This Is a ‘Mansfield Park’ Worth Visiting

Jane Austen never imagined how aptly her remark--”One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other”--would describe her own fans. Some of them decry the new movie “Mansfield Park,” written and directed by Patricia Rozema, for defiling the original with its indecent liberties, while others hail

it as a witty and frankly modern take on Austen.

Rozema’s movie is controversial because a powerful nostalgia motivates many assumptions about Austen, who is imagined to have celebrated a life that unfolded before the advent of the ills of modernity--such as doubt, war and, more recently, feminism and multiculturalism. In Austen’s time, it is fancied, everybody spoke wittily and knew what to do; men were gentlemen and women were ladies; the desires of gentlemen and ladies for each other were straightforward; houses and furnishings were magnificent--and, damn it, those who don’t agree should read someone else’s novels!

No wonder directors and performers have a hard time bringing the inventiveness, panache and contemporary edge to Austen that is routinely brought, say, to Shakespeare: The whole point is to preserve her in an unruffled past.

Half the Austenian world is furious because in Rozema’s movie--more of a free reading, an intervention, than an adaptation--the manor is cold and dilapidated, there are no loving shots of tea services, characters themselves notice the rift between manners and morals, and sex and power make everything untidy. We can’t escape to a world that looks like our own.

But was Austen really so placid? The other half thinks not, and loves the energy, irreverence and even bitchiness of her wit, the sharpness of her social criticism and the power of her characters’ passions, honed by intelligence and complicated by good manners. We coolly smile at the other half’s indignation because we know that Austen was unblinking and often shockingly unsentimental about sex.

In the novel, hero Edmund inadvertently tortures heroine Fanny by reporting how he and his father discussed her improving “figure,” while Fanny’s father, noting the same maturation, refers to her only “to make her the object of a coarse joke.” The crisis of the novel hinges on rank adultery, and even licit love teeters on incest and unseemliness: Rakish Henry gets turned on to Fanny by watching her complexion glow in the presence of her brother, and Edmund greets Fanny (his childhood playmate, and the woman he will soon marry) as his “only sister.” Nor is homoerotic badinage off-limits, for bad girl Mary flirts with Edmund via Fanny, and Fanny is fascinated.

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To convey the verve of the Austenian narrator, Rozema’s movie departs boldly from the novel, and her

innovations are jolting at first, but on the score of sexuality she invents little. When she evokes the yearnings of ardor, she is splendidly faithful, and when she shows it in the raw (as Austen does not, preferring indirect reportage), it is as unglamorous as it should be.

Concerning politics as well, Austen was more unblinking than her latter-day, elegiac admirers give her credit for. She knew that manors like Mansfield Park--unlike, say, Pemberley in “Pride and Prejudice”--were built with new money derived from slave labor in the West Indies. Foregrounding this element of the novel, Rozema draws on Austen’s well-known attachment to eminent abolitionist writers to make a point that was no longer very controversial at the time: that slaveholding is a form of misrule abroad that leads to misrule and turpitude at home.

Inspired by Harold Pinter’s intensity in playing the role of Sir Thomas, Rozema is unrelenting about the brutalizing ugliness of slaveholding, introducing some new scenes to put this across. This method of dramatic exposure is not always Austenian, but the underlying concern about the moral authority of the ruling class is.

“ ‘I can’t get out, I can’t get out,’ the starling says.” Rozema uses Austen’s allusion to Sterne to protest confinement--of slaves, women, talents. Toward the end of the film, as swarms of starlings swoop outdoors, Fanny, refigured as an Austenian narrator, comes into her own as a writer, and the camera soars rapturously over the hillside as she tells the story we watch.

Rozema’s “Mansfield Park” is about getting free, about the rewards of patience and intelligence and the uplifting clarity Austen herself gives us. At best capturing why my half of the world loves Austen in the first place, it is a glorious cinematic evocation of Austen’s shockingly clear yet forgiving vision, and its own stunning achievement of creative freedom.

At last a director has treated Austen not as a sacred text or museum piece but as a living presence who inspires us to take wing ourselves. Half of us, at least, will find a pleasure watching this dazzling, daring and deeply intelligent movie that the other half, as Austen predicted, will never understand.

Claudia L. Johnson is a professor of English at Princeton University in New Jersey.