The truth is, that our inquiries were too direct; we sent a servant, we went ourselves: this will not do seventy miles from London; but this morning we heard of it in the right way. It was seen by some farmer, and he told the miller, and the miller told the butcher, and the butcher’s son-in-law left word at the shop.
It was like those jokes that New Yorkers make about the pizza in Chicago, or the culture in Los Angeles, or those quaint, slow-witted people that they meet on vacation in Vermont.
More than snobbery, I saw, this was an appalling lack of curiosity. Accustomed to a world of “ask and have,” of trading money for pleasure in coldly impersonal transactions, Mary had no interest in trying to appreciate the face-to-face texture of country life, where news was passed from mouth to mouth and everyone cooperated in communal tasks like getting in the harvest. Not having to struggle for anything, I realized, also means not having to think about anything. The Crawfords, at least, were quick and clever, but Maria and Julia Bertram, praised and pampered from birth, were almost aggressively empty-headed—and their mother, of course, made of indolent stupidity a kind of art form.
I had fallen, I realized, for the oldest myth in the book: the idea that upper-class people are all urbane and cultured and intellectually sophisticated. It was probably Austen’s fault as much as anyone’s—all those Elizabeths and Darcys, with their crackling banter—but I only needed to look at what she herself was trying to tell us to see how ridiculous that notion was. Elegant manners and active minds are two completely different things; fat wallets and interesting thoughts have no particular connection. The upper class’s traditional pursuits had a lot more to do with horses than books. As for today, those beautiful people in shining clothes don’t sit around saying witty things; they drop names and talk about real estate. Matthew Arnold, who came about a half a century after Austen and who popularized the term “philistines” to describe the middle class, had an even less flattering name for the aristocracy: “barbarians.” People like Elizabeth Bennet were rare exceptions. Even someone as smart as Mary Crawford preferred to exercise her body, not her brain.
But wealth and comfort, Austen made me see, stunted more than just minds. When one of the Mansfield children fell ill away from home, Fanny, who was also away, was kept informed by Lady Bertram. Yet it was as if her aunt, protected all her life from trouble or hardship or even exertion, couldn’t finally feel what was going on with her own child—couldn’t feel, in other words, what was going on in her own life. Her letters to Fanny, as Austen put it, were but a “medley of trusts, hopes, and fears” (as in “I trust and hope he will find the poor invalid in a less alarming state than might be apprehended”), a frictionless, conventional language that represented nothing but “a sort of playing at being frightened.” Everything seemed to happen to her at one remove, as if she were handling life with gloves on.
It was just the same with the rest. With layers of money to insulate them from the consequences of their actions, nothing really mattered to them: nothing was serious, nothing was sacred, nothing could raise a genuine feeling. The idea of performance, I realized yet again, was perfectly to the point. When Henry set out to conquer Fanny’s affections (a lark for him, a potential heartbreak for her), he was, in essence, mapping out a script and acting as his own director. Austen constructed those scenes—Henry reads from Shakespeare, Henry talks about giving sermons—to feel like little plays. He was playing at sensitivity, playing at cultivation, acting out whatever strategies he thought would work and savoring his performance all the while. He was impersonating himself, a spectator at his own life.
On the outing to Maria Bertram’s fiancé’s estate, early in the Crawfords’ stay at Mansfield, the party was shown the old chapel. “Prayers were always read in it by the domestic chaplain,” Maria explained, “but the late Mr. Rushworth,” her fiancé’s father, “left it off”—that is, discontinued the practice. “Every generation has its improvements,” Mary quipped—only to eather words a minute later, when she learned of Edmund’s career plans. “‘Ordained!’ said Miss Crawford; ‘what, are you to be a clergyman?’” She almost refused to believe it, and she certainly refused to accept it, browbeating the man she hoped to marry, over and over, to get him to change his mind. It seemed to her a kind of joke. How could anyone take religion and morality seriously? How could anyone take words like “duty” and “conduct” and “principle” seriously? After all, she never took anything seriously.
Yet as the Crawfords prolonged their stay and came to know Fanny and Edmund better and better, they began to get an inkling of everything that they’d been missing. Henry saw something in Edward that he wished he could find in himself, and something in Fanny that he wished he could have for himself. As for Mary, when she did at last tear herself away from Mansfield to pay a long-delayed visit to another friend, she had this to say to the heroine: “Mrs. Fraser has been my intimate friend for years. But I have not the least inclination to go near her. I can think only of the friends I am leaving. . . . You have all so much more heart among you, than one finds in the world at large.” “Heart”—Mary’s stammering attempt to name the things she was starting to learn how to value: moral seriousness, depth of feeling, constancy of purpose. Inner riches—things you can’t buy, things you have to earn. The woman who’d thought she had everything was discovering just how destitute she really was.
Yet still—and this was really the saddest thing of all, both in the novel and among the wealthy kids I knew—she couldn’t finally bring herself to overcome her training. She loved Edmund, but she wouldn’t marry him as long as he insisted on becoming a clergyman. He simply wouldn’t be rich enough, though her own money was sufficient to make them both comfortable, and he also wouldn’t be glamorous enough. “For what is to be done in the church?” she asked him. “Men love to distinguish themselves, and in either of the other lines,” law or the military, “distinction may be gained, but not in the church. A clergyman is nothing.” But of course, Mary didn’t really mean that men love to distinguish themselves, though many certainly do. She meant that women love to see their men distinguished—or at least, women like her. And without distinction, apparently—without success, in today’s terms—a man was “nothing.”
Not to be able to marry the person you love, because you love money and success more. Is there any hell worse than this? Yet I saw it all the time in New York. Even the woman I loved that summer I studied for my orals, a person of great intelligence and sensitivity, once admitted, with rueful self-knowledge, that she wouldn’t be able to marry a man who didn’t make a lot of money. She was a doctor’s daughter, and had been raised in high suburban comfort. “I blame my father,” she said as a sort of ironic joke. “He provided me with a certain standard of living, and now I can’t do without it.”
Another woman I knew, equally brilliant and self-aware but even richer and more glamorous, broke up with a man she really liked because, as she confessed, he just didn’t have enough style. This was after a long string of romantic disappointments, no less. He was kind, she told me, he was attractive, he was smart, he was a good lover, he even made a very nice living. But he came from Ohio, and he didn’t know how to dress or groom or distinguish himself at a cocktail party. “It’s awful,” she told me, “but I just can’t do it.”
The next time I saw her, she was being led around by a welldressed boob who droned on about all the important people he knew. She glanced at me if to say, “I know—I’m sorry.” It made me think of Maria Bertram, who also knew exactly what she was getting: “a heavy young man, with not more than common sense; but as there was nothing disagreeable in his figure or address, . . . and as a marriage with Mr. Rushworth would give her the enjoyment of a larger income than her father’s,” “the young lady was well pleased with her conquest.” What a failure this was, of imagination as well as courage. “A large income,” Mary Crawford said, “is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of,” and apparently neither she nor Maria nor many of the smart young people I knew (“It’s worse than being poor!”) could think of a different one.