MANSFIELD PARK

I finished Mansfield Park, hooray! In the end, it wasn’t too bad—I’d rank it well below my faves Persuasion (bittersweet, romantic, mature), Pride and Prejudice (an all-around perfectly written book), and Emma (fun and funny), but above Northanger Abbey at least (not sure where Sense and Sensibility fits in this ranking—my memories of the book might be burnished by the great movie version). If I were Jane Austen’s editor, I would have told her to cut the length down a bit, especially in the first half. The book is divided into two very distinct parts, and the first part is rather perplexing because the main character is barely in it at all. The book starts to seem like an ensemble piece focusing on the antics of the supporting characters; there are whole multi-page stretches where Fanny doesn’t speak or move or think, and the narration doesn’t even seem to be from her point of view. Finally, in the second half, the story kicks into what for Austen is high gear, with some attempted engagements, a trip to Portsmouth, an illness, and a scandal, and Fanny does take center stage, or at least finally exerts a point of view. But overall, infamously, Fanny is a very passive main character. In fact, after I finished the book and was fishing around online for some literary criticism, I came across this brilliantly tongue-in-cheek note on the definitive Jane Austen website, The Republic of Pemberley:

The heroine of Mansfield Park has always been a controversial topic on AUSTEN-L, and we have had periodic “Fanny Price wars,” which one should avoid exacerbating needlessly and gratuitously. Therefore if you have just subscribed, and are new to the list, then it would be advisable, before you post any standing questions or urgent reflections about Miss Price, to take into account the current state of any discussions of the topic on the list, and especially whether or not a “Fanny Price war” has just ended (in such a case, your posting may serve to fan the dying embers of argument into fresh flames, just when many list members were beginning to breathe a sigh of relief)…Meanwhile, you should be careful about casually throwing around words such as the following in reference to Miss Price: “insignificant,” “moralizing prig,” “feeble,” “dull,” or “nebbish”—not because these are necessarily objectively wrong, but because on AUSTEN-L they are what the U.S. Supreme court has termed “fighting words.”

Hee. I’ll steer clear of “moralizing prig,” but my main problem with Fanny is that she’s just too good. In other Austen books, the main character is flawed but lovable, and the story follows her as she learns to understand and overcome her mistakes, and ultimately redeems herself. Emma learns not to be such a busybody, Elizabeth learns not to be so prejudiced, etc. Fanny doesn’t really learn anything because except that she’s been right all along about pretty much everything. She’s righter than all the rest of the characters (righter even than the reader, who’s certainly tempted to find the Crawfords charming), she suffers until everyone else realizes she’s right, and then she marries the only person in the book who’s been almost as right as she. Having a main character who’s so morally upright from the get-go, and quiet and inactive to boot, strikes a serious blow to the narrative development. Perhaps because of this, Mansfield Park isn’t a very funny or warm book—it’s solemn, rather judgmental. Even trying to place myself in an early-nineteenth-century mindset, I had trouble viewing some behaviors are harshly as the novel seemed to want me to. Also? Not one bit romantic. The man Fanny loves is her cousin, Edmund, who is practically a brother to her for most of the book, as well as being morally rigid, and there’s little or no chemistry between them. We’re even robbed of any scene where they finally declare their love for each other; we’re simply told that after Edmund has been foolishly duped and dumped by the naughty—but much more lively than anyone else in the book—Mary Crawford, he realizes the error of his ways and, almost as an afterthought, marries nice Fanny. Zzzzz.

Nonetheless, the book is still Jane Austen, and thus well-written, amusing, and acutely observed. Many of the scenes of flirtation and folly ring vividly true, and once she finally got noticed in the second half of the book, I did have some sympathy for Fanny. In fact, I started thinking that maybe the sharp disparity between the two halves of the book is intentional; there are so many scenes in the first half where Fanny is deliberately overlooked and neglected by her friends and family, where she simply watches the silliness unfold around her while people forget she’s even there, that maybe it makes sense that the narrative practically forgets her too. In the second half of the book, as the cousins who’ve overshadowed her get married, disperse to other cities, and prepare for careers, Fanny comes into her own—attends a ball, is befriended (albeit by Mary Crawford, for Mary’s own selfish reasons) gains and rejects a suitor, is visited by her brother, is allowed by her uncle (for the first time in over 10 years) to visit her parents and other siblings, and finally (after everyone else in the book has proven themselves flawed and misled) gets the attention of Edmund. The more we see of her, the more our sympathy for her grows. It’s a clever device, but it doesn’t quite make up for the fact that most of the action happens around or away from her, and that she takes very little action of her own.

Side note: I now think Filch’s cat in the Harry Potter books, Mrs. Norris, must be named after the loathsome Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park. If so, nice intertextual ref, J.K. Rowling!