The Frailties of Fanny: Mansfield Park and the Evangelical Movement
Mary Waldron, University of Essex
Volume 6, no. 3, April 1994
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ABSTRACT
“She is never, ever, wrong.” This estimate of Fanny Price, made by Tony Tanner in 1966 in his introduction to the Penguin edition, is often taken for granted by critics writing about Mansfield Park and is frequently assumed as the basis for her present-day position as Austen’s most unpopular heroine. Not all, it is true, take up exactly the same unequivocal position. For instance, in 1967 Robert A. Colby found some faults in Fanny — she is occasionally jealous and uncharitable. Avrom Fleishman, in the same year, suggested that “Fanny is presented not as a paragon of virtue, but as a weak woman with self-defensive and self-aggrandizing impulses.” Kenneth Moler in 1968 said “Jane Austen did not intend Fanny to be … the moral paragon that many readers take her to be.” At least one other more recent critic has seen imperfections in Fanny but has considered them unintended fallout from the author’s struggles with her material: Bernard Paris (1978) says “It is difficult to feel as positively about Fanny’s goodness as Jane Austen wants us to … it is rigid, desperate, compulsive. Fanny is not actively loving or benevolent.” Nina Auerbach, in a very unusual view of Fanny, relates her to most of the predatory villains of literature from Grendel to Dracula.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “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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