Fanny’s first sight of Mansfield Park (1983 BBC MP)
Scenes must be beautiful which daily viewed
Please daily, and whose novelty survives
Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years:
Praise justly due to those that I describe.
— Wm Cowper as quoted in the 1983 MP
Dear friends and readers,
It’s been more than a month since I attended the yearly JASNA AGM at Montreal, which this year focused on Mansfield Park as 200 years ago it was first published. I’ve blogged on my and Yvette’s experience of the conference itself, and the Burney conference and its papers; I’ve yet to offer some summaries and comments on the lectures and papers I heard on Austen and MP. As with my reports on the Burney papers, I will be in most cases offering the gist of what was said.
Rozema substitutes the narrator of the Juvenilia as Fanny (Francis O’Connor dreaming over satiric writing in 1990 Rozema MP)
For Yvette and I this part of the conference began on Thursday at 9 pm when Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield offered some thoughts on the “Fanny Wars:” this phrase is understood to refer to an assumed hostility to Fanny Price which flared up on the Internet when Austen-l was founded after the airing of the 1995 Pride and Prejudice which exponentially expanded the membership of this, other listservs and eventually blog-rings as well as JASNA itself. They and all others from here on in are hampered because the archives from Austen-l from the years 1994-1998 have vanished due to technological obsolence. I once told the history of those years (on a Burney page where I tell of how a group of us fared trying to read and discuss Cecilia), but of course what one wants is to read the actual postings. Surprisingly (to me they found a dislike of Fanny Price as a character, type, or personality (hard to say which) goes back to the earliest comments on the novel (gathered by Austen herself) at the same time as voiced admiration for the character (Whateley, 1821). Basically they offered a brief survey of criticism of Mansfield Park. I was disappointed because they did not bring out how Speaking About Jane Austen was the first published criticism to bring out into the discussably open how the average non-professional and woman fan reacted to Austen’s books: it’s here you find the first vehement rhetoric rejecting any identification with Fanny Price. Unsurprisingly (but registering this discomfort with this character and also book) they found radio and film productions have been influenced by the perceived popular dislike of this heroine.
At 1:30 pm on Friday the AGM proper began with the opening plenary lecture: Robert Miles, “Mansfield Park and the News.” Prof Miles is known for his admirable and ground-breaking work on Ann Radcliffe and the gothic. Prof Miles began by defining news as including gossip, particularly of the type found in lurid newspaper stories of the era. His talk consisted of regaling the assembly with stories of violence (executions and deaths from all sorts of causes), hanging of women for infanticide and men for sodomy, melodramatic elopements, heroic and disruptive incidents at sea and during wear and other catastrophes, gambling, executions for and the murdering of slaves (this enabled him to include stories of Antigua), local squalid internecine family preying on one another. His point seemed to be that this is the background crowding into Mansfield Park.
Gillray’s typical caricature propaganda: Slippy Weather outside a print shop
I did get up and objected. First, I praised his book on Ann Radcliffe, but then suggested there were two problems in his talk: the first, he took the stories he told at face value: told them as if this reporting was of what really occurred when quite a number seemed to be exaggerated re-tellings of what was supposed to be the truth (it’s been shown that the accusation of infanticide was often deeply unjust); second, if this is the feel of much of this material, we cannot know how Austen felt about what she read in such newspapers, which in any case are kept at the margins of the novel, whether it be vague references on the part of Tom Bertram asking Grant what he thinks about the trouble in the US, or Fanny asking a question we never hear nor its answer, or Mr Price reading about the Rushworth-Crawford scandal at Portsmouth. It is true that some of this material seeps into Austen’s letters where she is gleeful about scandals she occasionally glimpses in the appearance of people at assemblies, but Prof Miles made no reference to those places in Austen’s writing where we can try to glean what was her attitude through the jeering satire. In fact he turned away and didn’t answer my objections. Arnie Perlstein also spoke: it was to support Prof Miles and say all this material was deeply relevant to the subtext of Mansfield Park. I can’t remember a third person talking.
There were then two break-out sessions. Maria Sorbo’s talk on the Mansfield Park heritage films (she excluded any consideration of Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan) was of real interest to me as I have been working on a book and written extensively on the Jane Austen film canon. She approached the 3 films from the point of view of how the film-makers “read” Austen’s novel which she regards as a “rich, intricate and provocative” book treating courtship and love ironically. She argued that the 1983 BBC MP often described as “faithful” is deeply unfaithful (because of the serious earnestness with which the film invests the book’s themes); the 2007 MP has a miscast central star (Billie Piper whom she described as “sullen”), which while it shows how Fanny is marginalized and makes Mary Crawford a witty heroine remains inert. Her talk was designed to show that Rozema’s 1999 MP came closest to replicating Austen’s distruptive (of sentimentality), playful and quizzical tones; the lens is that of the confident and assertive Juvenilia. Prof Sorbo’s analysis of the ironic and sceptical outlook of the book brought out why it is so relevant today.
Rozema’s comical close of self-absorbed characters who by chance end up the way they do, with the happy rewarded couple walking off to their parsonage (1990 MP)
While I felt she made a strong case for the brilliance and subtlety of the use of film by Rozema, as in the incident of the release of the doves, the unadmitted to (by her) departures from Austen in the whole of the Portsmouth sequence, nevertheless she was unfair to the 1983 film when she suggested that its Fanny was silent. I spoke and protested that the over-voice throughout was Sylvestre le Tousel’s, that it made a genuine attempt to capture the epistolary and subjective consciousness of the novel, and that filmically the 2007 MP became a work of art (however truncated) in its own right against artifice. (She didn’t appreciate this at all, and snubbed me in the elevator; she wanted no criticism but vague praise and didn’t mind stupidity as when one person pointed out that Sylvestre Le Tousel is so pretty.)
What was most ironic telling in the experience, and happened in a number of the break-out sessions I attended was the audience reaction to all she said and her clips. These were mainly from the 1999 Rozema film, including the sequence showing Maria and Crawford caught in bed by Edmund, and the painfully vile sexual exploitation of women slaves in the drawings by Tom of what he saw in Antigua. It was as if she had not spoken at all. She might as well not have stood there. I saw this in other sessions where the presenter really did talk of MP (many people did not) in insightful and unconventional ways. The majority of Sorbo’s audience (no more scholars of film than literary texts) remained adamant in their dislike of Rozema’s film. There was an utter disjunction between this scholar’s approach to Austen and film and the fan understanding (I sensed they hated especially those she chose, the sexualized clips from Rozema’s MP). Sorbo’s published book, Irony and Idyll: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park on screen uses the same criteria as her talk offers an informed history of a selection of the film adaptations of these films (for P&P she does only the 1940, 1980, 1995 and 2005 films) while looking to see how her and other scholar’s reading of Austen’s 2 books is captured in these chosen films. She actually avoids all appropriations and anything not a heritage film.
For the second break-out session I attended Sarah Parry’s “‘Did you not hear me ask him about the slave trade last night: Looking for Clues in Real Houses Which Point to the Wealth and and Lifestyle of the Pictorial Mansfield Park.” Ms Parry took the audience through a journey of slides showing us a series of great country houses in England whose size, lifestyle, and source of wealth make them good surrogates for the house at the center of Austen’s book. When the owning family’s source of wealth for house after house is examined she found war profiteering, slavery, corrupt politicking, enclosures (whole villages erased or moved), Nabob and Barbados colonialist practices (including the occasional massacre) as what “made it all possible.” I couldn’t begin to take down the caterpillar (her word at one point) details. I assume (hope) the ironical information and pictures she provided will be published in the coming Persuasions on the conference. I find especially entertaining those passages she quoted which showed that what today is seen as “timeless elegance” in a mansion and landscape was in Austen’s time seen as vulgar, pretentious (a family trying to make up for not having a long upper class genealogy). She mentioned how when websites on line about such houses try to tell the truth about their pasts, some tourists protest. This reminded me of what I saw in the self-repression of the MOOC I watched on the Literature of the Country House. Afterward she was at the Chawton Library table (she is a member of their staff) and I congratulated her on the nature of her talk and mentioned how a course on country houses never mentioned the source of these houses’ wealth, their actual economic basis and working. She said such sites when they told such truths got vociferous mail demanding such truths not to be told as it “spoilt” the enjoyment. At Winterthur Museum similarly no one tells important truths or even admits what is the nature of the Downton Abbey exhibit or some of their others.
It was then 5:30 and the sessions for the day were unfortunately over. There had been no less than 8 sessions on at one time during this 2 hours and 15 minute period — an absurdity for those who would have liked to hear more of what was seriously on offer at the conference. (I am far from alone in this frustration.) The morning had been given over to tours, a dance workshop (for those few lucky enough to get in); since I had been at the Burney conference I had had to miss Marcia Folsom’s Teaching Mansfield Park. At around 6 I and Izzy filled with period called ” dinner on your own” with an enjoyable meal with a friend and the people who had judged the essay contest (though the restaurant like so many nowadays was so noisy we could hardly hear ourselves speak). At 8 there was the one-hour play, A Dangerous Intimacy: Behind the Scenes at Mansfield Park, by Diana Birchall and Syrie James and then for a second hour the glee singing (which I have described as lovely in my account of the social activities of the conference).
Saturday though was the one full day of the conference and I include the second plenary talk of the conference which occurred from 9-10:20 am, Lynn Festa’s “The Noise in Mansfield Park” here, so as to keep this report of the conference talks to two blogs (my next will cover 4 break-out sessions plus an account of what Izzy remembered of what she had heard and enjoyed).
Quiet star-gazing by Billie Piper as Fanny and Blake Ritson as Edmund (2007 MP, scripted Maggie Wadey)
Prof Festa’s lecture was a rich and stimulating display of an post-colonial, feminist and subtle psychological reading performed by a an intelligent mind engaging with the text at a close reading level. She began by saying it may seem perverse to discuss MP featuring a quiet unobtrusive heroine in terms of noise: Fanny is a quiet, gentle, timid character whose sharp observant mind throbs with emotion, and Mansfield Park quiet and peaceful [under the governance of Sir Thomas] though Mrs Norris, Lovers’ Vows and Portsmouth provide dissonance. Prof Festa suggested Austen wants us to listen to the kinds of noise we hear: soft fretful tones of Lady Bertram, strident cadences from Mrs Norris; Maria does not want to hear the noise of the cottage or church bells (everyone has her taste in noise); slamming doors and hallooing in Mrs Price’s hallways and stairs shows how power is seen when someone can control noise (Fanny is grateful when Sir Thomas stops Mrs Norris from discussing Henry’s proposal to her) and for those can speak freely (no Austen heroine has the right to speak freely). Mansfield Park lacks a language in which to discuss issues among themselves and listening itself is underrated: Fanny looks upon the voices of the Crawford as what she wants not to hear; her silence ignored by most but to some she speaks volumes with it. the rewards and punishments of the novel measure the characters: Mary is not evil but flawed because she does not control what she says and her understanding of what she is told and her wit superficial (so she ends up frustrated but at peace with her widowed sister); a harsh condemnatory language is used by Fanny of her mother; she speaks out of embittered disappointment and escapes back to Mansfield Park whose oppressions she never acknowledges. That hole in Fanny’s heart was put there when she was brought to MP and brought up displaced and marginalized and abused which Henry Crawford does recognize. Prof Festa seemed to have heard and been using Prof McMaster’s talk when she mentioned that Fanny was a proxy child for Mrs Norris, and suggested the terror Fanny feels at the approach of Sir Thomas’s footsteps an index of the brutality Fanny fears from powerful people.
Aubrey Rouget (Fanny, Carolyn Farina) and Tom Townsend (Edmund, Edward Clemens) discussing Trilling’s dislike of MP (1990 Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan)
The blurb about the conference apologized for Mansfield Park as a book a lot of readers of Austen don’t like. If this is true, all 5 talks thoroughly countered this dislike by demonstrating that the speakers’ at least found it in all the insight, drama, fraught trauma and comedy and satire, and depiction of levels of society and attached exploited worlds found in any great Victorian novel.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
It’s always driven me nuts how so many Janeites are on a bandwagon of knee-jerkily hating Rozema’s film because “it’s not Mansfield Park.” It’s a brilliant exploratory riff on MP, and why is that not as acceptable as yet another so-called faithful retelling, or a really loathsome riff like the Zombies? I always thought Rozema’s film was thoughtful and ground-breaking.
What was amusing (ironic, telling somehow) that most of the people sat there without being influenced at all by what was being said. What were they sitting there for then? Did any thoughts go through their heads? if so, what? Hardly anyone said anything: one man defended Sylvestre Le Tousel as “pretty” as if that somehow obviated all the criticism of the 1983 film.
Sorbo gave a the long presentation (well-argued) for the 1999 movie. I debated with her, which she didn’t much like (and afterwards snubbed me in an elevator) because in effect I was saying she was not looking at these films as works of art in their own right, to which she made the sudden seemingly unanswerable reply that she’s not a film scholar, somehow suggesting that it’s so hard to analyze a film as film and one needed special training.
Nonsense. It was clear that was what she had been doing (a filmic analysis, there’s nothing mysterious about it), only hers was n the service of her idea of what it was to be faithful to Austen’s Mansfield Park (which took up some of the first half of her presentation, her analysis of the book). She said she was looking at the films to find out about Mansfield Park; her analysis used them to bolster her reading of MP. The value of the presentation was the usual one when people go about to see if a film was faithful: comparative. By comparing you can find things out about the book, but she didn’t want to find things out about the film unless she liked its take on the book. I forced her to admit that the Fanny character was not marginalized in the 1983 film because she narrated so much of it, it became an epistolary film. It was interesting to me (revealing) that Sorbo knew that but had not wanted to say it.
So she was as stubborn about her views as her audience about theirs. She could hear me even if she didn’t like being brought up with a frank description of what she had done; she was herself repressing positive ideas about the 1983 film. In fact its tone and outlook is also in Mansfield Park, and Mansfield Park thematically is against artifice and for the natural world (the 2007 them). Her audience on the other hand, showed no evidence that they had heard her, appeared to take in nothing.
This was not the only break-out session where I saw this utter disjunction between audience and speaker.
I wondered what the big audience had thought of Miles’s plenary speech. Did they listen? someone told me later the reason he didn’t answer my observation that he might find some evidence for his contention Austen knew these lurid stories in the letters because it seemed to her he had not read the letters. Or if he had it was a long time ago. He said precious little about Mansfield Park itself. My guess is his talk came out of research he was doing in this period with some other aim than MP and Jane Austen.
How weird. She doesn’t sound too intelligent. I didn’t hear either of those talks, just as well methinks. By the way, Paul is sick, we suspect appendicitis and are taking him to the doctor in the morning.
No she was intelligent and perceptive; she didn’t want to admit aloud what she was doing because she knows that new breed of film scholars do not use faithfulness as a criteria.
I’m sorry to hear about Paul. I’m sure you’ll rush him to the doctor; it could be whole host of other things.
I have observed this disjuncture here too. We get academics who give excellent presentations, but there is a minority of British fans who are not open to anything other than a rather sexless, goody goody Jane. Some seem even uncomfortable with JA’s wit. They actually seem more interested in the dresses, bonnets and so on. Fortunately, they are a very small minority in our local branch. I was looking for “Talking about Jane Austen” but cannot find it on eBay or Amazon, nor Abebooks. Maybe it was published under a different title here. Could you let me know the author, Ellen?
Clare
What puzzles me is what goes through their minds as they sit there. Do they just somehow tune out and keep their own narrow thoughts and resentful feelings turned on full? I saw looks of disgust as Sorbo was playing the clips from the 1999 MP — and also the 2007 MP. The only one they looked complacent about was the 1983 MP, partly why Sorbo must hate it. (So the man gets up and insists Le Tousel is pretty as among the dumb talk about this MP is the accusation she’s homely. So what? What does that have to do with the quality of the film?) It’s not the fault of the 1983 MP that morons have attributed to it a meaning it doesn’t have: its Fanny is traumatized; it’s a deeply uneasy mini-series; the man who wrote it, Ken Taylor, wrote The Jewel in the Crown.
Everywhere identity and group politics; the professor doing it too. How dare I question her was her response to me. A “friend” doesn’t question a friend so I must be an enemy and to be snubbed. After all I don’t have a book on Austen published, or a rank.
The authors of Speaking of Jane Austen are Sheila Kaye-Smith and G.B. Stern, novelists of the 30s. They are the first to write of Jane Austen from a woman readers’ point of view. They were despised by Edmund Wilson and I see they have no prestige still. In the UK the title was Talking of Jane Austen. There was also a second book by them, also with two titles.
Most interesting. I was interested in the comments of the speaker who said that mail comes in protesting an experience being ruined if the truth is told about a country house. As I have mentioned before, years ago a neighbor of mine was outraged when she took her 3 yo daughter to Mt. Vernon and the tour guides mentioned that Washington owned slaved. As with the Rozema movie, which I find flawed but quite interesting on a number of levels, I often wonder what people are thinking. People apparently would prefer a canned experience, a predetermined narrative, to the truth: these houses are Disneyland.
I guess I should not ask, Why do they sit there, but apply what must be their irritation at such sessions to why so little time in a full week is given over to papers, lectures and sessions.
While JASNA officially begins Friday at 1 pm with the first plenary lecture (in the event Miles’s who showed no interest in the text of MP whatsoever), JASNA members start arriving on Tuesday and take their tours on Wednesday through Friday morning (Izzy did enjoy the one she went on — seeing the gardens and house she saw but said there was not enough time to learn anything even if she was lucky and had a rare guide who gave a historical talk): these tours resume on Sunday morning and some even on Monday. This year Sunday morning did have a lecture (by a man said to be a relative some distance away from Austen, but it was on naval history and I would have liked to have heard it), but at the last minute it was delayed to later in the morning and Izzy and I were afraid we’d miss our plane. This was done to “let people sleep” after the rigors of the ball (it ended at 11:30 pm) and allow for another of these breakfasts. Then the rest of Sunday was teas and a church service (creeping into the supposedly neutral public space).
The hotel was very expensive and there was no public lobby to sit in easily unless you count the bar where you were expected to buy drinks or food. Downstairs these gift shops.
To make a clear case: the fans’ distaste and limited toleration for the lectures (at a gut level) is allowed to trump time for scholarship on Austen. You could easily have 5 break-out sessions (or 4) instead of 8. JASNA could begin on Friday morning by 9; that would not increase the hotel fee as people could come in on Thursday. You could have real lectures continue to 6. You could begin early on Sunday morning and have sessions end at 1. As check-out time is noon, that would not cost the people staying at hotels more money. There would still be oodles of time for tours, Tues/Wed/the rest of Sunday/Monday. People could go on tours instead of going to lectures. There are too few dance workshops for the numbers of people there: Izzy did not have the good time at the ball she should have because she had forgotten the patterns she learned at the Jane Austen Summer Program (where there was enough space allotted for all those coming to join in). (There is also intense social pressure to dress up in 18th century dress at that ball and she hadn’t — you really need to make a dress or have one made or you look awful; and you need a corset.) As I say, I am not the only frustrated scholarly type there but those with some power can make no headway towards change.
I should qualify and say there were lectures and talks the JASNA fan types did enjoy: the one on the houses generally (lots of slides), the night of the ball there was a more innocuous one in another room (slides of elite gardens and pretty English landscapes), one on clergymen and religion, and some of the talks going over the characters, comparing them to characters in other novels, connecting Austen to elite naval patriotic history and so on. Lynn Festa’s got interested questions as did Juliet McMasters: again on the psychology of the characters, in the case of Festa some attacking Mrs Price (for her dress, the noise in the house) or expressing discomfort that Fanny could attack her mother in this disrespectful way. The questioners on Friday (when there was time) couldn’t seem to find a way “in” to question McMasters’s matter: it was cleverly done; nothing was said about the really interesting explanation for why Mrs Norris so hated Fanny.