Jane Austen's Heroines

[Barbirollians]

Anne Elliot is much my favourite and Persuasion much my favourite of her novels . Emma I did for A Level and have never been able to look at it again.

[Petrushka]

Anne Elliot is much my favourite and Persuasion much my favourite of her novels . Emma I did for A Level and have never been able to look at it again.

Yes, it took me 30 years to pick up Pride and Prejudice again for much the same reason.

[richardfinegold]

Yes, it took me 30 years to pick up Pride and Prejudice again for much the same reason.

Ain't it grand how formal education can ruin our appreciation for the really great things in life?

[vinteuil]

Yes, she confidently asserts that Ed 5 was murdered by his uncle but under Richard 3rd she appears to disbelieve her own 'confident assertion'. I wonder if she had read Walpole's Historic Doubts?

In his edition of Jane Austen RW Chapman at this point in his notes explicitly refers to Walpole's Historic Doubts.

[vinteuil]

... has French Frank removed an entry? I thought she had provided an interesting link to a feminist defence of Fanny Price, but I can't find it... *

On the other hand there is a more negative take :

'If Edmund's notions and feelings are vitiated by a narrow and unreflecting pomposity, Fanny's are made odious by a self-regard utterly unredeemed by any humour - is this still Jane Austen? - or even lightness. She is mortified by being excluded - at her own obstinate insistence - from the theatricals. She pities herself and does others the kindness of hoping that they will never know how much she deserves their pity. She feels that Henry's addresses involve "treating her improperly and unworthily, and in such a way as she had not deserved". She indulges in righteous anger a good deal, especially when her own interests are threatened. She is disinclined to force herself to be civil to those - a numerous company - whose superior she thinks herself to be; such people she regards with unflinching censoriousness. She is ashamed of her own home in Portsmouth, where there is much "error" and she finds "every body underbred', and how relieved she is when the "horrible evil" of Henry lunching there is averted. Significantly, the climax of her objections to her mother is that Mrs Price is too busy to take much notice of Miss Price from Mansfield Park. And, in the closing stages, her "horror" at the wretched Maria's elopement is such as to exclude pity in any word or thought.
This indictment could be greatly extended, notably in the direction of the "moral concern" Fanny feels at Mary's power over Edmund. The tendency of all this can perhaps be fixed by pointing out that the character of Fanny lacks self-knowledge, generosity and humility, the three "less common acquirements" which her girl cousins are, near the outset, stated to lack and which, by implication, are to be demonstrated as existing in her. Instead it is a monster of complacency and pride who, under a cloak of cringing self-abasement, dominates and gives meaning to the novel. What became of that Jane Austen (if she ever existed) who set out bravely to correct conventional notions of the desirable and virtuous? From being their critic (if she ever was) she became their slave. That is another way of saying that her judgment and her moral sense were corrupted. Mansfield Park is the witness of that corruption.'

These are serious criticisms, and I'm not sure I have an easy rebuttal.

They come from an essay by Kingsley Amis, "What became of Jane Austen?" in The Spectator, 4 October 1957 pp 339-340

* ... ah, here it is! (It was lurking on the 'What are you reading' thread) :

In praise of Fanny Price.

[french frank]

... has French Frank removed an entry? I thought she had provided an interesting link to a feminist defence of Fanny Price, but I can't find it... *
[...]

* ... ah, here it is! (It was lurking on the 'What are you reading' thread) :

I was just going to move it over here, but as you've reposted the link ... Thanks

[richardfinegold]

... has French Frank removed an entry? I thought she had provided an interesting link to a feminist defence of Fanny Price, but I can't find it... *

On the other hand there is a more negative take :

'If Edmund's notions and feelings are vitiated by a narrow and unreflecting pomposity, Fanny's are made odious by a self-regard utterly unredeemed by any humour - is this still Jane Austen? - or even lightness. She is mortified by being excluded - at her own obstinate insistence - from the theatricals. She pities herself and does others the kindness of hoping that they will never know how much she deserves their pity. She feels that Henry's addresses involve "treating her improperly and unworthily, and in such a way as she had not deserved". She indulges in righteous anger a good deal, especially when her own interests are threatened. She is disinclined to force herself to be civil to those - a numerous company - whose superior she thinks herself to be; such people she regards with unflinching censoriousness. She is ashamed of her own home in Portsmouth, where there is much "error" and she finds "every body underbred', and how relieved she is when the "horrible evil" of Henry lunching there is averted. Significantly, the climax of her objections to her mother is that Mrs Price is too busy to take much notice of Miss Price from Mansfield Park. And, in the closing stages, her "horror" at the wretched Maria's elopement is such as to exclude pity in any word or thought.
This indictment could be greatly extended, notably in the direction of the "moral concern" Fanny feels at Mary's power over Edmund. The tendency of all this can perhaps be fixed by pointing out that the character of Fanny lacks self-knowledge, generosity and humility, the three "less common acquirements" which her girl cousins are, near the outset, stated to lack and which, by implication, are to be demonstrated as existing in her. Instead it is a monster of complacency and pride who, under a cloak of cringing self-abasement, dominates and gives meaning to the novel. What became of that Jane Austen (if she ever existed) who set out bravely to correct conventional notions of the desirable and virtuous? From being their critic (if she ever was) she became their slave. That is another way of saying that her judgment and her moral sense were corrupted. Mansfield Park is the witness of that corruption.'

These are serious criticisms, and I'm not sure I have an easy rebuttal.

They come from an essay by Kingsley Amis, "What became of Jane Austen?" in The Spectator, 4 October 1957 pp 339-340

* ... ah, here it is! (It was lurking on the 'What are you reading' thread) :

Thank you for posting that! As I struggle to the conclusion of MP, I find myself in 100% agreement with that assessment.
What a killjoy FP is! I keep waiting for JA to lampoon her in some way, but she seems to identify with her completely. Give me Emma Woodhouse or Anne Elliot anyway.

[Deckerd]

Did Kingsley Amis read what JA actually said about FP? It's been a long while but I seem to remember she deliberately created an anti-heroine as a contrast to her popular heroines. I think it's a testament to her skill that she succeeded so comprehensively.

[french frank]

From the intro to my edition of MP (written by Richard Church - who places the work in the context of Jane's failing health, 'proclaiming the virtue of resignation, of patience, of submission' which due to various personal troubles in her life, she was herself obliged to show, three years before she died).

[SPOILER ALERT]

'Another puzzle for the unaccustomed reader will be Jane's unqualified approval of Fanny Price. From the time Fanny goes to Mansfield Park at the age of ten, she is submissive, until her emergence as the happy bride of her cousin Edmund Bertram, the younger son of the house, whose moral nature as a newly ordained clergyman, and whose emotional life as the unsuspecting lover of the guilty man's sister and ally, the handsome Maria Crawford, are both devastated by the climax of crime. Edmund and Fanny... would appear to the modern reader to be naively overdisturbed by the marital disaster which has broken into the family life. But here is a matter of moral values and social acceptances ...
But humility is a virtue little understood or appreciated these days. It is confounded with servility; which Fanny never showed, in spite of her gentle answers and obedient conduct. She knew how to stand firm against the flattering siege from Henry Crawford.
Jane sums up her nature in the phrase 'Fanny had the heroism of principle' ...'

[vinteuil]

'Perhaps no other work of genius has ever spoken, or seemed to speak, so insistently for cautiousness and constraint, even for dullness. No other great novel has so anxiously asserted the need to find security, to establish, in fixity and enclosure, a refuge from the dangers of openness and chance.

There is scarcely one of our modern pieties that it does not offend. ... It scandalizes the modern assumptions about social relations, about virtue, about religion, sex, and art. Most troubling of all is its preference for rest over motion. To deal with the world by condemning it, by withdrawing from it and shutting it out, by making oneself and one’s mode and principles of life the very center of existence and to live the round of one’s days in the stasis and peace thus contrived – this, in an earlier age, was one of the recognized strategies of life, but to us it seems not merely impracticable but almost wicked.

Mansfield Park was published in 1814, only one year after the publication of Pride and Prejudice, and no small part of its interest derives from the fact that it seems to controvert everything that its predecessor tells us about life.

Pride and Prejudice celebrates the traits of spiritedness, vivacity, celerity, and lightness, and associates them with happiness and virtue. [...] It is animated by an impulse to forgiveness. [...] Almost the opposite can be said of Mansfield Park. Its impulse is not to forgive but to condemn. Its praise is not for social freedom but for social stasis. It takes full notice of spiritedness, vivacity, celerity, and lightness, but only to reject them as having nothing to do with virtue and happiness, as being, indeed, deterrents to the good life.

Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park. Fanny Price is overtly virtuous and consciously virtuous. Our modern literary feeling is very strong against people who, when they mean to be virtuous, believe they know how to reach their goal and do reach it. [...] We take failure to be the mark of true virtue and we do not like it that, by reason of her virtue, the terrified little stranger in Mansfield Park grows up to be virtually its mistress.

Fanny is one of the poor in spirit. It is not a condition of the soul to which we are nowadays sympathetic. We are likely to suspect that it masks hostility – many modern readers respond to Fanny by suspecting her.'


from : Lionel Trilling "Mansfield Park" in 'The Opposing Self', 1955

[jean]

Could we tweak the spelling in the thread title, please?

[french frank]

I keep waiting for JA to lampoon her in some way, but she seems to identify with her completely.

Trilling notwithstanding, I think that is in fact correct: Jane does identify with her.

I've always pictured Jane as the quiet, contained character rather than one of her vivacious, sharp heroines. I find Trilling off-beam here: it would surely be anachronistic for Jane to celebrate 'social freedom'.

[Flosshilde]

Sorry, completely off topic, but I find it mildly entertaining that Glasgow has a Mansfield Park - http://upload.spottedbylocals.com/Gl...r-clare%29.jpg

A rather more bucolic view - http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2766/...5f475e3f07.jpg

(actually it's not so strange, as the manse is the residence of a church minister, so it's perfectly reasonable for there to be a park named after a field belonging to the manse (assuming that that is the derivation)

[french frank]

Trilling notwithstanding, I think that is in fact correct: Jane does identify with her.

I've always pictured Jane as the quiet, contained character rather than one of her vivacious, sharp heroines. I find Trilling off-beam here: it would surely be anachronistic for Jane to celebrate 'social freedom'.

Actually, re-reading the Trilling passage, he is mainly stressing how we view things differently now, how FP (unlike others of Jane's creation) is more of her time than ours. Does she (JA or FP) 'condemn'? After Machiavelli, it looks like Mansfield Park for me ...

[agingjb]

Jane Austen wrote in a letter: "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like."

and she is talking about Emma Woodhouse, not Fanny Price. Irony?