Reading for Health - Erika Wright Series in Victorian Studies

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a first-time visit. The narrator describes the route William and Fanny take to get to the house with none of the nostalgic reminiscences one might expect from someone of Fanny’s sensibility. After all, she is the one who turns to Cowper when she imagines the “avenue” at Sotherton (a place she has never seen) being “cut down” (48). We hear no such lamentations or recollections of the past from Fanny upon her first seeing Portsmouth after being away for nine years. The narrator tells us that Fanny and William “were rattled into a narrow street . . . and drawn up before the door of a small house now inhabited by Mr. Price” (312). This description suggests that Fanny, like the reader, is seeing the house for the first time. It is not “their” small house or “the” house but rather “a” house. The “now” adds to the ambiguity, implying at first that Mr. Price is at that present moment in the house but also suggesting that Mr. Price and the Price family formerly inhabited another house—the house Fanny grew up in—and “now” inhabit this one. Upon entering the house, Fanny confuses the parlor for “a passage-room” (because it is so small), and later Mrs. Price complains about the inconvenience of not having a “butcher in the street,” noting that “[w]e were better off in our last house” (313, 314). This “we” does not appear to include Fanny. Mrs. Price’s complaint serves as a general comment to anyone who will listen about her dissatisfaction but also suggests quite simply that Fanny does not know this particular street—this is not her home.

      Recounting Fanny’s Portsmouth life through estrangement and structural disorder allows Austen to invoke a preventionist—or what I refer to elsewhere as a “hygienic”—mode of reading and thinking. We need to see Portsmouth as a new place in order for this return to feel more like an originary moment, a moment that has “come before” earlier episodes, before Mary rode her pony and before Maria jumped the ha-ha. This return does not stand in completely for Fanny’s past. Certainly, a lot has happened since she last lived at Portsmouth: the babies have grown into adolescents, two more have been born, and William is no longer her companion. However, whether the place to which Fanny returns is her former home or whether it is more chaotic than it once was is not at issue. The basic condition—the domestic mismanagement—we witness during Fanny’s return replicates that which made Fanny’s initial “change of air” so desirable. And once again, Portsmouth makes Fanny sick, as we are told that “she had lost ground as to health since her being in Portsmouth” (339). Not only does Fanny reject Portsmouth, but Portsmouth rejects Fanny. The house virtually squeezes her out, almost suffocating her with “the smallness of the rooms” and “the narrowness of the passage and staircase” (321). Inactivity and lack of air accelerate her decline, such that when Henry Crawford comes to visit, he feels compelled to explain to Susan that Fanny “requires constant air and exercise” and that “she ought never to be long banished from the free air, and liberty of the country” (340). Because this scene takes place after Fanny has been living at Mansfield, we initially read Fanny’s decline as a psychosomatic response to her separation from Edmund and as evidence of her altered disposition. But Henry’s reference to “free air” recalls Mrs. Price’s initial hope that Fanny will be “materially better for change of air,” thus collapsing, if only momentarily, narrative time and allowing us to read the Fanny of volume 3 as the Fanny from volume 1. This situation is the very one that paradoxically fortified her against Mansfield and helped to establish Fanny as an agent of prevention.

      Austen offers a particularly telling story of mismanagement and prevention in this final volume, one that, like the Elizas in Sense and Sensibility, haunts (has haunted all along) the narrative. Shortly after Fanny came to Mansfield Park, her favorite sister died. Austen withholds the news of Mary Price’s death until we are in Portsmouth and see the conditions under which the sister lived. We never get to witness Fanny’s response, learning only during her return to Portsmouth that when she found out, she “had for a short time been quite afflicted” (320). We can read Fanny’s sorrow back into the narrative, speculating that it occurred somewhere between Mrs. Norris’s haranguing, Maria and Julia’s teasing, and Edmund’s care. At the same time, Mrs. Price’s wish that her children might be “materially better” becomes more firmly grounded in bodily health. Fanny’s move to Mansfield (the “change of air”) may have prevented her own death, but more than that—more than being the silent recipient of preventive care—Fanny’s change of space (the movement from Mansfield Park to Portsmouth) registers as a temporal shift. The move allows Austen to compress time and revise our imperfect knowledge about Fanny’s early life. Austen’s placement of the Portsmouth episode at the end trains us to see both what has come before and what could be. We can apply this thinking to Fanny’s attachment to Edmund and to her observations of his relationship with Mary Crawford.

      After walking in the Sotherton woods, Edmund and Mary become the main characters in Fanny’s prevention tale. Edmund is headed down a slippery path that nobody has taught him to traverse, for he has been mesmerized by Mary’s manipulative ways—enough to make him partake in the acting “scheme” he initially condemned (128). But Fanny has been watching and, in a sense, narrating for us the danger that awaits him were he to marry a woman who has no desire to be a clergyman’s wife. Through her, we anticipate Edmund looking back at this moment with regret. Of course, we also know that it will not culminate in this way. When Edmund finally realizes that the woman he courted was not “Miss Crawford” but only “the creature of [his] own imagination” (378), we sense some of what has been averted. This change, however, reflects minimal growth. His “impulse . . . to resist” Mary’s “saucy playful smile” is slightly contaminated by his admission that he “sometimes—for a moment—regretted that [he] did not go back” to Mary (379). For even though he has witnessed her deception, he still fantasizes about “how excellent she would have been, had she fallen into good hands earlier” (379). Here, Edmund puts a preventionist ethic to potentially dangerous use, imagining Mary as what she might have been and turning her into the woman he would have married. Mary is a cautionary wretch, and Fanny puts an end to Edmund’s revisionist fantasy by “adding to his knowledge of [Mary’s] real character.” She explains to him that Tom’s ill health and thus the potential for Edmund (as the younger son) to be heir appealed to Mary. Austen reveals Edmund’s response to this “hint” through the narrator’s ambiguous observation that “[t]his was not an agreeable intimation. Nature resisted it for a while.” But only for a while. Eventually, outside of the narrative, he grows out of his fantasy—“his vanity was not of a strength to fight long against reason”—and he sees as he ought and chooses Fanny (379).

      With Edmund on the proper path and Fanny poised to be his companion, two important questions remain: What, exactly, has been prevented in Mansfield Park? And more pressingly, how do we achieve closure through prevention? Medically speaking, the one serious illness in the novel is not prevented and, in fact, becomes an important plot point. Tom Bertram’s condition brings Fanny back from Portsmouth so that she can comfort the Bertrams and expose Mary Crawford.24 But even as Tom’s story reflects a discourse of cure, it does so within a larger framework of prevention; he, like Maria and Julia Bertram and Mary Price, becomes a cautionary tale about the dangers of debauchery and of bad parenting. Tom’s illness and recovery enable him to “bec[o]me what he ought to be, useful to his father, steady and quiet, and not merely living for himself” (381); Maria must be sacrificed to the story of prevention, while her sister, though initially wretched, gets a reprieve. The narrator explains that Sir Thomas finally becomes “conscious of errors in his own conduct as a parent” and is “the longest to suffer.” Only in hindsight—because he lacked the foresight—does he realize what he “ought not to have” done (380). He comforts himself, however, with the notion that his own daughters’ “real dispositions [were] unknown to him” (381). His strictness was no match for Mrs. Norris’s schemes, yet he refuses to take full blame for their “real disposition,” reasoning that “something must have been wanting within” (382). While Sir Thomas refers to their moral failing, his language (in light of the eldest son’s sickness) is partly medical, reminding us of his early concerns about Fanny’s disposition. Having been trained by Austen as preventionist readers, we know, however, that had Sir Thomas looked beneath the healthy surface and the pleasing manners of his children, he might have seen the “disease” growing within, for the moral and the medical, as Beddoes makes clear, are of a piece.

      The

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