[What follows are lecture notes for my current Austen seminar. We’re in the early discussions of Mansfield Park. These notes are produced on the gallop, and parts of them are to be taken up and developed later, so please read them as what they are.]

Approaching Fanny Price — Jane Austen’s ‘Anti-Heroine’ 

I trust it is obvious I am doing something odd with ‘anti-heroine’ in my title.  It does not mean quite what it ordinarily might mean — a female anti-hero.  

What I mean contacts what John Lucas means when he comments on Fanny in his introduction to the novel:  

The central problem is…the novel’s heroine.  For Fanny Price seems almost the anti-type of what we like to regard as the typical Jane Austen heroine.  She is totally lacking in vivacity and all but lacking in wit, she appears incapable of making any effort of friendship with those about her, she is self-effacing, silent and above all passive.

Some of Lucas’ finishing descriptions here of Fanny are, I rate, too strong, and I will get to them, but what I want to focus on for now is just the introductory description:  Fanny Price seems almost the anti-type of what we like to regard as the typical Austen heroine.  

Lucas mobilizes a notion familiar from scripture, the notion of type/anti-type.  That notion can be employed variously but, in Lucas, an anti-type contrasts with or is opposed to a type.  Elizabeth Bennet, as we’ve discussed, is the type of Austen heroine (she’s the most likable of the ‘Mariannes’ characters); Fanny Price is the contrasting type, the anti-type (the least likable of the ‘Elinor’ characters).  — That’s part of what I want you to hear in my use of ‘anti-heroine’.  But I also want you to hear a suggestion of difficulty or dislike — an anti-hero is a character in a novel, stationed at the post of the hero, but who is not (easily) reckoned as a hero — usually, we find the character difficult to like or we even actively dislike the character. Comic books (and Superhero movies) provide accessible examples:  think of the Punisher or Morbius.  From novels or literature, think of The Confederacy of Dunces’ Ignatius J. Reilly.  So, when I call Fanny Price Jane Austen’s anti-hero, I want you to notice both her contrast with Elizabeth Bennet (and the other ‘Marianne’ characters) and the features she has that make her difficult to like. 

To Lucas’ credit, he hedges his introductory description:  Fanny Price seems almost the anti-type of what we like to regard as the typical Jane Austen heroine.  I put ‘anti-heroine’ in scare quotes to help you hear something else in my use of it, a reticence, an almost — to help you hear me hedging.  I’m not saying quite that Fanny is an anti-heroine or that Austen intended her simply as such, but I also don’t take our reaction to Fanny to be the result of authorial incompetence or inadvertence on Austen’s part.  

Austen quite deliberately, knowingly, creates a character who tasks us as readers, heaps us, — Austen makes us read uphill.  We will talk about why Austen would choose to do that, since it can seem a counterintuitive, even a dangerous maneuver on the part of an author.  Johnson notes somewhere that “Whatever professes to benefit by pleasing must please at once”, and we might accuse Austen of failing in this respect — Fanny does not please at once, yet she does seem ultimately meant to please.  As I said, we will return to this.  

But for now, having touched on the complications of my use of ‘anti-heroine’, and keeping them in mind, I want to turn to Lucas’ other descriptions of Fanny.  

To frame my reaction to them, consider one of the unusual aspects of Mansfield Park’s narrative structure.  We are given almost three chapters of Fanny’s childhood, in a kind of narrator’s flashback, the story-telling reaching back into Fanny’s family history, and settling on the year of her displacement from Portsmouth to Mansfield Park (a journey Fanny will make again, but in the opposite direction, much later in the novel).  This should strike us as important; we are given no similar look into the childhood of the other heroines.  I have been encouraging you to attend to character entrances (and exits) and Fanny enters as a child (she is ten when she arrives at Mansfield Park). Austen thematizes (mis)education in her novels, and one thing we find out about Fanny’s early years is how little education she has when she arrives at Mansfield, and how little effort is expended on her education after she arrives.  Not wholly, but to a large extent, Edmund Bertram is Fanny’s education; he is the one who takes the time to interact with her, to see past his sisters’ declarations of Fanny’s stupidity.  Fanny decidedly is not stupid.  Edmund discovers and encourages her cleverness, her quickness, and her good sense.  He supplies her with books since she is fond of reading, and, what is more, Edmund discusses the books with her, encourages her taste, and corrects her judgments.  The rest of the family more or less neglects her, and takes no interest in her growing better or worse.  For them, she is sheerly a charity case.

Fanny’s education contrasts with the education of the Bertram sisters. Their education, by the standards of the day, is proper.  But from another, and a deeper point of view, it is improper.  They develop talents and acquire information, and those developments and acquisitions are taken as proof that they are also growing better, growing in self-knowledge, generosity, and humility.  But, for all the sisters’ outward grace and accomplishment, they know no inward progress — their dispositions, their habits, are neglected in their classroom education, and spoiled by their Aunt Norris’ officious and noxious praise and self-idolizing example outside the classroom.  Lady Bertram’s nodding indolence plays a role here too, as does Sir Thomas’ gloomy seriousness. 

Fanny’s education, comparatively makeshift though it is, reaches into who she is.  She is given to inwardness, and Edmund, while doing what he can to help her overcome her diffidence, supports and strengthens her inwardness, her self-knowledge, generosity and humility.  He helps her build good dispositions, building upon a nature already happily, if all-but-soundlessly, tending in that direction. 

Understanding the novel requires that we do not forget these early chapters, what we see and learn of Fanny in them.  Fanny is slowly recognized as what she is across the time of Mansfield Park.  At the beginning of the primary action, she is a young woman of gifts, virtues, but, like the gemstones inside statues of Silenus, her gifts are hidden.  For a long time, they are known only to Edmund. And, for a sad and difficult while, even Edmund loses sight of them, blinded as he is by the outwardly flashy cubic zirconia of Mary Crawford.  But by the finish of the novel, they are acknowledged by all who remain at Mansfield.

Why this backward glance at Fanny’s girlhood?  I find part of the answer in Lucas, in the near continuation of the comment I quoted above.  

Fanny is not passive by choice but through circumstance.  

This is part right, part wrong.  It is true that much of Fanny’s passivity results from unfavorable circumstances — loneliness, neglect, and underestimation:  all combine to make Fanny diffident, to make it hard for her to trust herself.  But all these combine to work on a native passivity, a native diffidence.  Fanny does not choose to be passive, and yes, her circumstances increase her passivity, but she is a passive girl, a passive woman. But the passivity is not all circumstantial. Fanny would, for instance, much rather suffer wrong than commit it.  Passivity goes deep in her — but so too do patience and humility and long-suffering.  The circumstantial nature of some of her passivity is shown during the visit of her brother, William, to Mansfield, when her passivity lessens.  With him, with someone who does not enforce the circumstances that increase her diffidence, she blooms; she speaks out her heart and mind without shame, pause, or regret. 

Note that even Edmund enforces the circumstances of Fanny’s passivity without meaning to — first just because he is a Bertram, both in and of Mansfield Park as Fanny is not; and, secondly, because he fails to be finely aware as Fanny is:  Edmund misses more than he should.  An obtuseness, sometimes self-caused, darkens his genuine goodness.  That is among the reasons he needs Fanny.

Seeing Fanny with William shows Fanny’s charms to Henry Crawford — and she does not lack charms, for all that she can sometimes seem to.  But Elizabeth Bennet or Mary Crawford’s assertiveness would never be natural to Fanny. She’s the reverse of pushy, even when with her brother. 

Fanny’s passivity is worsened by circumstances, and it is natural to her, and so in both those senses not chosen, but it is also implicated in the virtues that she exemplifies, works toward, and so it is, in another sense, acquired, if not exactly chosen as such.  The dichotomy, chosen or circumstantial, oversimplifies the story of Fanny’s passivity. It fails to be responsive to habit, disposition, and the complicated issues connected with the conscious development of habits, and of their concomitant changes.

Compared with Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny does seem to lack vivacity and wit — but it matters when we make the comparison, whether we make it when Fanny is young and oppressed by Mansfield Park, or when she is older and William is visiting, or when she is older still and the de facto mistress of Mansfield.  Fanny is never going to equal Elizabeth Bennet, but in the later moments, she is closer to her.  

Mansfield Park is the story of someone invisible slowly becoming visible.  That’s why it starts with Fanny in her youth, in her nearly complete invisibility.  Her increasing visibility has to do with changes in her, but it has more to do with the increasing visual acuity (moral, not physical) of those remaining at Mansfield, especially Edmund, changes Fanny creates in them slowly, passively, through her patient endurance.  Fanny creates changes in others by her quiet, steadfast refusal to be anyone but herself.  Edmund’s vision — what he sees and fails to see — is a major thematic element of the novel, since it is in his eyes that Fanny first materializes, is realized, both in the sense that she is made real and in the sense that he comes to know her reality.  A similar change occurs in Sir Thomas’ vision too, and even, to a degree that does not require her full wakefulness, in Lady Bertram.  They come to see Fanny and to see her as in and of Mansfield, indeed as integral to its continuance.  She is the true heir of Mansfield.  

It is an error to claim that Fanny is incapable of making any effort of friendship with those about her.  The problem instead is that almost all of those around her consider her disqualified for true friendship.  She lives with the Bertrams for years trapped between being a distant, slightly embarrassing relative, and a domestic servant.  Her place in the house, the room she lives in, its lack of a fire, all testify to her being a servant.  That may not have been Sir Thomas’ intention, but he never made any effort to make sure his intentions were carried out. In general, Sir Thomas seems inclined to think he enjoys a Divine Prerogative:  he needs only to think or speak it for it to be so.  That he does not enjoy this Prerogative he learns from Fanny to his eventual betterment, and from his daughters to his eventual sorrow. Mary Crawford wants to befriend Fanny — and believes she has — but Fanny can see Mary for what she is, can feel the mixed motives that prompt Mary’s efforts at friendship and Fanny mistrusts her and them.  

That Fanny has a capacity for friendship, that she craves intimacy, and equality, is shown by her relationship with William and later, in Portsmouth and then at Mansfield, with her sister, Susan.  It is true that they are both her relatives, but it is also true that she is separated from them both for a long time, and that her relationship with them is richer than a matter of blood.  And, even more important, she is friends, longtime friends, with Edmund.  She is his best friend, although he does not quite conceptualize her in that way, or in that way only.  He conceptualizes her as a cousin, little sister, friend, and pupil — and all these roles function as veils that obscure her from him, obscure what she most importantly is to him, despite the fact that he sees her earlier and more clearly than anyone else at Mansfield Park. 

Fanny’s love of Edmund has its girlish moments, as is shown by the whole business with the cross, the necklace, and Edmund’s note. (Fanny seems a bit like Harriet Smith moony over Mr. Elton, hoarding keepsakes).  But one good effect of the Crawfords, the theatricals, and Fanny’s sojourn/return to Portsmouth is that her love matures, and understands itself.  She knows Edmund for who he is and knows herself for who she has become, and she loves him still.  She cannot marry Henry Crawford, not just because he is wholly an actor, corrupt even in his attempts to overcome his corruption, but because she loves another man.  She believes Edmund lost to her, Henry and Sir Thomas exert enormous pressure on her, but she still says no. Her small but mighty no.

I mentioned that Austen makes us read uphill, and challenges us to contend with a Fanny who hardly seems like a heroine at all. — Why do that?  

My suspicion is that Austen intends her novel to test our visual acuity.  Can we see Fanny?  Can we see past Mary Crawford? What are our values? Are we really all cheap and flash or do we care about what we like to represent ourselves as caring about? Can we believe that heaven belongs to the poor in spirit, that the meek will inherit the earth, — and that that is how it should be? Do we care about purity of heart?

Final thought.  Lucas does realize that treating Elizabeth Bennet as the type of an Austen heroine might seem appropriate since she is the heroine of Austen’s most popular novel.  But he also realizes that she does not repeat.  None of the other heroines are Elizabeth Bennet:  Emma is probably the closest, but there are crucial differences between the two.  I believe this is why Lucas uses his extended, guarded phrasing, not only almost but also —  …the anti-type of what we like to regard as...  

No doubt Elizabeth Bennet has a tight hold on the imagination of Austen readers, she is all vivid, never invisible, but statistically (so to speak) she is no more frequent than any of the other heroines.  Certainly, it is possible to see Austen’s novels otherwise — as I admit I often do — and to find, say, Anne Elliot with a hold on one’s imagination tighter even than Elizabeth Bennet’s, to see her as Austen’s type.

(Comment on the Bertram sisters’ education. Johnson, in his Lives chapter on John Milton, remarks of educators like Milton, that “They seem to think that we are placed here to watch the growth of plants, or the motions of the stars.  Socrates was rather of the opinion that what we had to learn was, how to do good and avoid evil.”  Johnson sides with Socrates, not Milton:  “Prudence and justice are virtues and excellencies of all times and all places; we are perpetually moralists but are geometricians only by chance.” An education like the Bertram sisters’, for Johnson, despite its apparent propriety, is upside-down:  an education for perpetual geographers and chance moralists.  And their morals certainly prove chancy.)