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books, habits, Henry Crawford, Katie Davis, literature, Mansfield Park, Mansfield Park 200th anniversary, marriage, Mary Crawford, Mrs. Grant
Fifth in a series of posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. For more details, open Your Invitation to Mansfield Park.
In Volume 3 of Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas decides to try a “medicinal project upon his niece’s understanding, which he must consider as at present diseased.” Living at Mansfield has, he believes, “disordered” Fanny Price’s “powers of comparing and judging,” and he sends her “home” to Portsmouth to be cured. This fall, Sara Malton is going to write about that passage – but today, Katie Davis explores a different “medicinal project” earlier in the novel, when Mrs. Grant proposes to Mary Crawford that Mansfield Park is the “cure,” rather than the cause of disease.
Katie is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Western Heritage at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. She earned her Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Dallas in 2013, where she wrote a dissertation on Jane Austen’s Persuasion under the direction of Theresa Kenney (who’s writing about Tom and Edmund for my “Invitation to Mansfield Park” series). Katie is looking forward to celebrating the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mansfield Park with fellow Janeites at the JASNA AGM in Montreal this coming October, and I am, too. Registration opened yesterday, and Elaine Bander says more than 500 people have registered so far! Katie’s conference paper is entitled “Charles Pasley’s Essay and the ‘Governing Winds’ of Mansfield Park.” If you’re a JASNA member, you may have seen her essay on “Austen’s ‘Providence’ in Persuasion” in Persuasions 35, which arrived in my mailbox last week.
[Mrs. Grant to Mary Crawford] “You are as bad as your brother, Mary; but we will cure you both. Mansfield shall cure you both – and without any taking in. Stay with us and we will cure you.”
– From Mansfield Park, Chapter 5 (New York: Norton, 1998)
Arthur Barbosa’s cover image for The Unknown Ajax, by Georgette Heyer, reminds Katie of Edmund Bertram and Mary Crawford http://www.lesleyannemcleod.com/rw_art.html#barbosa
When Mrs. Grant tells Mary and Henry Crawford that Mansfield might cure them, she suggests that their view of marriage is faulty. Mary has argued that all marriages involve one or the other of the spouses being “taken in.” Mrs. Grant rightly identifies the problem with Mary’s point of view: she has a corrupt imagination, and this imagination is leading her to form a one-sided, “evil” (meaning something like cynical in this case) opinion about marriage.
Mrs. Grant’s suggestion that Henry might be “cured” ultimately by marrying Julia Bertram (Chapter 4) shows that she does not know as much as we do – thanks to the narrator – about the imperfections of the Mansfield Park family. Julia is not as bad as Maria, but neither sister is equipped to bring about the “cure” Mrs. Grant hopes for.
More importantly, neither Mary nor Henry is interested in what Mrs. Grant proposes: “The Crawfords, without wanting to be cured, were very willing to stay. Mary was satisfied with the parsonage as a present home, and Henry equally ready to lengthen his visit” (Chapter 5).
This brief passage in Chapter 5 calls our attention to a few of the central questions of Austen’s novel: to what extent can the opinions and habits of fully-formed adults be changed – or “cured” – by entering into community with people whose opinions and habits are, in crucial ways, totally different? What is required for such a transformation? Through this little exchange between Mrs. Grant and the Crawfords, Austen proposes that the will – corrupt or wholesome – is very real and extremely powerful. If Henry and Mary do not wish to be moved by their new friends, no amount of hoping on Mrs. Grant’s part will bring about the “cure.”
In the end, Mansfield does for Mary what Mrs. Grant wanted it to do: Mary’s time there does eventually “cure” her, but not in the way that Mrs. Grant had expected:
Arthur Barbosa, “A Riding Habit,” from Georgette Heyer’s Regency England, by Teresa Chris (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989).
Mrs. Grant, with a temper to love and be loved, must have gone [from Mansfield to London for Dr. Grant’s new position] with some regret, from the scenes and people she had been used to; but the same happiness of disposition must in any place and any society, secure her a great deal to enjoy, and she had again a home to offer Mary; and Mary had had enough of her own friends, enough of vanity, ambition, love, and disappointment in the course of the last half year, to be in need of the true kindness of her sister’s heart, and the rational tranquility of her ways. . . . Mary, though perfectly resolved against ever attaching herself to a younger brother again, was long in finding . . . any one who could satisfy the better taste she had acquired at Mansfield, whose character and manners could authorise a hope of the domestic happiness she had there learnt to estimate, or put Edmund Bertram sufficiently out of her head. (Chapter 48; Vol. 3, Ch. 17)
“[L]ong in finding” is better than the turn Persuasion’s narrator gives Elizabeth Elliot, to whom “no one of proper condition has since presented himself” (Vol. II, Ch. 24). Ultimately, it is love – Mrs. Grant’s enduring love and affection for Mary, and belatedly, Edmund’s good-hearted, thorny, thwarted love for Mary – that effects the change in Mary. Mary will never be satisfied with anything less once she has encountered this type of love at Mansfield. Austen enacts the theme of felix culpa here: Mary’s “evil” imagination could only be transformed by something as powerful as a broken heart, but thanks to that heartache, she has hope, eventually, of the “domestic happiness” that Mrs. Grant wanted for her all along.
To read more about all the posts in this series, visit An Invitation to Mansfield Park.
Sarah Emsley 
I think you make a very important point about the power of the will in the project of being “cured” by moving in different society and different manners. Mary immerses herself into life at Mansfield, and is clear-sighted enough to value the good examples of marriage she sees there. “My own sister as a wife, Sir Thomas Bertram as a husband, are my standards of perfection,” she says, and she’s right: within the world of Mansfield, these are the best examples of the type to be found. Mrs. Grant, if blind to the characters of her half-siblings, is an admirable woman, making a more conscious choice to love and be devoted than Lady Bertram. (Lady Bertram is devoted to her husband and relies absolutely and, I argue, rather sweetly on his judgment, but she’s hard to take as a model of positive action.) And Sir Thomas is a very amiable husband. Mary Crawford can’t contrast him with Mr. Bennet, but we can: never once does he put down his wife for saying something less than intelligent, never does he seem to wish his wife to be someone other than she is (for better or for worse). There are elements of their marriage that can be gently ridiculed, and the end of Mansfield shows that their combined parenting has showcased the worst of their flaws, but their marriage is, i think, more to be praised than censured.
But Mary does not will to be cured in the way that Mrs. Grant wishes her to be, and she removes herself to the society of her choosing, in London, where she is surrounded by friends whose attitudes toward marriage are a poisonous contrast to Mrs. Grant’s medicinal project. In her next breath after praising Mrs. Grant and Sir Thomas, Mary blithely outlines her friends’ flawed, worldly approaches to prudence in marriage. When Edmund meets with her again, he is struck by how changed she is after imbibing the atmosphere of London society. Though she is sobered at the end of the book and has a better intellectual understanding of the type of man who can make a worthy husband, her will is still improperly set: she is “perfectly resolved against ever attaching herself to a younger brother again.” (She’s probably still perfectly resolved against clergymen, too.) Her taste is improved, but she’s only learned prudence as a worldly, mercenary standard, not as a virtue. But who knows? Maybe Mrs. Grant’s model of “true kindness” and “rational tranquility” will prevail on Mary in the end.
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MrsDarwin, great comments. Thanks for providing this feedback. Your point about Mary’s resolution never to attach herself “to a younger brother again” is well-taken, and I think the passage points to a stage of bitterness combined with worldly prudence that does not yet signify the kind of transformation I suggest we are invited to hope for. But if she can’t get a character as good as Edmund Bertram (imperfect as he is) out of her head, and if she can’t leave behind the new Mansfield habits (“better taste”) she has learned to appreciate only in retrospect , perhaps what you say is true: Mrs. Grant’s model (and, I would add, Edmund’s) might prevail.
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Fascinating. One tends to overlook what happens to Mary at the end of MP, being wholeheartedly sick of her by that point. What I wonder, however, is how much Jane Austen believed that MP was truly such a “cure” with 3 of the 4 children flirting with social or physical disaster. Is she being ironic?
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Melinda, I think that’s a really important question. Joyce Tarpley, in her fantastic book, Constancy and Ethics in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, argues that part of Austen’s design is to move Sir Thomas eventually to recognize that he has made mistakes as a father. His daughters in particular have been able to cloak their true characters from him by putting on a pleasing outward show of propriety and obedience. This is not to excuse Maria, Julia and Tom, of course. But Austen’s representation of the parent-child relationship in Mansfield Park is particularly interesting because only here (or almost only – I think Mrs. Dashwood undergoes a similar recognition) does a father come to the shattering realization that the suffering his children have brought upon the family might, in part, have been due to his choices as a parent. I’m intrigued, however, by the notion that Austen might be exercising irony here. Could you tell us more about that?
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Might there be a stronger case for the efficacy of the Mansfield cure? After all, both Henry and Mary do find true love at Mansfield. Unfortunately, they have both been too corrupted by worldly motives to reap any lasting benefit from the cure. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen for both of them. Thank you for pointing to the passage that says that Mary was “long in” finding Edmund’s equal, not that she never did. Mary is so charming that it is hard for me to be completely out of charity with her. I enjoyed this article. Thank you!
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I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry, but I don’t think Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram are worthy marriage partners. There is something false, self-righteous and hypocritical in their views of morality. I find hard to believe that we’re expected to accept that Mary needs to find someone who was at the same level of worth as a hypocritical, controlling and self-righteous douche like Edmund. Yes, I dislike him that much. Mary was LUCKY that she never married him.
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