Mansfield Park read by Juliet Stevenson

Dear friends and readers,

After shoverdosing on the MP movies, I followed up my intermittent preparation for the Montreal JASNA AGM, topic Mansfield Park, with debating with fellow readers what should be the topic for the student essay contest. The winner was:

Consider the role of silence in Mansfield Park. Sometimes silence is chosen, sometimes it is forced, and sometimes it just happens. The number of times the narrator remarks that people say nothing is quite surprising, yet the narrator too is silent on important points. And sometimes only the narrator fills the silence on equally important points, especially about Fanny. What do we learn from the silences of Mansfield Park?

One person had objected to the over-guided nature of most of the suggestions; I suggested one can argue that through silence one can possess one’s soul wholly and apart — as Elinor Dashwood argues (in effect) to Marianne (Chapter 17, Vol 1) in one of their disputes:

My doctrine has never aimed at the subjection of the understanding. All I have ever attempted to influence has been the behaviour. You must not confound my meaning. I am guilty, I confess, of having often wished you to treat our acquaintance in general with greater attention; but when have I advised you to adopt their sentiments or conform to their judgment in serious matters?”

Elinor keeps her views even if no one agrees and she never voices or even acts on them openly. One can keep a space for peace. But equally one can argue that silence is a weak weapon, indeed one that easily can be manipulated against you as in law and custom: silence assumes consent. Lucy could easily have taken Edward Ferrars: she preferred the new (false) eldest, Robert (made so by the mother’s will). (Shades of Mary Crawford at first, when she said she knew it was her way to prefer the eldest, and then at last, when she thought Tom lay dying, so Edmund would be the heir.) Which of Austen’s heroines is pro-active on her own behalf? Maybe Jane Fairfax with her clandestine engagement? Which speaks truth to power. Elizabeth Bennet to Lady Catherine de Bourgh comes firmly to mind. But then what if you have no opportunity, but can only possess your soul — Anne Elliot’s case for 8 years?

So, is silence a effective weapon or shield in lives where (as the narrator suggests at the close of MP) we are born to struggle and endure? Or is it counterproductive?

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Silence. What is it like to be without Jim. It’s silence. And more silence. It’s he’s not here and there is no one I can turn to as any kind of replacement for the function he had in my life. Or for himself. Silence. He is not palpably absent; there is no sense of him except in my mind.

As I listen to Juliet Stevenson read aloud MP, it comes to me Austen is such a comfort because of her style and restraint. Stevenson reads the book exquisitely right. No over-reading, but not mindless or toneless. This steady graceful rhythm that enters my soul. Austere hard ironies are contained in it (strong stuff), pathos quietly conveyed (moving), and it soothes my soul because I can hold firm onto those rhythms. I manage to still my beating heart by holding to them. My rib cage doesn’t strain so. And the calm is not false for the words Austen uses are true to nature and human life.

Juliet Stevenson, a little about her

Still listening as of 11/7/13.

Ellen