Fanny Price
Frances "Fanny" Price is the heroine in Jane Austen's 1814 novel, Mansfield Park. The novel begins when Fanny's overburdened, impoverished family—where she is both the second-born and the eldest daughter out of 10 children—sends her at the age of ten to live in the household of her wealthy uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, and his family at Mansfield Park. The novel follows her growth and development, concluding in early adulthood.
Key events include the arrival of the charismatic Crawfords from London, the temptations of Sotherton, the family theatrical controversy, the coming-out ball, Fanny's obstinate refusal to marry Henry Crawford, Fanny's three month penance at Portsmouth, and Maria's elopement with Henry Crawford leading to family devastation followed by a final restoration.
Background
Mansfield Park is the most controversial of all Jane Austen’s novels, mainly because readers are unable to agree in their assessment of the novel’s heroine, Fanny Price. Fanny Price is unique amongst the Austen heroines in that her story begins when she is ten and traces her story up to age eighteen. Paula Byrne says, "Mansfield Park is perhaps the first novel in history to depict the life of a little girl from within".Fanny's mother is Frances Price youngest sister of Lady Bertram and Mrs Norris. Her father is an impoverished retired marine lieutenant in Portsmouth. There are eight other children. Because of the Price family's poverty, Sir Thomas Bertram offers to take Fanny in and bring her up at Mansfield Park, his Northamptonshire estate.
Fanny is described as small for her age, "with no glow of complexion, nor any other striking beauty; exceedingly timid and shy, and shrinking from notice." She is self-conscious, and untutored, but not brash or offensive in her movement or speech.
Fanny's arrival at Mansfield Park
Fanny feels intimidated at Mansfield Park and is homesick. The house seems far too big; Sir Thomas is daunting, Lady Bertram silent, Mrs Norris oppressive and her four cousins are distant. Even the maidservants sneer at her clothes. Nobody puts "themselves out of their way to secure her comfort". She misses her brothers and sisters where she had value as playfellow, instructress, and nurse.Fanny, who had been taught to read, write and do needlework but nothing more, now receives her education from Miss Lee in the school-room alongside Maria and Julia. In private the sisters think her 'prodigiously stupid' and make fun of her ignorance. Mrs Norris, who spoils the sisters, constantly emphasises Fanny's inferiority. Only Edmund attempts to understand her predicament. He befriends her, helps her adapt to her new life and guides her reading.
Character and psychological profile
Many gentle adjectives are used in the novel to describe Fanny - sweet, pretty, quiet, modest, timid, shy, graceful - but none describe the true character of Fanny who is clever, observant, strong-minded and practical. The young Fanny is seen as mentally and physically fragile, a vulnerable girl with low self-esteem and emotionally thin-skinned. The strength that has enabled her to survive is the love of her brother William, just one year older.John Wiltshire says that, by the beginning of the 21st century, critics had come to appreciate Austen's highly sophisticated expression of her characters' psychological lives. They no longer understood Fanny as the pivot of moral right and, depending on their point of view, to be simply celebrated or berated. Instead they explored her psychological development, seeing her as ‘a trembling, unstable entity, erotically driven and conflicted figure, both victim and apostle of values inscribed within her by her history of adoption'.
Joan Klingel Ray suggests that Fanny Price is Austen's insightful study of "the battered-child syndrome", a victim of emotional and material abuse in both households.
Growing into adulthood
Young adult
Colleen Sheehan offers a partial defence for the readers and scholars who dislike Fanny. She maintains that Austen deliberately makes the character of Fanny difficult to empathise with and that one has to work at liking her. Austen refuses to give the reader simplistic stereotypes that will allow of easy moral judgement. Beneath all the liveliness and wit of the charismatic Crawfords there is an intense spiritual and moral battle being waged against Fanny and Edmund. Austen encourages her readers to think for themselves, to exercise their own moral judgement in a complex world.Once the governess, Miss Lee, has left, Fanny continues to find in Edmund a considerate companion who tries to protect her from discrimination within the family. In time she becomes romantically and jealously attracted to him, though in secret. Throughout the novel, Fanny is portrayed in the uncompromising position of loving without invitation and without hope.
As an eighteen year-old adult, Fanny is considered pretty, with a good figure and countenance. But she tires quickly from any exercise, is still shy, and reluctant to give her own opinions or to assert herself. Deeply sensitive, however, she loves nature, poetry and biography, especially Shakespeare, Crabbe and Cowper. As well as later quoting from William Cowper’s Tirocinium, she also loves his extended poem, The Task. Beginning to use her shyness creatively, she becomes a skilled observer, listener and reflector. These skills prove to be useful in future decision-making, in winning people's confidence, and eventually, in being a help and strength to others.
Thomas Edwards says that, compared to the other characters, Fanny alone has a full conscience, a sympathetic understanding of what other people feel. Fanny's natural sympathy is at times so intense that she is overwhelmed by the perceived needs of others. Her capacity for empathy also acts as a partial balance against her tendency towards being judgemental. She can feel compassion for Mrs Norris even when narrator and reader feel only condemnation. "Fanny's disposition was such that she could never even think of her aunt Norris in the meagerness and cheerlessness of her own small house, without reproaching herself for some little want of attention to her when they had been last together."
Fanny lives by the strict moral principles she has learned from Edmund and derived from Sir Thomas's worldview. This code embraces typical regency views of propriety and of a woman's place in the world. Rousseau depicted the ideal woman as fragile, submissive, and physically weak, a view frequently reiterated in a young woman's reading matter. Fanny, with her constant illnesses, timid disposition, submissiveness and fragility, conforms outwardly to Rousseau's ideal woman. This leads some reviewers to consider Fanny priggish. Even Sheehan, who is deeply sympathetic to Fanny, describes her as pure, poor, plain, timid, sickly and without wit, and also rather prudish. Kingsley Amis described her as "morally detestable". Other critics, like Claire Tomalin, point out that she is a complex personality, perceptive yet given to wishful thinking, and that she shows courage and grows in self-esteem during the latter part of the story. While faithful to the moral code she has learned from Edmund, Fanny grows into an understanding which is deeper than that of her teacher. Her sufferings, her introspection, her integrity, her willfulness and her observation of human interactions lead her to unexpected conclusions. She has a core strength and In the end, Fanny unwittingly undermines prevailing attitudes to propriety, and finds inner resources to place conscience above obedience and love above duty.
The East Room
The school-room is later renamed the East Room by Maria, and once Miss Lee departs, it becomes vacant. Fanny gradually appropriates the room, filling it with her plants, her simple treasures and the books she buys once she has a little money of her own. It becomes her safe place, her 'nest of comforts' where, though unheated she retreats in times of stress. Here she reflects that, "though there had been sometimes much of suffering to her; though her motives had often been misunderstood, her feelings disregarded, and her comprehension undervalued; though she had known the pains of tyranny, of ridicule, and neglect, yet almost every recurrence of either had led to something consolatory", and the chief consolation had always been Edmund.Described in greater detail than any other part of the house, the room has many objects with symbolic potential. The table set against the East wall and its window with its transparency of Tintern Abbey, is suggestive of a chapel, a place of meditation, of comfort and prayer, though, unlike the improving novels of many of Austen's contemporaries, personal prayer is rarely mentioned.
The trauma of her dislocation at the age of ten is recalled here by Fanny eight years later when she is promised a visit to her birth family. "The remembrance of all her earliest pleasures, and of what she had suffered in being torn from them, came over her with renewed strength, and it seemed as if to be at home again would heal every pain that had since grown out of the separation." John Wiltshire describes Fanny as, "a heroine damaged early by her upbringing, as well as by her quasi-adoption, who experiences intense conflict between gratitude to her adoptive family and the deepest rebellion against them", a rebellion scarcely conscious.
Arrivals and departures
When Fanny is fifteen, her uncle Norris, the local clergyman, dies. Led to believe that she will be moved from Mansfield Park and live with Mrs Norris, Fanny again experiences the trauma of dislocation and abandonment, although it soon becomes clear that Aunt Norris does not want Fanny living with her because of the additional expense.The following year, Sir Thomas takes Tom to Antigua to deal with problems on his Caribbean estate, expecting to be away for about a year. His daughters do not grieve over his going, and Fanny only grieves that she cannot grieve. In his farewell private talk with Fanny, Sir Thomas encourages her to invite her brother William to visit but expresses the fear that William may see little improvement in her since they last met when she was ten. Her cousins, seeing Fanny's tears, misinterpret her pain and dismiss her as a hypocrite.
The wife of the new minister Dr Grant has a half-sister, Mary Crawford who comes to live with her at the parsonage, accompanied by her brother, Henry Crawford. Mary, first interested in Tom, soon finds herself attracted to Edmund, a matter which distresses Fanny.