A Jane Austen Education (18 page)

Well, I didn’t want to treat anyone like a piece of meat anymore, and I didn’t want to be treated like one myself, not even metaphorically. But what was the alternative? It wasn’t just my friends and their glamorous crowd. I had been learning to measure myself in terms of success—academic success, professional success—for as long as I could remember, and everything in the culture around me (New York was only an extreme example) instructed me that money and status were the keys to happiness.

So I kept thinking about that word, “nothing.” Who, after all, was “nothing” if not Fanny Price—“lowest and last,” as her awful Aunt Norris reminded her. Forget Catherine Morland in
Northanger Abbey
: if anyone didn’t seem like she was born to be a heroine, it was Fanny. And yet that was exactly what Austen had made her. Indeed, more than Catherine or Emma or Elizabeth Bennet, she was a heroine in the oldest sense—not just a protagonist but a role model, someone we were being asked, however improbably, to emulate. Her very insignificance, I now saw, was designed to provoke us into trying to figure out what her creator found so admirable about her.

Fanny, I realized, was not just different from the privileged people around her; she was their exact opposite. They had everything and wanted more; she had little and was willing to make do with less. Instead of responding to adversity with petulance and spite, she handled it with fortitude, resilience, and, when necessary, resignation. She had hated having to leave her family and come to Mansfield when she was a little girl, but “learning to transfer in its favour much of her attachment to her former home,” she “grew up there not unhappily among her cousins.” “Learning” was interesting: she had to teach herself to do it, it didn’t just happen by itself. “Not unhappily” was even more interesting. She wasn’t happy, and given the circumstances, she didn’t look like she was ever going to be, but by accepting the situation and making the best of it, she managed at least to avoid being unhappy—which was more than you could say for most of her cousins, most of the time.

Whereas Henry and the rest, always able to command amusement, were constantly dogged by the threat of boredom, Fanny had created a rich inner life for herself. The East room, her little space upstairs, was like a diorama of her mind, a place where she could always find “some pursuit, or some train of thought. . . . Her plants, her books, . . . her writing-desk, . . . her works of charity and ingenuity.” She was quiet and shy, yes, but she had a lot going on beneath the surface. For that was the big surprise about her, one that it took me a very long time to see. Mary, lovely and charming, was far better able to
incite
emotions, but Fanny felt them much more keenly. She may have been prudish and prim, but she was also, of all things, intensely passionate.

Shame, gratitude, terror, happiness, jealousy, love: her emotions were not always pleasant, but she felt them with her whole body. “Fanny’s feelings on the occasion were such as she believed herself incapable of expressing; but her countenance and a few artless words fully conveyed all their gratitude and delight.” “He saw her lips formed into a
no,
though the sound was inarticulate, but her face was like scarlet.” Life was simply much more real to her than it was to Mary or Henry or Tom or Maria. Its risks were more threatening, its pleasures more precious. One of Austen’s highest lessons, I realized, is that the only people who can really feel are those who have a sense of what it means to do without.

 

 

Which was not an endorsement of poverty, either. The glimpse we got of Fanny’s original family made it quite clear that Austen was not foolish enough to romanticize deprivation. The Price household was loud, chaotic, and dirty, with no more consideration for other people’s feelings than prevailed at Mansfield itself. Austen’s point was subtler. Being a valuable person—a “something” rather than a “nothing”—means having consideration for the people around you. Too much money renders that unnecessary; too little makes it very difficult. Fanny was a heroine, finally, because she was able to put herself aside for other people.

One of the novel’s most important words was “exertion” (meaning exertion on behalf of others), and another one was “duty”—two concepts we don’t hear very much about anymore, in this age of do-your-own-thing and every-man-for-himself. Fanny exerted herself for Lady Bertram and Mrs. Norris all the time—patiently, uncomplainingly—but she also coached Maria’s dull-witted fiancé when he was trying to learn his lines for the play (even though she frowned upon the project) and, a far more painful sacrifice, swallowed her feelings to help Edmund rehearse his scenes with the dreaded Mary.

As for “duty,” the word connected the obligations that Fanny understood herself to have as a niece, cousin, and friend with the responsibilities that Edmund looked forward to assuming as a clergyman and that William embraced as a naval officer—exactly the ideal of selfless conduct that Austen saw among the professional men in her own family (her clergyman father, her sailor brothers). The Crawfords, of course, had a different and more modern interpretation of the concept. “It is everybody’s duty,” Mary said, “to do as well for themselves as they can.”

But the novel’s most important word of all was “useful.” “It is not in fine preaching only,” Edmund told Mary, “that a good clergyman will be useful in his parish.” Henry had sense enough to put “usefulness” next to “heroism” (the “glory” of usefulness, no less) in his admiration of William Price. Lady Bertram, not surprisingly—it was the worst thing that Austen could say about her—“never thought of being useful to anybody.”

I resisted accepting this, for a long time, as a standard of behavior. It seemed so, well, utilitarian—so petty and practical. Is that the best we could do for one another, be “useful”? What about support and compassion and love? But eventually I started to see the point. Usefulness—seeing what people need and helping them get it—
is
support and compassion. Loving your friends and family is great, but what does it mean if you aren’t actually willing to
do
anything for them when they really need you, put yourself out in any way? Love, I saw, is a verb, not just a noun—an effort, not just another precious feeling.

 

 

Because Fanny had to work hard, set aside her feelings, and sacrifice herself for others—to be, in a word, useful—only she possessed the moral strength to rise to the challenge when circumstances arrived—it was the climax of the novel—that put everyone to the test. As for the others (always excepting her cousin Edmund), their money had given them too much freedom. They had never had to make the kinds of tough choices that build character, and in the crunch they were, precisely, useless.

Such circumstances, Austen knew, will always eventually arrive. They came for her own family when the wife of that same wealthy brother Edward died a few days after giving birth to their eleventh child. The oldest, Fanny Knight, her favorite niece, was still only fifteen. “Edward’s loss is terrible,” Austen wrote her sister Cassandra, who had gone once more to Godmersham for the lying-in,

What Austen recommended to us, she urged upon her nearest and dearest, too. Love means effort and self-control—for the sake of others, and thus, ultimately, for your own:

And so it proved to be. Writing to Cassandra a few months later—her sister was still at Godmersham, being useful herself, while Austen cared for Edward’s oldest boys, who had been away at school when their mother died—she was able to say this:

Duty, exertion, resignation, and ultimately, happiness: the same ideas that Austen would later embody in the story of that other Fanny, the one she created and sent to a place that looked a lot like Godmersham Park.

But there was one last form of usefulness (though I never would have thought of it that way) that Austen was keen to teach—so much so that she put it right up front, at the very start of the novel. The ten-year-old heroine had been at Mansfield for a week, sobbing herself to sleep every night, when her cousin Edmund, six years her senior, came upon her in tears on the attic stairs. “And sitting down by her, he was at great pains to overcome her shame, . . . and persuade her to speak openly.” She missed her family, he soon perceived, and so he said, “Let us walk out in the park, and you shall tell me all about your brothers and sisters.” And that was enough to win him a friend for life, the simple act of inviting Fanny to tell her story. No one else had thought to do it; no one else had thought about her at all.

How different this was, I realized, from the kinds of stories I had trained myself to tell my friend and his wife, those polished little anecdotes that had to have a laugh at every turn. “You shall tell me all about your brothers and sisters.”
All
about: no impatience, no competitiveness, no interruptions, no need to worry about being entertaining, no having to watch your listeners’ eyes glaze over while they thought about what they were going to say when you finally stopped talking already. Did Edmund really care about her brothers and sisters? Probably not. But he cared about her, and she cared about them, and that was enough for him. To listen to a person’s stories, he understood, is to learn their feelings and experiences and values and habits of mind, and to learn them all at once and all together. Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else’s stories—entering into their feelings, validating their experiences—is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness.

 

 

There’s no doubt about it: fun people are fun. But I finally learned that there is something more important, in the people you know, than whether they are fun. Thinking about those friends who had given me so much pleasure but who had also caused me so much pain, thinking about that bright, cruel world to which they’d introduced me, I saw that there’s a better way to value people. Not as fun or not fun, or stylish or not stylish, but as warm or cold, generous or selfish. People who think about others and people who don’t. People who know how to listen, and people who only know how to talk.

I could drift away from the private-school crowd—which, now that I had gotten my head screwed on a little straighter, is exactly what I did—I could leave New York altogether, as I knew I might someday have to do, but these lessons, I realized, would always apply. Few of us travel in the kinds of upper-class circles of which I’d had a glimpse, but we all live in a world where money and status and celebrity are cherished too highly, and we’re all susceptible to the temptation to value people for things like wealth and glamour and success—to value ourselves for them, and sacrifice what’s really important in order to get them.

The truth is, I never did grow to like Fanny Price, and I never could bring myself to dislike the Crawfords as much as I knew I should. By the same token, I didn’t find it easy to spend less time with my friend and his wife. Fun is fun, and charm is charming, and we can’t really prevent ourselves from feeling drawn to them. But the lesson of
Northanger Abbey
still applied: “Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves.” Thinking can’t stop us from feeling, but it can stop us from acting. It can prevent us from being taken in by our feelings.

I wasn’t even sure that
Austen
expected us to like Fanny Price. She knew quite well that Fanny would be tough to love, but she wanted to draw the contrast with people like the Crawfords in the starkest possible terms. By not giving her heroine any kind of wit or charm to distract us, she forced us to focus on the things that really mattered about her. Elizabeth Bennet also had a generous heart, was also capable of being thoughtful and selfless, but with her glorious lovability, who even bothered to notice? Reading about her, it was all too easy to imagine that Austen only cared about sparkle and wit.

That was why she had to make her heroine in
Mansfield Park
so dull. This time, she took Elizabeth and split her personality in half: Mary got the charm, Fanny got the goodness, and we had to decide which one was better. Austen wasn’t really condemning brightness and energy, I realized; she was just showing us that they aren’t the most important things in life. “Wisdom is better than Wit,” she wrote to Fanny Knight the very year that
Mansfield Park
was published, “& in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.” Choosing Fannyness over Mary-ness does not come naturally and is not always particularly pleasant, but, Austen was telling us, it is what we need to do.

And so, it is what I began to try to do. I knew perfectly well that I fell far short of the standards that Austen was holding up, so I started to watch myself, and I started, yes, to exert myself. I made a deliberate effort to be useful to the people around me, whether it was something small, like showing up on time for dinner, or something bigger, like proofreading a friend’s dissertation. Most of all, I practiced sitting still and listening—really listening. To friends, to students, even just to people I met, as their stories came stumbling out in the awkward, unpolished way that people have when you give them the freedom to speak from the heart. People’s stories are the most personal thing they have, and paying attention to those stories is just about the most important thing you can do for them. I never did come to like Fanny’s story, but that’s the deepest lesson that finally listening to it had taught me.