Jane Austen's Allegories of Mind: Memory Fiction in Mansfield Park

Abstract

Jane Austen's Allegories of Mind:Memory Fiction in Mansfield Park Sarah Eron (bio) In the gallery there were many family portraits, but they could have little to fix the attention of a stranger. Elizabeth walked on in quest of the only face whose features would be known to her. At last it arrested her—and she beheld a striking resemblance of Mr. Darcy, with such a smile over the face, as she remembered to have sometimes seen, when he looked at her. She stood several minutes before the picture in earnest contemplation, and returned to it again before they quitted the gallery. Mrs. Reynolds informed them, that it had been taken in his father's life time. There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth's mind, a more gentle sensation towards the original, than she had ever felt in the height of their acquaintance. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice1 In one of the most famous scenes in english literature, elizabeth Bennet enters a family picture gallery only to emerge with a mind and a life forever changed. The gallery is housed on the Pemberley estate where she has just arrived with mixed feelings. The grandeur of Pemberley impresses her almost enough to regret refusing Mr. Darcy's marriage proposal, but her worldly ambitions dissipate when she is reminded of her suitor's pride, which might forever divide her from her beloved family. Elizabeth describes this self-rebuke as a "lucky recollection" that "save[s] her" from "something like regret" (159). This seemingly pristine and moralizing memory comes under scrutiny, however, once the reader travels inside to hear the housekeeper's glowing account of Mr. Darcy. Just after hearing this praise, Elizabeth walks into the exhibit. From the start of Pride and Prejudice, Austen parodies a model of retentive memory that first represents information only to form the basis of moral judgment. Her use of the gallery draws upon an eighteenth-century [End Page 79] philosophical archetype for a kind of memory that operates as a collection. Elizabeth enters the gallery like the ideal empiricist, searching the collection (her mind) for what she already knows. But the picture gallery is an aesthetic assemblage that also reveals the powers of art to alter our original impressions. Artistry here is less about the portrait's painterly realism than it is about the literary context in which the portrait is hung. "At last … arrested" by the "striking resemblance of Mr. Darcy," Elizabeth claims that the picture jogs a memory of what she actually has never before observed in the novel. Where does this memory come from? The account slyly indicates that Mrs. Reynolds's flattering reflections on the young Fitzwilliam may be the source of Elizabeth's newfound memory. The transacted remembrance causes a new and "gentle sensation," one that supplants Elizabeth's previous anxieties to keep Darcy at bay. The novel intimates that this new "recollection" may be what truly saves Elizabeth "from something like regret" (159). As though the happy feeling produced by the altered memory is not enough, Darcy himself (rendered in a new light) magically appears at Pemberley's threshold immediately upon Elizabeth's change of mind. The passage is a literary trompe l'oeil that uses free indirect style as a vehicle for satirizing empirical assumptions about memory. For a moment, we may conflate our narrative memories with Elizabeth's, failing to see the true source of the heroine's impressions. Austen presents us with a gallery of curated memories that evolve through social networks; they are fictionalized as easily as they are penetrated by the remembrances and impressions of other persons. Most significantly, these memories have a powerful ability to soothe distress as they conjure up new feelings, circumstances, and events. One way of discovering the trick of this passage is by tracking the subtle mechanics of Austen's free indirect style. D. A. Miller has defined Austen's style as a "paradoxical form of impersonal intimacy"; it is a window into the "inner life" of a character that allows us to experience that life "in a way she never could."2 In this manner, the very idea of free indirect style always suggests...