It would have all ended in a regular standing flirtation, in yearly meetings at Sotherton and Everingham.' Could you have believed it possible?-Buit the charm is broken. He would have taken no pains to be on terms with Mrs. Had she accepted him as she ought, they might now have been on the point of marriage, and Henry would have been too happy and too busy to want any other object. Austen has Fanny interrupt once, and it is to the remark Mary made that it is all Fanny's fault: had Fanny married Henry none of this could have occurred Edmund paraphrases Mary as saying: For four long pages Edmund speaks of his pained recognition of Mary's shallowness and indifference not only to sexual mores, but to the deeper emotions such playing with sexual mores elicits and to any permanent pain or injury to the heart or self-respect or reputation with others such playing might cause. Fanny tells Edmund of Mary's letter and how Mary made it clear in that letter she was willing to hear of Edmund again and listen to him "affectionately" because now he would have money and sufficient prestige as an heir to offset her intense distaste at the idea of becoming a clergyman's wife which had previously led her to reject him as a husband.įirst as Eugene McDonnell's posting alerts us, the scene is 5 pages long. I am, of course, referrring to the passage at the conclusion of Edmund's description of his last interview with Mary Crawford when Fanny at long last informs Edmund that Mary's sudden new-found willingness to listen to Edmund's marriage proposals after months at Mansfield Park where she said she would never become the wife of a rural clergyman (dreadfully dull as "all the world knows" according to Mary), and after giving him an exceedingly icy shoulder in London, is that she believes Tom Bertam may not survive. I'd like to take up the one scene which most people mention as Fanny's horribly deplorable sin, revealing how malicious she "really" is, because it is the one place in Mansfield Park where Fanny can be found to be doing something which might conceivably promote her self-interest and has on this list been interpreted as mean, cruel, nasty, and superfluously spiteful (just what one might expect from a "passive-aggressive type"). ![]() ![]() This posting is another written in response to the "Fanny Wars" which have again and again erupted on Austen-L. Mansfield Park Vol III, Ch 16 : Commentary Fanny Delivers the Last Blow to Edmund's Illusions About Mary Crawford
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