The Lost Art of Becoming Broad-Hearted
Advent & Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
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What better time to begin our new Nuns’ Nook adventure than at the beginning of the new liturgical year? Advent is a season of beginning, of taking a fresh turn in our spiritual lives, and welcoming the Lord anew into our hearts. There is an old tradition, in which parents place an empty crib in their homes and encourage their children to furnish it with good deeds. For every act of kindness, generosity, and love, each child places a sliver of soft bedding into the cold manger, thereby making a place for the arrival of the newborn Jesus at Christmas. Of course, this gesture reflects the far more important reality of furnishing our heart with love as the temple of the Holy Spirit and the place of the Divine Indwelling.
But making space in our hearts for the Lord is not always an easy thing. It requires a stretching, a sometimes-painful expansion of our narrow focus and diminished love. Like leather, unworn, our hearts can be brittle, resistant things, and the sheer size of real love can do damage without the arduous process that precedes growth. While we’ve been encouraged, for a long time now, to apply ourselves to the art of being broad-minded, we have not paid as much attention to this work of becoming broad-hearted. I think often of St. Philip Neri praying in the catacombs for the lost and wandering to discover later that this supernatural enlargement of his heart had broken two ribs.
Becoming broad-hearted costs.
This could never be the case with a shallow virtue, with the kind of virtue lamented most bitterly by novelists the world over: the soft, bland, uninspiring figure of Lady Virtue reclining in a bower of lilies and cherubs.
But perhaps this says more about our vision than it does about virtue?
When Thomas Egerton published Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park in 1814, it sold out its first print run in six months. It repeated this feat in 1816 and was received by the public with a vehemence easily matching the rabid enthusiasm for Pride & Prejudice. Austen was hailed as a National Treasure, and Alfred Lord Tennyson compared her to Shakespeare. The critics, however, ignored the book until 1821, when it received its first rather uninspired review.
To this day, the critics have yet to warm to it. They attribute the early enthusiasm to a narrow-minded populace, who praised Austen’s conventional attitudes. Then, anyone who has read Austen knows that she reserved some of her most scathing irony for faulty conventional attitudes – especially of the matrimonial kind - and was criticized as a radical innovator by the conservative element of her day: a sentiment that millions of feminist readers (wrongly or rightly) still express with a revolutionary pride. This is to say nothing of the fact that only the most reductionist historian could suggest that Regency England was a monolithic hotbed of Victorian Attitudes twenty years before Queen Victoria took the throne.
As time went on, however, the readership unfortunately began to reflect the critics’ views. Mansfield Park’s protagonist, Fanny Price - initially as beloved as Elizabeth Bennet - gradually fell among literature’s least-inspiring heroines, and it was determined that the story would be able to engage contemporary audiences only when its racier elements were emphasized, and Fanny all but rewritten.
So, what happened?
The fact is that somewhere between Mansfield Park’s initial publishing and the current tastes, we lost sight of the robust wonder of developing a broad heart. Somewhere, virtue – real virtue – went out of fashion.
While some now view Fanny Price as little more than a wet blanket, or worse, a vicious scold, it’s often because they imagine that the world of Mary and Henry Crawford – the fast-paced cosmopolitans of the novel – is the one to be preferred, and that Fanny is kept from real fulfillment by her pedestrian and moralistic outlook. The point Austen would appear to be making in Mansfield Park, however, is the opposite one.
It is exactly Fanny’s moral outlook, her clear-headed perspective, derived from a continual devotion to goodness, that not only saves her from the vicious, dissipated fates of the other characters, but also allows her to see the most beautiful things in the novel. Freed from the consuming passions of the others, she is not drawn into their narrow pre-occupations and the somewhat frenzied world of want that defines them.
We see it best, perhaps, in a scene in which Fanny is apart from the group. Freed from their fraught banter, she steals a glance out of the window into the clear night sky – it is a serene calm, a cool and sweet relief from the fever in the room. Reminiscent of Dante’s emergence from Hell in his Inferno, the stars are absolutely spectacular - and absolutely ignored by all but Fanny. She sees everything, hears everything, judges of it meaningfully and, in the end, obtains the admiration of the man who (eventually) takes the same pains to choose a similar devotion to goodness. Her happiness is fixed on the highest goods, and it is unalloyed when she attains them after having suffered the consequences of staying true to them over more immediate, more impassioned, and sometimes more publicly-praised paths.
Her virtue is freeing, her discipline invigorating, her heart broad.
By contrast, the great tragedy of the Crawfords is in the fact that they are unable to see, unable to experience the good as Fanny does. Poor Mary Crawford cannot look beyond appearances and public opinion to the inherent good or evil of Henry’s actions; she blames him for his indiscretion, not his sin. Similarly, we lament that Henry himself, caught for a moment by the nobility of Fanny’s character, cannot find the strength to persevere in his love, and we are left with the regret that such a warm heart, such a sensitive nature, has been lost on another frivolous and doomed pursuit. Austen’s is hardly the one-dimensional approach that rejoices in the just deserts of the reprobates, which one might expect from the high-handed moralism she is sometimes accused of, instead she tries to make us see that virtue is, in fact, the more human road, and the one that leads to life in all its fullness.
As we enter into this holy season of Advent, it is this broad-heartedness that the Church encourages us to foster by turning ourselves more ardently toward living in communion with Christ and His Church, by living His commandments, and allowing Him to come and take residence in the very center of our hearts. Not only do we remember the glory of the first coming, the sweet and miraculous tenderness of the Incarnation, but we look forward with everything to the Second Coming – when His promises will be fulfilled, and God will be all in all.
This takes more than feeling, it takes the pains of true growth, of stretching our hearts beyond their narrow loves and fixing them on the highest ones, but it also carries with it the wide-open space, the true freedom and expansion of a life of virtue and a life with Christ.
Let us try this Advent, to take the pains to draw near to Christ, so that we too can experience the great joy of the lost art of growing broad-hearted.
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