MANSFIELD PARK
495
Emerson's objecton to Jane Austen is quick and entire, is instinctual.
He says that she is "sterile" and goes on to call her "vulgar."
Emerson held this opinion out of his passion of concern for the
liberty of the self and the autonomy of spirit, and his holding it
must make us see that the sexual reason for disliking Jane Austen
must be subsumed under another reason which is larger, and, actually,
even more elemental: the fear of imposed constraint. Dr. Chapman
says something of this sort when he speaks of "political prejudice"
and "impatient idealism" as perhaps having something to do with
the dislike of Jane Austen. But these phrases, apart from the fact
that they prejudge the case, do not suggest the biological force of
the resistance which certain temperaments offer to the idea of society
as a limiting condition of the individual spirit.
Such temperaments are not likely to take Jane Austen's irony
as a melioration of her particular idea of society. On the contrary,
they .are likely to suppose that irony is but the engaging manner by
which she masks society's crude coercive power. And they can point
to
Mansfield Park
to show what the social coercion is in all its
literal truth, before irony has beglamoured us about it and induced
us to be comfortable with it- here it is in all its negation, in all the
force of its repressiveness. Perhaps no other work of genius has ever
spoken, or seemed to speak, so insistently for cautiousness and con–
straint, even for dullness. No other great novel has so anxiously as–
serted the need to find security, to establish, in fixity and enclosure,
a refuge from the dangers of openness and chance.
There is scarcely one of our modem pieties that it does not
offend. Despite our natural tendency to permit costume and manners
to separate her world from ours, most readers have no great difficulty
in realizing that all the other novels of Jane Austen are, in essential
ways, of our modem time. This is the opinion of the many students
with whom I have read the novels; not only do the young men con–
trovert by their enthusiasm the judgment of Professor Garrod that
Jane Austen appeals only to men of middle age, but they easily
and naturally assume her to have a great deal to say to them about
the modem personality. But
Mansfield Park
is the exception, and it
is bitterly resented.
It
scandalizes the modem assumptions about
social relations, about virtue, about religion, sex, and art. Most
troubling of all is its preference for rest over motion. To deal with
