone else around you hopes that you'll want. Edmund is the thing no one wants Fanny to want, except for Fanny.
M: You have, in classic Daniel Lavery fashion, produced a brief comic adaptation of Mansfield Park for your own newsletter last spring. Do you feel you were able to communicate what you love so much about the book through this adaptation? Or did some part of its quality elude adaptation?
D: Always elusive! Mansfield Park has such a remarkable triple structure, and every single object and event has its matched pair, or even triplet, in a way I couldn't even begin to get at in my jokes. But the feelings surging between all the characters are so huge, and Fanny's self-control and agitation so immense, that it's always fun to try to condense it into a few short fragments. If you read MP with Fanny as, say, a very small bumblebee, or a dormouse, it still works, I think.
M: If someone has read and loved other Austen novels, but not this Austen novel, what are they missing out on?
D: Well, if you have read Mansfield Park and not loved it, I don't want to say you must necessarily be missing out on something. But I do think Fanny's struggle to know her own mind, and to test her motivations, and then to test her fortitude, is a really fascinating and remarkable project, and one that Austen writes so brilliantly. And the near-triumph of charm is something too -- you can see just beyond the page a version of the book where the Crawfords each carry off a Bertram/Price successfully, and it would feel so good, and it doesn't happen, and that near-miss sometimes feels like such a relief and at other times like such a crashing disappointment. I love that. I think if you found the scenes of forced-friendship between Lucy Steele and Elinor interesting in S&S, you'll likely be fascinated by the almost-sort-of-not-quite friendship and occasional esteem that springs up between Fanny and Mary.
Fanny's retreat from the world when she can't successfully fight and win on her own behalf -- it's like watching someone become an anchoress in the middle of a crowded living room. Not for nothing is she compared to Bartleby the Scrivener! The more I reread it, the more I'm transfixed by her struggle -- in this incredibly polite and well-off house she is in a constant battle for the right to think her own thoughts against an ever-widening, ever-more-affectionate band of enemies -- the more I like her, even though we are very different.
M: How do the things you love so much about Mansfield Park show up in your own work? Are there any parallels you would draw between the denizens of Mansfield Park and characters in your recent novel, Women’s Hotel?
D: It's very kind of you to try to shoehorn my own career in here. But I think I'm at least fifteen years away from even being able to think about incorporating anything like Mansfield Park's influence into my work. Give me time!!
M: Okay, so you’re saying it’s my job to draw out the parallels. I think I am equal to to the challenge and will happily do so in part 2 of this interview, which readers will be able to find in on Monday. In the meantime, they cannot go wrong by checking out your 3-part adaptation of Mansfield Park, which I have taken the liberty for excerpting below.
Daniel Lavery’s Mansfield Park, excerpted from
In the grand tradition of Danny’s Texts from Jane Eyre, please enjoy this taste of his comic truncation of Mansfield Park:
MRS. PRICE: Too many children
Too many children Portsmouth help
Mail son away
Send son away via mail
Send son East or somewhere via post office legal
How mail son to relatives who hate me
Cheaper to mail away son or daughter
SIR THOMAS: On the one hand I feel for the girl…
But on the other hand — if she grew up handsome, you see, and the boys noticed — It could be very awkward — Cousin marriage is all well and good when the cousin in question has something of her own, but a poor cousin —
MRS. NORRIS: If you’re afraid of the cousins getting married then the best thing in the world is for her to come and live here, where you can keep an eye on things. Strongest proof against cousin marriage I can think of. If there’s anyone you don’t want your sons marrying, my advice is to bring her up in your own home and treat her like a daughter. Fill the world with sisters, until there’s only one very rich woman they don’t think they’re too closely related to. Really we ought to bring all of her sisters too, if any of them look like they’re going to grow up to be charming. No one wants to marry someone they already eat breakfast with every day. That’s just my advice of course
MRS. NORRIS: By the way here’s the order in which I love everybody:
Maria
Tom
Julia
Edmund
Maria again
Pug dog
The girl
SIR THOMAS: Remember, girls, that Fanny is going to be your very best friend. But she must never look you directly in the eyes. If she dares, you must tell me at once, and I will give her to the Post Office right away
FANNY PRICE: ʰᵉˡˡᵒ ᴹʳˢ ᴺᵒʳʳᶦˢ ᵐᵒᵗʰᵉʳ ˢᵃʸˢ ᶦᵐ ᵗᵒ ᵍᵒ ʷᶦᵗʰ ʸᵒᵘ ᶠᵒʳ ʷᵉ ᵃʳᵉ ᵗᵒᵒ ᵐᵃⁿʸ
MRS. NORRIS: HELLO FANNY
YOUR MOTHER TELLS ME YOU HAVEN’T GOT ANY MONEY
THAT’S NOT VERY GOOD, IS IT
FANNY: ⁿᵒ ᵐᵃᵃᵐ
MRS. NORRIS: SPEAK UP
FANNY: ɴᴏ ᴍᴀᴀᴍ
MRS. NORRIS: THAT’S BETTER. SAY IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT. YOUR DISGRACE IS NOTHING TO BE ASHAMED OF
If you enjoyed this as much I did, you can read the rest on :
As always, thank you for reading, Dames Nationals! I hope to see some of your friendly faces on Monday!
XO/Dame Margaret