In our current Group Read
of Mansfield Park in Janeites and
Austen-L, after Christy Somer quoted the passage in Ch. 1 about Nanny being
offered to bring Fanny to Mansfield Park, there were several comments about
Nanny and why the narrator refers to Nanny dropping in unexpectedly on her
London cousin as an “attack”.
I chimed in as follows, based on my previous post about
Mrs. Norris’s overhasty reveal to her sister about always keeping a bed for a
friend, i.e., Mrs. Norris as a closeted lesbian:
It didn’t occur to me the
other night that Nanny might be part of that lesbian subtext, but now I see
that she most definitely is, as I will explain, below.
First, the word “attack”
is certainly not a positive description of Mrs. Norris’s plan for Nanny to ask
her cousin for the favor of providing Nanny with a bed (that word again) in London
for a night, so that Nanny can be waiting to collect Fanny there (notice the
rhyme) and bring Fanny back to Mansfield Park. In
fact, the word “attack” is used a total of13 times in MP (this being the first
one), which is nearly half the number of times it is used in the other five Austen
novels COMBINED, so it is a word I
believe JA wanted her readers to particularly notice when reading MP. In this instance, this
narrative usage seems to attribute that negative description of Nanny’s actions
to Sir Thomas—for some reason, he does not like Nanny, and so gratuitously
characterizes what would seem to be a generous action on her part, imposing on
a cousin in order to help Fanny get to
Mansfield Park from London under the secure chaperoneship of a trusted adult,
instead as an act worthy of criticism. Sounds like Sir Thomas has some “issues”
with Nanny, and what might those issues be? Chapter 3 would seem to give us a
big clue in that regard.
Second, JA goes out of her
way to put into Mrs. Norris’s mouth a detail about Nanny which can superficially
be explained as more of Mrs. Norris’s characteristic self-importance and phony
altruism:
“I am not one of those
that spare their own trouble; and NANNY shall fetch her, however it may put me
to inconvenience to have my chief counsellor away for three days.”
This is the same phony
self-importance that Mrs. Elton (she who famously boasts “I always stand up for
women”!) expresses when /she /metaphorically also assumes a position of
governmental authority:
"I mentioned no
/names/, you will observe.—Oh! no; cautious as a minister of state. I managed
it extremely well."
And it’s absolutely no
coincidence that here in Chapter 1, as she will do again in Chapter 3, Mrs.
Norris is very quick and decisive in pushing strongly for Fanny to live at
Mansfield Park itself. No one explicitly mentions the White House as a possible
living arrangement, but now we can see that after he agrees to Fanny living at
Mansfield Park, Sir Thomas, in his characteristic indirect way, keeps obliquely
hinting at this, when he voices his worry about Fanny’s getting too much sense
of equality with her female cousins, and too much sense of romance with her male
cousins, if she lives at Mansfield Park. It’s obvious, when you reflect on it,
that had Fanny been placed from the start with the Norrises in the White House,
both of those worries would have been completely nipped in the bud, so to
speak.
So we now see that Mrs.
Norris’s not wanting Fanny to live at her house is not a position that she
suddenly arrives at in Chapter 3, after Mr. Norris dies—no, she was on exactly the
same page before Fanny even showed up at Mansfield Park, and Mrs. Norris was
just as proactive to make sure to situate Fanny at Mansfield Park when she was
a young girl as when she was a teenager. And we are also therefore meant to
recall the negative reactions of Sir Thomas to Nanny in Chapter 1, when we read
Mrs. Norris’s gambit in Chapter 3---it’s a pattern that JA is hammering home early in the novel.
And, just in case we might
have missed these very early hints, JA makes sure to “ping” us with one more
very suggestive mention of Nanny, more than half the novel later, in Chapter
32, when we read:
"If I had known you
were going out, I should have got you just to go as far as my house with some
orders for NANNY," said she, "which I have since, to my very great
inconvenience, been obliged to go and carry myself. I could very ill spare the
time, and you might have saved me the trouble, if you would only
have been so good as to let us know you were going out. It would have made no
difference to you, I suppose, whether you had walked in the shrubbery or gone
to my house."
"I recommended the
shrubbery to Fanny as the driest place," said Sir Thomas.
"Oh!" said Mrs.
Norris, with a moment's check, "that was very kind of you, Sir Thomas; but
you do not know how dry the path is to my house. Fanny would have had quite as
good a walk there, I assure you, with the advantage of being of some use, and obliging
her aunt: it is all her fault. If she would but have let us know she was going
out but there is a something about Fanny, I have often observed it before—she
likes to go her own way to work; she does not like to be dictated to; she takes
her own independent walk whenever she can; she certainly has a little spirit of
secrecy, and independence, and nonsense, about her, which I would advise her to
get the better of."
What’s very revealing here
is that Mrs. Norris’s complaint about Fanny not having volunteered herself as a
messenger provides her with an innocent rationale for why Mrs. Norris herself
had to make a special trip to her house in order to carry “some orders for
Nanny”. Hmm….
Haven’t we seen this same
misleading gambit before in another of JA’s novels? In her next novel, JA would
present us with another character, Frank Churchill, who cleverly justifies a
walk to a certain destination—the Bates residence--with an explanation which we
later learn was a cover story for the ulterior motive for choosing that destination
in particular:
“A reasonable visit paid,
Mr. Weston began to move.—"He must be going. He had business at the Crown
about his hay, and a great many errands for Mrs. Weston at Ford's, but he need
not hurry any body else." His son, too well bred to hear the hint, rose
immediately also, saying, "As you are going farther on
business, sir, I will take the opportunity of paying a visit, which must be
paid some day or other, and therefore may as well be paid now. I have the honour
of being acquainted with a neighbour of yours, (turning to Emma,) a lady
residing in or near Highbury; a family of the name of Fairfax. I shall have no
difficulty, I suppose, in finding the house; though Fairfax, I believe, is not
the proper name—I should rather say Barnes, or Bates. Do you know any family of that name?"
"To be sure we
do," cried his father; "Mrs. Bates—we passed her house—I saw Miss
Bates at the window. True, true, you are acquainted with Miss Fairfax; I
remember you knew her at Weymouth, and a fine girl she is. Call upon her, by
all means."
"There is no
necessity for my calling this morning," said the young man; "another
day would do as well; but there was that degree of acquaintance at Weymouth
which—"
"Oh! go to-day, go
to-day. Do not defer it. What is right to be done cannot be done too soon. And,
besides, I must give you a hint, Frank; any want of attention to her /here/
should be carefully avoided. You saw her with the Campbells, when she was the
equal of every body she mixed with, but here she is with a poor old grandmother,
who has barely enough to live on. If you do not call early it will be a
slight."
The son looked
convinced….”
Frank protests way too
much about needing to be convinced to go there, as we all recognize upon
rereading. Now we can see that this was not JA’s first foray into such a plot
element---it’s the same exact game being played by Mrs. Norris, both concealing
a romantically-charged liaison with a forbidden partner. With Frank, we can all
agree that JA did this on purpose, because Frank’s secret relationship with
Jane is revealed at the end of the novel. However, due to its explosiveness, JA
obviously was not going to overtly reveal that Mrs. Norris has been a lesbian
all along.
No, the same reason why I
believe JA was pressured to omit Mrs. Norris’s too-revealing admission about
always keeping a bed for a friend in the second edition of MP, is what pushes JA
to leaves this subtext about Mrs. Norris’s lesbianism to be found only by the
sharp elves who have a great deal of ingenuity themselves.
And speaking of sharp
elves, I now wonder if I should add to my growing list of praises for Nora
Ephron for her many astute Austenian subtexts in /You’ve Got Mail/, one more,
this one about NANNY Maureen being subtly revealed as a lesbian in a
quintessentially Austenian way a few
scenes before the explicit
reveal:
It appears more and more
to me that Nora Ephron was one of the sharpest elves we had in Austenworld.
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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