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Jane Austen

Notes

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9 views3 pages

Jane Austen

Notes

Uploaded by

sreeragam2022a
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Jane Austen’s concept of ideal marriage in the novel

Mansfield Park

Like other Jane Austen novels, Mansfield Parks observes—and scathingly


satirizes—the fickle hearts and courtship rituals of members of England’s
genteel class as they fall in and out of love. Like so many other novels of its
day, Mansfield Park organizes itself around a marriage plot, meaning that
the action of the story drives toward a wedding as the plot’s culmination
and fulfillment. The book’s characters talk about marriage obsessively, and
as they do, they repeatedly articulate a view of marriage as, ideally, a love
match. For example, Sir Thomas worries about Maria’s loveless engagement
to Mr. Rushworth, and Edmund tells Fanny that she should only marry for
love as Henry courts her.
Marriage, moreover, seems to be the only socially acceptable form that love
is allowed to take—extramarital affairs are roundly condemned in the book.
Most notably, the characters express unanimous horror after Maria and
Henry disappear together to pursue their adulterous affair. Mary even
suggests that Maria and Henry’s affair must end in a marriage, because
otherwise there would be no saving them from total social disgrace.
But despite the characters’ professed commitment to marital love-matches,
marriage in practice throughout the book serves primarily as a means for
economic or social advancement, not emotional fulfillment. For instance,
Austen shows the reader the transactional nature of marriage through the
Bertrams’ open acknowledgement and acceptance that Maria married Mr.
Rushworth for material comfort and social influence rather than love.
Likewise, Fanny’s family enthusiastically encourages her to marry Henry
Crawford because the match is socially and financially advantageous,
despite the fact that Fanny repeatedly states that she does not love Henry.
Meanwhile, Mary Crawford outright refuses to marry Edmund, despite her
love for him, because she sees the marriage as being neither economically
nor socially beneficial. So while Austen’s characters obsessively idealize
marriage as a deep intimate connection between two lovers, in practice they
carry out marriage primarily as an economic transaction.
The characters’ insistence on financially advantageous marriages makes
their veneration of marriage bitterly ironic. The characters profess to
Cherish marriage as an institution, but they constantly degrade it by making
it merely an instrument for achieving material, as opposed to emotional,
comfort. That, in turn, renders the entire novel profoundly ironic, since the
novel orbits around an institution that has clearly been hollowed out of any
emotional or spiritual meaning. In a further irony, despite the novel’s
commitment to a story that centers around marriage, and despite the
characters’ insistence upon marriage as the only acceptable format for love,
Austen gives the reader virtually no positive portraits of married life in
Mansfield Park. Examples of messy marriages, on the other hand, are
plentiful. Despite the fact that Maria married for money, Maria’s marriage
to Mr. Rushworth is a disaster and, ironically, leaves her as a social outcast
with a meager budget courtesy of her father.
Marriage seems to be particularly devastating for Austen’s female
characters, even those who married “well.” Mrs. Grant, for example, is
made miserable by her husband’s demanding expectations of her role as a
housekeeper. Even Lady Bertram, whose marriage to Sir Thomas is not
explicitly described as negative, suffers from such a profound sense of
apathy in her marriage that she, devoid of any personality or passion, rarely
leaves her couch.
Austen’s cynicism towards marriage, palpable in her depiction of marriage
as a financial transaction, paired with her many portraits of unhappy
marriages and their negative effects on women, ultimately renders the
book’s “happy ending” somewhat sour. Even the marriages that are
purportedly love-matches end poorly, like Mrs. Price’s marriage to Mr. Price,
which produces a domestic life that is hectic, financially strained, and
haunted by Mr. Price’s alcoholism. Even Edmund and Fanny’s marriage,
supposedly a perfect match, and seemingly the desired ending to the book,

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is somewhat tainted. Edmund’s quick change of affection from Mary
Crawford towards Fanny comes across as sudden and, as a result, unfulfilling
and unconvincing. Likewise, though the narrator tells the reader that their
marriage is happy, the book ends without showing any evidence of marital
bliss. Both Fanny and the reader get what they are looking for, but Fanny’s
nuptial success seems like far less of a triumph when put in context of dark
view of marriage portrayed in the rest of the book. By making Fanny
victorious in winning Edmund’s hand in marriage, but also showing how that
accomplishment might not actually be such a happy one, Austen
sardonically implies that the marriage plot, when carried out to its inevitable
conclusion, is fundamentally unsatisfying because the institution of marriage
itself is toxic.

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