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
