"The Pen of the Contriver" and the Eye of the Perceiver: Mansfield Park, the Implied Author and the Implied Reader

“ T H E P E N O F T H E C O N T R I V E R ” A N D T H E E Y E O F T H E P E R C E I V E R : M A N S F I E L D P A R K , T H E I M P L I E D A U T H O R A N D T H E I M P L I E D R E A D E R LORRAINE M. YORK M cGill University I t was the implied author as well as the historical personage who earned Henry James’s warm praise when he wrote that “M. de Maupassant is remarkably objective and impersonal, but he would go too far if he were to entertain the belief that he has kept himself out of his books. They speak of him eloquently, even if it only be to tell us how easy . . . he has found this impersonality.” 1 One would be similarly mistaken to imagine that Jane Austen has artfully hidden behind the mask of her novels; the “pen of the contriver” of which she openly speaks in Northanger Abbey2 is reserved for a function far beyond that of overt commentary. Rather, it is the multi­ faceted contriver as described by James whom we witness in her works — sometimes openly critical, sometimes coyly suggestive or ironic, but always contriving to perfect the art which conceals art — implicit commentary. Wayne C. Booth’s conception of this thinly-veiled presence, the “implied author,” fuses moral intent and aesthetic concerns; it includes, for him, “not only the extractable meanings but also the moral and emotional content of each bit of action and suffering of all of the characters. It includes, in short, the intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole.” 3 That is, the implied author is a conglomeration of the elements of narration, style, plot — whatever, in short, in the “artistic whole” has its own message to con­ tribute, its own effect to create. Nevertheless, the title of Booth’s study is, after all, The Rhetoric of Fiction, and the very term “ rhetoric” powerfully suggests the other element in this act of communication — the reader. One must, therefore, examine the role of another agent in this process — Wolf­ gang Iser’s “implied reader.” To what extent may one speak of an omni­ present, industrious “other self,” working in complex psychological ways to infuse life into an otherwise “dead” text? The ideal literary' text to choose as a “battleground” for these not necessarily antagonistic theories is one which combines overt and implicit commentary in a variety of ways. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park fulfils that requirement; it paradoxically combines what Andrew Wright calls “a strict . . . moralizing tone” with a relative scarcity of overt narratorial intrusion.4 E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x iii, 2, June 19 87 According to Booth, Jane Austen is “one of the unquestionable masters of the rhetoric of narration” (R F , 244). In Mansfield Park, however, this mastery is only seldom achieved through direct intrusion. Austen, according to Mary Lascelles, was a Johnsonian rather than a Richardsonian, in that she rarely chose to appear in her works in propria persona.5 When she does so in Mansfield Park, it is always with a strict purpose in mind — not simply for the sake of digressive “chattiness.” When “Jane Austen,” for instance, assures us of Fanny Price that “ I have no inclination to . . . think that with so much tenderness of disposition, and so much taste as belonged to her, she could have escaped heart-whole from the courtship . . . of such a man as Crawford,” 6 she is actively manipulating our expectations. For Austen’s purposes, the threat to Fanny must be made tangible, or else her persistence and subsequent marriage to the virtuous Edmund would appear all too expected. Besides this creation of suspense and final justification, Austen’s intru­ sions may serve to excuse or to elaborate upon characters, much in the manner of George Eliot: She [Fanny] had all the heroism of...