I’ve brought up Fanny before – the bad rap she gets among Austen heroines, the difficulty adaptations have in presenting her in a compelling way, and my own assertion that she’s actually a deceptively strong young woman. Since most of the digital audiobooks I can readily get from my library are classics, I just finished an unabridged reading of the book, and I’m reminded that Fanny is even tougher than I tend to give her credit for.
I’m in the habit of focusing on Fanny’s natural shyness and her reticence around her wealthier cousins. For someone who likes to stay in the background and is loath to disappoint anyone, it takes a good deal of fortitude to stand up to Sir Thomas, and even more to hold her ground. Fanny goes through a lot over the course of the book, and she wouldn’t be able to do it if she weren’t as strong as she is. However, adjectives like “timid,” “meek,” and “quiet” don’t cover her circumstances.
Fanny is brought to Mansfield Park at age 10, plucked without ceremony from her family in Portsmouth, no indication of when she’ll see them again and no gentle introduction to the finer life of the country. She comes of age alongside cousins who are considered inherently better than her, not simply because they’re the children of her biased guardians, but because they’re of “better blood.” They’re the children of an aristocrat, and in Fanny’s world, that has far-reaching consequences. Before Fanny is brought to them, Sir Thomas puzzles over how they’ll raise Fanny and his children, especially his daughters, to understand the difference in their rank.
It turns out there’s no difficulty there. As soon as Fanny comes under the tutelage of Maria and Julia’s governess, the girls start laughing over their cousin’s ignorance, mistaking her lack of knowledge and education for stupidity. In nearly every aspect, they find her wanting compared to them, and their Aunt Norris is always pleased to encourage and magnify these distinctions.
Additionally, Aunt Norris is the chief offender when it comes to treating Fanny like a glorified servant. While Maria and Julia are expected to be accomplished and lovely with few other responsibilities, Fanny is the gofer, the seamstress, the gardener, and whatever else she’s needed to be. There’s an ugly, unspoken implication that Fanny must earn her keep for the Bertrams’ charity of taking her in, and Aunt Norris maintains a steady stream of derogatory insinuations about Fanny’s alleged ungratefulness while at the same time believing anything that benefits Fanny (which Fanny herself never asks for) to be an unnecessary expense or hardship.
This is everything that’s been coloring Fanny’s opinion of herself and her place in the family. In a way, it reminds me a little of Dido in Belle, in that she’s held to different rules than others in the household, and she has a close proximity to privilege without being able to really access it. Now, when Fanny’s shyness is added to this mind-warping soup of inequality, is it any wonder that she’s demure and reluctant to speak her mind? This is a young woman who’s been systematically beaten down throughout many of her formative years. How much more amazing, then, that she still braves Sir Thomas’s disapproval, that she makes a stand and says, “No – I will not be dictated on this point.” On the surface, she may seem weaker than Elizabeth Bennet, for example, but if she doesn’t reach as high, it’s only because she’s reaching from so much lower down.
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