MANSFIELD PARK
507
most engaging episodes of the novel, despite our impulse to feel that
it ought to seem the most objectionable. We think we ought not be
sympathethic with Fanny as, to her slow dismay, she understands
that she cannot be happy with her own, her natural, family. She is
made miserable by the lack of cleanliness and quiet, of civility and
order. We jib at this, we remind ourselves that for the seemliness that
does indeed sustain the soul, men too often sell their souls, that
warmth and simplicity of feeling may go with indifference to dis–
order. But if we have the most elementary honesty, we feel with
Fanny the genuine pain not merely of the half-clean and the scarcely
tidy, of confusion and intrusion, but also of the vulgarity that thrives
in these surroundings. It is beyond human ingenuity to define what
we mean by vulgarity, but in Jane Austen's novels vulgarity has
these elements: smallness of mind, insufficiency of awareness, assertive
self-esteem, the wish to devalue, especially to devalue the human
worth of other people. That Fanny's family should have forgotten
her during her long absence was perhaps inevitable; it is a vulgarity
that they have no curiosity about her and no desire to revive the con–
nection, and this indifference is represented as being of a piece with
the general indecorum of their lives. We do not blame Fanny when
she remembers that in her foster father's house there are many rooms,
that hers, although for years it had been small and cold, had always
been clean and private, that now, although she had once been
snubbed and slighted at Mansfield, she is the daughter of Sir Thomas's
stern heart.
Of all the fathers of Jane Austen's novels, Sir Thomas is the
only one to whom admiration is given. Fanny's real father, Lieutenant
Price of the Marines, is shallow and vulgar. The fathers of the
heroines of
Pride and Prejudice, Emma,
and
Persuasion,
all lack
principle and fortitude; they are corrupted by their belief in their
delicate vulnerability- they lack
apatheia.
Yet Sir Thomas is a
father, and a father is as little safe from Jane Austen's judgment as
he is from Shelley's. Jane Austen's masculine ideal is exemplified by
husbands, by Darcy, Knightley, and Wentworth, in whom principle
and duty consort with a ready and tender understanding. Sir Thomas's
faults are dealt with explicitly- if he learns to cherish Fanny as the
daughter of his heart, he betrays the daughters of his blood. Maria's
sin and her sister Julia's bad disposition are blamed directly upon his
