Impartial Spectator Meets Picturesque Tourist: The Framing of Mansfield Park

One of Austen's most celebrated achievements is her careful definition of the reader's perspectives on the characters and events of her novels. The reader participates in the point of view articulated within the narrative frame; the reader, in other words, is brought into the world of her novels and judges it on its terms. This technique creates the effect of transparency: the narratives seem to offer a disinterested and objective sense of things, a sense of things that her most celebrated heroines either already possess—Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (1811)—or must struggle to acquire.¹ The clear view Austen offers her readers, the feeling it gives of being both completely immersed and engaged and yet at the same time able to see everything, is perhaps the greatest pleasure of reading her novels.

In Mansfield Park (1814), Austen experiments with picturesque views to explore the detachment, distance, and impartiality implied in the third-person narrative. In this novel, Austen's heroine Fanny Price occupies the role, not of impartial spectator, but of picturesque tourist. The late-century theory of the picturesque organizes an art of seeing that precludes a disinterested and objective view; instead, it absorbs spectators into the scene, actively involving them in the construction of highly imaginative and entirely illusory—entirely interested—views and prospects. The theory of the picturesque interrogates the eighteenth-century tradition of an aesthetic distance, the space, ideally, created by a work of art to allow for disinterested and impartial reflection on the part of a spectator. It emphasizes instead illusion and absorption, and so stages a major challenge to the idea of, or possibilities for, disinterestedness.

Throughout Mansfield Park, carefully constructed picturesque views and arranged landscape scenes offer a subtle, embedded analogy with Austen's control of her reader's point of view. Fanny is immersed in a succession of metaphorical landscaped gardens in a way that highlights the illusory prospects and mediated views of picturesque aesthetics. Fanny's struggles with imposed perspectives—her own included—are so persistent and pronounced that they suggest Austen's engagement in an intense and sustained inquiry into the very possibility of disinterestedness. An early instance, for example, suggests a parody of the whole idea of a picturesque prospect—and along with it the idea of an aesthetic distance. Fanny walks out one morning looking anxiously after Edmund, who has disappeared with both Mary Crawford and Fanny's horse for an inordinate amount of time while Fanny herself waits to ride. She finds a picturesque prospect at her service: "She could look down the park, and command a view of the parsonage and all its demesnes, gently rising beyond the village road." From this vantage, Fanny can see "the happy party" in the middle distance—Edmund, Mary, Fanny's horse, Henry Crawford, Dr and Mrs Grant, and two or three grooms—"standing about and looking on." Everybody is engaged in the scene of Mary's success at riding, and the "sound of merriment ascended even to [Fanny]." Even at this distance, Fanny too is totally absorbed:

She could not turn her eyes from the meadow, she could not help watching all that passed. At first Miss Crawford and her companion made the circuit of the field, which was not small, at a foot's pace; then, at her apparent suggestion, they rose into a canter; and to Fanny's timid nature it was most astonishing to see how well she sat. After a few minutes, they stopt entirely, Edmund was close to her, he was speaking to her, he was evidently directing her management of the bridle, he had hold of her hand; she saw it, or the imagination supplied what the eye could not reach. She must not wonder at this; what could be more natural than that Edmund should be making himself useful, and proving his good-nature by any one? She could not but think indeed that Mr. Crawford might as well have saved him the trouble; that it would have been particularly proper and becoming in a brother to have done...