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Aristotle, Aristotle's Poetics, books, comedy, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Nolan, favourite Austen novels, George Whalley, happy endings, Jane Austen, Janet Beer, John Baxter, John Wiltshire, literature, Mansfield Park, Mansfield Park 200th anniversary, Mansfield Park and Tragedy, Marcia McClintock Folsom, MLA, Natasha Duquette, Patrick Atherton, Persuasions On-Line, Sarah Emsley, The House of Mirth, tragedy, William Dean Howells
I’m really excited about discussing Mansfield Park with all of you this year – so excited that I can’t wait until May 9th, when my series of guest posts on the novel launches, to start the conversation. I’m also far too impatient to begin at the beginning, so I’m writing today to tell you what I think of the ending. For anyone who hasn’t yet read Mansfield Park, here’s the obligatory spoiler alert. (Although I guess the title of this post already alluded to the ending….)
I think the key to understanding Mansfield Park is that it’s a tragedy, rather than a comedy. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that not many people choose it as a favourite from among Austen’s novels. (Natasha Duquette, who’s writing a guest post on part of Chapter 27 – in which Fanny “had all the heroism of principle” – is an exception. Is there anyone else out there whose favourite Austen novel is Mansfield Park? I would love to hear from you! I’ve already confessed that Pride and Prejudice is my own favourite, although MP is a close second.) Many readers find the ending of Mansfield Park disappointing. I think that’s because most of us tend to approach Austen novels with the expectation that they will be romantic comedies. And most of them are. But not this one.
Reading Mansfield Park in light of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy in his Poetics shows that it’s a tragedy with a happy ending, or a “prosperous outcome.” I wrote about this idea in my essay “The Tragic Action of Mansfield Park” in Persuasions On-Line a few years ago.
Aristotle’s Poetics, translated by George Whalley, edited by John Baxter and Patrick Atherton
The essay was based on a talk I gave at the 2006 JASNA AGM in Tucson, and over the last few years I revised it again, developing the argument further for publication in the MLA collection of essays Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Mansfield Park, edited by Marcia McClintock Folsom and John Wiltshire. That version of the essay will be published soon (the book is at the copyediting stage, so publication can’t be too far away – I hope!). [Edited to add: here’s the blog post I wrote in October 2014 when the book was published: Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Mansfield Park.]
But for now, if you’re interested in my argument, you can read the earlier version in Persuasions On-Line. This version includes comparisons between Mansfield Park and Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth, and I was quite attached to those comparisons (as you can imagine, because I love talking about Austen and Wharton). I expanded the rest of the essay for the MLA volume, but I had to take Wharton out because of the focus on teaching Austen.
So here’s your chance to read the Austen and Wharton version:
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton, edited by Janet Beer and Elizabeth Nolan
In October 1906, a dramatization of Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth opened in New York at the Savoy Theater. It was not a success, even though the novel had been very well-received the year before. The ending of The House of Mirth is melancholy: the beautiful heroine dies alone in a dreary New York boarding house, either by suicide or an accidental overdose of chloral, after a painful decline in her social and financial position and her marriage prospects. Like Fanny Price or Elizabeth Bennet, she has refused to marry a man she cannot love; unlike Elinor Dashwood, who marries Edward Ferrars on a small clerical income, Wharton’s heroine does not think she could ever be comfortable married to the man she does love, because he does not have enough money to support the life of luxury she craves. Edith Wharton later reflected on the judgment of her friend William Dean Howells, who, she said, commented to her after the performance that “[w]hat the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.”
Click here to read the rest of the essay in Persuasions On-Line.
Sarah Emsley 
Mansfield Park is my favorite. It was Vladimir Nabokov’s favorite, on the ground that it has the best prose of any of the novels.
There are still some of us who read the book that is on the page in front of us, not the one we have jumbled together in our heads beforehand. Even if I “expect” a romantic comedy, I know how to adjust to what I am actually reading.
I mean, if a reader is disappointed by the ending of MP because he expected a romantic comedy when he began the book, he has not been reading too well. He has had 400 pages to adjust.
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That’s a fair point – yes, of course we should read the books themselves to understand their endings. But at the same time, most readers have some idea of a book’s genre beforehand, whether that idea comes from the name of the section of the bookstore or library in which the book is shelved, the course for which it’s being read, or simply from the cover image or blurb.
Most of Austen’s novels are comedies, and Mansfield Park is usually read as a comedy too – by intelligent readers, not just those who may have a jumble of expectations in their heads – because, like Pride and Prejudice or Emma or Sense and Sensibility, it ends with marriage. Order is restored and harmony reigns. I think most readers do adjust, while reading Mansfield Park, to the fact that it isn’t “light, and bright, and sparkling” in the way that Pride and Prejudice is. I don’t mean that at the ending of MP, people are still looking for light-hearted comedy, and are disappointed that it isn’t there, or hasn’t been all along.
The problem is that it seems as if the marriage of Fanny and Edmund ought to be central, and it turns out to be mentioned only briefly. That, I think, is what so many people find disappointing. My argument is that the central action of MP is Fanny’s heroic resistance to the pressure Sir Thomas and Edmund exert when they try to persuade her to marry Henry Crawford. Fanny’s tempted to give in, but she recognizes that it would be a mistake to marry him, and her recognition forestalls disaster.
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Yes, I have seen it with my own eyes, readers who see that the high point of the novel is where you correctly identify it, yet are irritated that Austen does not complete the incantation with a proposal scene and perhaps some wedding planning.
I read Mansfield Park as a comedy myself, but I am going by tone and current rather than Aristotelian usage, not because the novel ends in marriage. Austen wrote comic novels much in the sense that Thackeray, Waugh, and Beckett wrote comic novels.
I was puzzled by this point in the paper actually. Are you arguing that MP can be seen as a tragedy according to a specific, little-used definition of Aristotle’s, which is certainly interesting, or that it is also tragic in some other sense? I do not think of “morally serious action” as at all inconsistent with purely comic modes. But then, I think Kafka writes in a comic mode.
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I agree that morally serious action isn’t confined to tragedy. But the intensity of the suffering is key. Aristotle isn’t talking about a different kind, or a subgenre, of tragedy – his point is that tragedy can have different kinds of endings.
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I’m not sure Aristotle’s division of Greek plays into comedies and tragedies is actually applicable to the wide range of novels today.
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Aristotle’s definition of tragedy is relevant to Austen’s novel because suffering and ruined lives are at the centre of tragedy, and these things are a large part of what happens in Mansfield Park.
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Fascinating! I have been waiting for you to blog about this since you tweeted that MP was a “tragedy.” Of course, I immediately thought of Shakespeare, not Aristotle. I will not argue that Fanny is a tragic heroine. It took me a while to warm up to her b/c, unlike Austen’s other heroine’s, she tires easily and can’t walk very far. Yet, ironically, she is constantly walked all over.
As to King Lear, MP can be seen as sort of an inverse of that in that Lear had everything going for him (wealth, power, kingdom) and threw it all away via poor decisions into catastrophe. Whereas Fanny had nothing going for her (poor, weak,no prospects) yet she manages to avoid catastrophe. Of course, I am prob the only one to compare Fanny to Lear. (Janite delusion?) I’m sure what the scholars say is that Sir Thomas Bertram is Lear and his daughters are like Goneril/Regan and Fanny is like the steadfast Cordelia? Also very interesting that the Bertram boys are Edmund and Tom … I’ve never made that connection to Lear’s Edmund and Poor Tom. Like Cordelia, Sir Thomas casts Fanny out … but she does not suffer Cordelia’s ultimate demise. A very interesting way to look at MP.
It is also much more tragic than any Austen novel b/c of the dreadful consequences to the characters. Unlike Lydia Bennet, Maria Bertam is not rescued and becomes a pariah. Mrs Norris is also cast out. Mr Rushworth hurt and embarrassed. Tom nearly dies and comes back a better person but wounded physically and with much money lost. Julia elopes to a so-so match. Mary Crawford lives with Mrs Grant and we assume becomes an artful spinster? Henry Crawford suffers some disgrace and is frustrated.
Fanny and Edmund get the only happy ending, though we learn early on in the novel that owing to Tom’s expenses, Sir Thomas has had to sell off some off the living income which would have gone to Edmund.
In other Austen novels, these sort of “come-uppance” blows are softened and everything seems to turn out ok for all.
I must say, that all of your insights have given me much to think about and reexamine in MP. Thank you!
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It’s really useful to compare Fanny and Lear. Thanks very much for your analysis of their characters! Yes, she’s also like Cordelia, but it’s fascinating that Austen complicates those parallels. What you say about the consequences for the others is illuminating, too: I agree with you that in the other novels the consequences are softened. There’s nothing soft in Mansfield Park. All the characters really do have to live with the consequences of the choices they make. It’s a happy ending in that the heroine is rewarded with marriage to the man she loves. And it’s a happy ending in that her resistance is shown to be the right choice. But there is still a great deal of unhappiness at the end of the novel. I’m glad you enjoyed reading the essay.
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Love the quote “the play should be at once both tragedy and comedy.” Meta!
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I love that line, too!
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Just one tiny point – Edmund does get all of the inheritance he should have gotten. Sir Thomas is obliged to sell the Mansfield living to Dr. Grant after Mr. Norris’ death, to pay off Tom’s debts; but the living is only sold for life. (Which is why Tom is so eager to think that Dr. Grant will not live long). So as long as Dr. Grant is alive the living is his (and presumably administered by a curate, since he has a stall in Westminster), but when he dies the living reverts back to Sir Thomas, who gives it to Edmund.
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“Mansfield park” is my favourite Austen, tied with “Emma” 😀
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Thanks for visiting — I’m always glad to hear from people who love Mansfield Park. Happy MP200!
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I agree that Mansfield Park is a tragedy and that’s why some readers get frustrated. I know I was that kind of reader, early on. I still don’t exactly warm to it, like one does to P & P, but I have developed great respect.
To me, it’s Sir Bertram’s story – it’s certainly his tragedy – even though he’s not even present for much of the first half of the book. In fact, his absenteeism is part of the tragedy, emblematic of the mistakes he’s making.
I don’t know how valid this is, but I have thought that Jane Austin famously didn’t write about conversations men had without a woman present (except we get exchanges between Sir Bertram & Edward & Sir Bertram & Crawford, but you get the idea) – at any rate, Jane Austen might have hesitated to take Sir Bertram as her protagonist and the marriage plot was something she knew well. So, she put the young-deserving-woman-looking-for-love bookends on either end of the novel and in between told of the story of the downfall of a family.
It is very tragic. I do see the Lear/MP parallels. Not sure how far that can be carried, but there’s definitely similarities. If Fanny is Cordelia, then it’s another interpretation of Cordelia’s silence – Fanny’s silence is timidity and feeling her dependency. Fanny does show Cordelia’s backbone in refusing to marry Tom.
BTW, don’t know if you got there yet in your posts – I don’t find Austen’s handling of Tom Crawford completely convincing, but that’s another comment.
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What an interesting idea that the story is primarily Sir Thomas’s. And that it becomes his story precisely because he’s absent. There are parallels with Mr. Bennet and his failure to understand the consequences of his inattention, too. Thanks for this. And no, we haven’t got to either Tom Bertram or Henry Crawford yet. Many weeks of MP discussions ahead!
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When I first began reading your post above, I did not agree that MP was a tragedy. But on reading your paper The Tragic Action of Mansfield Park, your clear and concise examination of Aristotle’s meaning of tragedy opens up a wealth of understanding. I have often felt the power of MP when reading it, and seen the growth and development of Fanny’s character as she matured into a virtuous woman with firm convictions based on her faith. Thank you for exploring the myriad details of ‘tragedy’ and giving all a better grasp of the true meaning of the genre.
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Thank you very much for your kind words about the paper, Jackie. I’m delighted to hear that you enjoyed reading it. The contrast between Fanny’s apparent weakness and her strength under pressure continues to fascinate me.
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