{"id":73770,"date":"2014-07-10T13:11:37","date_gmt":"2014-07-10T17:11:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=73770"},"modified":"2019-02-05T13:28:29","modified_gmt":"2019-02-05T18:28:29","slug":"in-defense-of-fanny-price","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/10\/in-defense-of-fanny-price\/","title":{"rendered":"In Defense of Fanny Price"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mansfield Park at two hundred.<\/em><\/p>\n

Poor Fanny Price. The unabashedly mousy, pathologically virtuous protagonist of Mansfield Park<\/em>\u2014which turns two hundred this year\u2014is Jane Austen\u2019s least popular heroine. She spends most of the novel creeping around the periphery of the titular park, taciturn and swallowing tears; she tires after the briefest of physical exertions; she looks down on her wealthier cousins for engaging in flirtatious amateur theatrics; and for most of the book\u2019s five hundred pages, she refuses to voice her long-held love for her cousin Edmund.<\/p>\n

Austen\u2019s own mother reportedly found Fanny \u201cinsipid\u201d; the critic Reginald Farrer described her as \u201crepulsive in her cast-iron self-righteousness and steely rigidity of prejudice.\u201d Even C.\u2009S. Lewis\u2014in the voice of his demon Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters<\/em>\u2014let loose a vitriolic rant about Austen\u2019s most priggish heroine, calling her \u201cnot only a Christian, but such a Christian\u2014a vile, sneaking, simpering, demure, monosyllabic, mouselike, watery, insignificant, virginal, bread-and-butter miss \u2026 A two-faced little cheat (I know the sort) who looks as if she\u2019d faint at the sight of blood, and then dies with a smile \u2026 Filthy, insipid little prude!\u201d Even if we are to separate Lewis from Screwtape, it\u2019s difficult to see Fanny as anything but, to quote Nietzsche\u2019s famous description, \u201ca moralistic little female \u00e0 la [George] Eliot.\u201d<\/p>\n

And indeed, those who defend Fanny tend to see her as a Christian heroine in the mold of a Dorothea Brooke. As the Austen biographer Claire Tomalin puts it, \u201cit is in rejecting obedience in favor of the higher dictate of remaining true to her own conscience that Fanny rises to her moment of heroism.\u201d But to read Mansfield Park<\/em> as a kind of Middlemarch<\/em> is to miss the far more complicated story Austen has told. Fanny Price\u2019s story is less about her individual virtue, or her richer relatives\u2019 lack thereof, but about class, about privilege in its most insidious form\u2014before the term ever cropped up in contemporary social justice discourse. Fanny isn\u2019t moral or upright because she wants to be, but because the role\u2014along with a whole host of so-called middle-class values\u2014is forced upon her. For all we know, she may well wish to be as carefree, as filled with dynamic sprezzatura<\/em>, as Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennet, Austen\u2019s more fortunate heroines, but the social dynamic, and the circumstances of her birth, deny her the security necessary for such frivolity. Fanny has too much at stake to be easygoing. <\/p>\n

She is, after all, a poor relation, sent to live with her wealthier cousins at Mansfield Park by a kind of nominal charity. From the first, her rich aunt insists that she never forget her social inferiority to her cousins:<\/p>\n

I should wish to see them very good friends, and would, on no account, authorise in my girls the smallest degree of arrogance towards their relation; but still they cannot be equals. Their rank, fortune, rights, and expectations will always be different. It is a point of great delicacy, and you must assist us in our endeavours to choose exactly the right line of conduct.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When Fanny is first understood by her cousins to be dull and stupid\u2014qualities the reader soon comes to find in her, too\u2014it\u2019s not because of anything she has done but simply because of what lacks in her background:<\/p>\n

They could not but hold her cheap on finding that she had but two sashes, and had never learned French; and when they perceived her to be little struck with the duet they were so good as to play, they could do no more than make her a generous present of some of their least valued toys, and leave her to herself, while they adjourned to whatever might be the favourite holiday sport of the moment, making artificial flowers or wasting gold paper.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Their aunt\u2019s reply to this disdain is telling: \u201cIt is very bad,\u201d she tells her children, \u201cbut you must not expect everybody to be as forward and quick at learning as yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

The qualities of your typical Austen heroine\u2014charming, forward, quick at learning\u2014are rooted in privilege; Mrs. Norris is blind to the fact that such qualities, along with the possession of scarves or an in-depth knowledge of French, are learned, not inherent. And so Fanny is never given the chance to exhibit the qualities of a \u201cgood\u201d Austen heroine; she\u2019s told from childhood that she is dull, stupid, and inadequate until she herself internalizes \u201cmy situation\u2014my foolishness and awkwardness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many critics of Fanny focus on her approach to an amateur production of the flirtatious Lover\u2019s Vows<\/em>\u2014performed by her cousins, along with two charismatic acquaintances, Henry and Mary Crawford\u2014who embody the charm and worldliness Fanny lacks. She disapproves of the proceedings, which see the arrangement, under the guise of acting, of various romantic alliances and m\u00e9salliances. But her disapproval, as too few critics note, comes less from prudery about the theater itself than from an awareness that acting Lovers\u2019 Vows<\/em> is an a excuse to get away with essentially cuckolding her cousin\u2019s hapless fianc\u00e9. While she is tempted by the idea of acting in theory\u2014\u201cFor her own gratification she could have wished that something might be acted, for she had never seen even half a play\u201d\u2014in practice, Fanny is well aware that Lovers\u2019 Vows<\/em> will (and does) offend Sir Thomas, the family\u2019s absent patriarch, upon his return. It\u2019s the latter argument that underpins the objections of Fanny\u2019s cousin Edmund\u2014her sole ally in the house: \u201cI am convinced that my father would totally disapprove it \u2026 my father wished us, as schoolboys, to speak well, but he would never wish his grown-up daughters to be acting plays. His sense of decorum is strict.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fanny\u2019s fear of giving offense may seem like further evidence of her priggishness. After all, Sir Thomas\u2019s own children have no such fear. Coddled, spoiled, and beloved, they\u2019re perfectly aware that Sir Thomas\u2019s wrath, whatever form it might take, will have few material consequences for them. So, too, Henry and Mary Crawford, who, by their wealth and social status, are largely shielded from consequence. But Fanny has no such protection. She\u2019s reminded at every turn that her presence in the house is contingent upon the good will of her social betters. Should she offend her foster family\u2014as she does, later on in the novel, by refusing to marry the eligible Henry Crawford\u2014she will be considered \u201ca very obstinate, ungrateful girl.\u201d And then it\u2019s back to her comparatively impoverished biological family.<\/p>\n

Compare Fanny with Mary Crawford, the novel\u2019s ostensible antagonist. Witty, charming, beautiful, and carelessly rich, Mary has more surface qualities in common with the typical heroines of Austen\u2019s fiction than Fanny does. She schemes like Woodhouse; she\u2019s as witty as, if not wittier than, Elizabeth Bennet; she makes risqu\u00e9 remarks, acts in flirtatious plays, and risks offending Sir Thomas. But she gets away with all this only because her actions have few real consequences. Her blithe worldliness, her willingness to transgress ostensible taboos, comes from the fact that she resides firmly within a fundamentally safe social sphere of immense privilege. It\u2019s Fanny, really, who\u2019s the more authentically transgressive of the two. By reminding her cousins of Sir Thomas\u2019s potential disapproval, as well as of the morally questionable (and quasi-adulterous) flirtations the Bertrams and the Crawfords use Lovers\u2019 Vows<\/em> to disguise, she calls attention to her middle-class inability to engage in the same carefree pseudo-risks of her aristocratic peers. (Even when Maria Bertram\u2019s adulterous affair with Henry Crawford becomes public, she\u2019s hardly left to fend for herself in the street\u2014her punishment is to spend the rest of her life abroad with her garrulous aunt.)<\/p>\n

Arguably, by contrasting Fanny with a \u201ctypical\u201d Austen heroine like Mary, Austen challenges us to read with a sharper eye to social class, and how such class informs her work as a whole. It can hardly be an accident that Austen is explicit about Mansfield Park\u2019s wealth\u2019s dependence on the slave trade\u2014a dependence she does not highlight in connection with, for example, Mr. Darcy\u2019s Pemberley. By seeing Mary through Fanny\u2019s eyes, we wonder, too, how Austen\u2019s and Elizabeth might appear to someone like Fanny, and whether they, too, get their literary appeal from qualities inherent to their social position. In wanting Fanny to be cleverer, bolder, sexier than she is\u2014in wanting her to be more like Mary\u2014we become complicit in the world of Mansfield Park<\/em>, and in the politics of exclusion through which Mansfield thrives.<\/p>\n

If we construe Mansfield Park<\/em> as a morality tale, or as a book about Fanny herself, we fundamentally misread Austen\u2019s novel. It\u2019s not called Fanny Price<\/em>, after all. Mansfield Park<\/em> highlights, as no other Austen novel does, the role that class and class privilege play in determining the popular qualities for a heroine\u2019s charm and wit\u2014characteristics that depend on an ability to transgress without consequence. It might be the most quietly subversive of Austen\u2019s novels\u2014weakening the foundations not only of its titular park but of Pemberley as well.<\/p>\n

Tara Isabella Burton\u2019s work has appeared in<\/em> National Geographic Traveler,<\/em> Al Jazeera America, the <\/em>BBC, the <\/em>Atlantic, and more. She is working on a doctorate in theology and literature at Trinity College, Oxford and has recently completed a novel.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mansfield Park at two hundred. Poor Fanny Price. The unabashedly mousy, pathologically virtuous protagonist of Mansfield Park\u2014which turns two hundred this year\u2014is Jane Austen\u2019s least popular heroine. She spends most of the novel creeping around the periphery of the titular park, taciturn and swallowing tears; she tires after the briefest of physical exertions; she looks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[2823,14564,6432,300,14566,14565,5636,1080,4590,8922],"class_list":["post-73770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-class","tag-fanny-price","tag-george-eliot","tag-jane-austen","tag-lovers-vows","tag-mansfield-park","tag-middlemarch","tag-money","tag-privilege","tag-wealth"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIn Defense of Fanny Price<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Tara Isabella Burton explores Jane Austen\u2019s \u201cMansfield Park\u201d at two hundred.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/07\/10\/in-defense-of-fanny-price\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"In Defense of Fanny Price by Tara Isabella Burton\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"July 10, 2014 \u2013 Mansfield Park at two hundred. 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