I think I might be Fanny Price.
Back in January, in the midst of the Pandemic Winter, when I couldn’t fall asleep at night, I began a project of rereading all of Jane Austen’s major works. Among Jane Austen fans, there’s a practice of identifying with one of her main characters. I’ve always seen myself as an Elizabeth Bennet because I am delightfully witty (ask anyone), have told off a couple of Lady Catherines in my time (they deserved it), and tend to rush to judgment and hold a grudge (I’m working on it).
I’ve never met anyone who would admit to being Fanny Price.
I approached Mansfield Park with something like resignation. I was going to read it because I was rereading Austen, but I didn’t expect to enjoy it. It was something to get through on my way to more enticing fare.
Fanny Price is a poor relation taken off her parents’ hands by her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir Thomas and Lady Maria Bertram. When she is ten years old, she leaves the naval town of Portsmouth to live with their family in Northamptonshire, where her position is uncomfortable: she’s a family member, but also a charity case, and they never let her forget it. The main action of the novel begins when Fanny is eighteen and the wealthy, attractive, flirty sibling pair of Mary and Henry Crawford come to town, disrupting everything. In movies, they’re so often portrayed as wicked, but they aren’t wicked so much as self-involved and thoughtless. (Like pretty much everybody in this book and um, maybe, idk, the world?)
I used to joke that Mansfield Park was proof that not even Jane Austen could win ’em all.
I was wrong. (Like Elizabeth Bennet, I can admit I’m wrong when presented with the evidence.)
Mansfield Park (1814) is a masterpiece, the work of an author at the height of her powers, but readers who go into it looking for a romance or a Mr. Darcy will be disappointed, and perhaps this is why—arriving on the scene so soon after Pride and Prejudice (1813)—without question Austen’s most popular work—readers have never liked it much.
Kathryn Sutherland writes that “it has long been agreed that this is Austen’s most complex and profound and her least likeable novel” (xi).
As I made my way through Volume I, still rolling my eyes at every single character, I found the strangest thing happening, something that had never happened with Austen before. My emotions were a wreck. Mansfield Park was causing me to grieve on some deep level.
Sutherland writes, “Mansfield Park was written and is fictionally situated as a wartime meditation on family and the place of family in the defence of a nation. It is this which explains the ideological weight that apparently personal conversation carries and the seemingly excessive moral armoury that Fanny and Edmund, in particular, bring to bear against the subversive incursions of fashion, wit, and fecklessness” (xxvii).
Anybody else have some ideologically weighty personal conversations about your family’s roles and choices in the midst of a global crisis over the past year?
I have misjudged Fanny Price. Forget Elizabeth Bennet, zombie slayer. Fanny is the perfect heroine for the pandemic. You need to team up with Fanny Price, because she’s not letting you let down your guard.
She’s often interpreted as a prude, a prig, spoiling the fun of her more laid back cousins. But I found in Fanny, upon this reading, a kindred spirit.
You see, I have always wanted to be good. I have always wanted to do good. Whether or not I have achieved that is anyone’s guess, but in the pandemic, it has manifested itself in a need to enforce encourage responsible behavior.
Fanny, I realized, is not a prude, but she wants to be good, and there is no question that she is in fact the best Mansfield Park has to offer.
She is the conscience of her family, and neither they nor the reader love her for it.
But she is not weak, and I cannot understand how she’s gotten this reputation.
She resists the temptation of marrying a man with an estate worth four thousand pounds a year, and she does not waver, even when everyone is telling her she should marry him, and in fact that, as a penniless relation, it is her duty. What better evidence of strength do you want?
Fanny is the embodiment of that aphorism, “Speak your truth, even if your voice shakes.”
Fanny always holds her ground. When everything falls apart for the Bertrams, Fanny is their rock. Readers and critics accuse her of being stationary, of not moving. Of course. That’s the whole point of Fanny Price.
When the pandemic began in March 2020, I told myself that I had one job, and that was to get my family safely through to the other side. As it turned out that involves a lot of not moving, a lot of becoming the conscience—and a lot of annoying people, a lot of having them think that you’re frightened, or timid, or weak, when the whole time you are standing your ground.
It involves a great deal of watching other people do what they want to do, rather than what they should do, and perhaps judging them for that. (Sorry, told you I’ve got a healthy dose of Elizabeth Bennet, and she’s honestly more judgmental than Fanny.)
One can imagine Fanny quietly riding out the pandemic in her East Room while the Crawfords host large indoor parties, and Edmund Bertram says it would be rude not to go but he will wear his mask the whole time, so don’t worry, Fanny, you’re really letting all this make you too anxious and he worries for you so.
Back in November, I read an article that suggested each quarantine bubble appoint a “commissioner” to handle tests, enforce protocols, and so on.
This is Fanny’s problem. She’s the commissioner of the bubble. She’s the one who has to remind people to wear their masks, stay 6 feet apart, wash their hands, stay at home—all the things they don’t want to do. She’s keeping them safe. She’s doing what she ought, and reminding others of it.
But no one loves her for it.
Until the end, when at last they realize it was Fanny holding them together the whole time.
Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. 1814. Kathryn Sutherland, ed. Penguin Classics, 1996.
Excellent analogy throughout .
Enjoyed the assertions of what Fanny would do in certain situations , past and present , and the intertwining of Fanny and Elizabeth’s characters actions in your work .
I also think that your self comparisons were well thought out and transparent.
In short , I enjoyed this immensely .
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!
Reminds me of the dynamics of being a rule-follower or “the fun one” in my family of origin. Now that I’m a mother, I have a newfound empathy for my own…
Yes, indeed. I’m definitely not the “fun one.”