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ОглавлениеChapter One
Jane Austen’s Plots of Prevention
In the second of eleven installments of Hygeia (1802–3),1 Thomas Beddoes offers the following fictional dialogue between a woman and her doctor:
“What is good against the head-ache, Doctor?”
“Health, Madam.”
“Well, if you feel no interest about an old woman like me—Marianne there, you perceive, has been hacking all afternoon. Do tell her of some little thing, [sic] that is good against cough.”
“Health, Madam.”
“But are you resolved not to give a more satisfactory answer?” (14–15)
To make a case that prevention is more important than cure, Beddoes satirizes those who turn to their doctors for easy remedies—those bad readers who are too easily seduced by the drama of diagnosis, the action of treatment, and the closure of cure. In fact, Beddoes “explicitly declare[s] PREVENTION of mischief to be [his] exclusive objective,” asking his readers in the second installment of Hygeia to “bear with [him] yet a few more months, before they give [him] up” (14) for the “makers of those books . . . which profess to distribute far and wide a capacity for discriminating diseases and applying remedies” (19). Health, conceived in this way, should not be about getting cured but about preventing illness in the first place. One does not become sick; rather, one loses the opportunity to stay well, and the woman’s response to her beleaguered doctor suggests that such a concept was, if not difficult to accept, at least highly unsatisfactory. The fictional woman interprets the doctor’s prescription (“Health, Madam”) as a refusal to practice medicine, and while the adage “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” was common enough, it did not quite capture one’s interest in the way that Widgeon’s Purifying Pills did.2
Beddoes renders the distinction between taking “some little thing” and becoming a preventionist explicit in terms of its narrative aims: “Writings intended to warn against the destruction of health,” he argues, “can hardly be confounded with such as pretend to teach people how to restore it. To direct a stranger how to traverse a slippery ground without injury is one thing. To instruct him how to set his leg should he break it, is quite another” (“Essay II” in Hygeia, 35). These instructions differ in terms of both their content and the form that they take—and to the reader addicted to the drama of broken legs, simply learning to traverse is not so immediately appealing. As Ginnie Smith explains in “Prescribing the Rules of Health: Self-Help and Advice in the Late Eighteenth Century,” “Prevention . . . is and was barely newsworthy[,] being a passive or negative operation.”3 No statistics exist for the number of healthy citizens of a given period, so we cannot know if something has been prevented, we can only know when it has not. The great paradox at work in such narratives is that one can only write about prevention by showing what must be prevented—that is, showing what one wants to keep from happening. To grasp the significance of the warning, we must witness the destructiveness—the proverbial broken leg—that results from avoidable behavior.
Beddoes was certainly not alone in his struggle with this problem. In the highly popular Domestic Medicine (1769),4 William Buchan assumes that his readers will be disappointed in the dearth of “pompous prescriptions, and promised great cures” (vii) to be found in his manual, asserting that he “would much rather teach men how to avoid the necessity of using [pills and potions], than how they should be used” (viii). Physicians such as Buchan and Beddoes were acutely aware that the anxiety over disease (both moral and medical) and the satisfaction that comes with recovery made for a powerful narrative, one not easy for doctors promoting prevention to displace. As such, the problem was how to show what a narrative of prevention looks like. Readers of health manuals wanted to learn how to get well more than they wanted to learn how not to get sick.
The problems associated with narrating prevention hold true for the nineteenth-century novel. Indeed, the novel bears much of the responsibility for the seductiveness of the illness-cure trajectory, having trained its readers to expect conflicts that get resolved and longing that gets rewarded. Narrative arises when we get sick; closure happens because we get well.5 Set during a period in which home health care guides were becoming more accessible than they had been in previous decades, Jane Austen’s novels, though no stranger to the cure model of narrative, embrace this tension between stories that warn and stories that restore. Not only does Austen rely on her heroine’s ailing body to govern, at least in part, how we read her story or how we read any story, but also she situates these crisis-cure moments (dangerous fevers and life-threatening falls) within and against narratives of prevention. Cure is, without a doubt, interesting, but as Austen’s novels demonstrate, it is not the only way to tell a story.
Prevention offers a different way of thinking about any single event. It draws the past and the future into contact by asking us to look forward to a time when we will look backward in regret at our current moment, a moment when we were still (however precariously) healthy and could have done something to avoid disaster. Thus, at the same time that prevention turns our attention to the past, it conditions us to think in terms of the future and to imagine the foreknowledge that will help nip disease in the bud and offer a healthy, happy ending. Prevention often consists in taking action, such as getting inoculated, or, as Austen satirizes in the unfinished Sanditon, in doing silly things to perfectly healthy bodies: pulling teeth, taking emetics, applying leeches. But more often, prevention expects us not to do something (don’t drink too much, don’t touch that). However static this directive may seem, prevention’s etymology—“to come before” (præ ‘before’ and venīre ‘to come’)—allows us to see the narrative opportunities, the intense activity, inherent to this way of thinking. The beforeness that defines prevention captures the imagined state of preserved health that turns plot into a constant caution not to “do” but to “not do” as we ought, redirecting narrative and readerly energy toward plots of averting, not anticipating—making us “patient readers.”
Most health guides, like Austen’s novels, focus their attention on middle-class family conduct and the role that parents play in educating their children and other subordinates. Buchan claims that he wanted to write Domestic Medicine in part because his patients needed a “plain directory for regulating their conduct” (xvi). Similarly, in a section in Hygeia entitled “Art of Preserving Health” (“Essay VI,” 90), Beddoes advocates “practical instruction” for parents on “the structure of the human body.” He even proposes public clinical and anatomical lectures for both men and women, the goal of which would be “to make fully sensible the mischief arising from systematic irregularity; from injudicious management after exposure to the inclemencies of weather, and from the other innumerable ordinary errors of individual conduct. [The lectures] must explain the origin and conduct, much more minutely than the treatment of disease” (91). Beddoes sounds like a novelist, highlighting not only “irregularity” and “injudiciousness” but also “ordinary errors” that shape character action or, as he puts it, “individual conduct.” By focusing his readers’ attention on the body and health as it relates to management, rather than to treatment, Beddoes enacts a subtle but important shift from cure to prevention. Certainly, therapeutics depend heavily on the compliant patient, but both physicians assume that patients are almost too willing at times to follow doctor’s orders when it comes to cures. Buchan and Beddoes offer a prescription for health, as they encourage—even require—individuals to observe the vicissitudes of their own and others’ bodies in a way that conforms to their expert opinion. As Beddoes asserts, “There is nothing [mankind is] so slow in learning, as how to direct their foresight, and portion out their cares properly.”6 For Austen, such foresight translates into learning to “do as one ought.” Indeed, a preventionist ethic assumes and even creates the “ought” with which Austen’s novels are, as critics have noted, so concerned and consumed.7
The first line of prevention is always a narrative one, and cautionary tales provide both the content and the formal structure of preventionist thinking. These stories assume a past (someone else’s) of disease, debility, and even death. These stories about what has been and what might be thus feature “characters” who behave imprudently and suffer greatly because of it. In a section on the “consumptive disposition” in “Essay VII,” for example, Beddoes transcribes a story written by one of his patients, Louisa, as a warning to his readers about the dangers of consumption or tuberculosis. She begins quite simply: “Our family was large.” She goes on, as the narrator of a domestic novel might, to describe this family: “There were twelve of us in all, eight sisters and four brothers. I do not reckon three others, [sic] that died in their infancy.” Louisa reaches back into her family history, noting that with the exception of her grandfather’s gout, “no hereditary disorder had appeared on either side.” The family’s problems developed as a result of her father’s “ambitio[n] that his sons should shine” and that his daughters should “have more information than in general falls to the share of women” (10). Initially, his attentiveness appeared progressive, but as his ambition turned into vanity and degenerated into neglect, the children suffered. Instead of merely describing her symptoms or speculating about proximate causes for her consumption, Louisa offers a narrative of what happens to the children of well-meaning but vain and ignorant parents. They “grow up to be the veriest of wretches,” because in such a household, “health [is] never a constant, and seldom an occasional, concern” (12). In Louisa’s tale, domestic management—a basic understanding of what constitutes a proper diet, exercise, climate, and leisure activities—is the source of prevention, for only a well-run household, we surmise, produces healthy, happy children.
For this reason, Buchan and Beddoes both begin their narratives before the problems, stresses, and dangers that come from living in the world infect the healthy body. In the first chapter of his Domestic Medicine, Buchan offers an earlier version of the cautionary tale Beddoes’s Louisa tells. Buchan highlights the importance of our pasts—our childhoods—to our future health: “The better to trace diseases from their original causes, we shall take a view of the common treatment of mankind in the state of infancy. In this period of our lives, the foundations of a good or bad constitution are laid” (1). Buchan uses an architectural metaphor to emphasize the relationship between the health of the home and the health of the individual. Beddoes offers a similar metaphor in Hygeia to describe the importance of this originary moment and the consequences of domestic management. He notes that bad childrearing is akin to “rearing an edifice without tie or foundation, in the face of a tempestuous sky!” (“Essay I,” 26). The value of this metaphor relies on the reader’s awareness—and fear—of shaky structures. The family, then, is like a house, and raising either without proper forethought and guidance will lead to its future destruction.8
The lessons for genuinely healthy conduct, if there are to be any, must come from the home. Parents must be taught, through the stories their doctors tell them, how to instill these lessons in their children. For this reason, the works of Beddoes and Buchan, which focus on what parents should do for their as-yet-uninjured children, differ from earlier eighteenth-century manuals that address their advice to sick adults.9 To be sure, both doctors’ manuals offer directives to the intemperate or consumptive adult individual, but they do so only after establishing the importance of parental care in laying a foundation for future health. In Domestic Medicine, Buchan anticipates Austen and numerous Victorian novelists after her by blaming mothers for their ignorance and fathers for their lack of interest. He laments “that more care is not bestowed in teaching the proper management of children to those whom nature has designed for mothers” (2) and that the gentleman father is more interested in the management of his dogs and horses than his own child, “the heir of his fortunes, and the future hope of his country” (3). And these are the healthy parents. If the parents are diseased to begin with, their chances of raising healthy children diminish greatly. Although Buchan blames both parents, suggesting, “No person who labours under any incurable malady ought to marry” (5), the health of the child falls primarily to the mother. Taking a cue from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, Buchan warns, “A delicate female, brought up within doors, an utter stranger to exercise and open air, who lives on tea and other slops, may bring a child into the world, but it will hardly be fit to live” (4). Buchan argues that, in some instances, the best way to prevent disease or debility is to prevent life in the first place.
Beddoes does not go as far as Buchan, but he similarly focuses his attention on what parents do wrong. Beddoes’s advice acts as a warning and a plea; for the manual, he claims, will help these parents “equip [their] children, as they advance to that age when they must be left to their own guidance, with the most precise instructions respecting the hazards they will soon have to encounter” (“Essay I” in Hygeia, 15). Hygeia demonstrates over the next thousand pages what Austen takes only a few hundred to show: how a mismanaged household produces debilitated children who grow up to be wretched adults. Bad diet, lack of exercise, poor schooling conditions, and intemperance—all the stuff of which novels are made—are just some of the “hazards” children suffer when left “to their own guidance.” The more pernicious activities of masturbation, shopping, and novel reading similarly matter less as moral vice than as detrimental to the medical health of the household.
But such medical advice is as much about the physical conditions of the body as it is about the moral condition of the soul. The full subtitle of Beddoes’s collection, Essays Moral and Medical, on the Causes Affecting the Personal State of Our Middling and Affluent Classes, articulates this connection, and in his first essay he instructs his readers that “[t]o form a moral sense . . . is not more practicable in itself, than to form a sense for health, or for happiness, which latter must be, in great measure, composed of the sense of health” (84). Beddoes conflates the moral and the medical to construct a comprehensive story of middle-class conduct, and he demands that his readers become moral managers of their own bodies and the bodies of those around them, particularly their children. To emphasize his point, he ends his first essay by asking his readers to imagine their own child, “[t]hat being, whose happy smiles thou art now watching,” crying out in the future, “Ah! had not the affection of my parents been as blind as it was strong, never should I have been the wretch I am” (92). Beddoes does not simply explain causes to his readers so that they can avoid their effects; he creates characters we recognize from the fictional narratives that nineteenth-century novelists reverted to time and again. We hear traces of the story of the fallen woman and the profligate son, whose demises were initiated by ignorant parents. Beddoes offers this ominous ventriloquizing of the reader’s child as a “wretch” in the future to suggest that parental responsibility is the key to familial health and happiness. As the last sentence of his first essay, this remark is quite a cliffhanger. What parent, especially one with strong affections, would not look out anxiously for the next essay, while keeping a more vigilant eye on his or her child and anticipating fresh dangers?
PREVENTION AND CURE IN Sense and Sensibility
Austen’s novels, which are also sympathetic to the relationship between the moral and the medical, do not allow for such a tidy elision between the two. Like the physicians, Austen targets negligent parents—though with a decidedly sharper wit and a more nuanced approach. Bad domestic managers are bad preventionists. In Sense and Sensibility (1811),10 Austen depicts the type of affectionately neglectful parent to whom Beddoes might be addressing his essays. Nobody doubts Mrs. Dashwood’s maternal affection, but we all recognize that she is more than a little “blind” to the truth of her middle daughter’s affair. The plot that unfolds, Beddoes might suggest, is a result of domestic mismanagement and a lack of foresight. From the start, Sense and Sensibility functions not so much as a manual of what to do or even of how to recover from what has been; rather, its structure relies heavily on the tension between preventing what might happen and curing what has happened. As such, Austen organizes her first novel around the discursive parallels between cure and prevention, between the cautionary wretch, Marianne Dashwood, and her more vigilant, older sister, Elinor. For example, during Marianne’s initial encounter with her would-be lover, Willoughby, when she twists her ankle, all propriety is lost in the face of physical harm. Willoughby, a complete stranger, must carry Marianne through the rain. Although her embarrassment prohibits Marianne from fully examining him, “his person and air were equal to what her fancy had ever drawn for the hero of her favourite story” (38), a story that soon becomes all too real. Willoughby’s constant overtures eventually lead everyone except Elinor to assume that the couple is engaged. When Willoughby takes his leave of Barton, Elinor’s foresight directs her to urge Mrs. Dashwood into proper conduct and to ask Marianne whether she and Willoughby have a formal understanding. Mrs. Dashwood’s refusal should remind us of those bad parents that Buchan and Beddoes describe. The narrator tells us that “common sense, common care, common prudence, were all sunk in Mrs. Dashwood’s romantic delicacy” (74).
Like her mother, Marianne ignores “foresight” in favor of romance. She would rather be a wretch than have no story at all. To this end, Marianne refuses to eat, finds it “very inexcusable” to sleep, and develops a “head-ache” in response to her lover’s departure. This unchecked grief initiates her decline and turns into the type of narrative that requires either cure or death at its end. But before she is fully sunk, Marianne embraces her grief. Buchan explains that while grief is natural, to embrace it is a potentially dangerous precursor to wretchedness. In “On Grief” in Domestic Medicine, Buchan offers guidance for preventing the physical decline that attends this “Passion of the Mind.” When in a state of grief, he suggests, we should “turn the attention frequently to new objects. Examine them for some time. When the mind begins to recoil, shift the scene. By this means a constant succession of new ideas may be kept up, till the disagreeable ones entirely disappear.” “Indolence,” he warns, “nourishes grief.”11 Austen initially presents Marianne’s behavior as comical—we are meant to laugh at the deliberateness of Marianne’s romantic symptoms. But beneath the absurdity of her behavior lurk the seriousness of Buchan’s warning and the potentially tragic outcome of Marianne’s conduct. The narrator tells us that Marianne plays Willoughby’s favorite songs and “read[s] nothing but what they had been used to read together.” In short, she does the opposite of what the manuals recommend. “This nourishment of grief,” we are told, “was applied [by Marianne] every day” (73). Nourishment generally has a positive association; we might think of hearty food or mother’s milk or any number of domestic terms that invoke home, health, and care, which contrast with Marianne’s rejection of such things. Buchan’s use of the term nourish thus hints at the domestic aspects of indolence and grief. Indolence occurs in the home and therefore comes under the purview of domestic management.
Austen adopts this sense of indolence but undercuts the danger we have learned to read into it from Buchan by recasting nourishment as the act of a silly young girl. Like Buchan, Austen applies the term to something that should not be nourished. An important difference between their usages is the agent of the action. For Buchan, indolence does the nourishing. For Austen, Marianne does. Buchan recommends that the grieved reader replace the sad story that has resulted in her current condition with a “new,” more agreeable one. Instead of following this model, Marianne cares for and nurtures her grief, deliberately allowing it to grow. Yet rather than simply condemning Marianne for, in some sense, failing to follow Buchan’s advice, Austen depicts her actions as necessary to the plot. Had Marianne properly prevented her grief—indeed, stopped it from growing—her narrative might well have stopped there. Instead, this grief becomes the first in a series of presumably preventable yet highly desirable and narratable episodes that propel the story and must, we expect, move us toward cure.12 Marianne’s resistance to prevention nourishes the narrative of cure, and the struggle between these two narratives—not simply the presence of crisis—energizes the novel.
But lest this sound like a familiar version of the crisis-cure plot, Austen’s anatomy of wretchedness offers an alternative style of grief management through the parallel plot of Elinor, the novel’s chief preventionist. During Edward Ferrars’s final visit to Barton in the first half of the novel, Elinor senses a difference in his treatment of her. She does not, at this point in the novel, know that Edward is engaged to Lucy Steele, but the changes she detects are enough to cause her grief. Instead of indulging her grief, however, Elinor becomes “determin[ed] to subdue it, and to prevent herself from appearing to suffer.” “She did not,” the narrator tells us, “adopt the method so judiciously employed by Marianne, on a similar occasion, to augment and fix her sorrow, by seeking silence, solitude and idleness.” Elinor is not invested in the romance of cure in the way that Marianne is; rather, Elinor “[sits] down to her drawing-table . . . [and] busily employ[s] herself the whole day” (90). So far, Elinor engages in recommended behavior, and Austen appears to be adhering to Buchan’s guidance. But the narrator explains, “[Elinor’s] thoughts could not be chained elsewhere . . . these thoughts must be before her, must force her attention” (91). Instead of complying entirely with popular advice for managing grief—that is, thinking of “new ideas”—Elinor allows her mind to reminisce freely on memories and indulge in fantasies built on her love for Edward (91). Despite Buchan’s claims to the contrary, this type of attentiveness to one’s grief—the presentness of one’s thoughts—proves not only unavoidable, even by the best preventionists, but also beneficial. Upon the Steeles’ departure, just after Lucy tells Elinor of her engagement to Edward, Elinor finds herself “at liberty to think and be wretched” (114). Only in private can Elinor accept and acknowledge, and therefore manage, her wretchedness. Elinor’s failure to look for new ideas seems a rejection of preventative advice, but her actions invoke a sense of privacy and reflect an understanding of the relationship between the past and the present that prevention deems important.
At the same time that Elinor attempts to protect herself from decline, she must keep Marianne from becoming the heroine of a cautionary tale. From jokes about the intensity of Marianne’s feelings to scoldings about accepting inappropriate gifts from Willoughby, Elinor holds firm to the spirit of prevention, lovingly coaxing Marianne into healthier conduct. In London, after witnessing Marianne’s persistent, futile, and improper attempts to correspond with Willoughby, Elinor invokes the specter of the precautionary “wretch” by writing to her mother, in order, the narrator says, “to awake[n] her fears for the health of Marianne” and get her “to procure those inquiries which had so long been delayed” (145). Such inquiries, Elinor hopes, will force Marianne to acknowledge that she has been participating in a romantic fantasy and therefore save her from becoming the tragic heroine in a love story of her own making. Elinor thus imagines the story that could be—indeed, the story that we know has already been written by Austen—to manage its outcome.
Austen pits Elinor’s plot of prevention against Marianne’s plot of crisis and cure. For as the manuals suggest, the only way to render the narrative of prevention intelligible is by framing it in relation to—or even as a form of—cure. By the time Austen wrote Mansfield Park, she had ceased to rely on such framing and focused all the narrative’s energies on prevention. But in this early novel, we experience a clear or at least clearer demarcation between the curative model and the preventative one. When Marianne finally learns of Willoughby’s engagement to another woman, she becomes the self-described wretch that Beddoes portends and that Elinor fears. After Willoughby rebuffs Marianne at a London party and returns her letters, Marianne resists Elinor’s remonstrance to maintain her composure. She cries out, “I care not who knows I am wretched. . . . I must feel—I must be wretched” (160). Austen invokes the wretched child, the figure on whom preventative medicine relies and for whom it laments, but she revises the meaning of the child’s cries. Marianne embraces her wretchedness just as she nourished her grief, as if it were precisely what she was waiting for all along. Despite Elinor’s best attempts to prevent Marianne’s wretchedness (a state we already know she has experienced herself), Marianne claims she “must feel” and “must be” the wretch. In some respects, Elinor’s attempt to teach Mrs. Dashwood the methods of prevention is an attempt to regulate how Marianne conducts herself and, thus, what Marianne signifies in the novel.
But while Elinor attempts to prevent Marianne’s wretchedness, and while her parallel plot marks the difference between prevention and cure, the stories of two other wretched women perform, both thematically and structurally, the work of prevention. All of Austen’s novels have, to varying degrees, embedded narratives that function as warnings—stories that “come before” (præ venīre) the main narrative. In Sense and Sensibility, the stories of Eliza Brandon and her daughter, Eliza Williams, precede Marianne’s and Elinor’s plots of wretchedness.13 The flannel-waistcoated Colonel Brandon, the novel’s other preventionist, introduces these stories, believing that the story of the younger Eliza will be useful to Marianne. He begins his narrative by referring to events that precede the novel’s beginning, as well as others that occurred earlier within the time frame of the novel but were never narrated. He tells Elinor about his love for Eliza Brandon, who he claims resembles “in some measure” Marianne (173). He speaks of her coerced marriage to his brother, the subsequent divorce, and her tragic decline into disrepute. He describes how he found her in a sponging house, a “melancholy and sickly figure” in the last stage of consumption.14 This story of lost love precedes the story more relevant to Marianne’s case: Willoughby’s affair with Eliza Williams and the pregnancy that resulted from it. Austen delays this information to give the reader the time and reason to appreciate Colonel Brandon’s attraction to Marianne and to anticipate Marianne’s eventual acceptance of him as a husband. But for the purpose of prevention, this part of the story is also important in that it rehearses the deadly consequences of improper conduct by one who was so “blooming” and “healthful”—it is a story that just did not have to be (175).
The younger Eliza’s story echoes a portion of her mother’s, beginning, as the wretch’s narrative must, with domestic mismanagement and parental neglect. At three years old, Eliza came under the guardianship of Colonel Brandon, who, having “no family, no home,” placed Eliza at school, with a “very respectable woman” (176). Unfortunately, respectability was not quite the guard against wretchedness that the Colonel had hoped—if only he had paid attention to the first Eliza Brandon’s story. At sixteen, Eliza Williams visited Bath with a young friend and her “well-meaning, but not quick-sighted father” (176)—yet another ignorant parent. Under such care, the impressionable and orphaned young Eliza was easily ruined and left by Willoughby. When the Colonel tells Elinor this story, Eliza has been hidden away in the country with her bastard child.
Although we can read both of the Eliza stories as cautionary tales of what Marianne might have become, Colonel Brandon does not exactly mean for Marianne to draw parallels between herself and the Elizas, despite the resemblance. Rather, he presents their stories to Elinor as examples of how well Marianne behaved, comparatively speaking. She has the potential for prevention after all. Brandon hopes that she will “turn with gratitude towards her own condition, when she compares it with that of [his] poor Eliza, when she considers the wretched and hopeless situation of this poor girl.” Marianne’s sufferings “proceed from no misconduct, and can bring no disgrace” (177). Although Austen condemns Marianne’s behavior more than the colonel does, she depicts Marianne’s wretchedness and misconduct as proceeding from domestic mismanagement and from a crucial failure of what Beddoes might refer to as her “health sense.” A “[c]onsciousness of health,” Beddoes explains, “will become just as much a source of pleasure as the consciousness of virtue.”15 The novel works toward helping Marianne reach this level of awareness and health—or, more specifically, it works toward helping the reader see how Marianne develops this sense.
Colonel Brandon aids the reader by pointing out that although Marianne has been saved from the moral fate of the Elizas, she remains in danger of suffering the same physical consequence and thus has not quite achieved that balance between virtue and health. Part of the tragedy for Colonel Brandon is that the previously healthy girl he loves has become melancholy and sickly. Eliza’s social decline, we are led to believe, initiates a physical one. One must have the sense to know that improper attachments are both physically and morally unhealthy. The Elizas are Austen’s version of the cautionary wretch, but they do not entirely work in the way we might think they should, for even after hearing their sad tales from Elinor, Marianne continues to neglect her health. Her “violent” cold comes on the heels of two long walks in the “longest and wettest” part of the grass, after which she “[sat] around in her wet shoes and stockings” (259). Her cold turns into an almost fatal fever, which begins to resemble the physical decline we imagine having preceded Eliza Brandon’s consumption. The Eliza stories reach back into the past as a means of predicting the future and of developing not so much Marianne’s but the reader’s narrative foresight.
Before either Marianne or Elinor can find happiness in marriage, Marianne must emerge from her fever with a clearer moral and health sense. Once out of physical danger, Marianne expresses her wish that Willoughby not suffer too much. In response to this, Elinor asks, “Do you compare your conduct with his?” “No,” Marianne replies, “I compare it with what it ought to have been; I compare it with yours” (293). This comparison is what Austen has been encouraging her readers to make all along. But although we can read Marianne’s contrite “what it ought to have been” as a reference or comparison to Elinor, we can also read it in terms of prevention. A semicolon interrupts Marianne’s claim that she should have compared her behavior to her sister’s. Certainly, the syntax of the sentence asks us to read the pause between “ought to have been” and “yours” as Marianne’s recognition of Elinor’s superior—healthier—conduct. However, we might also read the semicolon as an “and,” separating the two claims. For underneath the comparison between Marianne and her sister lies the more tragic one between Marianne and the truly wretched women who haunt this novel, the two Elizas. The reader, if not Marianne, recognizes that through almost no will of her own, Marianne has survived an ordeal that two women before her did not—theirs ought to have been her fate, too.
PREVENTION AS NARRATIVE: Mansfield Park
In Sense and Sensibility, Austen articulates the difference between cure and prevention—between “happily ever after” and what “ought to have been”—through the parallel plots of Marianne and Elinor and through the cautionary tale of the two Elizas. In her “mature” work, Austen embeds prevention into the deep structure of her narrative, and within a single and singular heroine, Fanny Price. Mansfield Park (1814),16 more than Sense and Sensibility, is interested in exposing root causes as a means of avoiding future effects; it is a novel about rendering the imagined story of what “comes before” in order to prevent what could be. Not that there is nothing to cure in Mansfield Park: Fanny’s mother hopes she will become “materially better for change of air” (11); Tom Bertram’s drinking causes him to suffer a life-threatening fever; Mary Crawford’s cynical views of marriage prompt her aunt to worry that Mary is too much like her brother, Henry, and to claim that “Mansfield shall cure [them] both.” “Stay with us,” Mrs. Grant advises, “and we will cure you” (40). But for all its talk of cures, Mansfield Park is not fully governed by cure’s narrative properties. In fact, Austen offers and then rejects at least two cure plots: the one that Mary Crawford imagines for her brother to which we shall return, and the more significant one that we as readers imagine for Fanny, one in which the “puny” and invisible heroine will grow into the belle of the ball. For although Fanny does become, as Lionel Trilling points out, “taller, prettier, and more energetic,”17 she does not improve as much as or in the way that we might expect of a heroine. Fanny never achieves the physical or mental strength of an Anne Elliot or an Emma Woodhouse, as generations of cure-minded readers and critics have observed.18
That is not, however, because this is a bad novel: it is because Austen is doing something different here, teaching us something else. She is instructing us not to improve but to sustain, not to look ahead to the “multiple possible outcomes of a single moment in history”19 or to forget a traumatic past,20 but to look forward and backward simultaneously, not to cure but to prevent. For prevention in Mansfield Park, as in the medical discourse, is built on the tension between longing and fearing, between an idealized past and a threatening future; Fanny Price, with her wretched past and her vigilance about the future, is ideally suited for this preventionist project of protecting characters, revealing plots, and inoculating readers.
In a pivotal scene of prevention, one that critics like Marilyn Butler describe as the “ideological key to the novel” (224), Fanny sits on the sidelines, worrying as usual and cautioning her cousin Maria Bertram “not to slip” into the ha-ha. We witness more than just disapproval of Maria—who, after all, does not slip, though she will get seriously hurt. Fanny fails to stop the engaged Maria from following Henry Crawford instead of waiting for her fiancé. Nevertheless, she does succeed in the other intervention of this scene: keeping Edmund from following Mary Crawford into disaster. We mistake the larger purposes of the novel, however, if we read only for Fanny’s incidental successes and failures. She cannot prevent Maria’s “fall”; she cannot entirely preserve the Bertram estate; she barely manages to save Edmund. What she does do effectively is restore prevention as the source of good, for both characters and readers. For prevention proceeds along both of these tracks in the novel: not only must Edmund be preserved, but also readers must be educated. If for Edmund prevention is a course of abstinence—in which he must not marry Mary Crawford—so, too, is it for readers, who must retrain themselves in the value of delay, learning not to “slip.” Just as Edward holds back, so must we, and it is through both its characters’ travails and its temporal displacements that the novel teaches the art of prevention. And as with Sense and Sensibility, this lesson begins at home.
The Bertrams and the Prices, though separated by class and geography, are united in their lack of “health sense.” Both households are home to spoiled, misbehaving children and distracted, disengaged parents, and the narrator describes the mismanagement of both: Portsmouth is a “scene of mismanagement” (324) just as Mansfield Park is a place of “grievous mismanagement” (382). Initially, the Prices are more easy to condemn, as the narrator criticizes them in the first chapter for being out of control and bursting at the seams, while allowing the Bertrams, particularly Sir Thomas, to sound like careful domestic managers. Mrs. Price must reconcile with her sisters after an eleven-year rift because as she “prepar[es] for her ninth lying-in,” she fears for “the future maintenance” of the eight other children (6). The Bertrams and Mrs. Norris do appear snobbish and self-congratulatory (we are never meant to assume that they are morally superior to the Prices), but they seem more capable of raising healthy children. The vigilant patriarch, Sir Thomas, looks out for the harm Fanny’s residence might cause his own family, warning Mrs. Norris that “[s]hould [Fanny’s] disposition be really bad, . . . we must not, for our own children’s sake, continue her in the family” (10). This concern about her “disposition” refers initially to Fanny’s presumed “bad” manners (a result of her lower class) and the potential problems a bad disposition may cause for the household. It assumes, as well, that things at Mansfield Park are fine as they are.
Disposition is tricky, though, because it evokes both “a frame of mind” and a “state of bodily health” (Oxford English Dictionary). The term aligns the moral and the medical, a pairing that underwrites the preventionist interest in domestic management. When Sir Thomas uses disposition to describe what Fanny could be (but probably is not) like, he invokes the specter of prevention, imagining what might need to be avoided at a future date. He explains to Mrs. Norris that they are likely to encounter “gross ignorance, some meanness of opinion, and very distressing vulgarity of manner.” Such conduct, he determines, is neither “incurable” nor “dangerous” to those around her, and although he refers here to “curing” her habits, he does so in a preemptive manner, thinking of keeping his children disease-free rather than of helping Fanny to improve (10). His language shifts our focus from the social to the physical, from her behavior to her body, and Mrs. Price’s letter reaffirms this dual meaning.21 She offers “assur[ance] of her daughter’s being a very well-disposed, good-humoured girl” but then confirms the alternative meaning of disposition when she shares her hope that her daughter’s health will improve as a result of her contact with Mansfield Park’s salubrious “air” (11). The novel’s interest in Fanny’s improvement, however, never fully materializes, as key episodes that appear to feature her as the heroine of a cure plot turn, instead, on her preventionist perspective.
In fact, we are encouraged from very early on to see Fanny as a struggling preventionist. When the “old grey poney[sic]” she has been used to riding dies, the narrator tells us that Fanny “was in danger of feeling the loss in her health as well as her affections” (31). Nobody thinks to replace her pony until Edmund, the only one to attend to Fanny’s physical well-being, notices the loss’s “ill effects” (32) and trades his road horse for a suitable mare. The lack of both a horse and the family’s interest in getting Fanny a horse contributes to her potential decline. Medically speaking, horseback riding, or some comparable activity, was often prescribed as therapeutic during this period. For example, Buchan observes that “exercise is not less necessary than food for the preservation of health” and that “[i]t seems to be a catholic law throughout the whole animal creation, that no creature, without exercise, should enjoy health, or be able to find subsistence.”22 Not surprisingly, riding makes Fanny feel better, and without it she is in danger of getting sick again. But this episode, we know, is not about proclaiming the benefits of a particular medical regimen. Rather, it demonstrates Fanny’s desire for Edmund, a desire that Austen presents as prevention. When Edmund lends Mary Crawford the mare, we see instantly what must be avoided—and it is not Fanny’s ill health. The horse shifts our attention from Fanny’s need for improvement to Edmund’s more pressing need for intervention.
The static and “delicate” Fanny needs somehow to hinder the seemingly healthier “active and fearless” Mary Crawford from winning her cousin’s affections, but this task is not easy. As Fanny watches from a distance, waiting for Edmund and Mary to return with the horse, she “[feels] a pang” at the thought that Edmund should forget her. The narrator never goes so far as to describe Fanny as jealous, an emotion that would place her firmly in a therapeutic plot. But we do learn that Edmund and Mary’s “merriment ascended even to [Fanny],” and “[i]t was a sound which did not make her cheerful” (57). When Edmund asks Fanny for permission to lend Mary the horse, he assures Fanny that her health has priority over Mary’s pleasure. “It would be very wrong,” he explains, for Mary to “interfere” with Fanny’s regimen: “She rides only for pleasure, you for health” (59). At this point, the novel moves rather comfortably between the medical and the metaphorical, as Fanny’s literal health offers Edmund a way to talk about Mary’s (and presumably his own) desire. Fanny must acquiesce—it is, after all, Edmund’s horse. But more to the point, she must give up the horse because she does not want Edmund to think of her as continually incapacitated and thus unfit to participate in a love plot of her own. When his only excuse for Fanny’s riding is her health, she reminds him that she is “strong enough now to walk very well” (59). For Edmund, the horse represents a narrative of Fanny’s perpetual cure. For Fanny, the horse incites a narrative of Edmund’s prevented affections. In both cases, prevention prevails, but it is not until the Sotherton episode that we see prevention at work and Fanny as its most active agent.
Significantly, Austen does not frame the Sotherton excursion and Fanny’s warning at the ha-ha as a moment of crisis in need of cure; she frames it in terms of advancing prevention and of Fanny’s highly developed foresight. Fanny is static, sitting on her bench in the wilderness because she has become too fatigued to walk. Fanny can only, therefore, watch Edmund and Mary walk off to “determine the dimension of the wood” (81) and Maria and Henry slip dangerously over the ha-ha. We experience, through Fanny, the desire of anticipation, imagining what might be, as her condition forces her to remain on the bench while both of these couples wander unchaperoned among the shrubs. Initially, Fanny attempts to stop Edmund and Mary from leaving her, but she gets rebuffed: “Edmund urged her [to] remai[n] where she was with an earnestness which she could not resist.” The narrator tells us that “she was left on the bench to think with pleasure of her cousin’s care, but with great regret that she was not stronger” (81). At this moment, Edmund does not want her and neither do we, because she hinders us from following the more illicit, narratable couples, the ones who will get into trouble, create conflict, and need curing. But this is precisely how prevention functions as narrative, for all Fanny can do at this point, and all Austen really wants her to do, is watch so that, as readers, we are left to anticipate rather than to witness what ought not happen.
Austen expands Fanny’s preventionist reach by redirecting Fanny’s efforts away from Edmund and Mary and toward the more dangerous coupling of Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford. Rather than actively prevent anything from happening (for, as I have noted, she will fail), Fanny allows us to imagine what, in the words of Marianne Dashwood, “ought to have been.” Her warnings reflect three very good reasons for Maria to stop her current behavior: “‘You will hurt yourself Miss Bertram,’ she cried, ‘You will certainly hurt yourself against those spikes—you will tear your gown—you will be in danger of slipping into the Ha-Ha’” (84). The first and last arguments refer to preventing bodily injury. All three hint at the real reason for Fanny’s concern—Maria’s virtue is at risk. Perhaps Fanny should have taken a cue from Dr. Beddoes and warned Maria that she will most certainly become a wretch if she travels down this path—but would Maria have listened? That seems unlikely. Certainly one thing is clear: Fanny cannot stop what she is sure will (and what, in fact, does) lead only to mischief and heartache.
Maria’s unfortunate end is less a failure of prevention than a failure of cure—the cure that sets out to turn Henry Crawford from a rake into a good husband. Prevention is never given a chance. Readers have been reluctant to recognize this point and to subscribe to a preventionist ethos, because, like most of the characters in Mansfield Park, readers actually prefer disaster, always needing the fix of a “cure” to keep them interested. Busily reading for a fall (“you will slip”), they want bad behavior to proceed and then be fixed. But readers, too, are insufficiently cautious—they eagerly read ahead when they should be carefully reading backward. And for this reason, Austen aligns her plan of prevention with a plot of temporal displacement, one that “cautions” its readers. We see this arrangement in the great (failed) cure of the novel: Sir Thomas’s attempt to “cure” Fanny by sending her home to Portsmouth. This episode sends us backward into the novel, teaching us why Fanny is the one who will triumph in the end. Our removal to Portsmouth in the final volume shows us, in fact, what has already been prevented.
It is no accident that Sir Thomas is the great believer in cure—after all, he is the novel’s worst preventionist, as we know from watching his children misbehave, fall, and fall ill. The second half of Mansfield Park is Sir Thomas’s attempt to cure his physically healthy but morally diseased family. To do so, he sends Fanny home—but he also sends readers into the past, where Austen not only exhibits Fanny’s spiritual fortitude but also teaches readers how to read preventatively. Sir Thomas returns Fanny to Portsmouth and to her “mismanaged family” to teach her a lesson, introducing us to characters we have met only through narration and epistolarity. As with her entrance into Mansfield, Fanny’s homecoming is imagined as a “medicinal project” (305). Sir Thomas hopes that sending her away from her upper-middle-class environs will “cure” her “diseased” understanding and make her appreciate Henry Crawford’s marriage proposal. And in part, he is right. What she finds when she arrives at Portsmouth is a house full of unruly children, ill-trained servants, and greasy dishes. As the narrator explains, “It was an abode of noise, disorder, and impropriety” (322). More than three hundred pages after our initial introduction to the Price family, we feel for the first time the burden that nine pregnancies and a “husband disabled for active service” (6) must be. We meet a drunken father who fails to notice his daughter, and a mother who is too busy with her eight other children to be more than merely “not unkind” (323). The narrator shifts allegiances here, for at the end of the opening chapter of volume 1, we are encouraged to sympathize with the “[p]oor woman” who just wants her children to be well. Fanny’s chief antagonist, Mrs. Norris, now appears positively maternal when compared to Mrs. Price.
Prevention narratives are designed for precisely the type of parents Fanny has endured, and Mr. Price is as much of a cautionary tale as is his wife. Not only does he show little interest in his daughter’s well-being and absolutely no interest in Mansfield but also he has no authority in his home. Fanny’s first point of comparison with Sir Thomas is the fact that all her father can talk about is William going away: “[I]n her uncle’s house there would have been a consideration of times and seasons, a regulation of subject, a propriety, an attention toward every body which there was not here” (317). But more than lacking the ability or desire to properly direct conversation, Mr. Price has none of the patriarchal control that Sir Bertram seems to enjoy. His empty threats are, as Fanny notices, “palpably disregarded” by the noisy young boys, who only quiet down after they appear to have worn themselves out. In his earlier manual, A Guide for Self Preservation, and Parental Affection (1793), Beddoes asserts, “To keep the children strong, and in good plight to stand such complaints [measles, sore throat, fever, or any other violent disorder], there is but one way. The father must be sober and industrious; and the mother learn to manage well.”23 The Prices fail on all accounts.
The lackluster greeting mimics the narrative logic of prevention by showing us what would have been Fanny’s whole life—and so it could still be, if Sir Thomas has his way. But Fanny is initially disconnected from Portsmouth. She looked forward with pleasure to her homecoming, imagining a more affectionate relationship with her mother than she had experienced in the past, despite William’s warning that “we seem to want some of your nice ways and orderliness” (308). Her return to Portsmouth turns out to be less a homecoming than a first-time visit. The narrator describes the route William and Fanny take to get to the house with none of the nostalgic reminiscences one might expect from someone of Fanny’s sensibility. After all, she is the one who turns to Cowper when she imagines the “avenue” at Sotherton (a place she has never seen) being “cut down” (48). We hear no such lamentations or recollections of the past from Fanny upon her first seeing Portsmouth after being away for nine years. The narrator tells us that Fanny and William “were rattled into a narrow street . . . and drawn up before the door of a small house now inhabited by Mr. Price” (312). This description suggests that Fanny, like the reader, is seeing the house for the first time. It is not “their” small house or “the” house but rather “a” house. The “now” adds to the ambiguity, implying at first that Mr. Price is at that present moment in the house but also suggesting that Mr. Price and the Price family formerly inhabited another house—the house Fanny grew up in—and “now” inhabit this one. Upon entering the house, Fanny confuses the parlor for “a passage-room” (because it is so small), and later Mrs. Price complains about the inconvenience of not having a “butcher in the street,” noting that “[w]e were better off in our last house” (313, 314). This “we” does not appear to include Fanny. Mrs. Price’s complaint serves as a general comment to anyone who will listen about her dissatisfaction but also suggests quite simply that Fanny does not know this particular street—this is not her home.
Recounting Fanny’s Portsmouth life through estrangement and structural disorder allows Austen to invoke a preventionist—or what I refer to elsewhere as a “hygienic”—mode of reading and thinking. We need to see Portsmouth as a new place in order for this return to feel more like an originary moment, a moment that has “come before” earlier episodes, before Mary rode her pony and before Maria jumped the ha-ha. This return does not stand in completely for Fanny’s past. Certainly, a lot has happened since she last lived at Portsmouth: the babies have grown into adolescents, two more have been born, and William is no longer her companion. However, whether the place to which Fanny returns is her former home or whether it is more chaotic than it once was is not at issue. The basic condition—the domestic mismanagement—we witness during Fanny’s return replicates that which made Fanny’s initial “change of air” so desirable. And once again, Portsmouth makes Fanny sick, as we are told that “she had lost ground as to health since her being in Portsmouth” (339). Not only does Fanny reject Portsmouth, but Portsmouth rejects Fanny. The house virtually squeezes her out, almost suffocating her with “the smallness of the rooms” and “the narrowness of the passage and staircase” (321). Inactivity and lack of air accelerate her decline, such that when Henry Crawford comes to visit, he feels compelled to explain to Susan that Fanny “requires constant air and exercise” and that “she ought never to be long banished from the free air, and liberty of the country” (340). Because this scene takes place after Fanny has been living at Mansfield, we initially read Fanny’s decline as a psychosomatic response to her separation from Edmund and as evidence of her altered disposition. But Henry’s reference to “free air” recalls Mrs. Price’s initial hope that Fanny will be “materially better for change of air,” thus collapsing, if only momentarily, narrative time and allowing us to read the Fanny of volume 3 as the Fanny from volume 1. This situation is the very one that paradoxically fortified her against Mansfield and helped to establish Fanny as an agent of prevention.
Austen offers a particularly telling story of mismanagement and prevention in this final volume, one that, like the Elizas in Sense and Sensibility, haunts (has haunted all along) the narrative. Shortly after Fanny came to Mansfield Park, her favorite sister died. Austen withholds the news of Mary Price’s death until we are in Portsmouth and see the conditions under which the sister lived. We never get to witness Fanny’s response, learning only during her return to Portsmouth that when she found out, she “had for a short time been quite afflicted” (320). We can read Fanny’s sorrow back into the narrative, speculating that it occurred somewhere between Mrs. Norris’s haranguing, Maria and Julia’s teasing, and Edmund’s care. At the same time, Mrs. Price’s wish that her children might be “materially better” becomes more firmly grounded in bodily health. Fanny’s move to Mansfield (the “change of air”) may have prevented her own death, but more than that—more than being the silent recipient of preventive care—Fanny’s change of space (the movement from Mansfield Park to Portsmouth) registers as a temporal shift. The move allows Austen to compress time and revise our imperfect knowledge about Fanny’s early life. Austen’s placement of the Portsmouth episode at the end trains us to see both what has come before and what could be. We can apply this thinking to Fanny’s attachment to Edmund and to her observations of his relationship with Mary Crawford.
After walking in the Sotherton woods, Edmund and Mary become the main characters in Fanny’s prevention tale. Edmund is headed down a slippery path that nobody has taught him to traverse, for he has been mesmerized by Mary’s manipulative ways—enough to make him partake in the acting “scheme” he initially condemned (128). But Fanny has been watching and, in a sense, narrating for us the danger that awaits him were he to marry a woman who has no desire to be a clergyman’s wife. Through her, we anticipate Edmund looking back at this moment with regret. Of course, we also know that it will not culminate in this way. When Edmund finally realizes that the woman he courted was not “Miss Crawford” but only “the creature of [his] own imagination” (378), we sense some of what has been averted. This change, however, reflects minimal growth. His “impulse . . . to resist” Mary’s “saucy playful smile” is slightly contaminated by his admission that he “sometimes—for a moment—regretted that [he] did not go back” to Mary (379). For even though he has witnessed her deception, he still fantasizes about “how excellent she would have been, had she fallen into good hands earlier” (379). Here, Edmund puts a preventionist ethic to potentially dangerous use, imagining Mary as what she might have been and turning her into the woman he would have married. Mary is a cautionary wretch, and Fanny puts an end to Edmund’s revisionist fantasy by “adding to his knowledge of [Mary’s] real character.” She explains to him that Tom’s ill health and thus the potential for Edmund (as the younger son) to be heir appealed to Mary. Austen reveals Edmund’s response to this “hint” through the narrator’s ambiguous observation that “[t]his was not an agreeable intimation. Nature resisted it for a while.” But only for a while. Eventually, outside of the narrative, he grows out of his fantasy—“his vanity was not of a strength to fight long against reason”—and he sees as he ought and chooses Fanny (379).
With Edmund on the proper path and Fanny poised to be his companion, two important questions remain: What, exactly, has been prevented in Mansfield Park? And more pressingly, how do we achieve closure through prevention? Medically speaking, the one serious illness in the novel is not prevented and, in fact, becomes an important plot point. Tom Bertram’s condition brings Fanny back from Portsmouth so that she can comfort the Bertrams and expose Mary Crawford.24 But even as Tom’s story reflects a discourse of cure, it does so within a larger framework of prevention; he, like Maria and Julia Bertram and Mary Price, becomes a cautionary tale about the dangers of debauchery and of bad parenting. Tom’s illness and recovery enable him to “bec[o]me what he ought to be, useful to his father, steady and quiet, and not merely living for himself” (381); Maria must be sacrificed to the story of prevention, while her sister, though initially wretched, gets a reprieve. The narrator explains that Sir Thomas finally becomes “conscious of errors in his own conduct as a parent” and is “the longest to suffer.” Only in hindsight—because he lacked the foresight—does he realize what he “ought not to have” done (380). He comforts himself, however, with the notion that his own daughters’ “real dispositions [were] unknown to him” (381). His strictness was no match for Mrs. Norris’s schemes, yet he refuses to take full blame for their “real disposition,” reasoning that “something must have been wanting within” (382). While Sir Thomas refers to their moral failing, his language (in light of the eldest son’s sickness) is partly medical, reminding us of his early concerns about Fanny’s disposition. Having been trained by Austen as preventionist readers, we know, however, that had Sir Thomas looked beneath the healthy surface and the pleasing manners of his children, he might have seen the “disease” growing within, for the moral and the medical, as Beddoes makes clear, are of a piece.
The novel does not spend much time worrying over these obvious examples of what has and has not been prevented, because it is rather more interested in Edmund’s case. Has he been prevented from marrying the wrong woman or merely “cure[d]” of what the narrator calls “unconquerable passion” (387)? After all, the Crawfords have been described as needing “cure,” and, moreover, because they do not “wan[t] to be cured” (40), Mary’s status as potentially infectious remains open. We might even give Mary credit for inoculating Edmund—his limited contact with the morally tainted Mary helps to fortify Edmund against future “disease” and keep him healthy for Fanny. Austen’s language in the pivotal exchange between Edmund and Fanny—that his “nature” resisted the truth and that he only recognized Fanny’s worth when it was “natural” for him to do so—suggests that Edmund was never really “sick,” that Fanny’s preventive project (her presence) worked: it preserved Edmund’s naturally healthy disposition and has protected him from future wretchedness.
Indeed, Edmund’s epiphany implies that Fanny has been his guide and protector all the while he imagined himself to be hers. The narrator explains, “With such a regard for her, indeed, as his had long been, a regard founded on the most endearing claims of innocence and helplessness, and completed by every recommendation of growing worth, what could be more natural than the change? Loving, guiding, protecting her, as he had been doing ever since her being ten years old, her mind so great a degree formed by his care, and her comfort depending on his kindness, an object to him of such close and peculiar interest, dearer by all his own importance with her than any one else at Mansfield” (387). Edmund’s claim to have been “loving, guiding, [and] protecting” Fanny since she was ten does not account for the unintentional neglect she suffered at his hands, giving her horse to Mary or leaving her on the bench at Sotherton. His version of the story is slightly inaccurate. We know, too, that without Fanny’s “hint,” his nature could not have detected Mary’s “real character”; it would have only fantasized about her excellence and his loss. Austen means for us to speculate about what could have been, as the narrator states explicitly that “had [Henry] done as he intended, and as he knew he ought, . . . he might have been deciding his own happy destiny” (385). Mary takes a slightly different view, blaming Fanny for Henry’s bad behavior. She tells Edmund that Fanny “would have fixed” Henry, and “[h]ad she accepted him as she ought, they might now have been on the point of marriage” and Henry would not have eloped with Maria Bertram, now Maria Rushworth (376). But however much Mary or the reader may wish for this alternative ending, the narrative has never been interested in curing Henry Crawford because it was never interested in the Fanny-Henry plot—it was never interested in cure. Nor has it been interested in protecting the other Bertram children, whose stories, as Beddoes might say, only “pretend to teach people how to restore [health].”25 Rather, the narrative has always been concerned with advancing Fanny’s desire for Edmund and the preventionist stance that such desire represents.
To answer the question of how we achieve closure through prevention, I return to the physicians. Buchan has difficulty addressing prevention’s narrative constraints about an end. And for all his emphasis on prophylaxis, he concludes by offering a list of cures, beginning with balsams and ending with wines. Beddoes, in contrast, concludes his final installment by explaining that there is no conclusion. He maintains, “There yet remain many subjects in preventive medicine,” and he goes on to express what we know or hope to be true of our favorite writers—namely, that they will have more to offer. “I find myself,” he says, “far from spent with the toil, and I can say with as good a heart as many who have lain by, all the time, in the shade—‘To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.’”26 We must always be vigilant about maintaining health.
The novelist provides the rest of the answer. The curt, and what one critic calls “controversial,”27 ending of Mansfield Park disrupts the kind of tidy restoration generally offered by cure. The narrator blunts the certainty of closure by rushing to assure us that “[m]y Fanny indeed at this very time, I have the satisfaction of knowing, must have been happy in spite of every thing. She must have been a happy creature in spite of all that she felt or thought she felt, for the distress of those around her. She has sources of delight that must force their way” (380). The narrator is, perhaps, too emphatic about Fanny’s happiness. The repetition of “must” is as much an assertion of what will occur as it is a question about what should happen—Fanny must be happy after all that she has endured, mustn’t she? Of course she must. But not immediately. The narrator “purposely abstain[s]” from telling us when Fanny became happy, instead “intreat[ing] every body 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 Mary Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny, as Fanny herself could desire” (387). What some see as an uncharacteristically rushed and overly personal conclusion, Tony Tanner sees as a transfer of the “obligation of the author to the discretion (or fantasy) of the reader”; the absence of specificity becomes an invitation to “write this part of the novel.”28 Though Tanner refers here to Austen’s refusal to depict Edmund and Fanny in conjugal bliss or something quite like it—“they are after all cousins”29—I see this gesture toward the development of the reader’s imaginative capacity as coincident with the project of prevention.
Cure and restoration are important to narrative, but as Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park show us, the stories that come before and beyond cure, the ones that carry us outside of a recovery model, are equally valuable, though perhaps not quite as exciting. Prevention, as I have been suggesting, is a way of reading; it is a lesson in patience more than it is a lesson in being a patient. Elinor Dashwood is arguably Austen’s first preventionist heroine, while Fanny Price, the sickly central heroine who is not trying to get well, is perhaps her most complex. Even her final complete novel, Persuasion, suggests that prevention more than cure guides our reading. The invalid Mrs. Smith registers the kind of anticipatory regret that prevention seeks to instill. But in Persuasion, we also get a turn away from prevention, for Anne Elliot, who lost her bloom before the novel begins and regains it before our very eyes, seems to argue against preventionist thinking, not because it lacks the narrative force of cure but because it is too much like it. Having followed Lady Russell’s advice and turned down Wentworth’s proposal eight years before the novel begins, Anne, though longing to regain her lost love, does not blame herself for following this advice. She does, however, feel that “were any young person, in similar circumstances, to apply to her for counsel, they would never receive any of such certain immediate wretchedness, such uncertain future good” (20). In Anne’s situation, prevention, instead of mitigating wretchedness, becomes the only way to ensure it.
Telling the story of prevention is not easy. In real life, we are left to recognize the signs and structure of preventive thinking and to do our best to avoid what we are sure might cause us harm. In fiction, we get a bit more insight, a bit more certainty, as the narrator can tell us (if she so chooses) what might have been. But even in fiction, prevention is still a shadow, an imagined story of averted future regret that hovers over all the stories we tell.
