The famous first line of
Mansfield Park is: “About thirty years ago Miss
Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck
to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of
Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all
the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.”
I just read, in
Deresiewicz’s 2007 Jane Austen and the
Romantic Poets, his excellent catch regarding the above opening sentence of
MP:
“ ’Captivate’, that wicked
double entendre, points to the thematics of slavery that have been so well
discussed of late in the critical literature, but it points first of all to the
fact that marriage in this world is, at least initially, a mutual enslavement,
a buying and selling of human beings on both sides.”
My only disagreement with
Deresiewicz is in his “at least initially”, as I believe that Fanny and Edmund’s
marriage is yet another in the queue of marriages and other family transactions
which are more “commerce” than love-based.
It also occurred to me to
check to see if JA revisited the wonderfully ironic pun on “captivate” elsewhere
in MP, which, as Patricia Rozema so brilliantly put it 15 years ago, is JA’s
extended meditation on servitude in human interaction, of every variation and
gradation. What I found fits very nicely with both Deresiewicz and Rozema.
First, in the second sentence
of Chapter 2 (a fitting bookend to the first sentence of Chapter 1), we read:
“Fanny Price was at this
time just ten years old, and though there might not be much in her first
appearance to captivate, there was, at least, nothing to disgust her relations.
“
I had not previously
noticed that JA has thereby subtly drawn an ironic contrast between, on the one
hand, Miss Maria Ward (aka Lady Bertram) who captivates a man who holds
hundreds of other human beings as literal captives, and, on the other hand, Fanny
Price, who cannot captivate, but must be content to avoid disgusting her
quasi-parents, including that very same captivating Miss Ward.
And then, near the end of
the novel, in Chapter 46, we read of the charismatic Henry Crawford, who
captivates the eldest daughter of the former Miss Ward, and inducing her to
commit adultery with him:
“Fanny read to herself
that "it was with infinite concern the newspaper had to announce to the
world a matrimonial fracas in the family of Mr. R. of Wimpole Street;
the beautiful Mrs. R., whose name had not long been enrolled in the lists of
Hymen, and who had promised to become so brilliant a leader in the fashionable
world, having quitted her husband's roof in company with the well-known and
captivating Mr. C., the intimate friend and associate of Mr. R., and it was not
known even to the editor of the newspaper whither they were gone."
So, bravo to William
Deresiewicz for picking up on this subtle, significant textual clue, that JA
hid in plain sight in the first sentence
of Mansfield Park, the significance
of which could only be apparent on rereading the novel, and therefore already
knowing that Sir Thomas owned a slave plantation on Antigua. So, in a real
sense, JA needed to so captivate her
readers with their first reading of MP, that they would eventually feel the
desire/need to reread it, whereupon that pun would be there at the “front door”
of the novel to admit them to a deeper reading of the text.
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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