Quiet Heroine: A Review of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
by Karly Noelle Abreu White
Definitely the dark horse of Jane Austen’s canon, Mansfield Park is centered around the painfully shy and upright Fanny Price. Raised in squalor by a family of low social standing, ten-year-old Fanny is taken in by her well-to-do aunt and uncle, the Lord and Lady Bertram, as a charity case, where she is intended to be a companion of her two female cousins, Maria and Julia.
Fanny is bullied, harassed, and ignored in turn by the Bertrams, who constantly remind her of her inferior station. Instead of fighting back, she accepts it all with quiet acquiescence. Fanny forms a bond only with her older cousin, Edmund, who becomes her protector and advocate. She is content in her life of assisting her indolent aunt and being outshined by her vain, selfish, and spoiled cousins. Despite setbacks, she grows into an upright, moral woman of taste, intelligence, and feeling, and is consistently appalled by the selfishness of her cousins — excepting Edmund, who she begins to develop an unrequited crush on, knowing her affections will never be returned due to the vast difference in their social standings. (Important to note here that “kissing cousins” were incredibly common in Austen’s day in Europe, though it may come across as icky to a modern reader.)
The plot gets underway when Lord Bertram leaves the home to the care of his eldest son, Tom, to take care of business on his plantations in Antigua, and with the subsequent introduction of two newcomers to their quiet corner of society, the Crawford siblings, Henry and Mary. Raised in moral, if not financial, squalor by a sailor and his mistress, the Crawfords are provocative and worldly, and they instantly catch the eye of the Bertrams, with Henry attaching himself at once to Julia, while Maria, engaged but bored with her unbearable fiancé, cannot keep her eyes off of him.
For his part, Edmund spends the majority of the novel pining after Mary Crawford, a woman Fanny immediately and correctly pins as unworthy, and most of the book revolves around Fanny just waiting for everyone else to catch on to what is blatantly obvious to herself: that the Crawfords are selfish, immoral, and will drag everyone down with them if given the chance. In this way, Fanny can come across as a passive — even occasionally self-righteous — heroine, but you also can’t help but feel for her, as her qualities are ignored or actively maligned by her more worldly acquaintances and family. That is, until she begins to be pursued by Henry Crawford himself, first as a joke, and then as he begins to see the qualities no one else seems to appreciate in her. But there is little true romance in this book, which stands in contrast to the themes of Austen’s more beloved works, such as Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, as this book is more about Fanny and her perseverance.
Additionally, compared to more popular Austen works, this one seems to be the most heavy-handed and moralizing, with Fanny and her innate goodness standing in sharp contrast to the follies of every other woman (and most of the men) around her, but Austen is also quick to note the unfairness by which women are judged in this society, and how Fanny’s own superiority generally falls on deaf ears and blind eyes because she has no beauty or fortune to recommend her. Of course, things work out for her in the end, but when the bulk of the novel deals with the foibles of her companions, her own happy ending doesn’t feel quite as satisfying as perhaps it should, and its build up is rather too abrupt.
There is also plenty to unpack about the world Fanny inhabits and its expectations on women, on men, on the moral, the poor, and the rich. While Fanny can come across a bit prudish to the modern reader, what she really portrays is a woman who fights to be true to her own self and heart, though her methods — by remaining upright when everyone around her wants to bring her down to their level morally — may initially seem less endearing than Lizzie Bennet’s sarcasm or Marianne Dashwood’s poetry, she is no less admirable a heroine, nor less human a character. Her qualities become apparent and lovable the more time one spends with her, her inner strength and indomitably flying in the face of her seeming shyness and quietness. This is very much a story about what it takes to be a good person and who is ultimately worthwhile in society; Fanny, poor and with little social standing, as the heroine who eventually outshines her “betters” is countercultural in a way that’s important to recognize for her era. She represents what could easily be represented by any minority or marginalized character today.
It is, however, impossible to bring up Mansfield Park without mentioning the uncomfortable fact that our good heroine and her family prosper due to the horrors of the slave trade, (a fact given as offhandedly as the toast they have with their tea), which certainly can and should sit uncomfortably to a modern reader, especially when the novel is so concerned with uprightness and morality. It is probably for this reason, as well as the less romantic nature of the story, that this book has been subject to only a single film adaptation. Certainly, it’s an uncomfortable truth that plenty of decent-seeming people from this era prospered because of the subjugation of others, but it is a truth that this otherwise harmless little book forces you to grapple with, and it calls upon a reader who is willing to hold these uncomfortable truths in tension.
Despite these challenges to the reader, this IS Jane Austen, and that means wit and a mastery of the English language that never feels as dated as many works by her peers. Her characters all sparkle with a humanness that is immediately identifiable across time and culture. We can all feel as though we have met Marias, Julias, Edmunds, Fannys, Marys, and Henrys regardless of the world in which we live. In this way, while Austen tends to get saddled with the “romance” label, what she is really doing is portraying universal truths about humans and relationships. Any one of her books could be uprooted and placed in modern India, or Jazz-Age Harlem, without sacrificing the core of the story, and Mansfield Park, for all that it’s an outlier in Austen’s canon, is much the same. And the book is a thoughtful read that lends itself to discussion and a bit of wrestling with big questions of morality, truth, and what we can glean from people living in a wholly different world, one both romantic and alien to a contemporary audience. There’s plenty here to glean, but, perhaps, like Fanny herself, this unsung novel is one which you will have to study more deeply to understand the innate goodness of, but which proves to be worth the time.
***
Karly Noelle Abreu White is an author, poet, copywriter, and editor. Her work has been featured in Writers Resist, Lines of Velocity, Untangled, Nothing Held Back, and Pieces of Me. She holds a bachelors in English literature from Biola University and spends her time writing about faith, justice, literature, equality, education, and pop culture. She has a husband, two children, a fussy cat, and lives in Southern California, where she can usually be found sipping tea.
