Defending Mary Crawford

[neadods]

I am, to my shock, riding into the virtual lists to defend Mary Crawford over at No Longer Quivering, which has a cross-post about not putting up with not-really-nice people. The problem is that the OP has decided that Mary Crawford is the archtypical "only seems to be nice" person and all I can think is "We didn't read the same Mansfield Park at ALL!"

Yeah, Mary's shallow. But Edmund's a prig, we can't let Fanny's rose-tinted view of him change the fact that the moment that breaks Edmund's heart forever is the moment when Mary not only shows that she's more adept at social management than he is, she's actually concerned about her friend and her brother whereas he's all too happy to let friend, family, and love object twist in the breeze. I can't help but think of cousin Collins in Pride & Prejudice, "sympathizing" with Lydia's social scandal by talking about how it totes would have been better if she croaked.

Also, Mary and Fanny are the only two people in the entire novel who actually fall in love. Frank plays around, Maria marries for money, Julia marries for escape and protection, and Edmund, having chased the only skirt not related to him for most of the book, settles for the only woman his age left on the rebound. (Although both he and Fanny have a compatible line in judgmentalism that will see them through nicely.)

Comments

[legionseagle (from livejournal.com)]

Plus, she digs Fanny out of a hole on several occasions with Mrs Norris, including stepping in to stop her being bullied into being Cottager's wife. And makes a cracking joke about sodomy in the Royal Navy.

[tempestsarekind.livejournal.com]

…Not really, though? I mean, here's Edmund's report of how Mary reacts to Henry's running off with Edmund's sister:

‘Why would not she [Fanny] have him? It is all her fault. Simple girl! I shall never forgive her. 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. He would have taken no pains to be on terms with Mrs. Rushworth again. It would have all ended in a regular standing flirtation, in yearly meetings at Sotherton and Everingham.’

The thing that horrifies Edmund is not that Mary is concerned about her brother and his sister; it's that she thinks Fanny should have married Henry, and then everything would have been fine because he only would have flirted with Maria once or twice a year. It's that she thinks Henry and Maria have only indulged in a bit of "folly" as opposed to, say, adultery and incontinence. It's that she's not upset at what they did, just that they got caught doing it. I mean, we might dislike Fanny and Edmund for holding the serious, even reproving religious views that they hold (though I love them both, actually), but they are real 18thc/19thc values. Mary's take - that Maria should leave her husband and then marry Henry, since they don't have any other option - might be practical or socially adept from our point of view, but her lack of any feeling about this is genuinely immoral from the narrator's point of view, who uses words like "guilt and infamy" about what Henry and Maria have done; it's not just Fanny and Edmund who think this way. Here's the narrator describing Sir Thomas trying to get his daughter away from Henry: "Sir Thomas, however, remained yet a little longer in town, in the hope of discovering and snatching her from farther vice, though all was lost on the side of character." This is a BIG deal, and the fact that Mary doesn't see it as such - that she doesn't see it as an issue of character, just an issue of expediency - is precisely the problem. It's not a plus.

(The narrator's remark also indicates that the family actually isn't planning on just letting Maria twist in the breeze; and if you remember, she ultimately moves in with Mrs. Norris. It's true that Sir Thomas won't let her back into the house - after she refuses to leave Henry, and stays with him for months until they finally hate each other and separate; things might have been different if she had come away at first. But he has no plans to let her beg in the streets, either: "As a daughter, he hoped a penitent one, she should be protected by him, and secured in every comfort, and supported by every encouragement to do right, which their relative situations admitted; but farther than that he could not go.")

Also…Mary might fall in love with Edmund, but that doesn't stop her from wanting him to change completely, so I'm not sure how valuable that is. She's happy when she gets him to do things against his moral code: "His sturdy spirit to bend as it did! Oh! it was sweet beyond expression." I know acting in a play is not a big deal from a modern perspective, so who cares if he performs in the play, right? But Edmund cares, and Mary knows that he cares, and yet she's glad that she makes him turn aside from what he thinks is right. I find that genuinely horrific, as a way to treat someone you purport to love.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Best line of the book, that sodomy pun. And I had zero sympathy for Edmund constantly saying "deep down she's an innocent lamb" when she pretty much introduced herself with that joke!

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Mary is a calculating thing - I have a mental image of her running after Edmund saying "Judge? Politician? Starbucks barista?" as she tries to get him to change professions. But although she came prepared to set her cap at Tom she still falls for Edmund even when she could take a second shot at (and probably gain) Tom. Tom, who equally calculatingly looked at Mr. Grant and estimated how long it would take him to have a heart attack.

The thing that horrifies Edmund is not that Mary is concerned about her brother and his sister; it's that she thinks Fanny should have married Henry

I'm not sure that's the center of his shock, though. Edmund tells Fanny that he only went to see her as "the last, last interview of friendship" - before she even opened her mouth, he had already decided to throw her over and had determined what and how she should feel. Whereas she, who had entered the book because she was tired of living with an uncle who had chosen to "bring his mistress under his own roof" (obviously without benefit of marriage) already had a working knowledge of how this sort of social scandal would play out. Well before he relates Mary's lines about marrying Fanny, Edmund has plenty to say about Mary assuming he'd talk to her at all much less "No harsher name than folly given! So voluntarily, so freely, so coolly to canvas it! No reluctance, no horror, no feminine - shall I say? No modest loathings."

It's true that Edmund has been holding a false image of what Mary's character is the entire book. I just have no sympathy for his shock and horror now, when he knew how she came to the parsonage and introduced herself to the Mansfield crew at dinner with a sodomy pun. Edmund hasn't been paying attention, but even if he'd done so, he still planned on leaving her to fend for herself matrimonially for the sake of principle after practically coming to the point of breach of promise.

[tempestsarekind.livejournal.com]

Oh, I do believe that Mary falls in love with Edmund! I just think it's a mean and selfish sort of love, in keeping with her character. It's the same way she sneakily forces that necklace onto Fanny, knowing that Fanny would never have taken it if she'd known it was from Henry. She may well care something for Fanny, and the necklace is no big deal to her - but she can see that it is a very big deal to Fanny, and she forces Fanny to accept it anyway.

As for Edmund...Obviously he can make his own choices, but the narrator makes it clear that everyone, not just Edmund, sees the scandal between Henry and Maria as the end of any relationship between Edmund and Mary. Sir Thomas, for example, believes that Edmund is now "cut off" from Mary. And that would matter a lot to Edmund - who doesn't even want to act in a play without his father's consent, and who would see the need to marry someone who could be an acceptable clergyman's wife (however unfair that might be as a criterion). However, despite his strong feelings for Mary, he's not engaged to her, and no promises have been made - in part because Mary keeps saying that she would never marry a clergyman, and in part because Edmund *has* spent the whole novel feeling that something just isn't quite right about Mary, and hasn't been able to take that step of making any actual promises to her. So I don't think it's quite right to say that he's leaving her to fend for herself or "coming to the point of breach of promise." She's not a ruined woman, and could set her cap at someone else if she likes. (At least, she's not a ruined woman because of Edmund. It's possible that the scandal might well damage Mary's marriage prospects, but the fault of that lies with Henry.)

Anyway, Edmund actually goes to that meeting still thinking well of Mary, even if he's determined that he can't see her again. The sentence you cite runs like this in its entirety: "regarding it as what was meant to be the last, last interview of friendship, and investing her with all the feelings of shame and wretchedness which Crawford’s sister ought to have known, he had gone to her in such a state of mind, so softened, so devoted, as made it for a few moments impossible to Fanny’s fears that it should be the last" (my emphasis). He's not appalled that she wants to see him; he's not appalled at all until she starts talking about what Maria and Henry have done. That's what he's talking about in the second excerpt that you quote, Mary's own discussion of the subject. ("'I heard you were in town,’ said she; ‘I wanted to see you. Let us talk over this sad business. What can equal the folly of our two relations?’") Yes, he's going to see her as a farewell, because he doesn't think he can be connected to her anymore because of the scandal. That's pretty standard operating procedure for the nineteenth century, and it's true, for good or ill, that Edmund was never going to be one of those heroes who cries out, "I care nothing for your family, I love you anyway!" But he's only shocked and horrified when Mary starts talking about adultery like it's no big deal. I don't think that her having an uncle who kept a mistress could reasonably have prepared him for her attitude, unless we assume that you can always tell what a person is like by looking at her relatives.

(Here's what Edmund says about Mary in chapter 27: "She does not think evil, but she speaks it, speaks it in playfulness; and though I know it to be playfulness, it grieves me to the soul." So he's deluded, but not because he hasn't been paying attention; it's that he doesn't realize how deep her sentiments and sayings actually go. He keeps giving her the benefit of the doubt.)