Irony and Action in Mansfield Park

Abstract

IR O N Y A N D A C T IO N IN M A N S F I E L D P A R K ALAN KENNEDY Dalhousie University O n e of the simplest meanings of irony is distance, and when it is asserted that Mansfield Park lacks irony what is usually meant is that there is no distance between Fanny Price and her creator. Fanny is seen as a moral centre who offers difficulty to those of us who will insist on reading the book from a modern standpoint, and it is precisely this prickly discomfort that leads Lionel Trilling to defend the book; it offers a challenge to contemporary ethical relativists. As he says, "when we have exhausted our anger at the offense which Mansfield Park offers to our conscious pieties, we find it possible to perceive how intimately it speaks to our secret inexpressible hopes." The hope he means is the hope that it is possible to discover "in principle the path to the wholeness of the self which is peace."1 Marvin Mudrick too sees little complexity in the book, and perhaps little value as well. He says, "its prevailing tone is grave, its issue unequivocal. Fanny - center of the action - is no heroine indulged, at an ironic distance, by the author; she demands our earnest sympathy, and on her own terms."2 Whatever we may come to believe about the accuracy of this judgement, it is the precise delineation of Jane Austen's type of irony by Mudrick that attracts me here, and I believe it is possible to argue that Fanny is subject to her characteris­ tic treatment; she is treated with an ironic distance and at the same time she is indulged by her creator. It is the indulgence - that is, ultimate acceptance - that makes it difficult to spot the irony, which is never heavy-handed. If Jane Austen treats Fanny ironically, then that must imply that there is a higher morality, that of the narrator with the ironic tone of voice or with the ability to structure ironic situations, that tests Fanny's morality. If a character is to be tested by a higher morality and yet ultimately indulged, the implication is that her wanderings from the higher code are never great, and further that she is capable herself of developing a higher morality. Indulgent irony implies then that the central character will change, grow, develop, undergo a process of education in the novel. Indeed - as has been often observed - one of the central themes of the novel is precisely education. Sir Thomas's daughters Maria and Julia are highly educated; from a very early age they could put together the jig-saw map of Europe, "repeat the chronological order of the kings of England'' and "of the Roman emperors as low as Severus," and a great deal besides. Sir Thomas comes to lament this education; in fact he himself is educated in the English Stud ies in Can ad a, hi, 2, Summer 1977 1 65 course of the novel to the extent that he too is worthy of the author's in­ dulgence: Here had been grievous mismanagement; but, bad as it was, he gradually grew to feel that it had not been the most direful mistake in his plan of education. Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting.3 He discovers that his daughters "had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice" (p 448). In contrast to Maria and Julia, Fanny has had little formal education, in her early life at least. Her girlhood in Portsmouth was far from the ideal of Rousseau, as we discover from a later scene in the novel, but Fanny does seem to have had time to develop the quality we see operative in her younger sister Susan, which is called a "natural light of the mind" (p 388). Despite her lack of information, Fanny has what her cousins lack; she has inner formation. In this sense, then, she is a prime candidate for education...