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
