Renée L. Haggart, Simon Fraser University

Jane Austen has been both praised and criticized for more than a century over the manner and sparseness of visual description which characterize her novels. While Austen is highly interested in discussing the value of material objects, this is not at all the same as actually describing objects themselves. If such paucity of detail seems counterintuitive to the way in which Austen was known to have described her own work, as the “little bit of ivory” worked with “so fine a brush,” [1] it could be argued that it is due in part to a misinterpretation of this quote. Rather than a painstaking exploration of any one aspect of the minutiae of the material world, the “little bit of ivory” that Austen describes could instead refer to the narrow scope of the private domestic world which is the exclusive subject of her work.  When physical objects do make their occasional appearances and are described in any detail in an Austen novel, however, it is to significant effect. Mansfield Park stands out strikingly as a fine example, and will be discussed below in detail as a testament to Austen’s awareness of the power of objects, and her skill in using minimal description for maximum effect, what Nancy Armstrong calls the “clean line of Austen’s Minimalist art. “ [2]

Austen’s realm is by design not the large scale, politically charged historical writing of her contemporary, Sir Walter Scott, yet the private and interior worlds that she describes are just as concerned with power struggles, agency, and determination of self and one’s place in the world as is any historical text.[3] The Duke of Wellington may have complained that “Jane Austen cared nothing for the visual arts,” [4] yet Margaret Lane points out that while Austen’s interior descriptions were economical to the point of parsimony, it “remains one of the mysteries of her genius, that we have so fine and firm an impression of her domestic scenes.” [5]

Perhaps more like a stark still-life painting than a heroic battle scene depicted, Austen’s art expresses emotions which lie outside of direct narrative language. Austen’s use of language and descriptive technique reveals a pattern in which the basic elements of her fictional world, material objects as well as ideal sentiments, are indicated but not deeply described, things are shown to us briefly, and then withdrawn from view, both provoking and preserving an aura of privacy and intimacy. [6]

18^th-century women inhabited houses that were nearly always exclusively owned and dominated by men, and as there was virtually no exterior existence for these women, it is natural that the world inhabited by Austen’s heroines would have been one of interiority. [7] However, Austen does not linger or expound upon the luxurious pattern of a tablecloth, the sun reflecting on a colourful set of china, the texture of a crusty loaf of bread, or a dazzling and fragrant bouquet; instead, the material landscape is present, yet not present, described in vague, generalized terms, and, as such, no sense of “thinginess” pervades the text.  In the striking exception of Mansfied Park, however, the world of Fanny Price becomes populated with “things” which are imbued with power, a power alternately imparted by Fanny and  also taking hold over her, and these “things,” though often still minimally described in a visual sense, take on, by their mere presence, characteristics at once both haunting and comforting.

Fanny Price stands out among Austen’s heroines in her association with and attachment to physical objects. These common, or even abject, objects, such as Edmund’s aborted letter – essentially a “scrap” of paper left behind, or a group of sub-standard family portraits deemed unworthy of wider display, which Fanny not so much keeps as enshrines in the private space that is her East Room, combine to create a place of refuge and rejuvenation for Fanny, where she can gain strength, construct a sense of self, and escape from the “world of the drawingroom” below. [8] These seemingly everyday items become true treasures for Fanny, and the importance of the East Room and its contents are emphasized by Austen’s uncharacteristically long and in-depth treatment of them. [9]

Some scholars have argued that Austen immerses Fanny in a make-believe world of fetishized objects as a way of identifying her as a morally and emotionally delinquent young woman; [10] in a related discourse, some also argue that Fanny’s room is essentially a prison, and that her confinement to it is representative of the claustrophobic and helpless nature of women’s lives of the period. [11] While these interpretations have some validity, I believe another layer of meaning exists. The fear of expulsion or abandonment, the longing for harmony, and the security of a place of one’s own can be just as strong as the feelings of imprisonment evoked by the limits of the domestic sphere, and treasured items can provide an escape just as much as they can construct a psychological prison.

Fanny’s attachment to things is neither juvenile nor trivial, nor are her items shallow indicators of status or wealth.  Fanny’s objects are most certainly not the jewelled toothpick-case of Robert Ferrras, [12] an obvious emblem of tasteless luxury and waste, or the material symbols of status displayed at Northanger Abbey by the grasping and social-climbing General Tilney. [13] Austen presents Tilney’s objects as having no history, there are no personal sentiments connected with them, and he would eagerly exchange them for things which would be perceived as more luxurious or more impressive.  Further, Fanny’s objects are also not the opulent harp of Mary Crawford, itself similarly implicated, atypically, in rich and powerful visually-detailed passages in Mansfield Park. [14] The harp is Mary’s interface with the world, and is a conduit by which she wields her personal power – a combination of wealth, beauty, and accomplishment.

Fanny, in contrast, covets her things not because of their monetary or use value, or because they in any way enhance her outward appearance, but because of their deep associations with particular people and events.  Everything in Fanny’s room — gifts from Edmund or other family members, books she has purchased, the writing desk, the image of the ship sent to her by her brother William – all of these combine to make a very private, very personal “nest of comforts” for Fanny, and instill in her a sense of control that is otherwise desperately lacking in her existence. [15]

Fanny’s treasures are not merely signifiers of individual people, but rather they become wholly personified.  Austen’s language tells us that “everything was a friend, or bore her thoughts to a friend” [16] (emphasis mine). The objects are loved not merely as reminders of friends, but are perceived on a critical level as cherished friends in themselves to Fanny. As friends, Fanny invites them to take up residence, effectively populating her East Room world with benevolent and attentive companions, gathered peacefully and harmoniously around her, fulfilling her wishes, and making her feel safe, comforted, and never alone. [17] The embracing sense of coziness which Austen evokes with her description of the details of the East Room does not prevail elsewhere at Mansfield Park, and the contrast is both effective and striking.

Essentially, Fanny curates and carefully controls the items in her room, and together they work to construct an environment that is her domain – an oasis for a young woman otherwise adrift in a sea of non-belonging and otherness. Fanny’s interior world can thus be seen as a mirror of Mansfield Park itself, but instead of a cautious intruder potentially on the brink of banishment or rejection, or perpetually subject to humiliation and oppression, Fanny, in the East Room, is the one with agency and freedom. Austen describes Fanny as “mistress” of the East Room:

The comfort of it in her hours of leisure was extreme. She could go there after any thing unpleasant below, and find immediate consolation in some pursuit, or some train of thought at hand. Her plants, her books…her writing desk, and her works of charity and ingenuity, were all within her reach…she could scarcely see an object in that room which had not an  interesting remembrance connected with it. [18]

Instead of being an object herself, to be controlled by Sir Thomas or others who rank higher in the social strata than she, Fanny has the opportunity within her room to experiment with exerting her own forms of authority and hierarchy. Sir Thomas controls the home – the women there can be seen as the objects that he curates. [19] They inhabit the interior landscape like furniture, as June Sturrock describes them, “expensive products” wholly subject to the authority of the house master. [20]

In Fanny’s East Room, the concepts of liberty and security seem to be equally at play. In Austen’s time, the male protagonist is not subject to the same confusion between persecution and protection, even perhaps between “persecutor and protector,” as are the women who are confined and oppressed within the domestic world. [21] Thus, in her private realm, Fanny attempts to create a microcosm of her wider world. In this microcosm, her world is idealized: “friends” will not betray her, they will not abandon her, nor will they be a source of reminder to her of her status as an outsider. She is able to curate and keep her “friends” in much the same way that she herself is kept by Sir Thomas, as an object in his domain and under his authority.

Claudia Johnson points out a disturbing problem, however, inherent with the empowerment of Fanny’s objects. According to Johnson, It is an ominous fact that the treasures of the East Room at one point bring Fanny to a state of bewilderment. [22] Johnson explains that Fanny is “confounded because she misrecognizes as friends things that are gifts which carry the exacting obligation to accept and the equally exacting obligation to reciprocate.” [23] Here Johnson, and perhaps Austen as well, paint a picture of Fanny’s empowered objects as something akin to wolves in sheep’s clothing.  The things in Fanny’s East Room are thus “not merely tokens, but active enforcers of relations,” exerting agency for themselves. [24] An extreme case is certainly that of the necklace proffered by Miss Mary Crawford. Under the auspices of friendship, Mary insists that Fanny accept the gift. Fanny cannot refuse, though she intuitively senses that Mary’s seemingly benevolent actions are actually a manipulation, designed to oblige Fanny to Henry, and thus to deprive her of personal power. The necklace, thus, becomes far more than just a piece of jewellery. Specifically, it is a personification of the power and hold that Henry, and even Mary, have over Fanny, but on a larger scale, is an embodiment of the domination that both men and the upper classes have over Fanny. Fanny was not born male, or rich, and the necklace might just as well have that sentiment engraved upon it.

An even more perfidious trap built in to Fanny’s constructed world of empowered objects is the ironic reality that Sir Thomas ultimately holds (and, in fact, exerts) the power to take it all away from her at any moment for any reason. In sending Fanny back to Portsmouth, he doesn’t just banish her from Mansfield Park, he sabotages her sense of security by removing her outright from the haven and refuge of the East Room.  Austen’s visceral portrayal of the squalor and chaos of Portsmouth stands in sharp contrast to the purposeful harmony and order of Fanny’s East Room. As well, the scenes at Portsmouth are uncharacteristically material in description, and the noise, filth, dust, and darkness are palpable.  The glasses are dirty, the milk and the tea are undrinkable, and the overall feeling is one of oppressive disorder. [25]

The foulness of Portsmouth induces nostalgia in Fanny for the comparative freedom and harmony of Mansfield Park, and the simple treasures and pleasantry of the East Room. In her distress over her displacement, Fanny adopts the same self-preserving behaviour that she originally developed as an outsider at Mansfield Park: she tries to introduce accord and solitude to her environment by recreating some version of the East Room in the small attic space she shares with her sister at Portsmouth. [26] There she can retreat from the coarseness and disgust of the home environment, just as she had retreated from a different brand of nastiness at Mansfield Park.  Fanny populates the tiny Portsmouth room with new “friends” in the form of books obtained from the local circulating library, which she shares with her sister, Susan.

Interestingly, Susan herself can be seen as perhaps the first “human object” controlled and shaped by Fanny in any genuine way. The little attic room becomes something of an ersatz schoolroom, paralleling the East Room’s original use, and also giving Fanny a venue for exerting her familial seniority, superior educational knowledge, more evolved social skills, and even monetary wealth over her sister, albeit in a way that aids, rather than exploits or objectifies.

At Portsmouth, one object stands out above all else as both a focus of disorder, and also the site of potential revelation and agency on the part of Fanny. The little silver knife veritably glitters against the sooty, gloomy background; the way that Betsey and Susan fight over the knife serves to elevate its status – and perhaps here Austen here shows us the “other side of the coin” in respect to the power of an object. This knife is not a “friend,” it is a source of avarice, covetousness, and chaos. The uncomfortable link with Fanny’s own fixation on objects is implied by Austen’s invocation of the strong emotions and actions surrounding the object. Johnson suggests that there is perhaps an inherent lesson here on objects inappropriately adored. [27]

The silver knife acts both symbolically and didactically – through Fanny, her younger siblings learn that a civilized person would never fight over such a trifling object. Fanny’s independent solution in the purchase of the second knife is an example not only to her siblings of “civilized” conflict resolution, but is also an indication of her own emotional growth,  newly asserted personal agency, and a demonstration of the power of financial resources. In many ways, the physical object here is not simply material, it is morally symbolic. James Thompson explains that in this particular instance, the knife is “perfectly integrated with the ideal moral, but still the knife remains a singular, isolated object, brought out into the narrative glare, as it were, to illustrate a particular lesson.” [28] Thompson makes a valid point; but Austen’s message is not overtly pedantic. That the second knife, a common use object, serves as a symbol of propriety and harmony, rather than an object of contention or disproportional projected personal attachment, also shows that Fanny’s enhanced attachment to objects cannot be strictly characterized or dismissed as arrested, fickle, or detrimental to personal development. [29]

Austen’s disinterest in visual description was so notable, that even one of her staunchest supporters (and apologists, in this case), Victorian literary critic George Henry Lewes, was prompted to comment that he thought Austen must have been nearsighted![30] Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s tepid praise of Austen’s work states that her novels are “perfect, as far as they go, that’s certain – only, they don’t go far,” while Charlotte Brontë remarked that she should “hardly like to live with [Austen’s] ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.” [31] That this lack of visual description and detail was a deliberate measure on Austen’s part seems clear when considering the warning against superfluous description raised to her niece in one of her letters: “You describe a sweet place, but your descriptions are often more minute than will be liked. You give too many particulars of right hand & left.” [32]

Other possible explanations for Austen’s scarcity of visual description which have been suggested claim that she was writing within a tradition wherein novels were still, to a great extent, read aloud, and she was therefore relying on aural rather than visual cues, or that she was operating under a neoclassical influence where too much specificity of detail was thought to be in direct conflict with the more universal aspects of art. [33] This paper has attempted to show, however, that Austen’s manner of handling of the material world is a skilful, intentional, and tactical technique, employed to maximize the potential for portraying vital and powerful emotional content in a way that simple words or even highly visual language cannot.

In Thompson’s comment on Austen’s descriptive qualities, he notes that “the bright, calm ordinariness of the scenes she presents to us is deceptive, a powerful imagination is in play, but it expresses itself while concealing itself.” [34] As in painting, the negative spaces, or the spaces between things, often speak with more authority and clarity than the solid objects themselves. Highly mindful of both the limitations and the latent power of her medium, Austen is able to evoke the ethos of solitude, the safety of order, and the seduction of escape, with a powerful combination of intervals of silence and rare episodes of intense description.  The appearance and treatment of material objects in Mansfield Park are a strong example of these rendered effects. Perhaps Austen explains it best herself in the novel when, through the voice of Maria, she says “I believe we must be satisfied with less…Many parts of our best plays are independent of

scenery.” [35]

ENDNOTES

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[1] Austen’s letter to her nephew Edward, dated 16 December, 1816. Accessed in: James Thompson. Between Self and World: The Novels of Jane Austen. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. p. 16.

[2] Nancy Armstrong. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. London: Oxford University Press, 1987. p. 134.

[3] James Thompson. Between Self and World: The Novels of Jane Austen. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. p. 14.

[4] The Duke of Wellington, “Houses in Jane Austen’s Novels,” Collected Reports of the Jane Austen Society, 1949-1965. London: Wm Dawson & Sons, 1967. p. 185. – Accessed in: Birgitta Berglund. Women’s Whole Existence: House as an Image in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen. Sweden: Lund University Press, 1993. p. 130.

[5] Margaret Lane, Untitled address in Collected Reports of the Jane Austen Society 1949-1965. Accessed in: Birgitta Berglund. Women’s Whole Existence: House as an Image in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen. Sweden: Lund University Press, 1993. p. 130.

[6] Thompson, p. 16.

[7] Birgitta Berglund. Women’s Whole Existence: House as an Image in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen. Sweden: Lund University Press, 1993. p. 14.

[8] Kenneth Moler. “Miss Price All Alone: Metaphors of Distance in Mansfield Park.”  Studies in the Novel. Denton: North Texas State University Press,1985, vol. 17, No. 2. p. 191

[9] Berglund, p. 222.

[10] Moler, p. 191.

[11] Berglund, p. 15.

[12] Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility. London: Penguin Group, 1995. p. 187.

[13] Jane Austen. Northanger Abbey. London: Penguin Group, 1981. p. 168.

[14] Jane Austen. Mansfield Park, New York: Broadview, 2001. p. 91.

[15] M. Lucy Schneider, “The Little White Attic and the East Room: Their Function in Mansfield Park.” Modern      Philology, Vol. 63, No. 3, pp. 227-235. University of Chicago Press: 1966. p. 229.

[16] Austen, Mansfield Park. p. 171.

[17] Claudia Johnson. “Jane Austen’s Relics and the Treasures of the East Room.” Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal. No. 28, 2006. p. 223.

[18] Austen. Mansfield Park. p. 171.

[19] June Sturrock. Introduction to Austen, Mansfield Park. New York: Broadview, 2001. p. 23.

[20] Ibid., p. 24.

[21] Berglund, p. 16.

[22] Austen. Mansfield Park. p. 172.

[23] Johnson, p. 223.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Thompson, p. 33.

[26] Melissa Edmundson. “A Space for Fanny: The Significance of Her Rooms in Mansfield Park.” Persuasions On-Line, Vol 23, No. 1. Winter 2002. Accessed at http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol23no1/edmundson.html on March 10, 2009.

[27] Johnson, p. 227.

[28] Thompson, p. 34.

[29] Johnson, p. 227.

[30] Ibid., p. 220.

[31] Berglund, p. 125.

[32] Letter dated 9 September, 1814. Accessed in Berglund, p. 131.

[33] Berglund, p. 130.

[34] Thompson, p. 15.

[35] Austen, Mansfield Park. p. 145.