New Ways to Kill Your Mother Read Free

makes her merely unpleasant, Fanny will have to respond to this in scene after scene because Lady Bertram is, unusually, an aunt in residence rather than an aunt who comes and goes. This then will become the story of the book, a simple story of cruelty and resistance to cruelty. If Lady Bertram is actively cruel to Fanny, then how will she treat her own children? If she treats them with kindness and cares for them, then the intensity of their agency will be diluted. If she is cruel to them too, then the singleness of Fanny, her solitude as a force in the book, will not emerge.
    It would really make sense to kill Lady Bertram, or to have her not there, allow her to be one of those unmentioned mothers in fiction, an unpalpable absence. But in that case, there will be no real impulse for Fanny to join her household rather than that of Aunt Norris and Fanny will miss daily contact with Edmund, who notices her and then doesn’t, thus releasing important dramatic energy in the book.
    In patterning the book, in creating its dynamic and its dramatics, Austen has to have Lady Bertram there as a mother and not there all at the same time; she has to give her characteristics that are essentially neutral. She might have been easily amusing or irritating or silly like Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice . Since her husband is away so much, she might have been given a more significant role. The pattern of Mansfield Park is essentially the pattern of the family. Even the outsider Henry Crawford comes armed with two sisters. When we look for the pattern of the book, we must therefore examine the dynamic of the family, the strange way power is held and withheld which allows the events of the novel to unfold and, more than anything, lets Fanny Price, so ostensibly dull and powerless and passive, emerge as deeplydrawn and deeply powerful within the silence of her own consciousness. The novel gives her a sort of autonomy that she could not have were the pattern to be different; it allows her to move from being an outsider to taking over the narrative and, indeed, taking over generally.
    Thus Austen has the ingenious idea of making the sofa, rather than the household, the realm over which Lady Bertram reigns, and making sleep, or half-sleep, her dynamic. She is too sleepy to care. When her husband is leaving for the West Indies, Austen writes: ‘Lady Bertram did not like at all to have her husband leave her; but she was not disturbed by any alarm for his safety, or solicitude for his comfort, being one of those persons who think nothing can be dangerous, or difficult, or fatiguing to anyone but themselves.’ While she thinks about her own comfort, she does not dwell too much on the subject. It defines what she does not do rather than any of her actions. She hardly has any actions. Austen writes: ‘Lady Bertram did not go into public with her daughters. She was too indolent even to accept a mother’s gratification in witnessing their success and enjoyment at the expense of any personal trouble …’ What Lady Bertram does in the book most of the time is not merely ignore others, but effectively ignore herself; she lives a gloriously underexamined life, so placing her in precisely the opposite force field to Fanny, who notices herself with considerable, almost intrusive, care, as though she were a little orphan novelist. Lady Bertram is lazy, has little to say, suffers from mild ill health. Her passivity and general lassitude play comically against her sister’s energy. But more than anything, the state of non-being, her presence as outline rather than line, her sheer inertia, her belief in the power of her own placid beauty, allow other forces in the novel – the venality of some of her children, Edmund’s sincerity – to happen, or have their effect, not because of their mother or their family or even despite the mother orthe family; instead, naturally, organically, each character is given their own autonomy, thus allowing Mansfield Park to