Your Complexion Is So Improved!: A Diagnosis of Fanny Price’s “Dis-ease”
Akiko Takei, Yamaguchi University
Volume 17, no. 4, July 2005
©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
The frailty of Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, is notorious. Because of her physical weakness, she has been considered Austen’s least likable and most incomprehensible heroine. In scholarly studies of this novel, critics have contrasted Fanny with Austen’s other heroines, often attributing her weakness to psychosomatic factors … Certainly, Fanny seems less attractive than Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, and her frailty is intimately coupled with her sense of inferiority in her wealthy adoptive family. Nonetheless, if we read her various symptoms alongside medical works of the period, the grounds for Fanny’s exceptional lack of buoyancy can be found in a recognized disease, chlorosis, which modern medicine sees as a form of iron-deficiency anemia. Like smallpox, chlorosis has been eradicated, but it was considered common in adolescent girls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its most easily recognizable symptom was a pale complexion, as suggested by its popular names “the virgin’s disease” and “green sickness.” Mansfield Park focuses on Fanny’s history from the age of sixteen to nearly nineteen, from puberty to the beginning of adulthood, the very age thought most vulnerable to this disease.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Jane Austen” include:
Why the Show Must Not Go On: ‘Real Character’ and the Absence of Theatrical Performances in Mansfield Park
by KATHLEEN E. URDA (ECF 26.2, Winter 2013-14)
Jane Austen’s “Excellent Walker”: Pride, Prejudice, and Pedestrianism
by OLIVIA MURPHY (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
Adolescence in Sense and Sensibility
by SHAWN LISA MAURER (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
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