Royal Romances: Sex, Scandal, and Monarchy (43 page)

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“all” the others. Her reaction to the possibility of moving from

observer to participant—when she is pressured to take a small part

in the play—seems an instance of the perfect synchronicity of feel-

ing and judgment. “It would be so horrible to her to act, that she

was inclined to suspect the truth and purity of her own scruples”

(107). Austen’s indirect discourse connects Fanny with Mary in

that both recognize the inf luence of desire on judgment, although

Fanny seems to be subjecting herself to rigorous self-examination,

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where Mary is content to be epigrammatic. But Fanny’s suspicions

are unfounded, an instance of her habitual discrediting of her own

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powers of discrimination. Her horror of acting proves rather than

disproves the purity of her scruples. She may doubt them, but the

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reader does not; her instinctive reaction is instinctively “right.”47

It is the inclination to suspect her own scrupulous horror that has

been artificially induced, in this instance by the cruel importunities

of her cousins and aunt, more broadly by her life of dependence at

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Mansfield Park.

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Fanny ’s judgments are products of her masochism, which is the

expression of her melancholy and the necessary ingredient in both

her idealization of Mansfield and her love for Edmund. Her self-

examination takes place in the schoolroom, a retreat (not a refuge)

that concentrates the careful mingling of pain and pleasure that ties

Fanny to Mansfield. Each of the items she looks at in her reverie

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“was a friend, or bore her thoughts to a friend,” and her associa-

tion of things to people leads to an illustration of the abusive cycle

that explains and shapes her judgments “though there had been

sometimes much of suffering to her—though her motives had been

often misunderstood, her feelings disregarded, and her comprehen-

sion under-valued, though she had known the pains of tyranny, of

ridicule, and neglect, yet almost every recurrence of either had led to

something consolatory.” The most important agent of consolation

is of course Edmund, whose presence, more than any other figure

in the novel, regulates the ratio of pleasure to pain. Sometimes the

“champion” or advocate who “supported her cause, or explained her

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meaning,” Edmund is more useful as the comforter who reconciles

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her to pain, giving “charm” to “every former affliction” by telling her

“not to cry” or giving her “some proof of affection which made her

tears delightful” (106).48

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Fanny’s self-doubt is learned, not the truth and purity—the mod-

esty—that make her recoil from the idea of performance. Yet hor-

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ror in Fanny is never the consistent, instinctive response it appears

here. Austen’s layering of discourses implies a contrast between the

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calculated and the natural reactions that her novel never endorses.

“Horror” turns out to be a frequently used word in the novel.

Variants of it appear twenty-one times, and its instability makes it

an unsafe register of moral authority.49 Fanny reacts with “horror”

at learning that she must begin the ball with Henry Crawford (189);

her “scruples” against accepting a gift from her rival make her “start

back at first with a look of horror” when Mary Crawford offers

her a gold chain to wear with her brother William’s cross (177).

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Both of these passages seem again to naturalize Fanny’s horror as

the inevitable companion of her modesty. Beginning a ball, after

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all, is a public display similar to acting, especially given the com-

plex mechanisms of courtship and seduction that acting involves

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in this novel.50 But the extremity of Fanny ’s reactions reminds us

that her modesty is so overbred as to become crippling, even ridicu-

lous. Embarrassment, discomfiture, yes, but horror? When Fanny

reacts with similar horror at the prospect of a dinner with Henry

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Crawford, we know we are in the realm of the same hyperbole that

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allows Mary Crawford to call her brother “the most horrible flirt

that can be imagined” (32) while the same word can be assigned by

Julia Bertram to the tedious Mrs. Rushworth (72) and by Tom to

the family billiard table (88).

The denouement of the novel recuperates horror for modesty, con-

trasting Fanny ’s and Mary ’s responses to the elopement of Henry

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R o y a l R o m a n c e s

Crawford and Maria Bertram: “The horror of a mind like Fanny’s, as

it received the conviction of such guilt . . . can hardly be described. At

first, it was a sort of stupefaction; but every moment was quickening

her perception of the horrible evil” (299). The narrator’s qualification

“a mind like Fanny’s” renders the horror intelligible. “Such guilt”

might not horrify every mind. It does not horrify Mary’s, to whom

the elopement deserves “no harsher name than folly” and who feels

“[N]o reluctance, no horror, no feminine—shall I say ? no modest

loathings!” (308) This is Edmund’s comparison, however, not the

narrator’s. Fanny’s reaction is in keeping with
his
equation of horror

with modesty, an equation demanded by his own renunciation, the

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necessity for which is clearer to him than the motivation. He must

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give up all thought of Mary either because she is not the woman he

thought she was—“How have I been deceived! Equally in brother and

sister deceived!” (312). Or else, possibly, she could be that woman,

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had not her “nature” been ruined by her faulty upbringing: “Spoilt,

spoilt!” (308).

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Yet, if Mary’s failure to be horrified signals (maybe) her “corrupt,

vitiated mind” (310), Fanny’s horror seems once again out of propor-

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tion to the event:

Fanny seemed to herself never to have been shocked before. There was

no possibility of rest. . . . She passed only from feelings of sickness to

shudderings of horror; and from hot fits of fever to cold. The event was

so shocking, that there were moments even when her heart revolted

from it as impossible—when she thought it could not be. A woman

married only six months ago, a man professing himself devoted, even

engaged
to another—that other her near relation—the whole family,

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both families connected as they were by tie upon tie, all friends, all

intimate together!—it was too horrible a confusion of guilt, to gross

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a complication of evil, for human nature, not in a state of utter barba-

rism, to be capable of! (299)

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D. A. Miller sees in Fanny’s horror a kind of hysterical wishfulness,

“morally exemplary” but “curiously blind to the sources of its own

excitement” (57). Her “excessive disgust” is “inadequately served”

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by the moral language she uses to explain it (58). Closer than ever

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to fulfilling a desire she has spent the novel schooling herself to sup-

press and disown, Fanny “responds to the wish fulfillment hysteri-

cally to avoid facing it as such” (60). Of course, as Edmund’s own

sexual squeamishness later makes clear, Fanny’s horror is precisely the

response to attach him to her. Her excessive modesty allows her to

luxuriate through “hysterical conversion” (Miller 59) in the multiple

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excesses occasioning and occasioned by the elopement, while distanc-

ing her from one who is implicated in the event by her philosophical

acceptance of it. Typically, Fanny responds with a neurotically metic-

ulous examination of her own feelings, Mary with what looks like

epigram.51

But the excess that horrifies Fanny is more than “the forbidden

sexual act inferable from the elopement” (Miller 59). Not the guilt

alone, but the “confusion of guilt” is “horrible.” Recent critics of

Austen have recognized that the “utter barbarism” Fanny imagines

is specifically incestuous.52 Her compilation of horrors—singularly

free of main verbs, as if she has lost the ability to reason from the

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event and can only iterate its parts—begins with the betrayal of con-

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jugal bonds: a “woman married,” a man “devoted, even
engaged
to

another.” But the emotional energy of her list concentrates on the

betrayal of familial bonds, “that other her near relation—the whole

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family , both families connected as they were by tie upon tie, all

friends, all intimate together!” For Ruth Bernard Yeazell, the “ori-

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gin” of Fanny’s “sickness” is not the sexuality of Maria (or Henry)

but “the discovery of people dangerously out of place, of accus-

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tomed categories blurred and confounded” (162). Fanny’s emphasis

on families “connected . . . by tie upon tie,” however, evokes the con-

founding of relational categories that have formed the substance of

her fantasies about Edmund, as cousin, brother, and lover/ husband.

Blurring categories is not the problem; blurred categories are the ideal

that the elopement disrupts and betrays. Critics have recognized the

importance of incest in the marriage plot of
Mansfield Park
, cit-

ing the exchangeability of Edmund with William and Edmund’s

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identification of Fanny as “my only sister” as a prelude to marriage

(302).53 Maria’s crime disrupts this authorized endogamy.54 The

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elopement is quasi-incestuous if we accept that Edmund is poised

to marry Mary and make Maria and Henry brother and sister, or

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if, following Mary Jean Corbett, we accept that the Crawfords have

already become an extension of the Mansfield group.55 But neither

of these groupings piles “tie upon tie.” Categories become blurred

only after the elopement, y et in Fanny ’s anguished rehearsal the

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condition of being “all intimate together” is the beginning, not

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the end. Stability for her is the incestuous mingling of categories;

instability is its betrayal.

Fanny ’s horror at the elopement reveals the extent to which she

is implicated in it. Like Maria, she desires someone to whom she is

already connected by tie upon tie.56 Like Lady Byron, she is the recip-

ient of confessions that force upon her a moral relativism from which

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she retreats but cannot escape, first in Edmund’s confidences to her

about Mary Crawford and, more drastically, in Mary’s communica-

tions with her after first Mary and then Fanny have left Mansfield.

An extension of the intimacy that both Edmund and Sir Thomas have

been self-servingly promoting, their correspondence is confounding

in the same way that Christensen argues Byron’s bedroom confes-

sions were for his wife. Mary’s letters (we never see Fanny’s replies)

occasion “unpleasant meditation” (268) first because they assume