Mansfield Park Jane Austen

Nina Auerbach (1980), identifying with the ambivalence experienced by many readers, asks "how ought we to feel about Fanny Price?"[23]

Austen's mother thought Fanny insipid, though other unpublished private reviewers liked the character (Austen collected comments by those in her social circle).[24][25] Many have seen Fanny Price as a nineteenth century Cinderella.

A major debate concerns whether or not the character of Fanny is meant to be ironic, a parody of the wholesome heroines so popular in Regency novels. Lionel Trilling (1957) maintained that Austen created Fanny as "irony directed against irony itself".[4] William H. Magee (1966) wrote that "irony pervades, if (it) does not dominate, the presentation of Fanny Price". By contrast, Andrew Wright (1968) argued that Fanny "is presented straight-forwardly, without any contradiction of any kind".

Thomas Edwards (1965) regarded Fanny as the most vulnerable of all the Austen heroines and therefore the most human. He argued that even Fanny's limited morality had much to commend it.[26] Austen biographer Claire Tomalin (1997) argues that Fanny rises to her moment of heroism when she rejects the obedience that, as a woman, she has been schooled to accept and follows the higher dictate of her own conscience.[27]

Priggish?

Clara Calvo (2005) says that many modern readers find it difficult to sympathise with Fanny's timidity and her disapproval of the theatricals, finding her "priggish, passive, naive and hard to like".[25] Priggishness has been a longstanding criticism of Austen's heroine. Wiltshire (2005) challenges the negative judgement of Fanny suggesting that it is the apparent conservatism of the novel that makes it confronting, and that "many readers cannot get past it".[28]

Tomalin sees Fanny as a complex personality who, despite her frailty, shows courage and grows in self-esteem during the latter part of the story. Her faith, which gives her the courage to resist what she thinks is wrong, sometimes makes her intolerant of the sinners.[27] Fanny, always self-reflective, is intolerant of her own intolerance. Change in her character is most marked during her three months exposure to Portsmouth life. Initially, shocked by the coarseness and impropriety of her parental home and its neighbourhood, she condemns it. While now recognising she can never be at home in Portsmouth, she gradually overcomes her acknowledged prejudices, recognises the distinctive qualities of her siblings, and works hard not to cause offence. In the wider community, judgement is more even-handed; Fanny does not take to the young ladies of the town and they, offended by the 'airs' of one who neither plays on the pianoforte nor wears fine pelisses, do not take to her.[29] She comes to see that part of her physical frailty stems from the debilitating effect of the internal arguments, conversations and identifications that sap her energy.

Auerbach suggests that Fanny, as the quiet observer, adopts "the audience's withering power over performance". She says, "our discomfort at Fanny is in part our discomfort at our own voyeurism", and that we implicate ourselves as well as Fanny "in a community of compelling English monsters".

Paula Byrne (2014) says, "At the centre of the book is a displaced child with an unshakeable conscience. A true heroine."[12]

Fanny's inner world

Fanny is unique amongst the Austen heroines in that her story begins when she is ten and traces her story up to age eighteen.[30] Byrne says, "Mansfield Park is perhaps the first novel in history to depict the life of a little girl from within".[31] By the beginning of the 21st century, says John Wiltshire, critics, appreciating Austen's highly sophisticated renderings of her character's psychological lives, now understood Fanny, formerly seen as the principled pivot of moral right (celebrated by some critics, berated by others) as "a trembling, unstable entity, [an] erotically driven and conflicted figure, both victim and apostle of values inscribed within her by her history of adoption".[9] Joan Klingel Ray suggests that Fanny is Austen's insightful study of "the battered-child syndrome", a victim of emotional and material abuse in both households.[32] From early on she is seen as mentally and physically fragile, a little girl with low self-esteem, vulnerable and thin-skinned. The rock on which she stands, enabling her to survive, is the love of her older brother William. At Mansfield, her cousin Edmund gradually takes on a similar role; both young men fulfil the essential role of care-giver left vacant by the adults. The East room, which Fanny gradually appropriates, becomes her safe place, her "nest of comforts" to which, though unheated, she retreats in times of stress. Here she reflects on her sufferings; the misunderstanding of her motives, her disregarded feelings, and her understanding undervalued. She considers the pain of tyranny, ridicule and neglect, but concludes that nearly every incident led to some benefit and the chief consolation had always been Edmund.[33]

The trauma of her dislocation at the age of ten is recalled by Fanny eight years later when she is promised a visit to her birth family. "The remembrance of all her earliest pleasures, and of what she had suffered in being torn from them, came over her with renewed strength, and it seemed as if to be at home again would heal every pain that had since grown out of the separation."[34] The pain of separation is as evident as is the idealisation of her former life at Portsmouth, an idealisation that masks the deeper pain of an abandonment soon to be acknowledged. John Wiltshire, returning to the theme in 2014, describes Fanny as "a heroine damaged early by her upbringing, as well as by her quasi-adoption, who experiences intense conflict between gratitude to her adoptive family and the deepest rebellion against them", a rebellion scarcely conscious.[35]

Feminist irony

Negative criticism of Fanny sometimes identifies with that voiced by characters in the novel. For some early feminists, Fanny Price was close to being considered, as she was by Mrs Norris, "the daemon of the piece". Many have despised her as "creepmouse", as her cousin Tom does.[9]

Margaret Kirkham (1983) in her essay "Feminist Irony and the Priceless Heroine of Mansfield Park" argued that Austen was a feminist writer who liked complexity and humour and enjoyed presenting puzzles for her readers. Many have missed the feminist irony of the character of Fanny.[36] Austen was a feminist in the sense that she believed women were as endowed with reason and common sense as men, and that the ideal marriage should be between two people who love each other.[37] Ironically, the love match portrayed between Fanny's parents is far from ideal.

Kirkham sees Mansfield Park as an attack on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's popular 1762 work, Emile, or On Education, which depicted the ideal woman as fragile, submissive, and physically weaker than men. Rousseau stated: "So far from being ashamed of their weakness, they glory in it; their tender muscles make no resistance; they affect to be incapable of lifting the smallest burdens, and would blush to be thought robust and strong."[38] The contemporary philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft wrote at length against Rousseau's views in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She also challenged followers of Rousseau like James Fordyce, whose sermons had long been a part of a young woman's library.[39]

At the beginning of the novel, Fanny, with her constant illnesses, timid disposition, submissiveness and fragility, conforms outwardly to Rousseau's ideal woman.[40] Subversively, her passivity is primarily that of a victim determined to survive, the result of the trauma of her dislocation and the internal complexities of her mental well-being. The once beautiful aunt Bertram, in her indolence and passivity, also satirises the stereotype.[41] In the end, Fanny survives by unwittingly undermining prevailing attitudes to propriety as she finds the strength to place conscience above obedience and love above duty. Fanny's refusal to capitulate to Sir Thomas' wish that she marry Henry Crawford is seen by Kirkham as the moral climax of the novel.[42] Through her deep-seated integrity and compassion, her reason and common sense, she is able to triumph, thus challenging the prevailing ideal of femininity (and propriety) in Regency England.[43]

A woman of will

The American literary critic Harold Bloom calls Fanny Price "a co-descendant, together with Locke's association-menaced will, of the English Protestant emphasis upon the will's autonomy".

He draws attention to C. S. Lewis's observation that "into Fanny, Jane Austen, to counterbalance her apparent insignificance, has put really nothing except rectitude of mind, neither passion, nor physical courage, nor wit, nor resource". Bloom agrees with Lewis but argues that he misses the importance of Fanny's "will to be herself" as a causal agent in the plot. Bloom argues that paradoxically it is Fanny's lack of the "will to dominate" that enables her 'will' to succeed. Her struggle just to be herself causes her to exercise moral influence, and this leads her to triumph in the end.[44]

Fanny as a 'literary monster'

Nina Auerbach recognises an extraordinary tenacity in Fanny "with which she adheres to an identity validated by none of the conventional female attributes of family, home, or love". By so doing, Fanny "repudiates the vulnerability of the waif to the unlovable toughness of the authentic transplant". Fanny emerges from the isolation of the outcast, becoming instead the conqueror, thus "aligning herself rather with the Romantic hero than with the heroine of romance".

To Auerbach, Fanny is a genteel version of a popular archetype of the Romantic age, "the monster", who by the sheer act of existing does not and cannot ever fit into society. In this interpretation, Fanny has little in common with any other Austen heroine, being closer to the brooding character of Hamlet, or even the monster of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (published only four years later). Auerbach says there is "something horrible about her that deprives the imagination of its appetite for ordinary life and compels it toward the deformed, the dispossessed".

Auerbach argues that Fanny defines herself best in assertive negatives. Fanny's response to the invitation to take part in Lovers' Vows is, "No, indeed, I cannot act." In life she rarely acts, only counteracts, watching the world around her in silent judgement. Fanny is "a woman who belongs only where she is not". Her solitude is her condition, not a state from which she can be rescued. "Only in Mansfield Park does Jane Austen force us to experience the discomfort of a Romantic universe presided over by the potent charm of a heroine who was not made to be loved."[23] Auerbach's analysis seems to fall short when Fanny finally experiences the love of her adopted family and, despite its traumas, achieves a sense of home.