Netflix’s Persuasion makes me want to re-read Mansfield Park

In recent days, I’ve had a few friends ask whether I’m planning to watch the Netflix Persuasion. Like many of us who have read all of Jane Austen’s novels multiple times,* Persuasion is my favorite. Or at least sometimes it is my favorite. But somehow all of this talk about the latest apparently mediocre Persuasion adaptation is just making me want to re-read Mansfield Park.

Thinking about Persuasion naturally led me to reflect on Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park, the other two Austen novels that seem to emerge into popular culture less frequently and favorably than the big three: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. Northanger Abbey is, for me, in a Jane Austen category of its own, but Persuasion and Mansfield Park have a thematic relationship in my personal classification system: their respective heroines Anne Elliot and Fanny Price have a lot in common.

If Pride and Prejudice is prosecco, Persuasion is a drinking chocolate: slow, warming, and dense with meaning. It is also satisfying enough to make the reading worthwhile. What then of Mansfield Park, Austen’s least sparkling novel?

It’s not even a beverage, but thick edgy sweet biting molasses. When I think Mansfield Park, I can smell suffering, and it’s an inescapable cloyingly sweet burnt and bitter miasma emanating from a morally rotten core. (Sorry, molasses.) The slave trade serves as a foundation of the wealth in the novel. As Marsha Huff’s “Sir Thomas Bertram and the Slave Trade” notes, “The first readers of the novel, published in 1814, would have assumed that Sir Thomas Bertram’s business in Antigua was a sugar plantation worked by enslaved people, as were all West Indian enterprises.” Though somewhat obscured by charades and shrubberies, and by the vivacious Mary Crawford, it’s hard not to read the novel with oppression on the mind given the deep background slavery and the overtly troubling treatment of the novel’s heroine.

No wonder it is what the Jane Austen Society of North America characterizes as Austen’s “‘problem’ novel.”

Since Austen is both one of the most well-known nineteenth century “women’s fiction” authors and her novels are frequently retold in various adaptations, her heroines are some of the most widely recognized nineteenth century women. I have the sense that Fanny Price is the easiest to forget.

If Persuasion’s Anne is slow to realize her own mind, slow to claim agency, Fanny’s reluctance and inability to do so is greater. When I read that the Netflix adaptation of Persuasion is understood to be off track because of the way Anne “has been given a spunky and outspoken persona absent from her character in the book” as CBR puts it, I can’t help but wonder what a Netflix adaptation in the same vein would do with Fanny. Her need for an entirely new, out-of-character re-write is far more desperate than Anne’s. If you haven’t yet read Mansfield Park or need a reminder, think of Fanny as a pathetic, more put-upon version of Pride and Prejudice's Charlotte Lucas, for whom things are bad enough that she is condemned by her place in life to willingly marry herself to perhaps the least appealing bachelor in a novel that includes the predatory villain George Wickham. At least Charlotte knows something of what she is trading for security.

Fanny is widely understood as too weak to be interesting due to such characterizations as this: “She had been quite overlooked by her cousins; and as her own opinion of her claims on Sir Thomas’s affection was much too humble to give her any idea of classing herself with his children, she was glad to remain behind and gain a little breathing-time” (Chapter XIX). She is not assertive, she does not recognize her own worth, and she does not expect attention. She is, as she puts it, “graver than other people” (Chapter XXI).

Of course she is. Nothing about Fanny’s circumstances builds her agency and everything about it conspires to make her “grave.”

Edmund, the brother with whom Fanny is in love without hope, has a suggestion about how she should ingratiate herself to her uncle. Her part in the conversation shows her to be analyzing everyone’s probable responses, hyperaware of the potential for criticism of herself: “‘Your uncle is disposed to be pleased with you in every respect; and I only wish you would talk to him more. You are one of those who are too silent in the evening circle.’ “But I do talk to him more than I used. I am sure I do. Did you not hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?’” The conversation continues and she defends herself by explaining why she did not pursue the conversation: “And while my cousins were sitting by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like—I though it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel” (Chapter XXI). Fanny’s attempt at self-defense is all the more painful because she has no appreciation of the unfairness of her situation. She understands herself to be trapped in this situation, with no way to win, but she does not recognize that she has been trapped by others whose control she cannot escape. In the context of the novel, her concerns make perfect sense. Her upbringing since age ten has been with a family determined that she should know her place and eager to scapegoat her.

Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price may not be a sparkling character, but she is a survivor. Her response to this impossible situation is intriguing. Lavish appreciation on characters like the witty, energetic, Elizabeth Bennet with her well developed sense of agency, but save some love for Fanny. She deserves it.

• Note: Though I’ve read all of Austen’s novels multiple times, I haven’t read them recently enough to be confident of accuracy with regard to the details. Specific comparison is not what this is about. What I’m exploring here is my memory of the books, my memory of the adaptations I’ve seen, of a range of criticism I’ve read, and my sense of the cultural role of the books, including the way they serve as indexes of societal priorities.

Unfinished Book Review: Ducks Newburyport

I am the perfect reader of Ducks, Newburyport. During early childhood I lived in Newburyport and fed the ducks. Back then, feeding the ducks wasn’t thought of as an environmental mistake. It was an activity kids did, gleefully breaking up white bread full of refined ingredients, mashing the soft crustless middles of squishy slices, eating some ourselves, crumbling the stale ends, saved for the purpose. The ducks of Newburyport, and elsewhere, were happy, the kids of the era were happy, all innocent of the consequences of such unhealthy sustenance for the ducks.

Newburyport is my father’s hometown, though since I didn’t finish the book, maybe she’s talking about a different Newburyport or for that matter different ducks, but anyway, maybe the place in the title is possibly my first hometown, which sounds redundant, but what with one thing and another, there is no town that for me constitutes a hometown, at least not in the way that people seem to mean it, not that I’m complaining or bragging (unlike noting that I get the literary allusion in the title, which is a kind of bragging), and not that it has to do in any obvious way with Ducks, Newburyport, but in our geographically unmoored world, which I realize sounds negative, but it isn’t fully so and anyway how could I, a person not only without a hometown but also without any dramatic story about immigration or even moving to exciting places—I’ve lived nowhere that would be considered by anyone interesting, unless you count staying somewhere for weeks or months living there, which I don’t, though this may say more about me than I realize, this requirement that I seem to have that living somewhere must mean actually living there, not studying there or teaching for a while from a hotel room where I rinsed my clothes in the sink there, or a piece with this sense that to have a hometown must mean really being from somewhere in a way that is largely outdated—though I’m married to an immigrant from a different country, a different continent even, from somewhere else always, in a much more significant way, but there it is, and here we are, neither of us from anywhere, a contemporary couple from nowhere, but amazingly and appropriately,we live in Ohio (duller and more everyday than Newburyport today, but Newburyport wasn’t like that when I lived there), and living in Ohio is the second fact that makes me the ideal audience for Ducks Newburyport, whose narrator is at least in Ohio, probably her hometown is even in Ohio, if she has one.

The third fact that makes me the perfect reader for Ducks, Newburyport is my recently demonstrated appreciation for long sentences. This massive book is essentially one interminable steam of consciousness sentence.

The fourth fact that makes me the perfect audience for Ducks, Newburyport is that I, like the aforementioned Ohio narrator, am a mother overwhelmed by the chaos of motherhood.

The fifth fact is that, I, again like the aforementioned Ohio narrator, am a person filled with thoughts and observations about the world around me. And that is why I am unlikely to be finishing this book any time soon. I spent, according to my app, 33 minutes reading, and it felt like weeks. I have my own stream of consciousness to manage, and, for the moment, that is enough.

Book Review: The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam

Ann Marie Fleming was curious. She wanted to know more about her great-grandfather Long Tack Sam. Her grand mother and great aunt had, as children, visited him and their grandmother Poldi in their NYC apartment for Christmas one year. Or every Christmas. Memory being what it is, this point, and many others in the story, are not settled. The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam is “an illustrated memoir” after all, and it is about memory and story as much as it is about the most famous magician you’ve never heard of—for all of the reasons.

Magic is out of fashion. As a Chinese performer in the West, Long Tack Sam was constantly marginalized. When Hollywood wanted to cast Chinese actors as laundry workers and bad guys, Long Tack Sam, who seems to have eschewed politics as a showman, refused on the grounds that it was racist and would harm his people. His daughters, who with their white Austrian mother were biracial, were deemed “too beautiful” to play Chinese parts. The family rejected Hollywood, which had become the way forward for performers. They were subsequently to a large extent written out of history, a point Fleming does not belabor but one that her work seeks to remedy. Long Tack Sam mentored Orson Wells. Long Tack Sam brought Chinese magic to the West. Long Tack Sam performed alongside the greats of the day.

This history did not live on in Fleming’s family, a family scattered around the world, descendants living in many the places where their ancestor once performed. Still, it was easy enough for Fleming to determine that Long Tack Sam and Poldi had been hit by a car and moved back to Austria, where Poldi was from and where they had a villa, to recuperate. That is where they died. She finds that he was born in 1885 into a time of famine in Northern China, and from there, the details of how he learned magic diverge, a point illustrated delightfully in the graphic novel by a series of classic comic tales of Long Tack Sam. Fleming, a film maker, has fun with the graphic form creating a collage montage of photographs and clippings and illustrations in different styles. If it all sounds confusing, don’t worry, she includes a character of herself, Stick Girl, to guide you through. A time-line of events runs through the book, adding context from what is happening in WWII to what is happening in entertainment.

In pursuing her grandfather’s story, she ends up in the world of magic, from Chinese acrobatics to Vaudeville, from China to Australia to Austria to Canada. Fleming traveled everywhere, talking to magicians, searching personal archives of magic, talking to her relatives. She created a film and then a graphic novel, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam to share the story—the stories, some contradictory—of Long Tack Sam.

I imagine that this would be a great read for people with a prior interest in magic. It’s definitely well worth reading for those interested history and graphic memoir, in the way peoples’ lives are threaded through world events, in the challenges of being an international family, in who is remembered.

Books and Beverages: My Favorite Absurd and Impossible Book Review Concept (1/???)

This is one of my current top three favorite blog ideas: Books and Beverages

This (nonexistent) blog features beverage-centric book reviews. Each review characterizes each book as a drink and gives a pairing recommendation. 

Example 1:

Pride and Prejudice = Prosecco

Jane Austin did the work for me on this one, writing of Pride and Prejudice: “The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling.” 

Elizabeth Bennet’s wit reflects Austin’s and shapes the book: “There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well“ (chapter 24). And yet this is a marriage plot novel, and Elizabeth manages to find and marry someone she both loves and thinks well of, unlikely as that may be. 

Read it with a cup of Earl Grey in a fine China teacup, preferably with a floral pattern including pink and yellow. 

Example 2:

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl = green smoothie with kale, wheat grass, and turmeric 

This autobiography written by Linda Brent with editor Lydia Marie Child is good for you, edifying, and will as would be expected leave a bitter taste in your mouth:  “Surely, if you credited one half the truths that are told you concerning the helpless millions suffering in this cruel bondage, you at the north would not help to tighten the yoke” (chapter 5).

Read it with a glass of dry tannic red wine, with an edge, not too sweet, to drown your sorrows.