The Critics vs Fanny Price

Over the last two weeks or so I have been alternately drowning and basking in articles on Austen – topics from landscape, empire, slavery, disability, cousinly incest, spectatorship, and Regency divorce, to Lord Mansfield, Lady Penrhyn, estate conservation, ha-has, amateur theatricals, annihilations of Fanny, defences of Fanny, muslin gowns, and of course, the decadence of pugs. With the looming deadline of another essay on the horizon (and it doesn’t help that my advent calendar says it’s already passed), I find myself once again in the middle of the worst vortex there is - a mind map.

I’m finishing off my 2022 writing about one of my favourite authors, and her treatment of nature in Mansfield Park. I won’t go into detail here, or I truly will get lost in overlapping spider diagrams, but today I thought I’d unburden some of my recent findings in a blog post. It’s beginning to look a lot like Dumbledore’s pensieve, but we’ll go with it.

One of the more memorable essays from that muddle mentioned above was Nina Auerbach’s (vitriolic) assassination of Fanny Price - admittedly not one of Austen’s most likeable heroines, but here me out while I put forward some evidence for the defence. Not to divert any of Auerbach’s ire elsewhere, but for me, Anne Elliot has always got me seething with frustration. I’m not the best at decision-making myself, but that woman delegates all her powers of judgment to the questionable Lady Russell. I heard somewhere that what annoys us most in others is likely what annoys us most about ourselves, so maybe I’m just projecting, but at least Fanny Price, for all her moralising, knows her own mind.

Now for my main case. Fanny has always attracted mild to venomous critical attention, from Austen’s own mother calling her “insipid” (Burton), to Nietzsche’s “moralistic little female” (Klein 577; emphasis added), and the afore-mentioned Auerbach who deems her a “silent, censorious pall” (447) who is “despised by all” (452).

Attempts have been made to redeem her or transvalue those aspects of the compliant, ‘passive’ character that seem to gall scholars, casual readers, and Janeites alike. On this most recent read of the novel though, I couldn’t help sympathising with Fanny’s situation, not to mention her struggles with anxiety, a clearly depressive episode at Portsmouth, and extremely low self-esteem. I found myself identifying with some of her least exalted traits - her timidity, shyness, (which Auerbach loathes), and nervousness. Anyone who has been called ‘quiet’ all their life will know how infuriating a pigeon-hole that can be. But Fanny’s quietness stems in no small degree from her dependent position, which is consistently drilled into her from the age of ten. Ever since arriving at Mansfield Park, Aunt Norris is at pains to foster her inferiority complex, subservience, and submission. As the novel demonstrates, Fanny can be cast out at any time to return to poverty. This threat, ever-present, combined with the emotional neglect of her aunt, fear of her uncle, and constant derision from Maria, Julia, and Tom (who calls her a ‘creep-mouse’ (MP 136)), builds up over time with unsurprisingly repressive results. Added to this, her parents only too willingly and indefinitely divested themselves of her keep, with little to no regret or communication, besides one letter we retrospectively learn reaches Fanny at Mansfield with the news of her little sister Mary’s death.

But my main issue with Auerbach’s damning, maybe slightly parodic, essay, is her use of heavily ableist language to discuss Fanny’s many ‘faults’. She suffers throughout the novel from headaches, nervous complaints, low energy and spirits, and emotional and physical fatigue. Auerbach’s essay turns these into weapons, suggesting a spectral and monstrous presence who haunts the text more than Sir Thomas’s Antiguan plantation.

Now, while it was written in 1980, thirteen years before Edward Said’s analysis, the construction of a vampirically marginalised character who “feasts secretly upon human vitality in the dark” (449) is an uncomfortable assertion to say the least. Apparent “deformed, … dispossessed” (447), a “sinister” outsider (449) who “stands with some venerable monsters in the English canon” (449) , she is allegedly “monstrous and marginal” (450), dwelling in her “lair” the East room (455). Now I wouldn’t normally promote “matrilineal, consanguineous ties” (Hudson 61), but after allegations like these, I would like to defend my client for latching onto the only genuine kindness, respect, and empathy, she receives at Mansfield. That Edmund happens to be her first cousin, and brother-surrogate, is sadly unfortunate.

In a counter-article, Ula Lukszo Klein posits a reading of Fanny Price as a disabled heroine, arguing “[t]he rhetoric of disability studies sheds light on how the novel represents lived, rather than metaphorical, physical and mental disabilities; how the novel invites readers to interrogate their own biases; as well as how economic status might function as its own type of disability” (578). In a persuasive point, Klein contends that Fanny’s liminality and symptoms of chronic fatigue confront us with a different way of experiencing the world from the Bertrams and Crawfords, who can walk and ride and act and dance in normative bodies. This representation shows “the ways in which disability intersects with issues of class, gender, and sexuality” (590).

In a previous post I discussed Patricia Rozema’s 1999 adaptation of Austen’s novel, which portrays a far livelier and athletic Fanny Price as a mishmash of Austen herself, her juvenilia and letters, and a dash of Elizabeth Bennet. After reading Kathryn Sutherland’s essay on Jane Austen in film, I have been thinking of her thoughts on the ‘heritage movies’ which translate the often heavy annotation of Austen’s novels into the visual landscape of film with “sumptuous props drenched with material significance … glamorous costumes … [and] grand indoor sets” (222).

Sutherland notices a recent shift towards minimalism, at least Austenian minimalism, where the same stately piles are “emptier and draughtier, their rooms less opulent, their furnishings competing less for our attention” (223). I would put Mansfield Park (1999) in this category, which at the very end of the 20th century, depicted in postmodern fashion, a cold and sparse set of scant furnishings and bare walls. Supporting the film’s focalisation of Mansfield’s oversees sister plantation and its consequent decline in morality, health and influence, the almost meagre interiors simultaneously evoke a hostile atmosphere for the lady’s thin muslins and a meta-theatrical dimension to its ‘set’-ness that parallels the play-within-the-film.

But Sutherland points to Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (2005) for its ‘new shabbiness’ approach to realism, exposing Elizabeth’s hem “six inches deep in mud”, indoor pigs, messy breakfast tables and the corresponding hand-held camerawork to render these modernisms more authentic. In a photography class in my undergraduate at IADT, I remember our lecturer showcasing this film, for its use of ‘dirty frames’; a framing device whereby a blurry foreground makes a distinct background or middle ground stand out in sharper relief. This visual dimension adds texture to accentuate the subject, while introducing that realism Sutherland highlights.

But “Austen’s brand of realism”, she asserts, is not “the enforcement of the eye’s higher rhetorical power” (215); rather “she wishes to throw the emphasis of understanding upon hearing, the faculty that in eighteenth-century aesthetics was associated with the social passions of sympathy, shared values and custom” (216). In this way, filmic adaptations - inherently favouring spectacle over sound - “[turn] her narratives inside out, making her stories visually comprehensible” and building those worlds Austen left to our imagination (Sutherland 224). This is fascinating to me, after a day spent researching for my current essay on Austen’s representation of nature in Mansfield Park. I have been considering Val Plumwood’s writings on the concept of ‘landscape’ as privileging sight over other ways of knowing the land. Of course, in Georgian Britain, the art of landscaping was a major national (and imperial) project, often altering swathes of countryside to conform to the ideals of the picturesque movement. Creating picture-perfect scenery with that smooth/rugged balance of the Burkean sublime, William Gilpin was one of the originators of this eighteenth-century fashion and Mansfield Park is rife with allusions to ‘improvements’ of this kind. As another critic states, Austen’s landscapes are carefully depicted to portray a character’s moral status, all the while leading to “ideas about community, continuity, the responsibilities of the clergy and landed gentry, and the moral and economic underpinnings of rural English society” (Minott-Ahl 259).

Austen uses nature in more interesting ways than I previously gave her credit for, and maybe many would consider her an author of manners and social settings over landscapes. But of course, most of her novels are rooted in the rural. Jonathan Bate has some interesting things to say about the way we sometimes overlook this aspect of her writings, pointing out that Austen’s “supremely poised culture” (543) can also be linked to considerations of an earlier meaning of ‘culture’ as a tract of cultivated land. In Mansfield Park for example, estate ‘improvements’ by Henry Crawford and Mr Rushworth are closely linked to their moral characters where Austen clearly associates a “lack of rootedness and a metropolitan brashness … with modernity and … corruption” (Bate 543).

Part of Henry Crawford’s extensive ‘improvement’ scheme for the parsonage at Thornton Lacey - “The farmyard must be cleared away entirely, and planted up to shut out the blacksmith’s shop … the view is really very pretty; I am sure it may be done” (MP 225).

But my favourite comparison from my readings this week has been Emma Spooner’s conflation between Fanny and cucumbers. Spooner believes “Fanny performs the same moral and spiritual work at Mansfield Park as Cowper’s cucumbers perform in The Task.” Just as Tom Bertram calls Fanny a “creep-mouse”, the cucumber is “lowly creeping, modest and yet fair, / Like virtue, thriving most where little seen” (Cowper 3.663-64).”

But back to “Austen’s brand of realism” (Sutherland 215) - Rozema’s Mansfield Park, as I have elsewhere discussed, provides a postmodern ‘reality’, specifically in its disruption of Austen’s narrative form, which of course must change from page to screen, but is here challenged with the breaking of the fourth wall to overstate Fanny’s ‘spectatorship’. The novel’s treatment of Fanny’s love of nature positions her as the outsider looking in, but of course the film depicts an insider looking out – at us.

To finish, another scholar states that “Fanny withstands being the 'bearer of meaning’ imposed by society and men in particular, and instead reveals her preference for making meaning by applying the gaze of the impartial spectator, the 'moral gaze’, firstly to herself and subsequently to those surrounding her” (Despotopoulou 573). This moral gaze is what disconcerts us so much in the modern age, but the film’s defiance of that imaginary wall, highlights the meta-theatricality and artificiality that abounds in the novel – the play-within-the-play/film that sparks the plot, and the pretence of all its main players. But crucially, this device brings us into Fanny Price’s secret inner world, which in the novel, few seem to care about. We can project all we like, but this ‘unlikeable’ heroine makes her own meaning, just as she knows her own mind.

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