Trump-style misogyny: Life imitating Austen's art

Jane Austen’s most overlooked heroine speaks volumes about the toxic masculinity still dominating headlines today, writes Dr Rosemary Sorensen.

THE EASY ACCESSIBILITY via ABC iview of Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius, which marks the writer’s 250th anniversary, must be accepted with thanks. While some of the delivery to camera of the “famous faces” tasked with giving us the information about Austen’s life and work do so with an unearned and over-animated authority, the story excites renewed interest in the books, as well as the screen adaptations.

A reliance on the 1999 film of Mansfield Park to make a case for Austen’s political intent in the later novels sent me off to watch it and it’s thoroughly enjoyable. But the warning that it changes the novel substantially then sent me to the book, which, accepting the received wisdom that it’s the least successful of her novels, I’d not read.

For a novel to be so entertaining, immersive and thought-provoking right now, at a time when it is so difficult to pay attention to anything but the stream of bad news, it’s a good one. Mansfield Park is, indeed, quality fiction.

That 1999 film, with lovely Frances O’Connor as Fanny and a pleasant Jonny Lee Miller as her Edmund, contends that a single reference to the slave trade (a question posed by Fanny to her uncle, just returned from managing his Antiguan business), as well as the fact that the real Lord Mansfield was instrumental in creating the laws that banished slavery, is strong evidence of Austen’s political intent. From that, they invent a reason beyond his weak and indulgent nature for Edmund’s older brother’s dissolute behaviour.

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According to the film, brother Tom went off the rails when he discovered that his father, Sir Thomas, not only benefitted from the slave trade but physically abused the men and women he owned as slaves.

This is all interesting and commendable revision of what Jane Austen might well have thought and written if she had lived a little later and had access to more knowledge. But it turns out that Tom is about as interested in the rights of slaves as he is in social justice for women: not at all. For most of the novel, he’s off at the races with his horses.

What is surprisingly underplayed in the film is how much Mansfield Park is about feminism. I was well into reading the novel when we were delivered the Four Corners revelations about the tragic consequences of toxic masculinity, which heightened and sharpened what Jane Austen was writing about in the early 19th Century.

Certainly, novels such as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility are about wonderful women but only incipiently feminist: men who abuse women for the callous gratification of their sexual desire and narcissistic pleasure do get their comeuppance, but, conventionally, the women are rewarded with love and marriage to superior men.

For this reason, Austen is not only classed as Romantic, but also dismissed as pre-, if not anti-feminist. But, in an age when we have such egregious examples of a masculinity which is so destructive, cruel, greedy and vainglorious – with Donald Trump its most visible and toxic exemplar – it is powerfully sobering to be reading Mansfield Park as Louise Milligan and the ABC Four Corners team release the story about a neurosurgeon and his longstanding “sexist and inappropriate behaviour”. He was, in the words of one of the women who witnessed this behaviour and its devastating impact, an “outspoken, powerful, sort of obnoxious man”.

Austen wrote about such men (although they are less obnoxious than sly, certainly dishonest and calculating), and lets us see how they use their power to deceive and trap young women. Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice. These are men who do dreadful damage to young women with narcissistic disregard for – even perverse pleasure in – the devastation they cause.

Mansfield Park, the least commercially successful of her novels, has a central character who is so good, so humble, so modest and so impossibly moral that, for a fair whack of the novel, she is a pain in the neck. Fanny Price is a challenge and her readers in 1814 didn’t approve. Why they didn’t like the novel is usually attributed to the fact that it is more serious, less playful, more sombre, less dramatic and more moralistic.

It might also have had something to do with the subversive challenge to the notion that a woman has more than her own feelings to consult when it comes to marriage.

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At the heart of the novel is Fanny’s love for her cousin Edmund, a decent, steady fellow who is an excellent judge of character, until confronted by pretty Mary Crawford’s winning ways. For an excruciatingly long time, it looks like he will remain blinded to the flighty, fanciful flaws in Mary’s character and marry her.

Mary’s brother, Henry Crawford, is also charming, high-spirited, entertaining, good-looking enough and wickedly narcissistic. He seduces women for the fun of it. Because he can. But also because he has no respect for the different outcomes of such seduction for men and for women.

The crucial play scene in Mansfield Park, where the young people, freed from any parental oversight, rehearse rather too energetically the scandalous “Lover’s Vows”, reveals to Fanny Henry’s philandering ways, as well as Edmund’s infatuation. Mortified, she keeps her counsel, watching, considering and, yes, judging. When she’s thrown into Henry’s manipulative path, she becomes a challenge to his ego, for here is a young woman insensible to his charms.

How Fanny got to have such sound judgement and such firm purpose is a mystery. How Elizabeth Bennet, such a readers’ favourite, got to be such a delightful, clever, witty, caring young woman, with such careless parents, is also a mystery, but not quite as unlikely. Emma, too, doesn’t come out of nowhere; her character is based as much on class as education, but she needs the guidance of a fine gentleman to steer her from the hazards of limited experience. Fanny, however, is angelic (as Henry says).

Fanny is younger than Edmund and benefits from his guidance. But she is, morally, fully formed and independent, right from the start, despite an unhelpful (impoverished, vulgar and careless) family life. An edition of Mansfield Park published in 1964, with an afterword by a male academic at the University of California, acknowledges the ‘greatness of this fractured novel’, placing it in the turning that separates the ‘bright spirits’ of the 18th Century (epitomised by Lizzie Bennet) and the ‘thickening pieties’ of the 19th (Fanny).

That writer ends by rather admiring Mary Crawford and regretting that Edmund chose to reject her and thus his own larger, more expansive, freer nature. And he also appears, doubtless as a bloke not yet blown about by the feminist breezes and gales that were soon to hit the universities and wider society in the late 1960s, to misread Henry.

Austen makes it very clear, through some of the most shrewd and amusing passages in the book, that Henry’s love is actually narcissism: he will defeat Fanny’s resistance because no one can resist him. Forget the chocolates and Valentine hearts. This is emotional blackmail, plotted by a master.

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Somehow, won over by Mary and Henry Crawford’s engaging manners, their wit and, to use an Austen word, their vivacity, the academic fails to listen to Fanny’s feminism — a feminism before its time.

When Henry is swept up by his own glorious decision to marry Fanny because she’ll be good for him and proposes, Fanny, like Lizzie before her, refuses, despite all the material benefits and the rise in her status that the union would bestow.

Fanny's uncle, Sir Thomas, is appalled:

I had thought you peculiarly free from wilfulness of temper, self-conceit, and every tendency to that independence of spirit, which prevails so much in modern days, even in young women, and which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offence.

The advantage or disadvantage of your family – of your parents – of your brothers and sisters – never seems to have had a moment’s share in your thoughts on this occasion.

You think only of yourself.

He's right about her thinking only of herself. And right that she makes the decision independently. Sir Thomas calling her out as ‘offensive and disgusting’ for having a mind of her own is ludicrous now; then, it was surely provocative.

Fanny, at this point in the story, becomes very interesting indeed, because Austen plays with readers’ expectations by inviting us to believe Henry has actually changed from a heartless rake into a worthy admirer and making it a little more difficult to stay on side with Fanny for disliking him.

Edmund, still in love with Mary Crawford, tries to convince Fanny that, even though he knows Henry is not thoroughly reliable nor serious, she will improve him, as needed:

‘He has chosen his partner with rare felicity... I know he will make you happy; but you will make him everything.’

How romantic, a reader might sigh. Happy ending.

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But no; Fanny cries out:

‘I would not engage in such a charge... in such an office of high responsibility!’

Edmund thinks she’s being modest, as usual, but Fanny rejects this feminine role, this angelic support act, this handmaiden’s tale.

When pressed to explain why she didn’t feel obliged to accept his proposal, Fanny explains that he surprised her:

‘How then was I to be — to be in love with him the moment he said he was with me?’

Fair question, Fanny.

Fanny does hold firm and she is rewarded with the love of a decent man when Edmund is shoved out of the fog of infatuation into the clarity of her constancy. It would be a harsh reader who calls out Jane Austen for too nice, too neat an ending. A novel doesn’t have to be real life, but it does have to have a kind of logic. If you’re saying, she wouldn’t say that, he wouldn’t do that, then the narrative loses your trust.

Austen’s female characters, such as Fanny Price (and Emma, and Anne Elliott in Persuasion) do survive what are small travails in the larger picture of women’s societal inequality, but intensely important at the individual level. Austen’s people are of a particular time and place, and we may find them ridiculously conventional in thought and action.

And yet, here is such a man as Henry Crawford, drawn with such perceptive nuance, and such a woman as Fanny, who knows what he is and has the fortitude to repel him — and both are somehow familiar and interesting to consider and try to understand. There’s comfort in such books, not as romantic escape, but as elegant critiques of social customs and individual responsibilities. It’s a bulwark against despair.

Would that we still lived in an age when discussions and arguments about Fanny and her creator were valued for what they could tell us about people and society. Instead, we’re swamped with Trump.