Copyright holder: Tyndale University, 3377 Bayview Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M2M 3S4 Att.: Library Director, J. William Horsey Library Copyright: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. Copyright license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License Citation: Duquette, Natasha. “’A Very Pretty Amber Cross’: Material Sources of Elegance in Mansfield Park,” in Art and Artifact in Austen, edited by Anna Battigelli, pages 146-164. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. ***** Begin Content ****** TYNDALE UNIVERSITY 3377 Bayview Avenue Toronto, ON M2M 3S4 TEL: 416.226.6620 www.tyndale.ca Note: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. Duquette, Natasha. “’A Very Pretty Amber Cross’: Material Sources of Elegance in Mansfield Park,” in Art and Artifact in Austen, edited by Anna Batigelli, pages 146-164. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. [ Citation Page ] Art and Artifact in Austen Edited by ANNA BATTIGELLI University of Delaware Press NEWARK DISTRIBUTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS [ Title Page ] University of Delaware Press © 2020 by Anna Battigelli All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First published 2020 978-1-64453-174-7 (cloth) 978-1-64453-175-4 (paper) 978-1-64453-176-1 (e-book) 987654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title. Cover art: Cassandra Austen, portrait of Fanny Knight, 1808, watercolor on paper. (Jane Austens House Museum, Chawton, UK) [ Title Page Verso ] Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations xi Introduction: The Intimate Ironies of Jane Austen’s Arts and Artifacts 1 Portraiture as Misrepresentation in the Novels and Early Writings of Jane Austen 24 PETER SABOR Jane Austen’s “Artless” Heroines: Catherine Morland and Fanny Price 44 ELAINE BANDER Legal Arts and Artifacts in Jane Austen’s Persuasion 61 NANCY E. JOHNSON Jane Austen and the Theater? Perhaps Not So Much 76 DEBORAH C. PAYNE Everything Is Beautiful: Jane Austen at the Ballet 93 CHERYL A. WILSON Jane Austen, Marginalia, and Book Culture 109 MARILYN FRANCUS Gender and Things in Austen and Pope 126 BARBARA M. BENEDICT “A Very Pretty Amber Cross”: Material Sources of Elegance in Mansfield Park 146 NATASHA DUQUETTE Religious Views: English Abbeys in Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Emma 165 TONYA J. MOUTRAY [ Page v ] Intimate Portraiture and the Accomplished Woman Artist in Emma 189 JULIETTE WELLS “Is She Musical?” Players and Nonplayers in Austen’s Fiction” 206 LINDA ZIONKOWSKI AND MIRIAM HART What Jane Saw—in Henrietta Street 224 JOCELYN HARRIS Bibliography 239 Contributors 257 Index 261 [ Page ] vi Illustrations 1. Cassandra Austen, copy of an engraving of George Morland’s Pedlars, 1808 25 2. Cassandra Austen, portrait of Fanny Knight, 1808 26 3. Cassandra Austen, Edward IV, in Jane Austen, “The History of England,” 1791 28 4. Henry Bunbury, Recruits, 1780 29 5. Cassandra Austen, Henry V, in Jane Austen, “The History of England,” 1791 30 6. J. M. W. Turner, Fishing Boats Entering Calais Harbour, 1803 39 7. Jane Austens inscription of Vicesimus Knox, Elegant Extracts (ca. 1782-83) 111 8. Jane Austens marginalia in “The Character of Mary Queen of Scots,” in Vicesimus Knox, Elegant Extracts (ca. 1782-83) 112 9. Jane Austens marginalia in “The Character of Queen Elizabeth,” in Vicesimus Knox, Elegant Extracts (ca. 1782-83) 113 10. Jane Austen’s marginalia in “The Character of Mary Queen of Scots,” in Vicesimus Knox, Elegant Extracts (ca. 1782-83) 114 11. Marginalia in Mary Brunton, Self-Control (1811) 118 12. Remnant of cut page in Frances Burney D’Arblay, The Wanderer (1814) 120 13. Angelica Kauffmann, Self-Portrait, 1787 155 14. Johann Zoffany, The Family of Sir William Young, 1767-69 162 15. William Gilpin, Tintern Abbey I, from Observations on the River Wye (1782) 170 16. William Gilpin, Tintern Abbey II, from Observations on the River Wye (1782) 171 17. J. M. W. Turner, Tintern Abbey: The Crossing and Chancel, Looking towards the East Window, ca. 1794 172 18. John Constable, Netley Abbey by Moonlight, ca. 1833 174 19. William Gilpin, Tintern Abbey I, from Observations on the River Wye (1800) 182 20. William Gilpin, Tintern Abbey II, from Observations on the River Wye (1800) 183 [ Page ] vii “A Very Pretty Amber Cross” Material Sources of Elegance in Mansfield Park NATASHA DUQUETTE In forming definitions of beauty and harmony we often move from the con- crete and visible toward the abstract and theoretical rather than vice versa. Such must have been the case for Jane Austen. The details and textures of her novels reflect her empirical observation of objects she held in her own hands. In Mansfield Park, specifically, the amber-colored cross given to Fanny Price by her brother William, paired with Edmund Bertram’s gift of a plain chain, suggest an Austenian ethical aesthetic of simplicity, strength, and purpose. Austens narrator sets this aesthetic of moral beauty, character- ized by simplicity and utility, in contrast to the extravagant baroque tastes displayed by some of the wealthiest characters. The decadence of artificial elegance and excess is countered by the thoughtfully simple elegance of the small amber cross. Jane Austen’s Topaz Cross Jane Austen herself was given a topaz cross by her younger brother Second Lieutenant Charles Austen, who purchased two topaz crosses in May 1801 for his sisters Cassandra and Jane. He purchased the crosses after receiving thirty pounds in prize money for his role in the capture of the French pri- vateer Le Scipio as a second lieutenant on board the British ship Endymion. In her biography The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, Paula Byrne writes: “The crosses are not identical: one is in the traditional crucifix shape, the other with the symmetry of a saltire. We do not know which one went to Cassandra and which to Jane.”1 However, Carrie Wright, in a Persuasions article published one year after Byrne’s book, claims, “Jane’s is the Greek style cross.”2 Though there is some ambiguity regarding which cross was actually Jane Austen's, we do know that Austen treated the gift with what Byrne terms her “characteristic irony.”3 Austen wrote of Charles, in a letter to Cassandra on May 27, 1801: “He has been buying Gold chains & Topaze [ Page ] 146 Crosses for us;—he must be well scolded ... I shall write again by this post to thank & reproach him.—We shall be unbearably fine.”4 Behind her irony, one senses Austen's true delight in her gift from her younger brother. In his book Jane Austen and the Navy, Brian Southam portrays Charles Austen as the darling of the family, noting that whenever his name ap- pears in Jane Austen's correspondence, she “writes of him with tenderness and solicitude.”5 Sheila Johnson Kindred also remarks on the close bond between Charles and Jane Austen, explaining, “She proudly followed his career from its beginning—the initial three-year period of study at the Academy, a further three years at sea as a midshipman, and his subsequent promotion to service as a lieutenant.”6 Byrne suggests that their brother and sister love was infused by a shared Christian faith: “The fact that Charles chose crosses rather than lockets is significant, alluding as it does to his sis- ters’ deep Christian faith as well as marking their delight in fashion.”7 She is thus aligned with Laura Mooneyham Whites emphasis in Jane Austen's Anglicanism on the Austen family’s faith. In the narrative of her novel Mansfield Park, Jane Austen depicts a shared familial faith when William Price gives his older sister Fanny the gift of a cross. This amber cross’s reli- gious significance in the narrative is undeniable, and shortly after receiving it Fanny engages in “fervent” prayer.8 Fanny Price’s Amber Cross The strong parallels between the fictional William Price and the real Charles Austen have been duly noted by critics such as Southam and Byrne, among others. One explicit tie to the history of Charles Austen’s gift is the fact that in Mansfield Park there is a ship named Endymion stationed at Portsmouth harbor, an oblique reference to the ship Charles was serving on when he gained the money used to purchase the crosses for his sisters. In reality, Charles Austen's naval career took him to the Mediterranean and to Bermuda, and in Mansfield Park Austen’s narrator explains how William Price has “been in the Mediterranean—in the West Indies—in the Mediterranean again” and has “been often taken on shore by the favour of his Captain” (275). In the course of Mansfield Park’s narrative, William Price slowly rises through the lower ranks of British naval officers, from mid- shipman to lieutenant, partially aided by Henry Crawford's connection to Admiral Crawford. When Fanny first speaks to Henry of her brother's role aboard a ship called the Antwerp she displays a remarkable intensity, and as the narrator notes, she is “elevated beyond the common timidity of her [ Page ] 147 mind by the flow of her love for William” (271). The language of elevation or loftiness imparts a sublime quality to Fanny’s love for her brother. This elevation of discourse is akin to what Edmund Bertram earlier describes as Fanny’s “enthusiasm” when she utters her short but intense meditation on the “wickedness” and “sorrow” of humanity and the “sublimity of Nature” (132) as she gazes out at a starry sky. Once William returns from his seven years at sea and visits Fanny at Mansfield, the usually reserved Fanny finds a discursive freedom in con- versing with her brother, in what the narrator depicts as “unchecked, equal, fearless” (MP, 273) self-expression. He, in turn, voices his “desire” (293) to see Fanny dance to his uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram. Perhaps this desire to see Fanny elevated into the ranks of those who dance at a Mansfield Park ball is behind William's gift to his sister of a “very pretty amber cross” (295). Coming from his naval background, William would be aware of the signifi- cance carried by medallions and other ornaments adorning a naval uniform. Motivating his gift of the amber cross may be his desire to lift up the lowly Fanny by bequeathing dignity and honor to his sister. This is a very different kind of motive than that of Henry Crawford, who through duplicity sends Fanny a gold necklace on which to hang her amber cross, as part of his plan to make her fall in love with him. As he puts it crassly, “I cannot be satisfied without Fanny Price, without making a small hole in Fanny Price’s heart” (267). Henry’s gift of the gold necklace is manipulative and driven by his egoistic longing to make a conquest of Fanny, to capture her as an object, whereas William’s gift of the cross signifies his hope for Fanny’s elevation, his faith in God’s providential care for Fanny, and his own love for his sister. Interestingly, Austen represents the ornate gold necklace Henry has cho- sen for Fanny as too large to accommodate the ring of her amber cross. Thankfully, Edmund Bertram also provides her with a piece of jewelry on which to hang her cross, and Edmund’s gift is more straightforward, more suitable, and more aesthetically appealing to Fanny than the overly ornate and intricate necklace snuck into her hands by Henry via his sister Mary, When Edmund himself presents his gift directly to Fanny, it is “a plain gold chain perfectly simple and neat,” which causes her to exclaim, “Oh! this is beautiful, indeed!” (MP, 304). She responds with a spontaneous and positive aesthetic judgment of approbation. Elaine Bander’s essay in this volume pre- sents Fanny Price as “artless,” since she is not an accomplished artist herself, yet Fanny does emerge as an aesthetic theorist in the narrative. Edmund is in alignment with Fanny’s aesthetic judgments by keeping in mind “the simplicity of [her] taste” (303) when he selected the chain, which causes her [ Page ] 148 to respond, “It will exactly suit my cross” (304). The emphasis on simplicity here is significant. In his 1759 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Edmund Burke had argued for the aesthetic power of “perfect simplicity.”9 Burke makes this comment in a sec- tion on architecture, but Austen applies the same concept of the aesthetic merit of simplicity to Edmund Bertram's gold chain. Edmund Price observes Fanny articulate her aesthetic preference for natural simplicity and thus reveals his own ability to see Fanny as a think- ing and perceiving woman with a taste of her own. This is opposed to Henry, who imposes his own decadent taste on Fanny via the baroque-sounding necklace he has somewhat forced upon her. Brian Southam notes: Jane Austen sets poetic justice to work. The necklace proves too large for the ring of the cross; so, instead, Fanny uses a chain offered by Edmund; and, worn together, all three—the cross, suspended from the chain, and the necklace on its own—become the adversative emblems of true love and false friendship. . Charles Austen, and other members of the family, would be delighted at such a notable working-up of the topaze crosses and gold chains sent to Jane and Cassandra in 1801: his gift of jewellery now answered with a gift of literature.10 Interestingly, in a novel within which the heroine reflects philosophically on the nature of human memory, Austen's narrator applies the word “me- morial” to both the amber cross and the simple gold chain, noting how, for Fanny, they are “memorials of the two most beloved of her heart... dearest tokens so formed for each other by everything real and imaginary” (MP, 314). With the idea of the cross as a memorial that appeals to empiricism and imagination, to the mind and the heart, Austen reminds us of how the shape of a cross has functioned as a memorial for centuries within the inter- national history of Christianity. This particular amber cross, in the narrative of Mansfield Park, has come from Sicily, acquired during one of Williams’s side trips ashore with his captain while sailing in the Mediterranean. Crafted in Sicily, it is no doubt a Catholic cross, or at least a cross made by the hands of a Catholic artisan, which has made its way, via international trade and naval routes, into the center of an English novel depicting the Anglican ordination of Edmund Bertram. Of course, Austen is paying tribute to the amber-colored cross, actually crafted from the mineral topaz, given to her by her own brother Charles, but still, she has intentionally added the detail of her fictional cross’s Sicilian origin. Austen allows her readers to imagine her fictional [ Page ] 149 cross as truly made of actual amber, congealed and fossilized tree sap, rather than simply being constructed out of topaz which happens to be amber-col- ored, like the historical crosses given to Jane and Cassandra by their brother Charles. In the fictional world of Mansfield Park, the amber medium and Sicilian craftsmanship bring an air of international cosmopolitanism and Catholic sensibility to Fanny’s cross. Due to the material history of ancient amber trade routes, originating in Scandinavian forests and flowing south through the Mediterranean,11 amber jewelry is still much more prevalent in countries such as Latvia, Poland, and Italy than it is in England. In his 2017 monograph Jane Austen and the Reformation, Roger E. Moore pre- sents Fanny’s amber cross as a metonym for Catholicism, writing, “The cross of course declares Fanny’s Christian faith, but it also testifies to a spe- cifically Catholic form of Christianity; it is from Sicily, deep in the heart of Catholic Europe. Fanny reveres the buildings and rituals of England’s Catholic past, and the cross’s Sicilian origin subtly solidifies her association with Catholicism.”12 In Catholic tradition broadly, the image of the cross (and especially a crucifix) has served, over and over again, in multitudinous mediums, to memorialize the painful death of Jesus Christ. Historically, a cross signifies intense suffering, and it is a quite suitable emblem for Fanny Price, a young woman who does suffer much during the course of Mansfield Park, so much that critic Sarah Emsley has identi- fied Fanny’s story as a tragedy which concludes with a comic ending only in its very last chapters. Emsley traces how “in the language and action of Mansfield Park [Austen is] making a tragedy, whether it is of the new or old type.”13 Direct references to the “pain” of Fanny Price appear over thirty times in Mansfield Park. Coming from a disadvantaged background, Fanny “must take . . . pains” (22) with her education. She is pained, emotionally and physically, when Edmund takes his quiet mare away from her in order that Mary Crawford may ride it. The pain of a headache afflicts Fanny after she has been made to cut roses and run errands in the glare of the hot sun. During her years at Mansfield Park, she experiences “the pains of tyranny, of ridicule, and neglect” (178). Austen's narrator hints that, due to Fanny’s im- poverished and highly dysfunctional family of origin, she has experienced significant emotional pain long before her initial arrival on the doorstep of Mansfield Park at the age of ten. As readers, we receive hints that both she and her brother William have endured trials together as the children of an underemployed, alcoholic father who is prone to violence. When Fanny is later embraced by her father, for example, she is “sadly pained by his lan- guage and his smell of spirits” (440). Fanny and William share the intense [ Page ] 150 bonds of affection often felt by children who have grown up sheltering each other from the corrosive behavior and speech of an alcoholic parent. To return to the amber cross, when William Price gives it as a gift to his sister Fanny, it carries the weight of their strong and loving bond created through the shared suffering of their childhood home. Spiritually as well as aesthetically, then, the amber cross shines out amid the darkness of Mansfield Park as a beautiful emblem of brotherly love forged in the crucible of suffering. William and Fanny are not passive victims, and they are able to courageously transfigure their difficult child- hood experiences into what the narrator terms “heroism.” When William visits at Mansfield Park, Henry Crawford is actually abashed by what he terms “the glory of heroism” at sea, the “usefulness,” “exertion,” and “endurance” that make Henry self-conscious about his own “shameful” “selfish indulgence” and lack of clear vocation (MP, 275). After William gives Fanny her amber cross, Fanny is able to exert “all the heroism of principle” (307), when she witnesses Edmund’s growing infatuation with Mary Crawford. Specifically, she finds the courage to pray rather than be consumed with jealousy. The narrator explains: “Could she believe Miss Crawford to deserve him, it would be—Oh, how different it would be— how far more tolerable! But he was deceived in her: he gave her merits which she had not; her faults were what they had ever been, but he saw them no longer. Till she had shed many tears over this deception, Fanny could not subdue her agitation; and the dejection which followed could only be relieved by the influence of fervent prayers for his happiness” (307). Fanny is the only heroine explicitly described as praying in a Jane Austen novel. And, not only does she pray, but she fervently prays for the happiness of someone who is paining her through his blindness and lack of discernment. She prays for Edmund’s happiness regardless of whom he ultimately chooses to marry, and Austen cleverly invites us to imagine her prayers being answered when Edmund marries Fanny herself at the very conclusion of the narrative. Fanny’s uttering of these prayers occurs almost immediately after she receives the amber cross from William, near the center or crux of Austen’s narrative. This moment is a turning point for Fanny. After praying, Fanny displays the “heroism of principle,” and her character increasingly strengthens through the rest of the novel, evidenced by her ability to defy her uncle Sir Thomas Bertram when he tries to co- erce her into marrying Henry Crawford. Emsley goes so far as to argue that “the tragic action of the novel centers on Fanny Price’s prolonged temptation to marry Henry.”14 Ultimately, Fanny resists this temptation [ Page ] 151 through her growing ethical and spiritual fortitude. Elaine Bander has labeled this quality Fanny’s “true heroism.”15 This dauntless heroism of Fanny’s, evidence of increasing inner strength, is akin to the naval heroism of William and appears to have been amplified through his gift of the amber cross. In Mansfield Park, this small amber cross symbolizes the beauty of love, endurance, faith, and devotion, as well as resistance to temptation. It elevates Fanny not only socially at the ball but also spiritually through her prayers and ethically through her growing courage to stand her ground. Wearing her amber cross, Fanny grows into a woman of strength and elegance. The Question of Elegance in Mansfield Park Elegance is a complicated aesthetic category for Jane Austen, however. In Mansfield Park, specifically, Austen takes the concept of elegance and turns it about, examining it from multiple angles. Her careful examination of this aesthetic term tests various definitions of what it meant to be an elegant woman in Georgian England. For example, Fanny Price’s cousins Maria and Julia Bertram, daughters of her wealthy uncle Sir Thomas Bertram, are in- troduced into the narrative of Mansfield Park as “elegant, agreeable girls” (52). The terms are highly ironic here, as Maria and Julias selfish superfici- ality quickly becomes manifest in their belittling of their cousin Fanny. As postcolonial critic Edward Said has convincingly shown, the material ele- gance of Mansfield Park, and the Bertram family who inhabit this country estate, is implicated with the labor of oppressed slaves in the West Indies. Though British involvement in the slave trade became illegal in 1807, British citizens continued to illegally participate in the slave trade, and the British navy was deployed to catch ships engaged in illicit human trafficking. Deployed in the West Indies, Charles Austen himself likely served in this manner, apprehending slave traders on behalf of the British. Although the slave trade was abolished, slavery itself remained legal in the British West Indies well into the 1820s and early 1830s, as testified to by slave narratives such as The History of Mary Prince, published in 1831. It was not until 1833 that slavery was completely outlawed in the British West Indies. Therefore, when Jane Austen published Mansfield Park in 1814, her readers would have understood Sir Thomas’s economic interests in Antigua, an island in the British West Indies, as complicit in the practices of slavery. Edward Said has essentially accused Austen of not being a vocal enough critic of the continuing practice of slavery in the British West Indies during [ Page ] 152 her lifetime.16 However, we know Austen read and admired antislavery writ- ers such as the poet William Cowper and essayist Thomas Clarkson, and she expressed fondness for a brother, Charles Austen, who patrolled the waters off the Americas during a period when one of the British navy’s primary tasks was to capture slave ships. In Jane Austen in the Context of Abolition, Gabrielle White focuses on Fanny Price’s courageous question about the slave trade, which she poses to Sir Thomas after he has returned home to Mansfield Park from a trip to Antigua. Another critic, the narratologist Susan Fraiman, argues that “had Said placed Sir Thomas Bertram... in line with the deficient fathers who run unrelentingly from Northanger Abbey through Persuasion, he might perhaps have paused before assuming that Austen legitimates the master of Mansfield Park.”17 Indeed, what the narra- tor terms Sir Thomas’s “government” (MP, 229) of Mansfield Park certainly brings order and a degree of surface elegance to his home and children, but it also brings “gloom” (229). The reader cannot help interpreting what Fanny initially perceives as his “absolute power” (326) over her as an extension of the autocratic slave owner’s will. The order of Mansfield Park is maintained through powerful control, and the elegant lifestyle of Julia, Maria, and the brother Tom Bertram is at least partially supported through an ethically troubling socioeconomic system. This makes “elegance” a complex term for Austen, especially in this novel. As Vivasvan Soni has written in his preface to Jane Austen and the Arts, “Austen herself undoubtedly retains a certain complicated commitment to the values of elegance, propriety, harmony, and a neoclassical aesthetics more generally, but to the extent that she does, she also recognizes that... [r]ules can lead us astray.”18 Rules can also attempt to control and repress at Mansfield Park. As she does with the idea of sensibility, Austen implies that elegance can appear in false or distorted, even deforming, modes. She resists an overly di- dactic or simplistic approach either for or against elegance through her use of subtle irony. Against Said, Rajeswari Rajan defends Jane Austen’s place as a satirical critic of social normativity, pointing to the “effects of irony” in Mansfield Park, a novel which is after all a complex yet harmonious and ele- gant structure in its own right.19 Ana-Karina Schneider writes of this novel that “although published only one year after Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park (written between February 1811 and the summer of 1813) is more ma- ture in both tone and purport than any of her earlier works: fashioned in a style of flawless versatility and consistent elegance, it is serious and moralis- ing without losing its ironic critical edge.”20 Schneider associates Mansfield Park’s elegant form with maturity of tone and a moral irony that allows for [ Page ] 153 ambiguity. Austen resists didacticism by balancing tragic notes with textual harmony and a satirical edge sustained to the end. Austen certainly satirizes false notions of “elegance” based solely in pride- ful social constructions of superior class or rank, beginning with the labeling of the vapid Julia and Maria Bertram as “elegant.” To help define the term in historical context, one element to consider is dress or fashion. The only full- length portrait we definitely know to be a portrayal of Jane Austen herself, a watercolor painted by her sister Cassandra in 1804, suggests she preferred a mode of dress that balanced modesty with subtle detail, sense and com- fort, and a certain flare. Her surviving letters to her sister Cassandra, after all, reveal that the young Jane Austen was somewhat of a bonnet enthusiast. The practical elegance of Austen's early nineteenth-century dress in what has been termed the “Bonnet Portrait” contrasts with the extravagance of the fashions in France leading up to the French Revolution. Mid-eighteenth- century French portraits include elaborate hats, for example, which could be crowned by tropical fruit or artificial birds’ nests, and the omnipresence of lapdogs, such as Marie Antoinette’s papillon, whom she supposedly carried with her to the guillotine in 1793. In Mansfield Park, Lady Bertram's pug is a fashionable French affectation, which Austen repeatedly deploys to satirical purpose. Women artists and writers of the late eighteenth and early nine- teenth centuries often resisted the artificial excesses in fashion and opted for a simpler elegance, as in a self-portrait by Angelica Kauffmann (fig. 13). The soft folds and empire waist of Kauffmann's dress would have been more comfortable for her hours spent sitting at an easel and painting. We can compare Kauffmann's seated portrait with Austen’s and note both women have chosen simple, two-tone, flowing fabric, though Austen's dress, as well as her pose, creates greater modesty and privacy, with her chest, neck, and arms fully covered, and her face turned away. Regardless, the simplicity of each woman’s dress suggests resistance to extravagant (or even ridiculous) excess in fashion. Austen knew the satire of fashionable excess in the work of eigh- teenth-century poets such as Alexander Pope. Pope’s critique of luxury for luxury’s sake may have been another source for her view of elegance, includ- ing her at times ironic approach to it. In 1735, Pope wrote a commentary on his Epistle to Burlington, wherein he explains how his poem satirizes “the vanity of expense in people of wealth and quality. The abuse of the word taste, verse 13. That the first principle and foundation, in this as in every- thing else, is good sense, verse 40. The chief proof of it is to follow nature even in works of mere luxury and elegance. Instanced in architecture and [ Page ] 134 Fig. 13. Angelica Kauffmann, Self-Portrait, 1787, oil on canvas. (Uffizi Gallery, Florence) [ Please contact repository@tyndale.ca for Figure 13 details ] gardening, where all must be adapted to the genius and use of the place, and the beauties not forced into it, but resulting from it, verse 50.”21 The poem moves from an aesthetic discussion of good and bad taste in landscape de- sign and architecture to a description of “Timon’s Villa” as an exemplar of bad taste and wasteful excess, before concluding with a vision of a possible future when landowners will steward wealth with both taste and purpose in ways that enable communities to flourish. Within his poem, Pope argues that good sense is “the gift of Heav’n,”22 which we ignore to our detriment, “a light, which in yourself you must perceive.”23 Above all, he believes that landscape and architectural design need guidance by sense and by nature in order to succeed, adding “let Nature never be forgot.”24 “Decency,” or privacy, is key to Pope’s sense of elegance. In reference to landscape, he writes: Let not each beauty everywhere be spied, Where half the skill is decently to hide. He gains all points who decently confounds, Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds.25 [ Page ] 155 Toward the end of his poem, Pope envisions a possible future age not guided by vanity but sense, when land will be used responsibly for agriculture; aes- thetics will be subordinated to purpose; and tenants will be well cared for by their Lord. Pope presents this vision in order to contrast it with the ex- travagant waste at Timon’s Villa. In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen similarly considers how notions of ele- gance, false or true, may be perpetuated by people of means via two young male characters: Mr. Rushworth and Henry Crawford. When Fanny Price visits the estate of Sotherton, which Mr. Rushworth is to inherit, she is with Maria Bertram, now engaged to Rushworth. After the young women and their party are greeted by the Rushworths, “it was first necessary to eat, and the doors were thrown open to admit them through one or two intermediate rooms into the appointed dining-parlour, where a collation was prepared with abundance and elegance. Much was said, and much was ate, and all went well. The particular object of the day was then considered. How would Mr. Crawford like, in what manner would he choose, to take a survey of the grounds?” (MP, 98). Sotherton is initially presented to visitors as a fashion- ably elegant estate to be more admired than enjoyed, not unlike “Timon's Villa” in Alexander Pope’s poem. Austen's Rushworth parallels Pope’s Timon with his strong desire to display his wealth with lavish food and to take visitors on tours of the landscape surrounding his country house. Like Mr. Rushworth, Henry Crawford is also a single man with money to spend who tries to convey his knowledge of elegance. He reflects on the idea of Fanny dancing and claims, in a conversation with William Price, “I have had the pleasure of seeing your sister dance, Mr. Price .. and will engage to answer every inquiry which you can make on the subject, to your entire satisfac- tion. But I believe (seeing Fanny look distressed) it must be at some other time. There is one person in company who does not like to have Miss Price spoken of” (291). The narrator wryly remarks, “True enough, he had once seen Fanny dance; and it was equally true that he would now have answered for her gliding about with quiet, light elegance, and in admirable time, but in fact he could not for the life of him recall what her dancing had been, and rather took it for granted that she had been present than remembered anything about her” (291-92). Though apparently imaginary, Henry’s idea of Fanny’s subtle, light elegance is apt, as it corresponds with the simple ele- gance of her small Sicilian amber cross. Fanny’s actual increase in real elegance becomes clear in chapter 28 of Mansfield Park when she appears, ready for her first formal ball, wearing her amber cross. The astute narrator notes: “Her uncle and both her aunts [ Page ] 156 were in the drawing-room when Fanny went down. To the former she was an interesting object, and he saw with pleasure the general elegance of her appearance, and her being in remarkably good looks. The neatness and pro- priety of her dress was all that he would allow himself to commend in her presence, but upon her leaving the room again soon afterwards, he spoke of her beauty with very decided praise” (316). Lady Bertram mistakenly thinks Fanny looks well because the servant Chapman has been sent to dress her. And, Mrs. Norris, Fanny’s other aunt, cries out, “she has good reason to look well with all her advantages: brought up in this family as she has been, with all the benefit of her cousins’ manners before her” (316). Mrs. Norris wrongly believes Fanny has acquired her elegant appearance by watching and imitating her cousins Julia and Maria Bertram. Her cross is not men- tioned by anyone at this point, but we know she is wearing it. When Fanny’s increased elegance eventually attracts the attentions of Henry Crawford, she resists her uncle’s pressure to marry Henry and as a result is exiled from Mansfield Park. While banished temporarily to her rough, chaotic, and impoverished birth family in their lodgings at Portsmouth, Fanny Price yearns for what she remembers as the elegant order of her adoptive family and their country house estate. Nestled in the fresh green landscape of Northamptonshire, on its surface, Mansfield Park is characterized by what Fanny recalls nostalgically as a peaceful serenity in contrast with the discord of Portsmouth. In Portsmouth, the tensions and disagreements disturbing Fanny’s family of origin are fueled by the heavy drinking of her birth father, Lieutenant Price, and the sibling rivalries of her sisters Susan and little Betsey. Betsey, by contrast perceives Fanny as a “fine new sister” (MP, 438). This reference to Fanny’s “fineness” resonates with Jane Austen’s statement in her letter to her sister Cassandra that they will be “unbearably fine” wearing their amber crosses. In Mansfield Park, immediately after Betsey’s statement, Mr. Price bursts on the scene, and his loud swearing and violent, abrupt actions stand in direct contrast to such fineness. He enters his home shouting an “oath” and forcefully kick- ing “away his son’s portmanteau, and his daughter's band-box in the pas- sage” (438). In Fanny’s bandbox may be some of the treasures from her East Room, to which Peter Sabor has drawn attention in his essay for this collection, including the small sketch of the Antwerp sent to her from the Mediterranean,26 and perhaps also her amber cross. Not only has Mr. Price not provided adequately for his children, but he also adds insult to injury by physically harming what small possessions they have been able to acquire when he kicks their traveling gear aside. [ Page ] 157 The tumult at Portsmouth makes Fanny miss the elegance and propriety of Mansfield Park. The narrator describes her inner state at length: The elegance, propriety, regularity, harmony—and perhaps, above all, the peace and tranquility of Mansfield, were brought to her remembrance every hour of the day, by the prevalence of everything opposite to them here. The living in incessant noise was to a frame and temper, delicate and nervous like Fanny’s, an evil which no superadded elegance or harmony could have entirely atoned for. It was the greatest misery of all. At Mans- field, no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence was ever heard; all proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness; everybody had their due importance. (MP, 453) Through free indirect discourse, the narrator takes on Fanny’s conscious- ness, and Mansfield Park is idealized via the filter of her very human and fallible atmospheric memories. Fanny misses the physical elegance of Mansfield Park, which she associates with regularity and order, editing out how this order is maintained by Sir Thomas’s wielding of “absolute power” and control. She appears to be forgetting how the silence of Sir Thomas’s household has resulted from a repression that forces desires and opinions underground and beyond control. One of the most striking examples of this tension occurs when her question about the slave trade is met with “dead silence” (231). Fanny’s subjective memory of all proceeding with cheerful orderliness at Mansfield Park directly contradicts her earlier experiences of painful socialization into what the narrator had termed the “gloom” of its elegant order. Any mention of Mansfield Park’s elegance is abruptly dropped when Sir Thomas’s daughter, the married Maria Rushworth, commits adultery with Henry Crawford, to the horror of both Fanny Price and Sir Thomas Bertram. At this point, Sir Thomas realizes he has raised his daughters to be elegant and agreeable on the surface, but with no sense of an inner moral compass to guide their actions in the world: He saw how ill he had judged . . . clearly saw that he had but increased the evil, by teaching them to repress their spirits in his presence, so as to make their real disposition unknown to him. . . . Here had been griev- ous mismanagement; but, bad as it was, he gradually grew to feel that it had not been the most direful mistake in his plan of education. Something must have been wanting within, or time would have worn away much of its ill effect. He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting, that they had never been properly taught to govern their inclinations and [ Page ] 158 tempers, by that sense of duty which can alone suffice. They had been in- structed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice. To be distinguished for elegance and accomplishments—the authorised object of their youth—could have had no useful influence that way, no moral effect on the mind. (MP, 535-36) With his strict government of the external words and actions in his home, Sir Thomas has taught Maria and Julia Bertram to govern, or control, their outward speech and etiquette in his presence, so they may be admired for their surface elegance. However, he now realizes this was but an external façade of obedience maintained in his presence but with no correspondent inner moral conviction. The Bertram sisters exactly lack what the narra- tor terms Fanny Price’s “heroism of principle” (307), which is strengthened by her prayer after she receives the amber cross. The spiritual or theolog- ical point Austen is making here becomes even clearer when Sir Thomas laments how his accomplished daughters have a theoretical knowledge of religious concepts but no ability to wisely apply them to everyday decisions. This epiphany is a turning point in Sir Thomas’s own character develop- ment, which occurs toward the very end of the novel and gives the reader hope for his further growth. Throughout his concern for his son Tom’s grave illness and his shock at his daughter Maria’s adultery, Sir Thomas Bertram reflects on his past mistakes. During these difficult and unstable times Fanny Price is a steady and edifying presence, a sort of rock within the shifting sands of the Bertram family dynamic. But, as readers, we are still left with an unresolved question. Why has Sir Thomas Bertram's parenting and educating of his own children at home led to “elegant and agreeable” daughters without moral discernment? Part of the problem may lie in so- cietal pressures for daughters of the aristocracy to acquire learning and ac- complishments, ranging from theological knowledge to piano playing, for the purpose of display alone, in order to marry a wealthy partner of the highest possible rank. Approximately thirty years before the publication of Austen's Mansfield Park, the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft warned that the socializing of women to appear superficially attractive and amiable would cause them to sacrifice the sterner virtues of duty. In her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Wollstonecraft argues against Edmund Burke’s definition of femi- nine beauty in terms of coquettish and yielding weakness and softness. She cautions how women who conform to this model of beauty risk becoming amoral creatures, hesitant to sacrifice their amiability to “the force of those [ Page ] 159 exalted qualities, fortitude, justice, wisdom, and truth.”27 In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft likewise critiques male “des- potism that kills virtue and genius in the bud.”28 She argues: “Women are everywhere in this deplorable state; for, in order to preserve their innocence, as ignorance is courteously termed, truth is hidden from them, and they are made to assume an artificial character before their faculties have ac- quired any strength. Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s scep- tre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adore its prison.”29 Here again is the idea of young girls, through their (mis)education, being discouraged from the pursuit of both virtue and truth in order to maintain a beautiful, or elegant, appearance. Later, Wollstonecraft extends her metaphor of the gilded bird cage by describing wealthy married women thus: “Confined then in cages like the feathered race, they have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch.”30 Within Mansfield Park’s narrative, during the touring of Sotherton, Maria Bertram compares herself to a starling in a cage, a domesticated bird who cannot escape its prison. This is, of course, a direct allusion to the starling in Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768), but it may also be a veiled reference to Wollstonecraft's powerful figurative imagery of elegant yet entrapped aristocratic young women, like beautiful birds in gilded cages. The possible Wollstonecraft connection lends Maria's statement poignancy and could create a degree of readerly sympa- thy for her, despite her later transgression. Her action partly arises from the mode of her education and socialization, as Sir Thomas Bertram himself remorsefully acknowledges. Sir Thomas Bertram’s eldest son, Tom Bertram, also falls into a pattern of unhealthy excess, transgression, and dissipation, which ultimately threatens his life. Indeed, instability and lack of integrity pervade both male and female “elegance” at Mansfield Park. Austen sets true elegance in tension with false elegance throughout her novel, using various situations to draw the contrast. Philosopher and antislavery activist Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck likewise differentiated between a truly graceful elegance and its distortion or corrup- tion in her Theory on the Classification of Beauty and Deformity, and Their Correspondence with Physiognomic Expression, Exemplified in Various Works of Art, and Natural Objects (1815). In this treatise, Schimmelpenninck di- vides beauty into three “genera”—the sublime (subdivided into two species: “the horrible” and “the contemplative”), the sentimental, and the sprightly. Each of these aesthetic categories can be twisted or deformed into grotesque antitypes. She explains, “The distinguishing characteristic of the sentimental [ Page ] 160 is elegance,” and she associates such elegance with “grace,”31 as well as “light- ness.”32 For Schimmelpenninck, however, when such elegance increases in relaxation and inactivity and diminishes in sensibility, it morphs into “British sensuality,” “Luxurious indolence,” and “self-indulgence.”33 In her “Chart No. 2—Deformities,” she suggests that human beings caught in this deformation of elegance are sluggishly imperceptive, governed by sloth, and “destitute of fixed principle.”34 These are indeed characteristics notable in Lady Bertram and her children. There is a reason Fanny Price reads Samuel Johnson's satirical journal the Idler while coping with her years at Mansfield Park. Perhaps the very idleness and lack of struggle in the young Bertrams’ early lives, and the resultant general languor of Mansfield Park, has contrib- uted to their atrophied sense of principle. Before his epiphany regarding his errors in raising his own children, Sir Thomas Bertram boasts about the elegance of plantation owners’ luxurious lifestyles in Antigua. During the same conversation within which Henry Crawford imagines Fanny Price dancing with “light elegance,” the narra- tor observes Sir Thomas “by no means displeased,” becoming deeply “en- gaged in describing the balls of Antigua” (MP, 292). The extravagant abun- dance of such Antiguan balls in the British Caribbean was supported by the labor of African slaves. So-called “house slaves” would have been present at Antiguan balls, working hard to support their master's appearance of ele- gance. In creating the character of Sir Thomas Bertram, Austen had avail- able to her the known travel patterns of absentee slave-owning British fa- thers who were away from home for years at a time while attending to their economic interests in the West Indies. One such father is depicted in Johann Zoffany’s group portrait The Family of Sir William Young, painted in the 1760s (fig. 14). Sir William Young was a British man with economic interests in the Caribbean who was away from his family for eight years between 1764 and 1773. The Jamaican historian Lennox Honychurch notes, “Sir William ensured that the finer trappings of the British aristocracy were transported across the Atlantic and planted upon rain-drenched volcanic islands amidst the bland brutishness of a colonizing plantocracy.”35 Honychurch’s word “brutishness” is striking, as it echoes Schimmelpenninck’s characterization of a deformed elegance marked by not only excessive luxury but also “brutal carelessness.”36 What is striking in the portrait of Sir William Young's family is the general indolence and lack of activity. The cello at the center could sig- nify an elegant accomplishment, but the cello is not being played. And the letter in the lap of the young woman on the right could signify literacy, but the couple leaning over the letter are more interested in each other than the [ Page ] 161 Fig. 14. Johann Zoffany, The Family of Sir William Young, 1767-69, oil on canvas. (Walker Gallery, Liverpool) [ Please contact repository@tyndale.ca for Figure 14 details ] text. The one vigorously active person in this painted scene is the African man on the left, who literally supports the youngest boy in the family, as he lifts him onto a horses back. In French style, a lapdog lounges at Lady Young’s feet. The reader of Austen can discern a societal pattern for Pug and Lady Bertram in Austen’s Mansfield Park. In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen shows us that elegance, like sensibility, is not a good in and of itself. We should not strive to be so elegant and smooth that we gloss over what Fanny calls “wickedness” and “sorrow” (132) in the world. There exists an artificial elegance aligned with deceit and what Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck called the “British sensuality” of the de- formed sentimental. Austen allows for elegance, however, in right propor- tion. A poised elegance was adopted by free black and mulatto women in the Caribbean and England as an expression of self-worth, intelligence, and dig- nity, for example. Fanny Price, too, marginalized as she is for the majority of Austen’s narrative in Mansfield Park, is able to adopt a degree of simple ele- gance through her amber cross, light dancing, and even her careful choosing of edifying books from the Portsmouth circulating library. In the end, Fanny emerges as a quietly elegant woman of wisdom and strength, sensibility and sense, with not only taste but also a mindful moral discernment of her own. [ Page ] 162 Notes 1. Paula Byrne, The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014), 237. 2. Carrie Wright, "'Unbearably Fine’: The Socio-Political Powers of Jewelry in Jane Austens World,” Persuasions Online 36, no. 1 (2015), www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/ vo36no1/wright.html. 3. Byrne, The Real Jane Austen, 238. 4. Jane Austen, “To Cassandra Austen,” in Jane Austen's Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 95. 5. Brian Southam, Jane Austen and the Navy (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2003), 14. For further detail on Jane Austen's sensitive younger brother Charles and his career in the navy, see also Natasha Duquette, “The Sensibility of Captain Benwick in Literary and Historical Context,” in Jane Austen and Masculinity, ed. Michael Kramp et al. (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2018), 103-5. 6. Sheila Johnson Kindred, Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2017), 14. 7. Byrne, The Real Jane Austen, 238. 8. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. John Wiltshire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 307. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be provided paren- thetically throughout the text. 9. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: Routledge, 1958), 142. 10. Southam, Jane Austen and the Navy, 195 11. See Arnolds Spekke’s The Ancient Amber Routes and the Geographical Discovery of the Eastern Baltic (Stockholm: M. Goppers, 1967), 17-18. Among the classical writers Spekke cites as describing the circulation of amber are Homer, Herodotus, Pytheas, and Didorus of Sicily. 12. Roger E. Moore, Jane Austen and the Reformation (New York: Routledge, 2017), 128. 13. Sarah Emsley, “The Tragic Action of Mansfield Park," in Approaches to Teaching Austen's “Mansfield Park,” ed. Marcia McClintock Folsom and John Wiltshire (New York: Modern Language Association, 2014), 170. 14. Emsley, “Tragic Action,” 170. 15. See Elaine Bander, “Jane Austen's ‘Artless’ Heroines: Catherine Morland and Fanny Price,” in this volume. 16. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 55. 17. Susan Fraiman, “Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 4 (1995): 808. 18. Vivasvan Soni, “A Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” preface to Jane Austen and the Arts: Elegance, Propriety, and Harmony, ed. Natasha Duquette and Elisabeth Lenckos (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2013), xi. 19. Rajeswari Rajan, “Austen in the World: Postcolonial Mappings,” in The Postcolonial Jane Austen, ed. You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (New York: Routledge, 2000), 8. [ Page ] 163 20. Ana-Karina Schneider, “Mansfield Park,” in The Literary Encyclopedia, www.liten-cyc.com, first published January 9, 2008. 21. Alexander Pope, “Argument” prefacing Epistle 4. To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, in The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Joseph Black et al. (Peterborough, NH: Broadview, 2015), 597. 22. Pope, Epistle 4. To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, line 43. 23. Pope, Epistle 4. To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, line 45. 24. Pope, Epistle 4. To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, line 50. 25. Pope, Epistle 4. To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, lines 53—56. 26. Peter Sabor, “Portraiture as Misrepresentation in the Novels and Early Writings of Jane Austen,” in this volume. 27. Mary Wollstonecraft, Works, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: William Pickering and Chatto, 1989), 5:45. 28. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Deirdre Shauna Lynch (New York: Norton, 2009), 48. 29. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 48. 30. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 60. 31. Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, Theory on the Classification of Beauty and Deformity (London: John and Arthur Arch, 1815), 285. 32. Schimmelpenninck, Theory on the Classification of Beauty and Deformity, 244. 33. See the large, fold-out chart at the back of Schimmelpenninck’s Theory on the Classification of Beauty and Deformity. 34. Schimmelpenninck, Theory on the Classification of Beauty and Deformity, 47. 35. Lennox Honychurch, Negre Mawon: The Fighting Maroons of Dominica (Dominica: Island Heritage Initiatives, 2014), 65. 36. Schimmelpenninck, Theory on the Classification of Beauty and Deformity, 47. [ Page ] 164 ***** This is the end of the e-text. This e-text was brought to you by Tyndale University, J. William Horsey Library - Tyndale Digital Collections *****