Book Review: Mansfield Park is still quality Austen, although to my mind not quite up to Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice. Here she was going for something new, trying to work with more disparate characters, but the ensemble just didn't come together. And a previous plot point is recycled. This is still Austen's monochromatic world, where servants rarely have names, rules are rules one daren't break, and money is rarely a problem we must dwell on for long. Even the poor relations, who send not one but two daughters to the wealthy relations, have two servants. This world is like nothing I've ever known, an unreal fantasy, quite diverse from my life. But it's also sometimes comforting in its predictable manners and mores -- I enjoy the strange world building. Our main character in Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, is too good to be true: judgmental, quite the prig, self righteous, quick to moralize about others but afraid to live life herself. She judges every other character in the book, to their detriment. She is contrasted to her somewhat "immoral" female cousins (and all other characters), but it's unclear from where her moral purity and certainty derives. Certainly not from the slovenly home in which she was born (her father described: "he swore and he drank, he was dirty and gross"), or Mansfield Park where her female cousins were raised. She also agonizes for an untoward number of pages over the marriage proposal of a wealthy man truly and passionately in love with her. Her rejection leads him to sin. Austen is not saying that the noble poor are somehow better than the immoral rich. Both are found wanting. But in Mansfield Park at least there is some consideration of the English class system (such as how Fanny is treated by her Aunt Norris), which is interesting and I liked that Austen raises class more than in her previous novels. The most intriguing characters are the Crawfords, a wealthy brother (charming, what we might now call a "player") and sister (lively and vivacious, a "party girl") who come to town and upset the apple cart. These are the people who prim, proper, and apprehensive Fanny is meant to contrast. Both are entertaining, attractive, and part of the changing times. It's clear to me that clever, satirical, sharp-tongued Jane Austen identifies with Mary Crawford, even as she approvingly nods at Fanny's strict moral code. Finally, and this is not Austen's intent, it seems that the intense moral strictures, codes, and customs of the time lead directly to the "dreadful crimes" that occur: a married woman running off with another man, a young woman eloping rather than return to the repressive atmosphere of her father's house. Obviously, the horrors that young Fanny condemns (an engaged woman kissing another man in a play) are not considered quite so dreadful today, but it seems the rules of the day led to the bad acts. Fathers approved and disapproved marriages, a woman had the obligation to marry money, a young person had a quite limited number of acceptable partners to choose from, the opportunity to get to know each other (even when engaged) was sharply curtailed. As a result, no one even bats an eye at marriage between first cousins. For me, Mansfield Park has too many preachy, judgmental pages, with too little uncondemned fun and too much agonized moralizing. I still enjoyed Austen's fantasy world (a re-read may be in order), but wanted more Mary Crawford and less Fanny Price. [3½★]
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