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CMP# 30  In Praise of Brusque But Kindly Widows

2/23/2021

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Clutching My Pearls is about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. Click here for the first in the series. 

In Praise of Brusque But Kindly Widows
​“My dearest Clarentine, you are always either upon crutches or upon stilts!”  -- Mrs. Denbigh
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  In the last post, I discussed Austen scholar Mary Waldron’s thesis that Fanny Price is not a perfect heroine because she falls short of her own Christian ideals. Waldron suggests Sarah Burney’s Clarentine, who I have also discussed previously, as an example of a "perfect" heroine, 
   Waldron says Clarentine is a girl who, “despite temptations, never deviates, even in thought, from the accepted path of right conduct.”
   While “pictures of perfection” heroines in Georgian literature were a thing, I don’t agree that Clarentine is one of them. It’s not just that, by modern standards, she is ridiculous. It is that there are a sensible people within the novel who can see she is being ridiculous.
    Clarentine, like Fanny Price, manages to make timidity look like hauteur. When Clarentine goes to live with her guardian’s old tutor, she trembles as she descends from the carriage: 

Clarentine’s heart failed her as the moment drew near that was destined to introduce her to the strangers she was henceforward to reside with… she stopped at the bottom of the steps and said with a half smile –  'It is very foolish, but indeed, Mr. Lenham, I am almost afraid of venturing farther.'
    Mr. Lenham laughed at her apprehensions, yet with great kindness said –
   'Shall I go in first then, and announce your arrival?'
   Glad of any reprieve [Clarentine] eagerly accepted the proposal, and struggling to gain courage during his absence, was able when he returned to accompany him onto the room with tolerable composure.
       So our heroine is timid and all that, but she sees no issue with making old Mr. Lenham, whom she has just met, announce her like she was a Duchess or something.
       And may I suggest, dear reader, that only very pretty girls can get away with this kind of crap? Anyway…
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   We don't see Fanny Price or Clarentine struggling against temptation in the sense of wanting to do something they know is wrong. With the minor exception of agreeing to help with the play at Mansfield, nothing tempts Fanny, and she yields through peer pressure. Clarentine likewise is not tempted to misbehave, because all forms of misbehavior repulse her. For example, she rejects the gaudy pleasures of London. These heroines would be more interesting and sympathetic to us if we did see them struggle with temptation. 
      Fanny is described as struggling against low spirits and sometimes jealousy, as does Clarentine. Mr. Lenham, seeing her melancholy state, (and no doubt tired of having a moody teenager moping around the house) begs her to confide in him, but she protests, “mine is a secret that ought not to be told.”
    “You amaze me,” [Mr. Lenham] cries. “What secret can be deposited in a heart so guileless and so pure as your’s, that you need blush to reveal?”
   “Alas, Sir!” exclaimed Clarentine, sighing, “how little you suspect the state of that heart you seek thus benevolently to penetrate. It is filled at this moment with every evil passion. Pride, resentment, envy and ingratitude, assail it by turns; and, oh, Sir, assail it so forcibly, that I know now how to repel them!”
    When her secret love for her guardian causes Clarentine to fall ill, her neighbor Mrs. Denbigh upbraids her and advises her to get over herself: "Is your case, my young friend, a new one? Oh no! – how many notable and contented old women there now are, attending daily to the domestic occupations of their household, scolding their maids, whipping their children, snarling at their husbands, and sitting in judgment upon their neighbours, who once, like you, were sunk in listlessness and apathy, and thought no pleasure equal to that of elegantly indulging their romantic despondence!”
     Clarentine protests that, given her situation as a friendless, dependent orphan suffering the pangs of unrequited love, it is only natural that she should be sunk in misery, but the brusque but kindly Mrs. Denbigh interrupts: “A fatal tendency to encourage causeless repinings seems to have been your bane through life.”  

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     Throughout the last volume of the novel, Mrs. Denbigh is the voice of reason, trying to persuade Clarentine to moderate her hysterical vaporings. As a character, she plays a valuable role in the novel. We see our sentimental heroine through her eyes, the eyes and viewpoint of a rational person. That got me thinking about Austen’s heroines and the structure of Austen's novels. In the previous post, I mentioned C.S. Lewis’s essay, “A Note on Austen” in which he contrasts Elizabeth Bennet, Catherine Morland, Marianne Dashwood, and Emma Woodhouse with Fanny Price and Anne Elliot. The first four heroines are wrong about something. And they all have someone who tells them they are wrong (although of course they acknowledge, and regret, their errors themselves.) Emma has Mr. Knightley. Marianne has Elinor. Catherine is brought down to earth by Henry Tilney.
    In each of these novels, there are conversations (or a letter, in the case of Pride & Prejudice) where the heroine is told she is wrong.
   But there are no such conversations in Mansfield Park. On the contrary, the people who tell Fanny she is wrong, are wrong themselves. Edmund hopes Henry Crawford will “succeed at last” in winning her hand: “You have proved yourself upright and disinterested, prove yourself grateful and tender-hearted; and then you will be the perfect model of a woman which I have always believed you born for.” Sir Thomas thinks she turned down Henry Crawford because she is "willful and perverse." He’s very wrong about her character and her motives. And everyone is wrong about the Crawfords, and Fanny is eventually vindicated.
​   In Mansfield Park, there is only the merest hint that Fanny has created some of her own problems, or made them worse, because of her temperament: “As usual, believing yourself unequal to anything! fancying everything too much for you!" Edmund exclaims at one point. Here, Fanny compares herself with her younger sister: “Susan was only acting on the same truths, and pursuing the same system, which her own judgment acknowledged, but which her more supine and yielding temper would have shrunk from asserting. Susan tried to be useful, where she [Fanny] could only have gone away and cried.”
​    The narrator makes essentially the same point during the wrapping-up: when Susan (lucky girl!) is established at Mansfield as Lady Bertram’s unpaid companion: “Her more fearless disposition and happier nerves made everything easy to her there. With quickness in understanding the tempers of those she had to deal with, and no natural timidity to restrain any consequent wishes, she was soon welcome and useful to all…” (And, to be fair, no Mrs. Norris to cope with).

   Fanny's timidity is referred to as a fact, more than as a fault, it seems to me.
    Poor Fanny does not have a Mrs. Denbigh in her life, and she could use one. In my variation on Mansfield Park, A Contrary Wind, I did supply Fanny with a foil, and it just so happens that it is a brusque but kindly widow. 


   Speaking of timidity, here is a sharp and funny critique from Dorothea Sofia-Rossellini, an Australian Janeite author, concerning Fanny Price: “Lord, what a self-absorbed little wimp she was… Fanny, of Mansfield Park, really was constitutionally incapable of girding her loins and slaying the serpent that had entered her family home – I mean… she was, quite simply, so maidenly that she truly couldn’t so much as indicate that serpent’s hiding place (in Mr. Crawford’s trousers). She is so enchantingly frail that she cannot choose but to shrink away to the East Room – while the happiness, the honour, the very social existence of the family which had brought her up in comfort and health, all went to hell in a handbasket.”
​    Dorothea Sofia-Rosselini's variation on Persuasion is witty, daring and whimsical, a quite unique variation of Jane Austen fan fiction for die-hard Austenites. I'm glad to see it's now available in ebook, too.
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CMP#29  The Faults of Fanny

2/16/2021

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Clutching My Pearls is about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. The opinions are mine, but I don't claim originality. Much has been written about Austen. Click here for the first in the series.  
Is Fanny Price a Picture of Perfection?
     Perfect heroines – sweet, guileless, innocent, virtuous – were a staple of novels in Austen’s time. Some social critics of the day believed that heroines ought to represent ideal female behaviour, lest novels set a bad example. 
     So is Fanny Price intended to be Jane Austen’s entry in the “perfect heroine” category? Is she so sweet and mild-tempered and virtuous that she's unrelatable to modern readers?

    Scholar Mary Waldron says we’ve been getting Fanny – and Austen’s intentions – wrong. She says Fanny is not perfect, and  is not intended to be perfect.   
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    In Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time, Waldron says Austen’s contemporaries understood that Fanny wasn’t perfect, but since then, Fanny has come to be seen as an artistic failure. The take on Fanny is that "Austen must have been trying to create a perfectly good girl and has failed."
   For example, C.S. Lewis calls Fanny insipid. “Jane Austen has put really nothing [into Fanny’s character] except rectitude of mind; neither passion, nor physical courage, nor wit, nor resource” to counterbalance her insignificance. (By insignificance, Lewis means that Fanny is the least important person in the household, the one nobody listens to).

 ​   Waldron suggests that instead, we look at Mansfield Park “as a working through of the unresolvable conflicts facing a young woman” who tries to follow evangelical principles. While Fanny’s actions are correct, her mind is in “turmoil.” Inwardly, she is rebelling against her fate. Waldron suggests that Austen is exploring whether it is possible to be faultless, to be perfectly modest, submissive, and charitable, and to give up the man you love without an inner murmur of the heart.
​    So what are Fanny’s faults? Well, says Waldron, she resents Mary Crawford and is jealous of her. She cannot give Mary credit for the good, kind things she actually does. While Fanny condemns Mary for her mercenary attitudes, she herself can’t stand living in poverty in Portsmouth. She longs for the “ease, refinement and wealth” of Mansfield Park. Fanny gladly tutors her sister Susan in virtuous conduct but hypocritically refuses to  give moral guidance to Henry Crawford.

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    I’ll add a fault of Fanny that particularly grinds my corn: her passive-aggressive tendencies. 
    When Fanny is returning from an errand, she is caught in a heavy rain shower near the parsonage. The Grants see her trying  "to find shelter under the branches and lingering leaves of an oak." They send “a civil servant” to invite her in from the rain. She refuses. Austen describes this as “modest reluctance.” In other words: “No, thank you. Even though your mistress specifically sent you out here to invite me in, I can’t take her at her word--I am just too unworthy. I’ll just stand here, in plain sight of your comfortable home, in the rain. Sorry you got your feet wet for nothing.”
    This means Dr. Grant (who, we recall, is indolent and selfish, and will not stir a finger for the convenience of anyone) now must get his hat and umbrella and fetch her himself. “[T]here was nothing to be done but to be very much ashamed, and to get into the house as fast as possible.”
    Fanny also keeps everyone waiting when Mrs. Grant invites her to dinner. We can imagine the Grants standing there, with hospitable smiles frozen on their faces, while Fanny dithers, and looks at Edmund, and dithers some more -- and she also dithers and delays when Mary Crawford asks her to choose a necklace. Because nothing says “I am humble” like inconveniencing people who are more important than you.
       For a deeper dive, here is my "Fanny vs Mary debate" with author Kyra Kramer, who likes Mary Crawford. Kyra says "Fanny bullied everyone with her timidity." 
       But I am not certain if Austen presents Fanny’s timidity as a virtue or a fault. That would be the key question here. What do you think, reader?  And is it really modesty which makes Fanny dither in these three situations? Or is she avoiding being around Mary Crawford, and not wanting to like her, or be obliged to her? Waldron mentions the necklace incident and suggests it's the latter.

  Having presented Waldron’s side of the argument, I’ll turn to a counterargument, which is, if Fanny is not perfect, does she have a moment of clarity about her faults? Does she realize she’s been wrong, that she hasn’t been charitable enough towards the Crawfords? Because as C.S. Lewis points out, Austen’s four self-deluded heroines have that “a-ha” moment. Elizabeth Bennet realizes she’s misjudged both Darcy and Wickham, Emma has been wrong about everything, Catherine Norland has overdone it with the Gothic novels, and Marianne Dashwood has overindulged her romantic propensities. But Fanny Price and Anne Elliot do not have an “a-ha” moment. Anne does not concede that she was wrong to turn down Wentworth, because she was not wrong to listen to her elders. And Fanny Price is completely vindicated in Mansfield Park, while everyone else was deceived about the Crawfords.
Picture"She could hardly believe it. To be placed above so many elegant young women!"
   So, although Waldron almost convinced me, I’m not completely convinced. At most, I will say that Mansfield Park is a more subtle novel than the novels with perfect heroines, such as Traits of Nature and Self-Control and Coelebs in Search of a Wife. The characters are real, not caricatures, neither all good or all bad, but all brilliantly depicted. Lady Bertram doesn’t mean any harm, but she causes harm through her indolence. Mary Crawford’s genuine respect for Edmund and Fanny did not prevent her from writing to Fanny and saying she hopes Tom will die so Edmund can inherit. Henry Crawford’s redemption balances upon a knife’s edge. He could have gone home to his estate, but his own vanity demanded that he stay in London and bring Maria to heel. Even upright intelligent people like Edmund can be seduced into ignoring their own principles, and find reasons for excusing behaviour they would otherwise disapprove of.  These are all very human failings, which lead to disastrous outcomes and a less-than-happy ending at Mansfield.
    And Fanny, while very moral, has a "supine and yielding temperament." Again, is this intended to be a fault, or a virtue, or just Fanny being Fanny?

  Next post: the advantages of having a brusque old widow in your life...

C.S. Lewis's brief essay "A Note on Jane Austen" is not available on the 'Net, but is well worth seeking out.  If you can't read enough about Fanny Price, I've got more links at my Jane Austen page to some thoughtful stuff on the Web.

​I could see why Mary Crawford would be your first choice for a guest at a weekend house party, in preference to Fanny! If you think Mary deserves her own novel, try Kyra Kramer's Mansfield Parsonage.
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    About the author:

    I'm a writer and a teacher of English as a Second Language.  "Laowai" means foreigner. Check further down for tags for specific subjects. My earlier posts (prior to June 2017) are about my time in China, more recent posts focus on my writing. Welcome!

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