It’s true. No one (except Edmund Bertram, perhaps) loves Fanny Price. How can we, when we have already met Elizabeth Bennet? When we have admired Lizzy for her wit, her daring ways, her courage. How can we love the dutiful, repressed, prim Fanny, when we, (together with Mr. Darcy), have fallen for Lizzy?
But love isn’t always right. In fact, love can be totally misleading sometimes. This is why, more than two hundred years after Fanny was born within the pages of Jane Austen’s ‘Mansfield Park’ it is time to read the book again and again to realize in the same way Lizzy was prejudiced about Darcy, perhaps we are prejudiced about Fanny.
I confess the first time I read ‘Mansfield Park’ I could not bring myself to like, let alone love, Fanny Price. Like critic Anna Keesey the first time I met poor Fanny, raised with her rich Bertram cousins in their home at Mansfield Park and saw how she, “keeps her pious head down and her nose clean, and eventually, after a number of trials, wins her man,” I wondered, “Was this not just a lame Cinderella retread?” And unlike that firecracker Elizabeth Bennet, wasn’t Fanny Price a weakling: often debilitated by a headache, needing to sit down to catch her breath after a few hundred yards of walking. And to cap it all, someone who never laughs. As Kesely observes, Fanny “makes not one joke in 442 pages.”
It appears, there are others, who have tried, but failed to see something attractive, something invigorating in the poor heroine of Austen’s third novel. After all, when we first see her she is a timid ten year-old, terrified by her new situation and longing for home. Then, we see her grow up and step into the role of unpaid servant. We should feel sorry for her. But we don’t. Why is that?
As John Mullan notes, in his book, “What matters in Jane Austen?” most lovers of Austen’s work have lived with the same sentiments about Fanny Price. “Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park,” declared the great critic and Austen aficionado Lionel Trilling. Marilyn Butler, whose book ‘Jane Austen and the War of Ideas’ did much to establish the novelist’s intellectual credentials, nevertheless conceded, “that Fanny is a failure is widely agreed”.
They say, Austen’s own mother reportedly found Fanny “insipid”; the critic Reginald Farrer described her as “repulsive in her cast-iron self-righteousness and steely rigidity of prejudice.” Even C. S. Lewis—in The Screwtape Letters—let loose a vitriolic rant about Austen’s heroine, calling her “a vile, sneaking, simpering, demure, monosyllabic, mouselike, watery, insignificant, bread-and-butter miss … who looks as if she’d faint at the sight of blood, and then dies with a smile … !” Although, by any standard, Lewis is being too harsh, it is hard to decide who is harsher when we recall Nietzsche said of Fanny, “a moralistic little female à la [George] Eliot.” And yet, there are others who have been equally fierce. Kingsley Amis called Fanny “a monster of complacency and pride” concealed under “a cloak of cringing self-abasement”. Austen herself said as much though in a milder tone when she wrote to her brother Capt. Francis Austen in 1813, “I have something in hand – which I hope on the credit of P. & P. will sell well, tho’ not half so entertaining.”
It might seem odd to provide a summary of an Austen novel but I beg to do so as ‘Mansfield Park’ is one of the lesser-read books of Austen. To continue the thread from where we left off, the only member of the Bertram family who treats Fanny with any kindness is her cousin Edmund. When her Uncle Sir Thomas Bertram leaves on an extended business trip to Antigua the household rules are relaxed and the sophisticated Crawford siblings join the family circle. Fanny is wary of Mary Crawford, whose “sparkling dark” eyes, athletic courage, and vivid wit immediately fascinate Edmund, the younger Bertram brother. It happens that Fanny loves only two people in the world unreservedly: her brother William, abroad with the Navy, and this cousin Edmund; he has cared for her comfort and education since she came among them as a frightened, homesick child, and as she has grown to womanhood, her gratitude has become a passionate but wholly secret love. Now, she is displaced as Mary Crawford tries to win his heart.
This is surely a situation that demands us to take Fanny’s side. But we don’t. Many critics point to the reason behind Fanny’s unpopularity. If only she wouldn’t abase herself. “I can never be important to any one,” is Fanny’s heartfelt response when Edmund tells her she will be a valuable companion for her Aunt Norris. Fanny is introduced into the Bertram house as an inferior – a poor relation who is being done a great kindness and must always be “sensible of her uncommon good fortune”, as Mrs Norris puts it. “Austen shows how character and circumstance are never completely distinct. Fanny, the only Austen heroine who is seen in childhood, is shaped by the compliance that is forced upon her.”
No wonder then, that Fanny grows up to be a cold, aloof character. She does not reach out to create friendship independently like Emma Woodhouse or Catherine Morland. She is not spontaneously affectionate like Elizabeth Bennet. She rarely even displays fondness, something Anne Eliot manages to do for her young nephews. Fanny just sits quietly hoping for a few more minutes of peace before she is given her next task. But when she sits quietly, she also observes, and this can be quite unnerving, even to us, the outsiders looking in.
Fanny, seated in a corner, observing everything around her brings to mind the image of Jane Eyre. They are both brought up with richer cousins. They are both treated with cruelty as the poor relation. But, we feel an easier connection with Jane because she speaks up for herself. Where Fanny has to swallow down her feelings for her cousin Edmund and nod along with Aunt Norris’ every idiotic utterance, Jane is outspoken. She is bold enough to reveal her feelings for Mr. Rochester. She claims her independence even if it means an uncertain future. Then again, none of this is Fanny’s fault. By the time Jane encounters Rocherster at Thornfield Hall, many decades have gone by and literary traditions have changed. The words spoken by Jane were not permissible in Austen’s era.
On the other hand, ‘Mansfield Park’ looks a whole lot like ‘Pride and Prejudice’ too, turned upside down. Like Elizabeth, Fanny refuses an advantageous offer of marriage. Like Darcy, Henry Crawford puts himself to considerable inconvenience to assist Fanny’s family. He not only assists her brother but he also travels all the way to Portsmouth to see her. Their meeting is reminiscent of the meeting between Elizabeth and Darcy at Pemberley. Removed to a new context, the two parties are able to re-establish their acquaintance on more favourable terms. Fanny recognizes that Henry would readily allow her to bring her sister Susan to live with them if they married. But Fanny is not Lizzy and no man, leave alone Henry Crawford, can hold a candle to Fitzwilliam Darcy. So, fate, or more likely as scholars of Austen argue, the author, intervenes.
Thus Austin makes Fanny marry Edmund, Edmund, who had not wanted to marry Fanny, but decides to do so when he cannot take the hand of Mary. However, marrying him is Fanny’s best option and to gain his hand if not his heart is a victory.
And so, we don’t like Fanny. Perhaps the Crawfords come close to unraveling the mystery of how we feel, when Mary says, “I begin now to understand you all, except Miss Price.” “I do not understand her,” confesses Henry. “What is her character? Is she solemn? Is she queer? Is she prudish?”
And this could be why we don’t like her. Because we don’t understand her. Or, could it be we have been on the wrong path, altogether. As Tara Burton says in the Paris Review, “If we construe ‘Mansfield Park’ as a morality tale, or as a book about Fanny herself, we fundamentally misread Austen’s novel. It’s not called Fanny Price, after all.
Indeed. The book is not about Fanny Price, after all.
