Place and Replacement in Mansfield Park

F. T. FLAHIFF Place and Replacement in Mansfield Park On the ramparts at Portsmouth, F~l.nny Price is almost as vulnerable as Hamlet was upon the ramparts of Elsinore. 'The very place,' Horatio warned the Prince, puts toys of desperation Without more motive, into every brain That looks so many fathoms to the sea And hears it roar beneath.1 The uncommon loveliness of that Portsmouth day, the chiaroscuro effect of the sporting clouds, the vivacity of the sea 'dashing against the ramparts'2 combine with the recent oppressiveness of the handy-dandy world of her parents' household, with the presence of Henry Crawford's arm upon which she can lean, even with the little opportunity she has had of late for this kind of exercise, to make Fanny 'almost careless of the circumstances' (p 413) under which she experiences the scene. Kenneth Burke has cited Horatio's warning to Hamlet as an example of the power of place to initiate and to limit action.3 Horatio feared that the seductiveness of this place might be exploited by the Ghost to deprive Hamlet of 'sovereignty of reason, / And draw [him] into madness' (I.iV.73-4), even possibly to suicide. By means of a contrived account of the view from Dover cliff, Edgar in King Lear led his father to attempt just such an action as Horatio feared (a suicidal leap), but the nature of the place - flat ground - determined its outcome. When, on the other hand, Louisa Musgrovein Persuasion jumpsfrom the seasteps atLymeRegis, she becomes a victim both of the spontaneity that the scene arouses in her, and, to her sorrow, of the fact of gravity. Alone among these characters who have teetered above real or imagined waves, Fanny Price does not have her wits turned. In becoming 'almost careless,' however, she comes closer to succumbing to the charms of Henry Crawford than at any other point in Mansfield Park. As a result of their outing and of their kindred responses to the day, to the sea and to the view, Fanny imagines some 'wonderfulimprovement' inHenry. She is even moved to consider his departure from Portsmouth as 'a sort of renewed separation from Mansfield' (p 413). UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1985 222 F. T. FLAHIFF In his essay entitled 'The Architectural Setting of Jane Austen's Novels,' Nikolaus Pevsner drew attention to a curious anomaly in our author's handling ofplace. He noted that while herreferences to locations in Bath and London, for example, are extraordinarily precise, with characters inhabiting those streets and squares consistent with their tastes and circumstances, her references to architectural detail are vague in the extreme, taking the form of general epithets which recur in her novels. Pevsner proposed what many commentators before him had concluded, that this vagueness of reference to the details of setting reflects Jane Austen's 'lack of interest in anything but people.'4 The early association of her art with drama, and especially with the drama of Shakespeare, has, for all its rightness and shrewdness, resulted in a tendency to bring to considerations of her novels something of that indifference to, or even bias against, setting that is perhaps traceable to a lingering reluctance to admit the importance of place in drama. Kenneth Burke's interest in the settings in which dramatic actions occur, his proposition that 'the scene contains the act,'5 goes a long way towards reminding us of what we have ignored. Like Macbeth, and with almost as dire consequences, we have been reluctant to admit the dynamic of a place, the possibility that Birnam Wood can come to Dunsinane. Yet it does; and, indeed, the heroine ofJane Austen's most popular novel dates her love for Mr Darcy "'from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." ,6 Jane Bennet will, of course, not accept her sister's too-frivolous account of the origins of her love for Darcy: 'Another intreaty that she would be serious, however, produced the desired effect; and she soon satisfied Jane by her solemn assurances of attachment' (p 279). Elizabeth Bennet's 'solemn assurances' appear to save her - and the novel's denouementfrom the disconcerting...