Mansfield Park: A Tolerable Comfort

[harmony_bites]

As some of you might know, silburygirl is a serious Austen scholar; she's doing a paper on Mansfield Park and urged me to reread it when I told her it was the one Austen novel I loathed and gave me instructions on what to look for. I did and posted a review on LibraryThing and Goodreads. Sil urged me to post the review on LJ, because she wants to see what

Comments

[kellychambliss]

Yay, Jane Austen! I'm in the middle of teaching a JA seminar this semester, and we'll be beginning MP soon. It's definitely different in tone from PP and Emma and the others, but I still like it for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is Mary Crawford. But Fanny does have spirit, for all her submissiveness -- to stand up against them all and refuse to marry Henry? That takes guts. I tend to think that Austen is a darker novelist than she's usually considered, and there's a savagery about MP that appeals to me, in a twisted sort of way

[harmony_bites]

a monster of complacency and pride who, under a cloak of cringing self-abasement, dominates and gives meaning to the novel

She really popped out at me on second read. I confess I rather love her, and am still in my mind making excuses defending her behavior. Thinking to myself, that in the letter when she talks about wouldn't it be great if Tom died making Edmund a Sir, she's just making one of her at times shocking and tasteless jokes. And as for her reaction about Maria and Edmund--well my first reaction too wasn't so much, how wicked, but how stupid. I guess I forgive Henry more easily than Wickham or Willoughby because he didn't after attempt to seduce an innocent. In Wickham's case trying to get Georgiana's fortune and then intending with Lydia at first not to marry her at all to her ruin. In Willoughby's case, getting that girl pregnant and abandoning her

[silburygirl]

An entire seminar on Austen? Such wonders! I've never even read Austen for a university-level class; it's all been personal interest and directed readings/thesis things.

What are you talking about in it? I must know!

[ctrent29]

If I must be honest, my only true reason for my dislike of Fanny Price is that she never really developed as a character. I would have tolerated this in a supporting character, but I simply couldn't in a main character. How can a character like Fanny (or Edmund, for that matter) develop, when she is incapable of acknowledging her own flaws?

[harmony_bites]

That is a great deal of what stands out to me too. (Although I guess begs the question if what we see as flaws Austen would).

But so many of Austen's heroes and heroines grow in the course of their books: Lizzie, Darcy, Emma especially. It's what to me marks out the Austen books as more than just romances.

Fanny does stand out as in stasis. Sickly, inactive, marries close kin who formed her mind and her happy ending comes more from digging in than anything.

[jill_rg]

Thank you for agreeing with me and C.S. Lewis that it's very inaccurate to call Fanny a prig.

A prig is not just someone with an "exaggerated conformity or propriety," but someone smug in it.

You just described Anne Elliot, who confidently lectures Col. Benwick on the proper way to move on from a lost relationship, secretly knowing she hasn't followed her own advice, and boasts to Wentworth of how perfectly she acted eight years ago, despite how miserable it made them, going as fara s saying being engaged to him would have made her more miserable! Pleae tell me you hate her, too

[albathetross]

Agreed with almost all of the above

[jill_rg]

Thank you for the reassurance! That second paragraph is so true!

I do agree that the ending is a little squicky and incestuous in more than the simple fact that Fanny and Edmund are first cousins.Austen always comes up with ways for her heroines to be allowed to interact with their intendeds more than her society's very rigid rules of propriety normally allowed, for them to actually get to spend time together and get to know each other. Edward Ferrars and George Knightley are married to Elinor Dashwood's and Emma Woodhouse's siblings, so they're allowed to spend time together like family. Catherine Moreland becomes friends with Henry Tilney's sister, so she gets to stay under the same roof as him as his sister's guest. Too many circumstances to list throw Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth together over and over again. Making Fanny's intended her cousin (which was not at all seen as incestuous back then and hasn't been in most cultures for most of history) was a loophole that allowed her to get to spend more time with a man that her society

[albathetross]

Oh, it's not the cousinhood that I object to as incestuous -- I accept that as part of the world of the story; it's the Pygmalion aspect that harmony_bites mentions that makes me a little uncomfortable. Still, I like seeing Fanny happy. ;-)

I took [Susan's] permanent placement at Mansfield Park to mean that she eventually ended up marrying Tom.Hehe, that's definitely one of my scenarios for her. I guess it's the most obvious one in any case, since we aren't left with any other single young men at the end of the story except William

[jill_rg]

Sorry, the library was about to log me off, so I had to hurry and log back in before I got the chance to thank you. I'm so glad someone else appreciates Mansfield Park. You really lifted my spirits up after the way it was snubbed at the Jane Austen Festival I attended today. I consider it one of the two most cruelly underrated novels in history, along with Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Both books brutally destroy fundamental romantic fantasies, which I think is the reason (subconsicous, at least) people dislike them so much. A Fanny/Henry and Mary/Edmund ending would have been more romantic but completely unrealistic.

[vamoaire]

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