Fanny is at her absolute least sympathetic in this section. Everyone has stopped badgering her about Henry Crawford (huge relief), but she’s also monumentally judgy about her family. She doesn’t like her father because he drinks and swears and talks about his job (seriously, this is a reason that is listed for her not liking him). She doesn’t like her mother because her mother’s not a good housekeeper, although I admit this bit is very well described:

Her days were spent in a kind of slow bustle; all was busy without getting on, always behindhand and lamenting it, without altering her ways; wished to be an economist, without contrivance or regularity; dissatisfied with her servants, without skill to make them better, and whether helping, or reprimanding, or indulging them, without any power of engaging their respect.

“A kind of slow bustle” honestly killed me. Whomst among us has not known the grim failure of a slow bustle? WE INTENDED A FAST BUSTLE BUT THE REALITY IS WHAT IT IS.

She doesn’t like her brother Sam because he’s “loud and overbearing”; she doesn’t like her other brothers because they’re “untameable by any means of address which [Fanny] had spirits or time to attempt”; she doesn’t like Betsey because Betsey’s a brat; and she doesn’t like Susan because Susan fights with all the other family members. Eventually she decides Susan might be sort of okayish, but overall she hates the house because it’s loud. In other words, because her family members are poor. Like, honestly, it’s not surprising that the other Prices don’t want to hang out with Fanny! She clearly thinks she’s better than all of them, and they can tell, and that’s not fun for anyone!

Jane Austen makes another not-un-racy joke here:

In a review of the two houses, as they appeared to her before the end of a week, Fanny was tempted to apply to them Dr. Johnson’s celebrated judgment as to matrimony and celibacy, and say, that though Mansfield Park might have some pains, Portsmouth could have no pleasures.

lolololololol

But then Henry Crawford comes visit, and he could not be more charming and winning. He squires Fanny and Susan all over Portsmouth when they want to go to shops, making himself very agreeable to Mr. Price in the meantime, and he also asks Fanny’s advice about how to be an ethical l…andlord? business-owner? (I’m not 100% on the business that calls him to Portsmouth? because I wasn’t ALL that interested in it, and I was much more interested in Henry Crawford endearing himself to every Price, including Fanny.)

She thought him altogether improved since she had seen him; he was much more gentle, obliging, and attentive to other people’s feelings than he had ever been at Mansfield; she had never seen him so agreeable–so near being agreeable; his behaviour to her father could not offend, and there was something particularly kind and proper in the notice he took of Susan. He was decidedly improved.

I loved that little moment of “she had never seen him so agreeable–so near being agreeable.” How charming is that? She had a little Freudian slip! There simply could not be a better indicator that Fanny is amenable to eventually falling in love with Henry Crawford, right? Like. He’s improved! Pretty soon he’s going to have improved enough that she can love him! Isn’t that a reasonable-ass expectation for me as a reader?

Moreover, Henry learns that Fanny’s been at Portsmouth the greater part of the month, and he not only immediately offers to come with Mary and pick her up and drive her back to Mansfield any time she wants, but he also tells her very gently that he knows that the other residents of Mansfield Park are neglectful of her comforts: “I know Mansfield, I know its way, I know its faults towards you. I know the danger of your being so far forgotten, as to have your comforts give way to the imaginary convenience of any single being in the family.”

I am not sure Edmund has ever stated the case as plainly as this! Henry Crawford, 1. Edmund Bertram, 0.

Then Tom gets sick, and then Tom gets very sick, and Fanny is still at Portsmouth writing and receiving letters about Tom’s illness. Mary Crawford hasn’t written her for a while, which Jane Austen notes rather tartly, but she does eventually write to basically say that she hopes Tom dies. In the same letter, she mentions that Henry is hanging out with Maria again in town, which Fanny gets on the judgiest judgey face about. I was like “Calm down, Fanny, it’s way too early in the book for Henry and Maria to run away together! If they did it now, it would feel way too abrupt and unearned.”

Yeah. Well. Guess what. Henry and Maria Rushworth nee Bertram have run away together. At around the same time, Julia eloped with Mr. Yates — remember him? He wanted to play a part in the play where he got to do a lot of ranting? That guy. He and Julia are married now. The Bertrams are very very upset, so upset in fact that they summon Fanny back to Mansfield Park to run all their errands for them, and generously offering for her to bring Susan too, to run even more errands.

(Oh, Fanny likes Susan now. It’s because Susan has obediently agreed to absorb all of Fanny’s lessons and do exactly what Fanny wants all the time, which in the vocabulary of this book means the Morally Correct Things. I don’t know, y’all, it seems like part of the lesson of the book is that whereas the rich can choose not to be morally righteous, the poor can’t choose to be morally righteous because it’s too, like, noisy in Portsmouth or whatever. Big question mark to Jane Austen on that one.)

So Maria and Henry eventually break up, and Maria goes to live with Mrs. Norris in someplace that isn’t Mansfield Park. (When the question is raised of whether Maria can live at Mansfield Park again, her father is like, oh, absolutely not, too immoral, I can send her money but I can’t, like, associate with her anymore. Great parenting, my dude!) Julia and Mr. Yates are meekly repentant of their elopement, so they get to still associate with the family. Fanny and Edmund get married. The end. Ugh.

Fuck You, Edmund Bertram

My three angriest Edmund Bertram moments both had to do with Mary Crawford, surprise, surprise. The first one is when he’s writing to Fanny about his planned proposal to Mary, and when he anticipates her turning him down, he says this: “The loss of Mary I must consider as comprehending the loss of Crawford and of Fanny.” He says this to Fanny, a woman who has repeatedly, firmly told him that she has no interest in Henry Crawford! But oh, no, here comes Edmund being like “well, you’ll change your mind for sure.” She has just told you and she has repeatedly told you that she’s not planning to marry Henry Crawford. For fuck’s fucking sake.

Second, when Fanny and Edmund are debriefing all the things that went down with the Crawfords, he’s like, listen, I know you were in love with Henry Crawford, but what about my feelings in all this? It’s doubly infuriating because it’s so goddamn selfish but then it’s also predicated on her being in love with Henry Crawford, which she has told him a hundred thousand times she isn’t. Shut! Up! Edmund!

But all of this really pales next to the orgy of self-righteousness he indulges in when he’s telling Fanny about his post-scandal conversation with Mary Crawford. Mary says something like she can’t believe their siblings were so foolish, and Edmund’s like:

Guess what I must have felt. To hear the woman whom–no harsher name than folly given! So voluntarily, so freely, so coolly to canvass it! No reluctance, no horror, no feminine, shall I say, no modest loathings? This is what the world does. For where, Fanny, shall we find a woman whom nature had so richly endowed? Spoilt, spoilt!

He scolds and fusses at Mary (I know because he proudly tells Fanny about it), and when she doesn’t gratefully receive his scoldy lecture about the failures of her character, he’s mad about that too! She jokes:

A pretty good lecture, upon my word. Was it part of your last sermon? At this rate you will soon reform everybody at Mansfield and Thornton Lacey; and when I hear of you next, it may be as a celebrated preacher in some great society of Methodists, or as a missionary into foreign parts.

Once again, and as always, a good joke from Mary Crawford! Edmund indignantly tells her that he hopes he learns to be more self-aware and do her duty, and then he storms off. Advantage Mary Crawford.

Did the Crawfords Do a Wrong?

Yeah, Mary is pretty wicked here. Tom Bertram gets sick, and Mary immediately starts thinking about how fun and great it will be if he dies and she marries Edmund, who will then be the eldest son and thus Sir Thomas’s heir. Mary! That’s a terrible thing to write to Tom and Edmund’s cousin about! Wtf!

Aside from this, their main wickedness in this section is related to Henry’s running off with Maria, for which, see the next section.

Were the Crawfords Wronged?

As in my memory, it feels a lot more like Jane Austen did a wrong than the Crawfords. I cannot explain this distinction, given that the Crawfords have no separate existence from Jane Austen, but I feel it keenly. What bugs me is that I would have been fine with Henry Crawford really truly reforming his fuckboy ways but then not marrying Fanny, because I do not demand that Fanny marries someone she doesn’t love! But here’s Jane Austen’s valedictory statement about Henry:

Henry Crawford, ruined by early independence and bad domestic example, indulged in the freaks of a cold-blooded vanity a little too long. Once it had, by an opening undesigned and unmerited, led him into the way of happiness. Could he have been satisfied with the conquest of one amiable woman’s affections, could he have found sufficient exultation in overcoming the reluctance, in working himself into the esteem and tenderness of Fanny Price, there would have been every probability of success and felicity for him. His affection had already done something. Her influence over him had already given him some influence over her. Would he have deserved more, there can be no doubt that more would have been obtained, especially when that marriage had taken place, which would have given him the assistance of her conscience in subduing her first inclination, and brought them very often together. Would he have persevered, and uprightly, Fanny must have been his reward, and a reward very voluntarily bestowed, within a reasonable period from Edmund’s marrying Mary.

So like! It just feels really contrived! Jane Austen has this whole alternative plotline planned out for Henry Crawford where things end well for him and his reform is genuine! Her closing statement is that his reform was genuine, but he got bored of it, which is totally narratively unsatisfying! Like either make it insincere all along (like Frank Churchill flirting with Emma) or let him reform all the way! You know? Why do this to us?

At least Mary Crawford’s faults are consistent! She doesn’t change much over the course of the book: The person she is at the start of Mansfield Park (charming, funny, self-centered) is exactly the person she is at the end. Though Edmund claims that she’s changing and improving, we all know that she’s staying exactly the same. But I don’t think her flaws are all that horrific! The worst ones are her snobbery and self-centeredness, and those are the same flaws Emma Woodhouse has. The only difference is that Jane Austen decides to reward Emma with a moment of realization, and she doesn’t give the same thing to Mary because she’s too committed to Mary being bad.

The most vivid and interesting characters get done the dirtiest, and I simply can’t believe that Jane Austen intended us to like Edmund Bertram. Fanny Price, yes; Fanny at least is in a pitiable position, and it’s easy to feel sympathy for her when her rich relatives go tromping all over her wishes. But Edmund? Is there any redeeming feature to Edmund? He’s a shitty judge of character, a patronizing scold to Fanny, and in the end he’s rewarded by having all his dreams come true. This book rules but my God is the ending ever unsatisfying.

The post Once Again, I Call Shenanigans: Mansfield in May, Part Five appeared first on Reading the End.

Not to keep beating a dead horse, but Mansfield Book continues to rule. I am having the best time reading it, and I swear to you that I am going to love it more than Emma by the time I finish. And I fucking love Emma. It’s just that in this one, Jane Austen is simultaneously so funny and so insightful that I kind of can’t take it. Maybe it’s just because I haven’t read a Jane Austen book in a little while and I forgot how good she is? Could that be it? Because I keep being bowled over by how keenly observed this book is, even on the scale of Jane Austen to Jane Austen. I’ll get into it, but the whole business of Fanny needing a chain for her necklace is just *chef’s kiss*.

Okay, so! We start with Edmund being a class-A prick. Fanny’s talking to him about how much she enjoys hearing her uncle talk about the West Indies, and she says “I am unlike other people, I dare say,” meaning unlike the Crawfords lololol, and Edmund says this:

Do you want to be told that you are unlike other people in being more wise and discreet? But when did you, or anybody, ever get a compliment from me, Fanny? Go to my father if you want to be complimented. He will satisfy you.

Edmund, I cordially invite you to get fucked. Like, I am going to have some very critical things to say about Henry Crawford in a minute, but at least Henry Crawford knows he’s a fuckboy. At least Henry Crawford gets slapped down by Fanny and the text of Mansfield Park for being a fuckboy. This is the weirdest most unnecessary piece of cruelty I can imagine, and Fanny is mortified about it. She hates compliments and is not fishing for one! Which if Edmund were paying the slightest bit of attention to her, ever, he would know! Then when he sees that he’s embarrassed her, he just goes ahead and embarrasses her more, this time 100% definitely on purpose.

If you cannot bear an uncle’s admiration, what is to become of you? You must really begin to harden yourself to the idea of being worth looking at. You must try not to mind growing up into a pretty woman.

I hate Edmund. I haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate him. We also get the famous moment where Fanny mentions that she, alone of the young Bertrams, has follow-up questions about the slave trade, i.e., the trade on which the Bertram family fortune has been founded. This exchange, in which Fanny mentions that she asked about the slave trade and was met with silence, is the only reason I read Mansfield Park in the first place: It was part of a course on colonial British literature that I took when I was twenty. It is not really very headline-worthy! Enslaving human beings is bad, says Jane Austen, maybe, sort of.

Anyway, Maria gets married and Julia goes off to stay with her, which means Fanny is the only girl at the house, which means everyone is suddenly bored enough to pay attention to Fanny. She hates it. I would too! It sounds awful! And I would feel like a real dick having everyone be like “oh Fanny’s pretty, actually!” and “oh maybe let’s throw a dance for Fanny!” after years of that never ever happening. It would make me feel like a doll that everyone had suddenly gotten bored enough to want to play with.

Case in point, Henry Crawford, fuckboy, who tries to talk to Fanny about the play and gets slapped down hard (v. satisfying honestly). The next morning he announces to his sister, “My plan is to make Fanny Price in love with me.” Which is a very fuckboy thing to say, but I have to admit his follow-up is pretty funny. But bad!

“No, I will not do her any harm, dear little soul! only want her to look kindly on me, to give me smiles as well as blushes, to keep a chair for me by herself wherever we are, and be all animation when I take it and talk to her; to think as I think, be interested in all my possessions and pleasures, try to keep me longer at Mansfield, and feel when I go away that she shall never be happy again. I want nothing more.”

These are good jokes. I am sorry. I would be madder at the Crawfords if they didn’t seem so fun to be around.

Except, here’s where I truly am mad at the Crawfords. Okay, so Fanny’s brother William has shore leave or whatever and comes to Mansfield Park on a visit. Fanny is so happy, and I am happy for her. SHE DESERVES THIS. While he’s there, Sir Thomas (who like everyone is bored) decides to have a little dance and invite some people from the area and it’ll be a nice treat for Fanny. So far so good. Her problem is that she has this very pretty amber cross that William brought her from Italy, but he wasn’t able to afford a gold chain to put it on, and a piece of ribbon isn’t fancy enough for Fanny to put it on for this dance. So what will she do? Crisis!

Mary Crawford then is like, oh, do you need a gold chain for that pretty cross that William gave you? Have one of mine! I have too many!, and as she’s showing Fanny all the different chains she can choose from, Fanny gets the impression that Mary wants her to choose this one specific chain. So okay, Fanny chooses that one. Then Mary says this:

“You must think of somebody else, too, when you wear that necklace. You must think of Henry, for it was his choice in the first place. He gave it to me, and with the necklace I make over to you all the duty of remembering the original giver. It is to be a family remembrancer. The sister is not to be in your mind without bringing the brother too.”

Fanny suspects, and I do too, that the Crawfords talked this over and CONNIVED on it together. She feels awful, but she has already accepted the gift and can’t take it back now. When she gets home, Edmund is there with a gold chain to give her a gift. Even more crisis! This occasions a big conversation between Edmund and Fanny about how nice he thinks Mary Crawford is, and Fanny realizes that he’s maybe in love with Mary Crawford? Question mark? Which makes Fanny sad because she, of course, is in love with Edmund.

In the event, though, the chain Mary Crawford gave her is too big and won’t go in the little ring on the amber cross, so she has to wear Edmund’s. She feels so happy about it that it reminds me of that “Cyclops Has a Good Day” thing where it counts as a good day if he, like, finds a quarter on the ground. I just want Fanny to be happy.

The whole sequence of events around the gold chain reminded me of what I love so much about Jane Austen. It’s a matter of very little consequence, in the broad scheme of things. Fanny is going to get a chain, and she’s going to put the amber cross on the chain. But the path to get there tells us so much about everybody involved, about both Crawfords, about Fanny, and about Edmund. It’s also the type of thing that feels so much like life, where like, you have this one small thing that needs to get accomplished (acquire gold chain for amber cross), but every step on the way to the goal is fraught with these weird emotional sand traps where instead of just getting a damn necklace, you have to navigate a series of increasingly fraught and complicated social dynamics when all that really needed to happen was get a damn gold chain for this damn amber cross. And that’s a very Jane Austeny thing and I’m into it.

Did the Crawfords Do a Wrong?

Yes, both of them. Mary continues to be such a rude jerk to Edmund about his job. Like, Edmund sucks, and I’d love for Mary to insult him about the things he deserves to be insulted about. But she keeps being like, “Ugh, a vicar. Gross. Poor. Hate it.” Mary, that’s rude! Who raised you?

Henry, meanwhile, is being the fuckboy of all fuckboys by conceiving a plan to make Fanny fall in love with him just because he’s bored and she’s unattainable. That said, this would be an amazing romance novel premise, wouldn’t it? Like, he starts out fucking around but then he falls in love for real and becomes a better person and at the end they fall in love? WHY ISN’T THAT THE BOOK I’M READING, JANE AUSTEN?

The matter of the gold chain is honestly cruel, though it’s unclear to me the extent to which the Crawfords realize it’s cruel, given their imperfect understanding of Fanny. But I am mad at them both.

Were the Crawfords Wronged?

Not even slightly. Not a bit. The Crawfords are jerks in this section. I have nothing to say in their defense except that they do still seem really fun. I don’t want to marry a Crawford, but I’d love to take a Crawford out for brunch. By contrast, I would rather demolish the institution of brunch for all time than attend one single brunch with Edmund Bertram, who sucks.

The post Flying the Fuckboy Flag: Mansfield in May, Part Three appeared first on Reading the End.

I have to say, I am enjoying Mansfield Park so much. Part of the reason people seem to hate it is that it doesn’t have a satisfying romance like some of the others — which is true, certainly, but Jane Austen’s dry observational humor on the tiny interactions between people has never been better. There’s a part where everyone’s out for a walk on Mr. Rushworth’s estate, and they all abandon Fanny on a bench while they wander around, and then when they get home everyone’s cross because “they had all been walking after each other, and the junction which had taken place at last seemed, to Fanny’s observation, to have been as much too late for re-establishing harmony, as it confessedly had been for determining on any alteration.”

(I know that’s a small thing, but it’s so on point! That is how it goes when nobody makes a plan and everybody’s just wandering around all willy-nilly!)

Also, re the casting process for the play:

Mr. Yates was particularly pleased: he had been sighing and longing to [play the part of] the Baron at Ecclesford, had begrudged every rant of Lord Ravenshaw’s, and been forced to re-rant it all in his own room…. To do him justice, however, he did not resolve to appropriate [that role]; for remembering that there was some very good ranting-ground in [the part of] Frederick, he professed an equal willingness for that.

JANE AUSTEN YOU ARE KILLING ME.

Though I didn’t know it when I made my Mansfield in May schedule, this batch of chapters (chapters ten through twenty) perfectly encompasses the entire arc where they want to put on a play. A man called Mr. Yates arrives from the country, disappointed at having to abandon the plan to do a play at some other friend’s house, and then the young Bertrams (except for Fanny) and the Crawfords get all excited and want to do a play. The original idea is for them to perform it only among themselves, but you can just tell that when the time comes, they’re going to change their minds and want to invite everyone and be applauded for.

Edmund hates this. Fanny haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaates this. They have several serious conversations about what a bad idea it is. Then Edmund, the jerk, shows up in Fanny’s room to be like, listen, I think I need to take part in the play, you know, for Reasons. (The reasons actually make sense to me, within the moral terms the book is laying out: They want to get a near-stranger to act in the play with them, and Edmund finds that unseemly and thinks that if he takes the role in question, it’ll be less overall inappropriate because it’ll be just within their two families.) I wouldn’t mind Edmund taking part in the play (since, again, I don’t mind that they’re doing a play, that seems perfectly cromulent), except that he kind of browbeats Fanny into agreeing that it’s the best course of action? He comes in to get her opinion; she says she doesn’t think he should do it; and he keeps asking the question in like fifteen different ways until he gets a version of her answer that sounds sort of like yes. Then he’s like “Great! We agree! I knew I could count on you!”

The worst, meanest thing that happens in this whole section is when everyone starts aggressively peer-pressuring Fanny to take a small role in the play. She keeps saying no, she’s very uncomfortable, and the other people keep insisting, and finally Mrs. Norris says, “I shall think her a very obstinate, ungrateful girl, if she does not do what her aunt and cousins wish her — very ungrateful, indeed, considering who and what she is,” which is staggeringly mean and has Fanny in tears.

Mary Crawford immediately comes to Fanny’s rescue, which is nice because Mary hasn’t been the most aware of Fanny’s situation up until then. She comes to sit by Fanny and cheers her up by asking what Fanny’s working on, where she got the pattern, what Fanny’s brother is up to at sea, how handsome that brother must be, etc. It’s legitimately very sweet, although it does prove that Mary Crawford knows perfectly well how to be polite about someone’s brother’s profession even if she herself does not personally want to socialize with someone in that profession, which nobody is asking her to do anyway. But I liked it, because so few characters ever seem aware of how vulnerable Fanny is in relation to her cousins and aunts, and I was glad that Mary took her side so visibly.

In fairness to Edmund — and I am trying to be scrupulously fair to Edmund because of how much I dislike him — he does defend Fanny when his father gets home and is mad about the play. He says this: “We have all been more or less to blame, every one of us, excepting Fanny. Fanny is the only one who has judged rightly throughout; who has been consistent. Her feelings have been steadily against it from first to last. She never ceased to think of what was due to you. You will find Fanny everything you could wish.” THANKS, EDMUND.

Did the Crawfords Do a Wrong?

Yes! Henry Crawford is a big jerk in these chapters, although I have to say that the real villain is the societal system that forbids open honesty about one’s intentions until one is ready to propose. The fact that Henry Crawford is flirting outrageously with both Maria and Julia, to the point that a bunch of characters think he’s going to propose to Julia and Maria thinks he’s going to propose to Maria, is really shitty given that he has no interest in marrying them. It would be one thing if they were all playing the same fun flirty game, but Henry knows they’re not. Once the idea for the play is given up, Henry fucks off to Bath without a backward glance, leaving the Bertram sisters miserable, disappointed, and angry with each other.

Which: We are kind of far into the book for him to have no interest in Fanny yet. I had remembered him fixating on her much earlier on in the book, but I’m not sure they’ve had a single conversation as of chapter 20. She does notice him being a fuckboy to her cousins, but she’s not in a position to do anything about it. She runs it up the flagpole with Edmund, and Edmund is oblivious. Fanny says, wonderfully, “What a favourite he is with my cousins!” but Edmund doesn’t catch on at all. Edmund is a ding-dong.

Were the Crawfords Wronged?

Henry Crawford is terrible in this section, as I’ve said. But I think it’s mean that everyone keeps going on about how ugly and short Henry Crawford is. It comes up like five times in this section of the book! People keep being like, “I mean, he’s FINE if you like them SHORT” or they’ll be like “well he can’t play THAT part, he’s only five-eight, gross.” Calm down, weirdos!

Fanny also blames Mary Crawford for Edmund taking part in the play. It’s actually really uncool! She’s like, “Could it be possible? Edmund so inconsistent! Was he not deceiving himself? Was he not wrong? Alas! it was all Miss Crawford’s doing. She had seen her influence in every speech, and was miserable.”

A of all, Fanny, slow your roll with that. Edmund is actually capable of making his own wrong moral decisions; Mary Crawford is not the boss of him. Secondly, this is the severalth time that Fanny has blamed Mary Crawford for things Edmund is doing. Maybe try blaming the man who is doing the things, instead of the woman you think might possibly be motivating the man to do the things. And number three, Mary just went out of her way to be nice to Fanny, which supposedly is the whole reason Fanny likes Edmund in the first place, and Mary is far from the driving force behind the play-putting-on idea. So I am not sure whence this notion that Edmund’s acquiescence to the play is supposed to be Mary’s fault. FEELS LIKE EDMUND’S FAULT.

In closing, I love Mansfield Park. Twenty-year-old Jenny was not wrong; Mansfield Park is hilarious and great. If it weren’t for the years of sentimental attachment to and fun adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park might unseat Pride and Prejudice in my heart. I’m not 100% that won’t happen anyway. I am loving it. I can’t believe that it’s acquired this reputation for being grim and joyless when it is so consistently funny and smart. Like, yes, Edmund’s a pill, but all of Austen’s heroes¹ are pills! No surprises there!

The post It’s Gonna Be PLAY: Mansfield in May, Part Two appeared first on Reading the End.

Okay, okay, I am getting ahead of myself. As you can see, it’s May! And for years I have been threatening to reread Mansfield Park in one of the months that begins with M, and at last in May of 2021, I have finally done it. For today, I read the first nine chapters of Mansfield Park, a book I have reliably been calling Mansfield Book, and I am here to report on my findings about it.

What Happened?

In these first chapters, we get a lot of set-up and, frankly, more jokes than I expected! Our heroine is Fanny Price, who’s a poor relative of Lord and Lady Bertram and has been raised in their home as a favor to her mother, Lady Bertram’s wayward sister. Three of the four Bertram children (the older son, Tom, plus the girls, Maria and Julia) have no use for Fanny, but her cousin Edmund sometimes does nice things for her. He is very patronizing. I hate him.

Due partly to Tom’s gambling debts, Lord Bertram has been called away to his properties in Antigua to try and recoup the family’s financial losses. While he’s away, strangers come to town: the charming Crawford siblings, Henry and Mary, who instantly become staples in the lives of our Bertrams. We haven’t seen much of Henry Crawford yet, but Mary Crawford is an absolute goddamn delight. That’s not what we’re meant to think of her, however. We’re meant to think that she is funny but immoral. I can already tell you that’s never going to be my opinion of her.

Is the World Wrong About Mansfield Park?

So far, yes. I am in love with this book so far. Mary Crawford is such a treasure.

Did the Crawfords Do a Wrong?

Yes, I have to admit that they did. Well, Mary did. When she finds out that Fanny’s brother is in the Navy, she’s very snotty about low-rank Navy guys. It’s rude! It’s especially rude if she understands — which she must, if she’s been paying any attention at all — that Fanny is not in a position to go against the Bertrams and their guests. I will say very mildly in her defense that Fanny didn’t not open hostilities here: Mary is making jokes about how brothers are bad correspondents, using her own brother as an example, and Fanny’s like, “Oh my brother writes me amazing letters.” But it’s still rude, and it’s snobby.

Mary is also quite snotty about Edmund’s plan to become a clergyman. For someone as socially adept as she’s supposed to be, I am not sure whence this very snotty habit she has of insulting other people’s jobs and aspirations. Maybe she’s mad at Edmund for being a total prig, for which, see the next section.

Were the Crawfords Wronged?

Yep! Henry Crawford doesn’t have much to do in these chapters, but there’s a lot of Mary Crawford, and I’m sure you have picked up on the fact that I was here for it. Before I get into the ways Mary was grievously wronged in this section of Mansfield Book, let me start by reporting that she rules. She’s consistently flashy and unembarrassed and so, so fucking funny, and Edmund doesn’t deserve her.

Okay, I will give you an example. Mary Crawford plays the harp (hot) and has been having a hard time getting her harp delivered to her new residence near Mansfield Park. So they’re talking about all the harp logistical challenges, and Mary says to Edmund, “Now, Mr. Bertram [Edmund], if you write to your brother [Tom], I entreat you to tell him that my harp is come: he heard so much of my misery about it. And you may say, if you please, that I shall prepare my most plaintive airs against his return, in compassion to his feelings, as I know his horse will lose.”

Help me? I love her???

And then, just when I thought I couldn’t love her more, she makes what you will absolutely never convince me isn’t an anal sex joke. Edmund asks her if she knows Fanny’s brother, and she says no, she doesn’t socialize with captains, too lowly!, but she has met a bunch of admirals.

Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.

L O L. Now, I have done some research into this matter. Jane Austen scholar Devoney Looser believes that Mary was making reference to strictly heterosexual vices. Mary and Henry were taken in by an aunt and uncle when their own parents died, and then when their aunt died, their uncle installed his mistress in the house so Mary had to leave. Yikes! Dr. Looser’s argument is that Mary is referring to that kind of vice; i.e., the kind to which Mary may already be assumed to have been exposed by her shitty, vicious uncle.

Given what the novel reveals – the adultery of the uncle and the attempted reform and adulterous repetition in the nephew – it seems clear that Mary (and Austen, in giving her voice) was making the most pointed reference in her pun to the heterosexual vices of powerful old Naval men, not to the illegal, punishable, same-sex vices of men’s rears.

Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, a woman after my own heart, argues in her book Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions, that Jane Austen tooooooooootally meant it that way, connecting the “Rears and Vices” joke to other jokes about homosexuality in Jane Austen’s juvenilia. (She also argues that Jane Austen sides with Mary Crawford over Edmund, which I’d love to believe and will be keeping an eye out for going forward.)

D.A. Miller says that one reaction to coming upon a double entendre such as this in Austen, is to be “embarrassed and often arrested by the question, ‘Could a character in Jane Austen ever mean this?'” Miller poses a good question. My answer is that, yes, despite her lady-like manners and spinster status, Austen can create characters who mean “that.”

Brian Southam argues in a 2002 article for Essays in Criticism that it’s not a sodomy joke because Jane Austen is too polite to make a sodomy joke, and her publisher and audiences would have been upset if there had been a sodomy joke.

The point is worth contesting, because the pun has become caught up in something much larger and more damaging than a matter of purely local interpretation; it has become involved in a wider campaign to promote the idea of a bawdy or dirty-joke Jane Austen. … [Austen’s] effects … are achieved by the slightest adjustments in style and tone, and these do not include a subtext of sexual punning or double entendre. The power of the novels is achieved strictly within the terms of polite fiction, and one way of describing Jane Austen’s greatness is to say that she wrote the novels she wanted to without transgressing its literary and social decorum.

Seth Stein LeJacq points out (rather compellingly, in my opinion!) that naval sodomy trials hit their peak in the Regency era, and that Jane Austen’s two brothers sat on — and in one case presided over — naval sodomy cases. In other words, the notion of naval sodomy would have been familiar to readers of the era generally, and to the Austen family particularly.

Basically, the pro-sodomy-joke arguments and the anti-sodomy-joke arguments can both be boiled down to “Oh, come on,” and as such, I feel perfectly free to conclude that she was making an anal sex joke. Evidence: That’s fucking funny.

Anyway! After this conversation in which Mary Crawford absolutely definitely makes an anal sex joke, Edmund and Fanny sit down to recap how they felt about the conversation, and they spend a little while tsk-tsking to each other about Mary being insufficiently respectful of her uncle. The source of their unhappiness is that Mary makes a joke that her aunt and uncle did a home reno one time and it was inconvenient (plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose!), plus I guess this rears and vices joke. Like — why can’t she be snotty about her uncle? He was supposed to be sheltering her, and he totally threw her out on the street because he wanted to bone his mistress in comfort! Her uncle sucks!

The other thing is that Fanny gets mad at Mary Crawford for monopolizing her, Fanny’s, horse. It’s unclear to me how much Jane Austen endorses Fanny’s annoyance in this matter. Edmund tells Mary she can borrow Fanny’s horse in the morning before Fanny needs it, but then he starts letting Mary keep the horse out later and later, even though he knows damn well that Fanny wants to do for a ride. You do not have a Mary Crawford problem, Fanny, you have an Edmund problem. We all have an Edmund problem, because Edmund sucks. Which is disappointing because I love the name Edmund and I love most characters called Edmund (Pevensie, Dantès, Winslow). MARY WAS WRONGED. IT’S EDMUND’S FAULT.

That’s it for today! Next week at this same time, we’ll be chatting about chapters 10 to 21. I hope to have more information to share with you about the other Crawford sibling at that time!

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• Mansfield Park is unfairly maligned (by the world); and
• The Crawfords are unfairly maligned (by Jane Austen)

Well, 2021 is the year we’re going to find out the truth! Is Fanny as much of a pain as I remember? Is Edmund the actual worst Austen hero, or does that title still belong to Mr. Farrars? And, perhaps most importantly, does Mary Crawford deserve what she gets, or is she amazing and she deserved better? We will find out together!

Here’s my proposed readalong schedule, although of course you may read at your very own pace. I am going to do a post every Monday in May (there are five) that follows my reading, and I will surely be nattering about the book in minor, petty ways on Twitter, using the hashtag #MansfieldInMay. Join me, comrades!

The Official Mansfield in May Schedule

May 3: Chapters 1 – 9
May 10: Chapters 10 – 21
May 17: Chapters 22 – 29
May 24: Chapters 30 – 38
May 31: Chapters 39 – 48

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After months of silence, Paul finally gets a letter from the lady, in which she informs him that she has borne his son. He’s thrilled about it, and can’t believe that destiny would keep him from his son forever. I just — DESTINY is not keeping you from your son, you dumb cluck! YOUR OWN CHOICES are keeping you from your son! The kid’s mother’s OWN CHOICES are keeping you from your son! JUST MAKE BETTER CHOICES.

Regardless, she tells him that at long last they can see each other again, under a set of really byzantine circumstances with codes and special dates and secret things Paul is supposed to say and do to Dmitry and the lady’s other servant. Paul’s father, who is weirdly unperturbed by the notion that he has a grandchild in Russia being raised by at least one notably violent and terrible Russian ruler, offers to help Paul out by taxiing him out to the Mediterranean and, one must assume, funding all of his activities.

Here’s what irritates me. First of all, the lady dies. Of course. And Elinor Glyn says “And so, as ever, the woman paid the price,” which like — that would be an impactful message if this were a true story that had happened in real life. But it came out of Elinor Glyn’s brain! She chose to have the woman pay the price! She could have killed drippy Paul!

As if that’s not annoying enough, the lady doesn’t even die onscreen. When Paul shows up for the first rendezvous, her servants send him away in haste due to complications, and tell him to come back another day. He comes back, but the next thing he hears is that she’s been stabbed by her husband, who was in turn killed by her second servant, Vasili. In Russia there are apparently no consequences for bodyguards killing monarchs.

Paul is inconsolable. I am frankly inconsolable myself. At last a stabbing — that part’s good — but then nothing ever happens with Dmitry’s revolver? Why even have a revolver? Just to introduce a note of mystery? HOW DOES HE NEVER HAVE TO SHOOT THE REVOLVER? He briefly contemplates self-harm after the lady’s death, but decides against it in favor of moping for the rest of his life UNTIL he runs into a Romani widow (yes of course the book uses the slur word for Romani) and is like “wow she sucks, I don’t want to be that kind of widow,” and he finally goes to Russia and meets his kid.

The end.

Oh, Elinor Glyn. What a mess this book was, yet how happy I feel to have read one of your books at last. I pledge my troth to you here and now, upon the bloom of the least romantic-sounding flower of all time, the tuberose, which you nevertheless chose to give pride of place in this goddamn book, I shall never read another. What silliness lies in this one. How blessed am I to have consumed it.

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When I got to the end of Chapter 19, I said “Ohhhhhh shit” because my friends? The idyll (??) portion of Elinor Glyn’s masterpiece, Three Weeks, has finally ended. The drama has begun.

Because after yet another (argh) night of floral scents and uncontained passion, the Lady blows this popsicle stand. Paul is so distraught about her sudden departure that he falls into a desperate illness–brain fever! This sounds like a very real thing that real humans suffer from, and not a nonsense invented by Elinor Glyn as a convenient plot device for her extremely silly novel.

Have any of you who read crept back to life from nearly beyond the grave? Crept back to find it shorn of all that made it fair? After hours of delirium to awaken in great weakness to a sense of hideous anguish and loss—to the prospect of days of aching void and hopeless longing, to the hourly, momentary sting of remembrance of things vaster than death, more dear than life itself?

NO I HAVE NOT AND NEITHER HAS PAUL. His father comes out to England to care for him and gets the whole story out of Paul’s valet Tompkins, who I THOUGHT we were going to learn was extremely discreet, but who in fact is like “oh yeah she was real hot, she had these foreign servants, her husband’s maybe a King, idk.”

The one thing that actually really worked for me is that Paul has this little dog back in England named Pike that he’s very fond of? And he’s shown a picture of Pike to the Lady and she thought Pike was real cute? So when she leaves, she sends back a letter expressing her affection and the gift of a beautiful, fancy dog collar for Pike. That is legitimately nice. Paul’s father is not the only one who felt emotional about it.

So Paul and his father and the blabbermouth valet take a ship around the coast of Italy. The captain of it hears that Paul is grieving a failed love affair and says, quite rightly, “Damned kittle cattle!” This is my verdict of the entire book, in fact. Presented without comment in this description of how Paul occupies his days aboard ship:

For the last evenings, as the moon had grown larger, Paul had been strangely restless. It seemed as if he preferred to tire himself out with unnecessary rope-pulling.

After a long trip around the coast of Italy in which Paul does nothing but mope and mope and pull his rope, they get home for his birthday party, about which he is an absolute wet week. Allegedly, however, his time with the fascinating (debatable) Lady has turned him into a true man of the world, deeply refined and eloquent, the sort of person on whose word everyone hangs. Of course, we don’t get any evidence of this. Elinor Glyn just tells us that he gave an incredible speech to his father’s tenants, but she doesn’t quote it at all. This is a great call, because she is in no way capable of writing an inspiring holiday speech. Just, how are we supposed to believe in this? HOW CAN I TRUST YOU, ELINOR GLYN???

Okay, friends, there is one more week of Glynalonging. So far nobody has been stabbed. I await the stabbings that I SWEAR TO GOD HAD BETTER ARRIVE in the final portion of this book.

(Thanks to Alice for hosting!!)

The post Nobody Gets Stabbed in the Goddamn Glynalong appeared first on Reading the End.

The book opens with this introduction for American readers:

And to all who read, I say—at least be just! and do not skip. No line is written without its having a bearing upon the next, and in its small scope helping to make the presentment of these two human beings vivid and clear.

This is my favorite thing anyone has ever said in the introduction of a book. Wow. That she feels the need to start the entire book by saying “Read the whole thing” does not — I’m going to be so honest with y’all — bode well for the book’s quality going forward. But I’ll let you know how much I am or am not compelled to skip.

And one terrible day Paul unfortunately kissed the large pink lips of Isabella as his mother entered the room.

I will draw a veil over this part of his life.

But honestly, as I started reading the book, I found it — kind of hilarious and amazing? I was expecting it not to be good but it is actually funny and engaging, and I am not being sarcastic. It’s really charming! No wonder everyone liked Elinor Glyn and didn’t want to read the Ruby Hat of Omar Kayayayayay. (This is a Music Man reference.)

Anyway, our man Paul has contracted a fondness for an inappropriate target, a red-handed girl named Isabella Waring (poor Isabella), and to prevent him from making a disastrous mistake (marriage), his mother sends him off on his Grand Tour. There he meets THE LADY. The first scene in which she appears is typically ridiculous and amazing: They’re eating at the same restaurant, and Paul just gets REALLY REALLY ANGRY that she’s….eating. Every time she gets another thing to eat, Paul’s like, Oh, another type of FOOD that she’s just going to EAT, like who does this bitch think she is sitting here in a restaurant EATING RESTAURANT FOOD? and then he rage-drinks another glass of port.

She invites him back to her place, where there is a tiger skin, and Paul is like “wow I thought her eyes were green but they are purple” which is two extremely different colors and I can draw no conclusion except that Paul is colorblind. Then when she tells him to leave her for his own good, her eyes are gray because Paul is an idiot. He’s like “I’ll never leave you! This is real!” and then he — leaves? It’s very strange. She seems clearly to have invited him to her place for SIN but then once they’re there, and she’s proposing a liaison, he immediately leaves and this appears to be what she expects. Sin must have been different in olden days.

Next thing you know, he’s broken it off with Isabella by letter and purchased a tiger skin for the lady (whose real name we still don’t know, by the way, and Paul has NOT YET ASKED). She puts on a crepe garment for lounging and writhes about on the tiger skin, and Paul’s like “yeah awright it’s time to get to the sexin” but instead she’s like “oh let’s read fairy tales together, darling.” IN LATIN. This lady. But this proves sufficient foreplay, I guess, and they bang on the tiger skin.

That concludes the first reading installment, so we can now get to chapters 7-12 of this nonsense book, which mostly consist of banging it out in various European locales. An aspect of it that I genuinely find really pleasing is this reversal of genders: Paul’s the one yearning for the favors of a mysterious older woman, and you know what happens the day after they sin on the tiger skin? She IGNORES HIM. She ignores him ALL DAY. He convinces himself that she must have meant to not ignore him, so he just stands outside her terrace in the rain waiting for her to emerge and invite him in for more tiger-skin sinning. Then the day after that she invites him up into the mountains for a tryst.

Then, um, this happens:

Its milky whiteness lit by her strange eyes—green as cats’ they seemed, and blazing with the fiercest passion of love—while twisted round his throat he felt a great strand of her splendid hair. The wildest thrill as yet his life had known then came to Paul; he clasped her in his arms with a frenzy of mad, passionate joy.

BREATH PLAY IS DANGEROUS. THIS HAS BEEN A PSA. But also, I did not know that people in olden times knew about erotic asphyxiation, and I kind of get why Hermione Gingold didn’t want her daughter reading this book. It’s kind of a dirty book! Sexytimes on tiger skins! Sexy strangling! Bestowing weird kisses upon Paul while he’s sleeping. The book actually says that. “Strange, subtle kisses, unlike the kisses of women.” I like have no idea what that means, but also, this lady needs to wake Paul up and get his consent before she goes sexing up his sleeping body.

There is but one false note to this extremely weird idyll: Her manservant, Dmitry, shows up in Paul’s room and offers him a revolver. Paul doesn’t want it because who carries revolvers around during their summer vacations? But Dmitry is weirdly insistent, so Paul agrees in the end. I’m sure this gun won’t come back to haunt us.

Next time: Chapters 13-18! I hope someone gets shot!

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I had not sufficient light for my employment, and I remained idle, in a pause of consideration of whether I should leave my labours for the night, or hasten its conclusion by an unremitting attention to it.

See, this is how you know that I’m at the end of my rope with Dude Nonsense. I blame Jason Bateman and Jeffrey Tambor, but a lot of different people are at fault. It’s probably reasonable for Dr. Frankenstein to take a break in this manner at the end of the day, but all I could think about was how this damn mediocre asshole thinks he can just do whatever he wants all the livelong day and never face a DAMN CONSEQUENCE, and then I decided to give myself the evening off from Frankenstein and see if I would bring a more receptive mindset to it in the morning.

Y’all, I know that I have bitched and moaned about toxic masculinity and red pillers and stuff over the course of this readalong, but I have to say that it’s been really fun reading Frankenstein. It’s a weird little book, but good-weird, and I like it when Romantics take a break from swanning about looking at vistas and just write some really weird shit, and that’s what Frankenstein is. At the end, the monster just sort of slips off into the wilds of the Arctic, and for all we know lives forever up there.

There are also a lot of vistas.

Okay, so what happens at the end is that Frankenstein starts thinking about this project of making a lady monster, and he realizes it’s a non-starter. Fair play to him, he considers the possibility that the lady-monster won’t want to bang the existing monster (as that monster is a murdering jerk), but the thing that makes him decide to destroy his work is the fear that the two monsters will procreate. Frankenstein, you are a moron. Just don’t put a uterus in the lady monster and you would be all set. This is why we shouldn’t let men be scientists.

Well, the monster is angry about Frankenstein’s decision and he tells him, ominously, I WILL BE WITH YOU ON YOUR WEDDING NIGHT. Frankenstein, a noted imbecile, decides that he should therefore get married as soon as possible. You know what I would do if an invincible creature told me I WILL BE WITH YOU ON YOUR WEDDING NIGHT? I don’t know exactly, but for damn sure I wouldn’t run right out to get married in the exact location where the creature already knows to look for me.

(Oh, I forgot to say that Clerval dies. The creature kills him, and Victor is tried and acquitted for that murder. The whole experience ruins his health, and he tells the magistrate about the monster, and the magistrate believes him. Nothing about this experience makes him reconsider his behavior w/r/t the conviction and execution of Justine.)

Victor marries Elizabeth and then, although he knows that a confessed murderer is lurking nearby, he lets Elizabeth go back to her room by herself without any protection. My annotations contain lots of ideas from various critics about why Victor acts like such a dodo. The one I enjoy the most is that the creature doesn’t exist and Frankenstein has just been making shit up while doing murders himself all over Europe. I love that idea. It doesn’t really make sense with the text of the book, but I’d enjoy a fic where it was true. I hate Frankenstein. Luckily he hates himself too.

So, yeah, the creature kills Elizabeth, and then Papa Frankenstein is so sad that he dies too, and then Frankenstein himself resolves to chase the creature all over the world until he can get revenge on him. But quelle surprise, he’s too useless even to succeed at revenge, and he dies on Walton’s ship after gently rejecting Walton’s request that they become best friends.

The creature shows up at Frankenstein’s deathbed and talks for a while about how much he regrets his own choices. It’s — actually kind of good to hear this? Cause the creature has been a real asshole, and I’m glad to know that he’s looking back on things and realizing he could have behaved differently. But what really pleases me is that the creature actually plans to do something about it. Granted, his plan is Romantic Poet-brand stupid — he plans to go to the uttermost north of the world and set himself on fire — but at least it’s not like all of Frankenstein’s plans to date, which have been 90% “do nothing and hope the problem goes away” and 10% “do the bare minimum to address the problem while deeply hoping that it goes away on its own.”

And that’s it! That’s the book! We have now read Frankenstein.

Yay us!! If you haven’t yet entered our giveaway, it’s not too late to do that!

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The creature continues telling his tale of woe to Frankenstein, a very unsympathetic audience. It’s all about how he reads Paradise Lost and Plutarch’s Lives and The Sorrows of Young Werther and learns — doesn’t seem like much of anything? I guess his main takeaway is that it’s not good for a man/creature to be alone, but he def did not take in how to do proper morality, else he wouldn’t go on to kill little William, even if little William was being a real jerk at the time.

His plan, after finishing his reading material (and boy, the editor of the annotated edition is having none of the bullshit method by which he learned to read — every time he talks about reading, she’s got a footnote to be like “of course he couldn’t have learned to read that way in real life, this is stupid”), is that he’ll go to the De Laceys house when Safie and Agatha and Boy De Lacey (I want to say Frederick???) are out, and he’ll befriend old blind Papa De Lacey, who won’t be prejudiced by his appearance. Then once he and Papa De Lacey are firm friends, he’ll let the old guy convince the Lil De Laceys not to murder him on sight.

The creature plans this for months, even though it’s like, not an incredibly complex plan, like you could actually make that plan one day and put it into action the next day because it’s really quite basic. But anyway, he plans it for months, only for it to be screwed up by the Lil De Laceys coming home early. The girls faint and Boy De Lacey hits the creature with a stick, so he runs away to the mountains in despair of ever making a friend.

Okay, I’ve been a little snarky about the creature thus far, and if you don’t know this next bit, it’s going to seem like I’ve been a dick for no reason. But the thing is that what the creature concludes from all this violence and hatred — which I admit is sad and hard! — is that he needs Frankenstein to make him a lady creature to bang. And I tell you what, not even a whole month after that attack in Toronto,¹ but also, always, I have very little patience for the argument “I wouldn’t do murders if somebody would just bang me.”

Update: I now hate everyone in this book.

Okay, so the creature resolves to go find Frankenstein in Geneva (there’s a reason he knows that’s where Frankenstein’s from but it’s too boring to go into), and he gets to Geneva with only a few more occurrences of people being hateful and violent to him. There he encounters William, who calls him an ogre and says My father, M. Frankenstein, will get you! So, of course, he kills him. To be fair, William seems like he sucked. It remains, however, hella unfair to poor Justine! The creature plants evidence on her for no reason! He’s just doing it to be mean! Ugh.

The creature’s like “In conclusion, my life is terrible, so you have to make me a lady creature to marry.” It’s a lot for Frankenstein to take in.

In part because he feels responsible for the creature (but he says this so grudgingly! Like, I guess I am responsible — no, motherfucker, you are one thousand percent responsible! Why are you being like this!), but mostly because the creature threatens to kill everyone he loves if he doesn’t agree, Frankenstein promises to make a lady creature. Of course he promises this. He is much too useless not to cave to threats and demands.

But guess what else he is too useless to do? Oh, you’re not going to be surprised. He is too useless to MAKE THE SECOND FUCKING CREATURE. Instead of just MAKING THE FUCKING CREATURE, he putters around and whines and moans and gets engaged to Elizabeth (poor Elizabeth) and goes on a road trip with Clerval. This lasts, I’m not shitting you, another entire year. He does a little work, but mostly he swans around Europe being like “I hope the creature doesn’t kill everyone I love, but I really am too stressed to work on doing his demands right now.”

Contrary to how persnickety this post has turned out, I’m genuinely enjoying Frankenstein and I hope you are too. One more week and I will have finished it, and then I will bask in the glow of victory. And hopefully Frankenstein and his jerk incel creature will be gruesomely dead by then.

If you haven’t entered our giveaway for the Annotated Edition of Frankenstein, it’s not too late! You can also link up your #TraLaFrankenstein posts in the Mr. Linky below.

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