Abstract
Fanny Price sets postmodernist teeth on edge.1 This is so much so that the makers of the recent film and television adaptations of Mansfield Park felt she needed to be transformed into a more outspoken young woman resembling—along with the author herself, as revealed in the extant letters—Elizabeth Bennett. I therefore, will use the protagonist of Pride and Prejudice to prepare the ground for a re-presentation of Fanny Price.2
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Notes
What really has to be termed the anti-Fanny faction prominently includes R. F. Brissenden, “Mansfield Park: Freedom and the Family,” Jane Austen: Bicentenary ed. John Halperin (London: Cambridge, 1975), 156–71
Nina Auerbach, “Feeling as One Ought about Fanny Price,” Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (New York: Chelsea House, 1987). (8).
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Nota Bene-Yale, 2000)
Isobel Armstrong, Jane Austen: “Mansfield Park” (London: Penguin, 1988).
Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 71–80.
Tony Tanner, Jane Austen [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986], 143).
Anne B. McGrail, “Fanny Price’s ‘Customary Subjectivity’: Rereading the Individual in Mansfield Park,” A Companion to Jane Austen Studies, ed. Laura Cooper Lambdin and Robert Thomas Lambdin [Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000], 57–70).
Roger Sales, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England (London: Routledge, 1994), 116–24
See Will Durant and Ariel Durant, Reformation: A History of European Civilization from Wyclifto Calvin, Vol. 6 of The Story of Civilization, 11 vols. (1935–75), 533–34.
Christopher Brooke, Jane Austen: Illusion and Reality [Cambridge, MA: Brewer, 1999], 120).
Wallace suggests that for Aunt Norris “Fanny’s arrival sustains for her a fiction of being equal to the Bertrams. Through Fanny, Mrs. Norris can imagine herself a figure as powerful as Sir Thomas, conferring benefits on a less fortunate relation” (Tara Ghoshal Wallace, Jane Austen and Narrative Authority [New York: St. Martin’s, 1995], 61).
Since I have subsumed this subject under the ethical and spiritual elements of the world, I only touch on the richness of objects in the novel—cf. Hardy. Deresiewicz oddly paganizes a Christian novel calling the objects as Austen presents them in Mansfield Park “fetishes,” which he defines as “objects invested with extraordinary emotional power, and even felt, totemically, as possessing a life or spirit of their own” (William Deresiewicz, Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets [New York: Columbia University Press, 2004], 71–78).
Johnson finds a clear parallel between “slavery and the stress on gratitude,” specifically (Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Polities, und the Novel [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 106–7).
Oddly enough, Giffin questions whether or not Sir Thomas really wants Fanny to marry Crawford (Michael Giffin, June Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England [Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002], 141)
On Fanny’s hypothetical succumbing, see, e.g., MacDonagh (Oliver MacDonagh, Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991], 12)
See Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 43–46
Cf. Kathryn Sutherland, Introduction to Mansfield Park (London: Penguin, 1996), vii–xxxii
I have used Chapman’s Oxford Edition. Stovel compares Austen’s communal or family prayers to those in the Book of Common Prayer and posits more prayers that have not survived (Bruce Stovel, “‘The Sentient Target of Death’: Jane Austen’s Prayers,” Jane Austen’s Business: Her World and Her Profession, ed. Juliet McMaster and Bruce Stovel [Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996], 195–201).
Kirsten Olsen, All Thing’s Austen: An Encyclopedia of Austen’s World, 2 vols. [Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005], 602).
Goethe used as raw material for the “Confessions” a collection of writings left by Susanna von Klettenberg after her death (Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet und the Age, 3 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1987], 2:268).
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© 2009 Larry H. Peer
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Farnsworth, R. (2009). “A Better Guide in Ourselves”: Objects, Romantic-Protestant Ethics, and Fanny Price’s Individualism. In: Peer, L.H. (eds) Romanticism and the Object. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101920_6
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