Rob Schaap wrote:
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> >And then, what does Mansfield Park have to do with this?
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> Ain't Fanny's dependence on her fickle saviours kinda central to MP's plot?
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After i get my wrist back i may write a few gigabytes on this, but for now just a few pts. First, when we speak of MP we are in the same territory as when we speak of the odyssey, divine comedy, or the winter's tale. Like a pet milk can it repeats itself, but with variation, to infinity.
Secondly, while Fanny is one of the great characters of english literature, Aunt Norris looms over the whole -- she is to MP what the commodity is to capitalism. In comparison with her potential for destructiveness Iago is a boy scout who peed in the soup pot.
As both Rob & Aristotle note, the individual, she/he who is not dependent, the _idiotes_, is either a god or a beast. Aunt Norris poisons dependency, which is not only, as Yoshie says, a supreme pleasure in itself but is what used to be called the summum bonum, that good which is the precondition of all other goods. One must be human to have human pleasure, and without dependency one is not human. Aunt Norris, by making dependency impossible, turns humans into beasts.
Carrol
But to have done instead of not doing
this is not vanity To have, with decency, knocked That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame This is not vanity.
Here error is all in the not done, all in the diffidence that faltered . . .
(Canto LXXXI)
I was right there in Boston the night that they died
W. Guthrie