"Mansfield Park': Book vs. film

I recently read Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (either for the first time or for the first time in 40 years, I really don't know which), after seeing an intriguing mention of it in a review of Colm Toibin's New Ways to Kill Your Mother. Toibin's aside was more intriguing than Austen's book, which turned out to be a real slog.

Austen's 1814 novel is the story of Fanny Price, a girl from a poor family who is sent to live with her wealthy relatives, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram of Mansfield Park, and their four children (three of whom are selfish and spoiled; the fourth, Edmund, is Fanny's equal in virtue and lack of personality). Sir Thomas leaves for more than a year to deal with business in Antigua, returning to find the young people— with the exception of Fanny, who knows Sir Thomas would disapprove— practicing amateur theatricals.

One of the young actors, Henry Crawford, flirts with the Bertram daughters but then turns his attention to Fanny; he ends up proposing marriage with as much sincerity as he is capable of. Only Fanny realizes he's a rake, and so she steadfastly refuses him. Edmund, meanwhile, falls in love with Crawford's sister, who is just shallow as her brother.

Many things happen— well, a few things happen, but Austen needs many pages to describe them — but at the end everyone recognizes that the Crawfords are not nice people, and Edmund realizes he loves Fanny.

Glacial pace

The book is just as dull as it sounds— possibly more so. Fanny is no Elizabeth Bennet (the heroine of Austen's Pride and Prejudice) or even an Emma Woodhouse (of Emma). She lacks passion, intellect, humor and any discernible talent— anything that would encourage the modern reader to identify with her. The events, most of them undramatic, unfold at a glacial pace.

So it's understandable that when Patricia Rozema undertook her film adaptation of Mansfield Park in 1999, she would try to spice things up a bit, primarily by endowing Fanny with a personality. Rozema not only turned Fanny into an Austen heroine, she made her Austen's stand-in: an aspiring writer. She adds excerpts from Austen's juvenile works (most notably her irreverent History of England, in a schoolroom scene) and journals (in voice-overs that provide tart Austenian epigrams) in the new-and-improved Fanny's voice.

It's notoriously hard to effectively translate a book into a movie, to boil down complicated plotting into a single coherent narrative or portray interior states though a primarily visual medium. When it's done well, a movie can add richness to the experience of the unfolding story; when it's done badly, it can distort a novel beyond all recognition.

Balloon bouquet

In the book, Fanny isn't a writer— well, except for her regular long letters to her beloved brother William, a character who completely vanishes from the movie. Thus the gratitude Austen's Fanny feels toward Crawford for finding William a job— which temporarily causes her to reconsider her adamant rejection of his suit— disappears from the film. Instead, Fanny accepts Crawford, albeit briefly, after he woos her with an early 19th-Century version of a balloon bouquet.

(The rocket display, delivered by cart while Fanny visits her birth family, is anachronistically reminiscent of John Cusack and his boom box in Say Anything.)

Rozema's other major change is to make explicit the financial underpinnings of the world of Mansfield Park. Sir Thomas's yearlong trip to Antigua must have concerned business on a sugar plantation there, and the Bartlett fortune must have been based on slave labor. Austen makes this point only tangentially in the novel.

Rozema, however, threads slavery references and imagery throughout the film, showing us slave ships in the sea below the cliff on Fanny's original trip to Mansfield Park, and turning Tom, the heir, into an artist so that he could fill a notebook with drawings of slaves writhing under the lash.

Ignoring slavery

Some critics, including Edward Said and Vladimir Nabokov, have taken Austen to task for ignoring the slavery issue and thus tacitly supporting imperialism. Rozema's additions presumably support this critique: She effectively adds material that she feels Austen should have included in the first place.

But Austen consciously ignored slavery, just as she ignored the Napoleonic Wars and the Industrial Revolution. These were not issues she chose to address in her fiction; in real life, Austen opposed slavery. The addition of this political subtext, I would argue, distorts her original work, which was concerned with personal relationships, not political issues. Similarly, Austen deliberately chose not to give Fanny any characteristics aside from dutifulness (and a lack of robustness), so giving her a personality is equally a distortion.

The great value of Austen's Mansfield Park lies in its portrayal of how marriage worked in Regency England: as a financial transaction, not the culimination of a romance. If the novel seems dull and Fanny seems plain and hapless— well, that's precisely Austen's point.

Pity the students

Of course, Rozema has the right to make whatever movie she wants, and to shape Austen's material according to her own vision. And I'm certainly no purist when it comes to Austen adaptations— I adored the 2004 Bollywood take on Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in Bride and Prejudice, and I thoroughly enjoyed the Amy Heckerling's 1995 Emma update, Clueless. Both of those films, however, are set in the modern world and involve locations and social conventions that didn't exist in Austen's day.

Rozema's work, in contrast, is a costume drama set in the 1810s. As such, it presents itself as a more or less faithful version of Austen's work. Heaven help those high school students who watch the movie instead of slogging through the book, and thus end up with a fundamental misunderstanding of Austen's intentions.♦


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