A Modest Question about Mansfield Park

'^ mammà - "Put round her shoulders by Mr. Crawford's quicker hands," p. 226. Mansfield Park A Modest Question about Mansfield Park Jenny Davidson Mansfield Park attacks theatricality and condemns insincerity, some critics assert, and one critic describes die goal of the novel as to establish, "in the person of Fanny Price, a virtuous and immutable transparency."1 The question asked here rests on a very different assumption: what ifMansfieldPark representsJane Austen's mostfully elaborated argumentfor hypocrisy? MansfieldPark takes on a series of eighteenth-century arguments about the relationship between merit and compensation, between politeness and hypocrisy, and indeed about die nature ofvirtue itself, offering striking evidence ofthe turn taken by the conversation about manners at the end ofdie long eighteendi century. This article asks what happens when the 1 For the anti-dieatricality argument, see especially Lionel Trilling, "The Sentiment ofBeing and the Sentiments ofArt," Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 68; tile quotation is from NicolaJ. Watson, Revolution and theForm oftheBritish Novel, 1 790-1825: InterceptedLetters, InterruptedSeductions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), p. 90. Forasubde argument diat emphasizes die ambivalence ofMansfiddParktowards dieatricality, seeJoseph Litvak, Caughtin theAd: Theatricalityin theNineteenth-CenturyEnglishNovel(Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1992), pp. 17-20; and see also David Marshall, TrueActingand die Language ofReal Feeling," YaUJournalofCriticism3 (Fall 1989), 90. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 2,January 2004 246 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION commitment to politeness that characterizes eighteenth-century moral and political writing from Shaftesbury to Burke is taken up as a central concern by the novel. Both manners and politeness exist in dangerously close proximity to the less attractive quality called hypocrisy. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the term hypocrisy consequentiy takes on a double burden. Individuals are encouraged to practise "good" hypocrisy, forms ofdissimulation (often identified as manners or politeness) motivated by the obligation to maintain social intelligibility and serving to lubricate die machinery ofpolitical and domestic life, while rejecting "bad" hypocrisy, forms of deception in which self-interest or political and religious factionalism predominate. Introducing specific arguments about reputation, virtue and its rewards, and the true nature of female modesty, Austen produces in Mansfield Park (though few critics have recognized it) a new hypothesis: Üiat in certain circumstances some kinds ofhypocrisy are not only necessarybut eminentiyforgivable, and that the chores of dependency—especially women's dependency —deserve generous compensation. In die modest figure ofFanny Price, Austen defends those forms of insincerity that dependency produces. Fanny's dependent position forces into prominence questions about power and subjection, diough those terms belong to a vocabulary unavailable to the inhabitants of Mansfield Park.2 Fanny plays her cards close to her chest as a matter of self-protection, but her reticence in turn enables her own enfranchisement at the conclusion ofthe novel. Paradoxically, Fanny's thoughts fail the test of transparency precisely because her physiological transparency makes a habit of self-revelation. Fanny is the possessor, not of a poker face that gives nodiing away, but of a physiognomywith such frequent modestblushes, faints, and tears that it effectively masks moments of particular vulnerability (as when a conveniendy timed blush erases Sir Thomas Bertram's correct 2 While I suggest diat die eighteenth-century vocabulary of modesty, virtue, and hypocrisy offersa more precise instrumentfor excavating die history ofwhatshe calls "the psychic life ofpower," the terms power and subjection are borrowed from die work ofJudidi Buder, whose account ofsubject-formation emphasizes the paradox diat "to persist as oneself it is required to "desire die conditions ofone's own subordination"; see Butler, ViePsychicLife ofPower: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 9. A MODEST QUESTION 247 suspicion that Fanny's refusal of Henry Crawford might result from a secret passion for Edmund) . Perhaps the strangestfeature ofFanny Price's history is the disparity between her unwillingness to act strategically in the short term and the long-term success of her marriage project. Yet while the end of Mansfield Park rewards Fanny Price with die prize ofmarriage to Edmund Bertram, readers are left widi a lingering feeling Üiat virtue should be more properly its own reward. "It does not reconcile us to die virtue ofFanny Price Üiat it is rewarded by more than itself," Lionel...