How Memory Can Help You Heal

In Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, the character Fanny Price plays the role of observer. Unpretentious, sensitive, and circumspect, Fanny has adapted herself to her subservient situation. Fanny gets treated as inferior by those around her.

The author reveals through Fanny’s character her own commentary about other people in the story, composing a scene––a snapshot––of the characters, their interaction, prejudices, and indulgences.

“This is very pretty,” said Fanny, looking around her as they were thus sitting together one day: “every time I come into this shrubbery I am more struck with its growth and beauty. Three years ago, this was nothing but a rough hedgerow along the upper side of the field, never thought of as anything; and now it is converted into a walk, and it would be difficult to say whether most valuable as a convenience or an ornament; and, perhaps, in another three years we may be forgetting––almost forgetting what it was before. How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind!”

In the above paragraph, Fanny has marveled at the beauty surrounding her while describing the changes she herself has noted over time. Her companion pays scant attention to Fanny or their surroundings.

Fanny appreciates the changes, the same way you and I might notice and comment how much a child has grown since we last saw them.

And following the latter train of thought, she [Fanny] soon afterwards added: “If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way––but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.”

In this scene, Fanny not only observes, she leaps by association to the wonder of memory––how the mind takes in what it sees and makes associations beyond the moment by remembering and comparing the present to the past.

Modern readers can get lost in Jane Austen’s lengthy paragraphs and intellectual meanderings. Her writing comes from a time when life moved more slowly and with fewer distractions.

Once, I read that Jane Austen made notes about people on whatever scrap she could grasp in the moment to capture details that later found their way into her novels.

Jane Austen’s keen sensitivity to her surroundings and observer of the people who populated her small sphere have made her books enduring classics. Her characters’ peculiarities remind readers of people they may know. Perhaps even themselves.

Jane Austen spares no ink when describing unsavory characters, their hypocrisy and duplicity.

hypocrisy––the behavior of people who do things that they tell other people not to do : behavior that does not agree with what someone claims to believe or feel

duplicity––contradictory doubleness of thought, speech, or action

Jane Austen contrasts character flaws and deficiencies by showing admirable traits in others. Qualities like honesty, empathy, and loyalty distinguish characters like Fanny Price and expose the selfishness of others.

Memory: “A Miracle in Every Way”

The character Fanny wonders how sometimes the memory serves us. And sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the door opens. Sometimes the door to memories remains closed.

Her description of how the faculty of memory works: to retain some things, to forget others, and then at times be tormented by certain memories we wish we could forget led me to read further on the subject of memory.

From Harvard University, this simple explanation for how memory works: [1]

“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.”

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

Jane Austen novels offer closure. She leaves readers with a sense that truth, justice, and goodness will prevail.

[1] Harvard.edu https://ecf1b68e9ace531801f905dd8bb7078a.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

[2] See Genesis 50:20