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. |
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.
In Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time, Waldron says Austen’s contemporaries understood that Fanny wasn’t perfect, but since then, she's acquired the reputation of being a goody-goody.
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...