After reading Lionel Trilling’s excellent essay insisting that Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park oughtn’t to be dismissed as her weakest novel I was inspired to visit the novel again. I must admit I had thought, along with many another critic, that of all her novels this was indeed the poorest. With Austen, of course, even her weakest novel would be gradations above the novels of so many others, but still, it simply didn’t seem to rank up there with Pride and Prejudice. Trilling shows that Austen herself started writing Mansfield Park almost before the ink was dry on the pages of her greatest novel when she thought it could have been even better — an urge that lead her to start writing what she regarded as a more balanced novel.
Whether one agrees with Trilling or not, and the argument can get a bit hairsplitting at times, a tempest in a teapot if you will, Austen points us in a direction we seem to have too long ignored. In her novels, all of them, we are forced to admit that manners are what makes the person. Character and good manners go hand-in-hand and cannot be separated from one another. Ortega y Gasset reminded us in the 1930s that “civilization is above all else the will to live in common,” and Norbert Elias, in his study of The Civilizing Process insists that civilization is nothing more and nothing less that the awareness of others and the “consideration of what others might think.” In a word, the civilizing process involves “restraint and the regulation of elementary urges.” The notion that others matter, that we have obligations to others is the common thread in what we loosely call “good manners” — as it is in all of Austen’s novels.
When a man opens a door for an elderly person, or gives up his seat on a crowded bus; when a neighbor turns down the radio or television out of consideration for others who might be disturbed; when one avoids saying what one thinks because it might hurt the feelings of the listener; when a speaker refuses to interrupt another speaker; in all these cases, we see self-restraint at work along with the “regulation of elementary urges” — good manners. Edmund Burke saw them as the stuff of morality.
Franny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, is the embodiment of good manners, the civilized person. She has been torn away from her poor family at the age of nine to live with her wealthy uncle and aunt one hundred miles away. She suffers separation anxiety in the extreme because of the sudden change and her one link to mental stability is the care and concert of her young cousin Edmund who, alone among all the other “upper crust” people she nows lives with, cares about her and shows compassion and concern for her suffering. In the eyes of her new family, except for Edmund, she resides somewhere between the servants and themselves. One of her aunts relegates her to an attic room and tells the servants not to light the fire.
As Fanny grows older and her love for Edmund deepens and her sensitivity of others around her increases — including her three other cousins and her aunts and uncle — she becomes an attractive and fascinating woman. Indeed, a “gentleman” of considerable fortune by the name of Henry Crawford sets out to make Fanny fall in love with him, purely out of boredom, only to fall helplessly in love with her himself. He makes her an offer of marriage, an offer Fanny repulses — to the distress of her relatives. She sees him as the embodiment of all that is wrong with those around her, an “uncivilized” man; she sees
“. . .a want of delicacy and regard for others. . . .a gross want of feeling and humanity where his own pleasure was concerned — And, also, has always known no principle to supply as a duty what the heart was deficient in.”
In fact, the pleasure-seeking, self-absorbed Henry Crawford is the embodiment, along with his sister Mary, of what Trilling calls “the modern type, the person who cultivates the style of sensitivity, virtue, and intelligence.” In other words, in Trilling’s view Mansfield Park is about pretense, personality in the place of character, the tendency so many have to pretend they are something they are not for lack of sound moral principles to form a solid core of self. Fanny and her cousin Edmund are, among all the characters in the novel, the only two who are genuine and honest, the only truly civilized people among a host of others who either pretend to be so or who are past caring.
And this is where a novel written in 1816 can be seen to be a commentary on our own age and culture, an age and culture in which the self and its pleasures have become the center of concern for the greater part of humanity and the Other has been lost in that preoccupation with self that sees good manners as archaic and somehow irrelevant — and who view honesty as not an obligation we have to ourselves and others but simply a matter of letting it all “hang out.” All of which places us in the category of those who in one way or another revealed themselves to Fanny Price as people who are locked within themselves, showing a lack of principles “to supply as a duty what the heart is deficient in.”
hughcurtler 
Hugh, I cannot comment on the novel, not having read it. But, I do concur that people who have character tend to have good manners as well. I do not mean good etiquette, necessarily, but a kindness to others and a willingness to listen with intent.
I would add the converse is not always true. While only a book and movie villain, there is some basis for the killer Hannibal Lecter who was so very polite. That made him even more scary.
Setting that extreme example aside, I will give someone with good manners the benefit of the doubt. Someone who starts out as a cad, likely won’t change that opinion.
Keith
The key is consideration of others. Thanks for the comment!
All ill-mannered people are uncivilized but not all uncivilized people are ill-mannered. Your example shows this. (My old days of teaching logic: the “A:” proposition cannot be converted except by limitation!!)
Spoken like a learned professor.
😊
“Hola Hugh; buenos noches.”
This is the typical greeting one receives whenever meeting anyone – on the street, in a home, wherever… if you were sitting at a table in a restaurant – or in someone’s home, the other person might say the traditional greeting and then add -‘ buen provecho.’ The men usually insist that a woman gets in the elevator first, and at times they remember to open a door… an Ecuadorian takes great pride in being courteous, and I often mention how refreshing it is to live in a culture where it’s proper respect — and if there are 30 people in the room, if one enters, he/she says hello to every single person, usually with a kiss on the cheek unless it’s a first-time meeting.
An Ecuadorian friend and I were recently discussing the topics that are addressed here; she experienced being snubbed when she was a young – and very beautifiul – university student in New York, and though she came from high lineage – amazing lineage, no one knew that – and because she was ‘Latin’ – she was immediately dismissed.. even later by inlaws… When she told me that last part, I stated, ‘well it’s their loss…’
It would be great to find this book and give it to her; i think it would give her comfort, as it appears that she was one of the few ‘ truly civilized people among a host of others who either pretend to be so or who are past caring.’
thank you for this lovely review!
I had several tennis players from Colombia and they experienced some of the same problems you mention with your friend. And they were “well brought up” as we say. Austen’s book might cheer her up. Fanny Price had a tough row to hoe and handled herself very well. Thanks for the visit!!