Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen's 'Mansfield Park'

Conclusion. Reading Austen’s Ends

243 243 Conclusion Reading Austen’s Ends y Jane Austen’s narratives suggest that to answer rightly the question, “How should I live my life?” one must first know to what end that life aspires. Thus, in the realm of ethics, aiming for the right telos, or end, is paramount. With her unusual final chapter in Mansfield Park, she responds to the question of ends, making more intelligible thereby the way in which her heroine, Fanny Price, lives her life for the span of time during which we know her. “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.”1 Of all Jane Austen’s final chapters, none has provoked more controversy than that of Mansfield Park. Its opening lines are almost as famous (or infamous) as Pride and Prejudice’s epigrammatic first sentence, yet her ending continues to disturb and disappoint many readers. The novel’s most brilliant commentator, Lionel Trilling, rightly observes that Austen intends to make her readers uncomfortable . Yet in Mansfield Park, the word “comfort” appears in some form more than 130 times.2 This repetition signals her preoccupation with 1. MP 461, emphasis added. 2. According to a search on the “Modern English Collection,” in University of Virginia Electronic Text Center, the word “comfort” appears in Mansfield Park 138 times, Emma 122, Sense and Sensibility 104, Northanger Abbey 44, and Persuasion 42. No results were given for Pride and Prejudice. 244 244 Conclusion: Reading Austen’s Ends the word in a philosophic way. Her interrogation of the meanings of “comfort” constitutes a conversation about the choosing of ends, and constancy figures prominently in this conversation. Austen’s Understanding of Comfort In The Language of Jane Austen, Page offers excellent insights regarding Austen’s use of the word “comfort” in Mansfield Park: At first sight, comfort, at least in its most familiar present-day uses, seems to have little to do with “social or moral value”; yet the word is endowed with wider and deeper meanings by Jane Austen, and to fail to grasp these is surely to have an incomplete understanding of many important passages. . . . Only a minority of instances relate to physical or material comfort. . . . The majority . . . refer to emotional needs and satisfactions, and the fact that the word is employed in relation to the heroine far more often than to anyone else suggests that a scrutiny of its range of meanings may contribute to an understanding of a character otherwise puzzling in many ways.3 Austen’s understanding of comfort is, indeed, wider and deeper than the ordinary usage of the word. Of course, she uses it in its customary sense to mean the kind of commodious living that the modern Hobbesian context takes to be the primary end of self-interested human nature. This is the way the word is used at the beginning of the novel regarding the founding marriage between Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, for the latter concerns herself almost exclusively with this kind of comfort, as do Tom, Maria, Julia, Mrs. Norris, and Mary and Henry Crawford. In the final chapter’s opening sentence, however, the narrator uses the adjective “tolerable” as a qualifier for the word. What does this word suggest about the quality of comfort to which she hopes to “restore every body, not greatly at fault themselves”? For Austen, comfort exists on a scale of different degrees (or range) of meanings that may be experienced and/or aimed for depending on one’s ability (or inability) to practice constancy. Constancy provides an overarching Christian context within which the word may be understood, and within this context, the novel suggests these three degrees of comfort: apparent comfort, tolerable comfort, and genuine comfort. These degrees recall Dante’s infernal, purga3 . Page, The Language of Jane Austen, 39–40, emphasis added. 245 Conclusion: Reading Austen’s Ends 245 torial, and paradisal realms with an important difference. The “hell” her characters experience in their daily lives results from their mistaking apparent comfort for the most important end. Tolerable comfort does not guarantee a life without suffering, but it teaches the character to endure it in order to aim for the right end. Genuine comfort, which is not represented in the final narrative...