CordeliaFitzgerald

Cross out what you've already read. Six is the average.

Book Review by Bowen Simmons

“Mansfield Park” has always been Jane Austen’s most controversial novel.

The heroine of the book is Fanny Price, a powerless and socially marginal young woman. To almost everyone she knows, she barely exists. As a child, she is sent to live with the family of her wealthy uncle. Her parents give her up without regret, and her uncle only takes her in because he is deceived into doing so. Fanny’s wealthy relations, when they deign to notice her at all, generally do so only to make sure she knows of her inferiority and keeps in her place. Fanny is thus almost completely alone, the only kindness she receives coming from her cousin Edmund. Forced by circumstances to be an observer, Fanny is a faultlessly acute one, as well as the owner of a moral compass that always points true north.

Those who dislike “Mansfield Park” almost invariably cite Fanny as the novel’s central fault. She is generally accused of being two things: (1) too passive, and (2) too moral.

The charge of passivity is perplexing. Surely it is evident that for her to challenge those in power over her is extremely dangerous - in fact, when she finally does challenge them, on a matter of the greatest importance to her and of next to no importance to them, she is swiftly reminded of the weakness of her situation by being deported back to the impoverished family of her parents, who receive her with indifference.

The charge of morality is easier to understand - many readers feel themselves being silently accused by Fanny, and they don’t like it. The interesting thing is that those same readers often enjoy “Pride and Prejudice”, even though it is evident that the same moral standards are in place in both books. So, why do readers feel the prick of criticism in one and not the other?

Part of the answer is that in “Mansfield Park” the stakes are higher, which squeezes out the levity of “Pride and Prejudice”. Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of “Pride and Prejudice”, can afford to smile at the follies of others - they are not dangerous to her (at least she thinks not - she comes to think differently before the book is over). Fanny, however, can seldom afford to laugh. Vices that are funny in the powerless can be frightening in the powerful. Fanny’s vulnerability to the faults of others is clear to her, and she suffers for it throughout “Mansfield Park”.

Another part of the answer is that attractions that are combined in “Pride and Prejudice” are split in “Mansfield Park”. In “Pride and Prejudice”, Mr. Darcy is both rich and good; in “Mansfield Park”, Henry Crawford is only rich. In “Pride and Prejudice”, Elizabeth Bennet is both witty and good; in “Mansfield Park”, Fanny Price is only good. Readers who liked “Pride and Prejudice” because it had a rich man attracted to a witty woman, will either find nothing in “Mansfield Park” to engage their enthusiasms, or, as is not uncommon, they will actually find themselves drawn to the book’s sometimes-antagonists, the Crawfords.

Having dealt with why some people dislike “Mansfield Park”, it remains to deal with why other people like it. Its central attraction is the skillful blending of the story of Fanny Price herself, which is the Jane Austen’s adaptation of the “Cinderella” archetype, and the story of the other characters, which are of the great Christian themes of fall and redemption.

“Cinderella”, is of course the story of hope for the powerless. It has been subject to a certain amount of well-intended misreading in recent decades, but the motive for that misreading really concerns an accident of the eponymous story - the sex of the main character - rather than its real theme, which is universal. “Harry Potter”, for example, shows how easily and successfully the Cinderella archetype can be applied to a male protagonist.

Fall and redemption is the other story of “Mansfield Park”. At the start, the characters other than Fanny are fallen or falling. Some are so corrupt that we are have no hope for them; their presence is purely malign, endangering those not so badly off as themselves. Others have fallen far, but are not quite so far gone that we do not have hope for them as well as fear of them. Finally, there are those who are only beginning to fall, whose danger is all the more alarming for it.

In “Mansfield Park”, these stories are not just side by side, they are interwoven. Jane Austen’s Cinderella saves not only herself, but also saves - and almost saves - others as well. All but the worst characters in the book are drawn to the goodness in Fanny, even while they yield to the temptations that threaten them. The book has real tension in that we don’t know who will make it and who will not. Those who feel sympathy for the Crawfords are not entirely misreading the story - we are not wrong when we sympathize with a drowning man clutching at a rope thrown to him. Where we can go wrong is not when we wish not for the drowning man to be pulled to shore, but when we wish for the person at the other end of the rope to be pulled in after him.

Reblog if you’re a Dair shipper with Serenate feelings and a lot of Nair book!nostalgia.

you-define-beauty:

The pinprick, the goad

sinag:

i.

It’s just so exhausting sometimes.

The same old story: I pick up a book for light reading, something fictiony and adventure-y and fun, to lose myself in for a couple of hours because I want to stop thinking about all the injustice and horror of the world. (Sometimes I wonder if it is a selfish thing, to want to forget for a while; but then, I’m beginning to learn the necessity of survival.) I immerse myself in the story. I learn to love the characters, to laugh with them, to ache and fear and struggle with them.

And then something drags me out of it. Suddenly, at times; with a slow gradual sense of creeping dread, in others. Another person of color dead. Another culture of exotic magic and mysterious dark-skinned warrior-priests and arcane rituals and cryptic traditions. Another world from which the protagonist’s friend, the sole good person from that world, needs to be rescued. Broken language. Broken words.

I wish I could say, truthfully and without shame, that it surprises me every single time, that I am still capable of disappointment because I approached a work in good faith without expectations. But I can’t. When it happens I only feel sick to my stomach, pain and resignation and a blunted kind of anger roiling in me to translate into nausea. What am I doing? Why did I take that risk? Why do I keep inflicting my hope and my desire for good reading on myself?

Because this keeps happening, and I should know better. Because it’s too much to ask for, because it’s foolish to want such things when life doesn’t work that way, no books written for and about you, nowhere you can hold up a mirror and see yourself, nothing that doesn’t — won’t — hurt. And yet. And yet.

Some might say: it’s such a little thing. It’s just a book. Forget about it and move on. It’s just a story. Just one pinprick, one drop of blood, easily laughed away.

Is it? I wonder. Is it so common and accepted, that people like me must endure such things, that one more pinprick doesn’t matter anymore?

But you know, a tiny, infinitesimal stab. It can become a goad, too.



ii.

The list of such books is long and I have no wish to recall them. There are a few, though, that stand out a little more than others. These are books that were good, that I could have loved if not for— Isn’t it generally that way, after all? We’re hurt more intensely by the things we admire, that inspire us, that move us. And then there are the books that give birth to other things, which hurt almost as much, and make it very hard for me to read them again.

For instance: I first read The Hunger Games peering over my partner’s shoulder, on our flight back to my country. Despite some nitpicks I had with the world-building I thought it was brilliant. I loved Katniss from the very start and I was fiercely glad she was a person of color and identified as such. The book spoke to me about injustice and the knife-edge of survival and courage and sacrifice. It became truly dear to me.

And then they made Katniss white. And said it was all right, because the actress playing her was very talented anyway, and could portray her with depth and intensity, and. And.

It’s hard to convey all the little ways such a thing cuts. Because— a fictional character of color can be turned white so easily, it seems such a given, whiteness the default to cover the multitude of strangenesses in the other. Because— certainly the main character can never be a woman of color, much less be so courageous and defiant and so commanding of attention. Because— this happens every day, here too in my country, our spines and tongues twisting to mirror white America, denial of our selves and our heritage coming so easily to our lips. Because— it happens too often, with impunity, to accolades and ignorance and the casual dismissal, it is just a little thing. It is still good. Because— again and again, erasure and erasure and erasure, and with each new blot I sink deeper into the ghosts of my people whose stories of courage and revolution were subsumed and overwritten by the narratives of the heroic Americans saving us from our fates. Continuing to save us, vindicated in their victory as we are broken in our defeat and inability to save ourselves. Because— it is an affirmation of injustice, and the scales of power, and its whiplash, that one cannot see a brown girl set a city on fire.

Because stories matter, and already so few are told of us the rebels the defiant the third heel of the world.

Because joy betrayed turns to ashes in the mouth.

How is it that a story about oppression and survival and the brutality of power can become, itself, a weapon against the oppressed? How is it that even when one talks of revolution one must alter the narrative to give white privilege its due? What himagsikan only seeks to affirm the status quo, what pag-aalsa intends surrender to power? I think and think and the answer is already too clear, already iron on my tongue.

(It wouldn’t sell nearly as well, fellow members of my studied field say. It would be too strange. Economics is the study of choice; the problem of allocating scarce resources to optimum efficiency.)

Equality, too, is a scarce resource.

Pinprick and goad.



iii.

We still love. I, too, to my joy and sorrow. I love books and movies that hurt me, that erase me and warp my body and spit in my face and twist my guts into rock and glass. I love Tolkien’s work, for all that I am Southron or Easterling; I love the Narnia books, for all that I am kin to Calormene. I love the Star Wars books and the film trilogy (in my universe there are only three movies and nothing else)s, and L’Engle’s Time Quintet, for all that they sometimes cause me pain, a little below my sternum, a twinge of sharp ache. And I love the Hunger Games trilogy, too. There’s so much there that resonates — just so much.

And this is what I have learned, just so I can live with myself: compromise, keeping the rage at bay, swallowing past that stone in my throat so I can keep reading and watching and breathing without breaking into a fury of tears and sound. Of course it is unfair. There should not have to be this risk inherent in opening a book by a white author from the global North; the complicated assessment of— whether I have the energy enough to bear it should I see my skin shunned yet again, and my people treated as objects; whether I can still derive pleasure from a work that calls my features exotic. (Oh I have learned to take the bitter with the sweet.) But still. There is.

It would be easier if it were avoidable. It isn’t. I keep going on anyway. I keep reading and watching the films based on these books when I can, unashamed, knowing full well my chances. You can call it love, or a wild irrational hope, or stubborn persistence. Economists would call it cost. Yes, I think to myself, but cost is not bloodless; each day there is a price to pay, anger to be choked down, love to wrestle.

Though I love I will not be silent. Though I have learned compromise there are times when I can not, or will not, or am able to choose not to. (Those times are precious and rare. It is another cost that in these times I must brace myself for the outrage of high places.) That I talk about these things that wound me, that perpetuate narratives that have tried to shackle so many people like me for years upon years — it is out of love, too, that I speak. And for what little I can do, I will: write when I have words; keep my eyes open and my gaze steady when I cannot. I wish that there was more. I wish I had more words, more capacity to act. I wish I were not so often deceived into a learned sort of helplessness. Yet isn’t it enough, to love as honestly as I can, and live; can’t I call it enough, to simply see a thing for what it is, and not drop one’s gaze. I think: yes. Truth is also confrontation.

Sometimes it is enough to survive, only that, in a world where even paper and ink and the words of another can come together to try to refute my lived histories. I think — I am learning — sometimes that, too, is defiance.



iv.

I’m not sure it will ever stop being exhausting. I don’t think the pain will ever stop being what it is, for so long as the root causes exist. But sometimes (because I love words, I love stories, I love books and I love the multitudes of lives contained within them) I believe there is something else. Something more.

I want my people’s stories. I want more stories of people of color — fighting and struggling and living and loving and learning and dying and teaching and dancing and singing, singing, singing, shining, ablaze. I want more, so much more, of my kin being heroes and villains and sorcerers and professors and soldiers and librarians and street vendors and healers and clerks and artists and revolutionaries; of our printing presses and museums and halls and gardens and alleys and towers and laboratories and farms and balconies and rivers and trees and beds; our weaknesses, our courage, our margins, our inventions, our broken bones, our brows unbroken, our dust and ashes, our glory, our fire.

I want— I want so much, and every time my skin is written as my condemnation, every time I feel that familiar stab of story, the want sizzles and skitters in my chest, raging. This world, framed in rotten structures where injustice is a pillar of power, and strength means treading on dissidents’ spines— it would deny that want, if it could.

But, even exhaustion is overcome by desire. The pinprick becomes the goad. The yoke breaks.

I want to be a torch. I want to set those pillars on fire with stories.

(via holymotherofrowling)

mankey23:

theres nothing like buying a new book when you have 8183920188281 other books to read

(via izzyspellman)