A Mild Defense of Mansfield Park's Edmund Bertram

“I am going to write a husband whom no one but myself will much like"

Previously: Mansfield Park.

MRS. PRICE: Too many children

Too many children Portsmouth help

Mail son away

Send son away via mail

FANNY: ₕₑₗₗₒ

MARIA BERTRAM [disgusted]: I’m thirteen

what are you, ten

I simply cannot let go of Mansfield Park. It is far and away my favorite Austen novel, and the one I reread most often. Edmund Bertram is a particular favorite of mine, in part because he is so widely disliked. If you have ever dated someone that none of your friends approved of (not, I hope, for reason of cruelty or exploitation, merely as a matter of taste), you may recall the perverse pleasure of the experience.

I suspect that most people who date someone that the rest of their friends dislike are perfectly aware of it, and far from experiencing anything like shame or chagrin, find if anything that their romantic experience is enhanced by the disapproval. It’s very much like the fellow in Matthew 13, who finds treasure hidden in a field, and for joy over it goes and sells all that he has in order to buy it. There must be a corresponding perverse pleasure for practically every experience in the world, I think. There’s nothing quite like feeling misunderstood by the world at large and virtuously in love, both at the same time. Dorothea Brooke knew it; Fanny Price knows it too. So did Paramore, come to think of it; “Misery Business” has a great deal to do with that sort of pleasure, even though Paramore had to disavow it a few times before finally coming back around to owning their own sadism.

One of my favorite characters to write in Women’s Hotel, Gia Kassab, chooses her much-older, widowed partner almost exclusively on the basis of going against public opinion:

He was still young enough to be desirable, but old enough to have been crushed by life, to require her in a way no young man could, and Gia wanted, more than she wanted to be admired or appreciated or even adored, to be absolutely, vitally necessary to the man that she loved. Whether she loved him now, or whether she had merely decided that he ought to be the man she would love, and was willing to let the love arrive later, was very nearly beside the point. He was the man of her choosing, and she was proud of having arrived at her decision. This made him interesting, heroic, and worthwhile to her. The fact that he did not want her, that he did not at present want anyone—perhaps it is more strictly correct to say that he did not want to be alone, but neither did he want another woman—only made him more valuable.

Good-looking, sophisticated men with exciting jobs who did not want women were rare, and therefore to be prized. That he had loved his wife (Gia already thought of her, not without respect, as his first wife) spoke in his favor; that his not wanting another woman was temporary meant she would have to work fast. And it was more thrilling, somehow, to prove yourself a worthy successor to a dead and beloved woman, than merely to snag some man’s affections at random. To inherit a position of such esteem would be like winning a race, or a war; Gia could hardly understand why any woman would marry someone her own age, some fellow sapling with whom she would be forced to share the privileges of youth, rather than bear the palm alone, and be borne aloft in her turn on a pair of seasoned shoulders. A man who had first made himself strong, then been weakened enough by life to need her—that was the only sort of man worth having.

No one in Mansfield Park wants Fanny to marry Edmund, and hardly anybody who reads Mansfield Park, at least not since about the year 1920, wants her to marry Edmund either. Some people find Henry Crawford salvageable, while others will cheerfully kick him to the curb too, but there is near-universal approval of the No On Edmund ticket.

Edmund has plenty of faults, the most obvious of which is that he fails to be in love with Fanny for 99% of Mansfield Park. The next most obvious is that he is confidently, strenuously wrong about nearly every interpersonal observation he makes over the course of the entire book. He is as often wrong as Emma, but with none of Emma’s more charming characteristics to make up for it.

I’ve always appreciated Juliet McMaster’s 2014 article, “Is Edmund Bertram Right About Anything?,” for her examination of the moment where Edmund accidentally curses himself in chapter twelve by telling Fanny that “I believe it often happens, that a man, before he has quite made up his own mind, will distinguish the sister or intimate friend of the woman he is really thinking of, more than the woman herself.” In the case of Henry Crawford, this is demonstrably not the situation; but in the case of Edmund himself, it may very well be:

This brief exchange between Edmund and Fanny occurs after Henry Crawford has returned to Mansfield after only two weeks’ absence at his own estate of Everingham. And it is interesting in showing how Fanny, the pupil, with strong powers of observation and judgement, is desperately short of confidence in her own judgement; whereas Edmund, the tutor – (and their relation has been very much that of pupil and teacher) has full confidence in his own judgement, but with much less reason…

Is Edmund right about anything? His comment that Crawford “has no faults but what a serious attachment will remove” could be right – and Mary Crawford too believes that if he had married Fanny he would have settled down to being a good husband and landlord. That belief is pretty questionable, of course, but it is never tested, and since it is only a might-have-been, the answer must depend on the individual judgements of readers.

Then what about his general comment on human behaviour, that “it often happens that a man, before he has quite made up his own mind, will distinguish the sister or intimate friend of the woman he is really thinking of more than the woman herself”? Wrong again, so far as Julia and Maria are concerned! From this bit of general wisdom he intends to prove that Crawford’s attentions to Maria are really because he prefers Julia – which again is arrant nonsense (as Fanny knows, but daren’t say, because of her disastrous lack of confidence in her own judgment).

What interests me is the extent to which Edmund’s piece of wisdom may actually apply to himself.

It does make sense to think of Edmund and Mary Crawford as cursed, especially when you consider their strangely slippery relationship to time at the end of Mansfield Park. Our last image of Mary is an uncertain one:

Mary, though perfectly resolved against ever attaching herself to a younger brother again, was long in finding among the dashing representatives, or idle heir-apparents, who were at the command of her beauty, and her £20,000, any one who could satisfy the better taste she had acquired at Mansfield, whose character and manners could authorise a hope of the domestic happiness she had there learned to estimate, or put Edmund Bertram sufficiently out of her head.

“Was long in finding.” meaning she found someone after an unusually long delay? Or “was long in finding,” meaning she may still be at it, like the ship that never quite comes into port at the end of Villette? She has taste, beauty, money, and a sea of undifferentiated bachelors, and is surrounded by so much plenty that she has become stewed in time; a sort of reverse Miss Havisham, whose wedding might take place at any moment, but never does.

“I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own,” the narrator tells us, “I only entreat everybody to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire.”

Is there a more particular, or a vaguer date, than “not a week too soon?” And is there an ending more pleased in its own withholding of romantic satisfaction than “Bro, you just have to trust me?” And — in the language of the book at least — hasn’t he just swapped out one love spell for another? “He became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire.” There is no originality, no spontaneous growth; his feelings have now been artificially inflated to match hers, as if she had paid a psychic twenty bucks for it.

No one in Mansfield Park is ever happier for longer than two pages. In both its queasiness and its constant reversals, it’s the most like a roller coaster of all of Austen’s novels. There is nothing satisfying about Edmund. He does not perform to expectations, is not a pleasure in class, can always be counted on to do precisely the wrong thing at precisely the right moment, and gives the maximum amount of pain to the most acutely sensitive heroine this side of “The Princess and the Pea” roughly 400 times a page. Mansfield Park understands the pleasure of saying “Yes, that’s the one I want,” even when the waiter asks you to repeat your order with a look of incredulity on their face.

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