Salon | Classics Book Group: Carol Shields on Mansfield Park

_ T H E_ C A S E_ O F_ T H E
wimpy_heroine
JANE AUSTEN'S "MANSFIELD PARK" PRESENTS HER READERS WITH THE CHALLENGE OF LOVING A DOORMAT.

Mansfield Park
BY JANE AUSTEN
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ALAN DINGMAN

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BY CAROL SHIELDS | What is the matter with Fanny Price, shadow heroine of Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park"? Why is she so wimpy, nervous, passive, lacking in spirit, so relentlessly correct, so given -- when she is invited -- to little puffs of sanctimony, and why despite these qualities does she end up the respected mistress of the Bertram family and of their worthy country seat, Mansfield Park?
The question has teased the readers of Jane Austen's novels for close to two centuries. Austen's other heroines possess spirit and wit. In their youth and exuberance, they are sometimes impolite, rash, imprudent, mistaken in their judgment. Emma lacks maturity and tact; Elizabeth Bennet hurls herself blindly at life. Catherine of Northanger Abbey is helplessly curious. Anne Eliot, Fanny Price's closest sister in the oeuvre, is easily lead, but at the same time innately wise and always supported by an inner assurance.
Not one of these heroines, though, has begun life as radically disentitled as Fanny Price of Portsmouth, and in the reading and understanding of her character we can bring forward some of our contemporary psychological insights. A sensitive child, she spends the first decade of her life with a rough drinker for a father and a slatternly mother who prefers her sons to her daughters. Abruptly, and without her consultation, she is plucked from this disorderly home and placed in elegant Mansfield Park, where she meets with one indolent aunt, a second aunt who is cruelly manipulative, an absentee uncle and a set of cousins who have every advantage over her. Here, she is reminded daily that she is inferior to the members of the Bertram family and that she must be grateful for the crumbs that fall her way. She is called upon to perform dull and dutiful services, and when she reaches womanhood she is subjected to the pressing attentions of one Henry Crawford, a man she loathes.
Her rejection of this match brings upon her the wrath of the family and a punishing banishment back to her own family in Portsmouth -- where she is powerless, virtually without funds and kept ignorant of her future. That this pattern of abuse has created a being as repressed as Fanny is not in the least surprising. The modern reader understands precisely why Fanny is Fanny. Hers is a case of the Cinderella syndrome, of the prisoner's self-protective strategy. The problem is: How can we love her?
Austen clearly does love her. "My Fanny," she calls her in the novel's remarkable final chapter, in which all the narrative lines are brought to conclusion and the whole cast of characters summed up. Fanny triumphs in the end partly because Austen has artfully cleared the field for her: The two Bertram sisters are in disgrace; Aunt Norris has been sent packing; Mary Crawford, Fanny's rival in love, has been exposed in her moral shallowness. Fanny's uncle, Sir Thomas, humiliated and lost, requires the consolation of a daughter he can trust, and Fanny stands ready to fulfill that role. She is, as always, available. Furthermore, Austen has put the reader in a near impossible situation, for if we underrate Fanny's essential value, we put ourselves in the same camp as the Bertrams.
But Fanny does have real claims on our attention, albeit small and difficult to track. She shows growing signs of independent thought -- her little discourse, for instance, on memory in Chapter 22. And her anger -- about time! -- in Chapter 33 when the obdurate Henry Crawford refuses to believe she cannot love him. ("Now she was angry," Austen says plainly.) And, most particularly, we can esteem Fanny's resourcefulness when she is returned to her awful Portsmouth family. There she brings order where she can, assisting one of her brothers in his departure and introducing a sister to the treasury of literature. It is particularly this instance of the helpless coming to the rescue of the even more tragically helpless that wins our hearts and convinces us that, once again, Austen has read all the signs and correctly apportioned the rewards.
SALON | Jan. 12, 1998

Join Carol Shields in Table Talk for a discussion of Jane Austen and "Mansfield Park."