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.”  

     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. 

Next post: Death and Coincidence, part one

    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.