Prevention as Narrative in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

Abstract

Prevention as Narrative in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park Erika Wright Fanny, feeling all of this to be wrong, could not help making an effort to prevent it. "You will hurt yourself, Miss Bertram," she cried, "you will certainly hurt yourself against those spikes—you will tear your gown—you will be in danger of slipping into the Ha-Ha. You had better not go." —Jane Austen, Mansfield Park In 1802, Thomas Beddoes argued that "[w]ritings intended to warn against the destruction of health, can hardly be confounded with such as pretend to teach the people how to restore it." "To direct a stranger how to traverse slippery ground without injury, is one thing," he says,"[t]o instruct him how to set his leg, should he break it, is quite another" ("Essay II," 35). Or, to quote another of his near-contemporaries, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." To the novelist or the novel reader addicted to the drama of broken legs, however, prevention is not so immediately appealing. As medical historian Ginnie Smith explains it, "prevention...is and was barely newsworthy, being a passive or negative operation" (249). No statistics exist for the number of citizens who remained healthy during a given period, so we can never know if disease has been prevented or if health has simply been maintained. There is, in effect, no story to tell. And yet, as Jane Austen makes clear, teaching prevention is hardly a passive or story-less endeavor, and Mansfield Park, as I shall suggest, is the period's best instruction book in narratives of prevention. Dr. Beddoes made prevention part of his life's work and his project was to convince his readers not to "confound" prevention with cure. In fact, he "explicitly declare [s] PREVENTION of mischief to be [his] exclusive objective" ("Essay II," 13), asking his readers in the second installment of [End Page 377] Hygeia to "bear with [him] yet a few more months, before they give [him] up" ("Essay II," 14) for the "makers of those books...which profess to distribute far and wide a capacity for discriminating diseases and applying remedies" ("Essay II," 19; see also Mitchell v). Beddoes was not alone in this struggle to assert prevention's worth. In his highly popular Domestic Medicine,1 William Buchan acknowledges his reader's presumed disappointment in the dearth of "pompous prescriptions, and promised great cures" (viii) they will find in his manual, asserting that he "would much rather teach men how to avoid the necessity of using [pills and potions], than how they should be used" (ix; see also Lawrence 20-32). Physicians such as Buchan and Beddoes were acutely aware that the anxiety over disease (both moral and medical) and the satisfaction that comes with recovery made for a powerful narrative, one not easy for doctors promoting prevention to overcome.2 People notice health only when they do not have it, and as a result, readers of health manuals want to learn how to get well more than they want to learn how not to get sick. The problem of narrating prevention holds true for the nineteenth-century novel. Indeed, the novel bears much of the responsibility for the seductiveness of the illness-cure trajectory.3 Novels trained their readers to expect conflicts that get resolved, longing that gets rewarded, beginnings that necessarily and steadily move toward an end. As Peter Brooks argues about Great Expectations, "at the end we have the impression of a life that has outlived plot, renounced plot, been cured of it" (138, emphasis added). Cure, in this case, refers to the end of narrative, or what D. A. Miller describes as the "'nonnarratable' state of quiescence assumed by a novel before the beginning and supposedly recovered by it at the end" (Narrative ix, emphasis added). In "The Late Jane Austen," Miller goes further, aligning Austen's novels with his own (and any reader's) body in need of cure and suggesting that the novels "provid[e] the story of recovery" (55). The reader's body, Miller explains, "display[s] the same sanative logic as one of Austen's novels, with the initially alarming symptoms...