Fanny Price and the Sentimental Genealogy of Mansfield Park
Amy J. Pawl, Washington University
Volume 16, no. 2, January 2004
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Critics have had a difficult time knowing what to make of Fanny Price. Lionel Trilling flatly declares, “Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park.” Marilyn Butler, arguing for the importance of the novel in the Enlightenment “war of ideas,” nevertheless concedes: “That Fanny is a failure is widely agreed.” The negative reaction to Fanny began early. Jane Austen’s mother “thought Fanny insipid,” an assessment endorsed by C.S. Lewis and others who focus on Fanny’s meekness and passivity. Other critics have made stronger charges, accusing Fanny not just of dullness but of selfishness and moral dishonesty. … The reasons assigned for Fanny’s failure are varied, but the critics’ voices expressing puzzlement, disappointment, bemusement, and hostility create a chorus united in sounding a note of dissatisfaction. Mansfield Park is a “problem novel” largely because Fanny Price is a problem heroine. … Fanny’s difference from other Austen heroines can best be understood through realizing her similarity to heroines of the eighteenth-century novel of sentiment.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Sentimental Fiction” include:
Devotional Reading and Novel Form: The Case of David Simple
by TERA PETTELLA (ECF 24.2, Winter 2011-12)
“Women Love to Have Their Own Way”: Delusion, Volition, and “Freaks” of Sight in Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism
by W.C. HARRIS (ECF 23.3, Spring 2011)
Mourning, Melancholia, and Modernity: Sentimental Irony and Downward Mobility in David Simple
by JAMES KIM (ECF 22.3, Spring 2010)
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