Posted May 25, by argumentativeoldgit in Culture , literature. Now, always mistrust an essay or a posting that starts with such words. But I am going to go ahead and start with these words anyway. It is, I think, fair to say that Mansfield Park is the Austen novel that her fans tend least to like. And the reason this novel is so frequently disliked — if the comments I frequently find around the internet are to be trusted — is that Fanny Price is not considered by many readers a likable character.
Now, disliking a protagonist seems to me, for reasons well articulated here , a poor basis for disliking a book. But the question of whether or not we like Fanny is not, perhaps, one that is easily dismissed. The reader who sees Fanny as priggish, repressed, and overly censorious of human frailties is bound to interpret this novel differently from the reader who sees her as clear-sighted, possessed of moral integrity, and, indeed, heroic.
One may try, of course, to be more sophisticated as a reader, and see in Fanny both admirable and not-so-admirable features, but here again we run into difficulties, for those aspects of her character that may be regarded as admirable are precisely the same aspects that may, with equal justification, be regarded as reprehensible: the principled and the priggish are not different qualities, but, rather, the same quality seen from different perspectives.
And where Austen herself stands on all this, from what perspective she views her creation, is hard to discern given the various levels of irony she employs throughout. Following immediately on the footsteps of the eminently reader-friendly Pride and Prejudice , Austen here seems to go out of her way to make things as difficult as possible.
Fanny is the still centre of a turbulent world. While the various uncontrolled passions — or whims, or passing fancies — drive the other characters this way and that, Fanny remains in the midst of it all, not herself by any means passionless, but with a quiet and undemonstrative constancy.
