Fanny Price and the sentimental genealogy of Mansfield Park

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Volumn 16, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 287-315

  Pawl, Amy J ^a  

^a WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61949322972     PISSN: 08406286     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ecf.2004.0040     Document Type: Article

References (66)

1. Lionel Trilling, "Mansfield Park," The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism (1955; reprint, New York: Viking Press, 1959), p. 212;
2. Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 248.
3. Jane Austen, Minor Works, ed. R. W. Chapman, vol. 6
4. The Works of Jane Austen (1954; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 432;
5. C. S. Lewis, "A Note on Jane Austen," Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Watt (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 25-34.
6. Avrom Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park: An Essay in Critical Synthesis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967), p. 45;
7. Kingsley Amis, "What Became of Jane Austen?," Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Watt, p. 144.
8. Nina Auerbach, "Jane Austen's Dangerous Charm," Mansfield Park and Persuasion, New Casebooks, ed. Judy Simons (London: Macmillan Press, 1997), p. 64.
9. Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1983; New York: Methuen, 1986). Mary Waldron expands on Kirkham's claims by suggesting that Fanny's imperfections should be viewed as part of Austen's response to the unrealistic moral demands of Evangelical fiction.
10. See Waldron, "The Frailties of Fanny," Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 84-111 .
11. Another critic with a good word to say for Fanny is Ellen Gardiner, who sees her as an informed critic, aversion of the Female Spectator. See Gardiner, Regulating Readers (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1999), p. 136.
12. Butler, War of Ideas, p. 247. This particular sentimental convention only becomes more widespread later in the nineteenth century.
13. R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress (London: Macmillan Press, 1974), p. 119.
14. Brissenden, p. 129.
15. The topic of father-daughter and guardian-ward relationships in eighteenth-century fiction has been frequently discussed in the past decade. A fine recent study is Caroline Gonda's Reading Daughter's Fictions, 1709-1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
16. See also the essay collections Daughters and Fathers, ed. Lynda Boose and Betty Flower (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989)
17. and Refiguring the Father, ed. Patricia Yeager and Beth Kowaleski Wallace (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989).
18. J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 85.
19. Janet Todd, Sensibility (London: Methuen, 1986)
20. Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney, The Life in the Works (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), and others have elaborated on this claim.
21. This is more true for Mr Bennet and Mr Woodhouse. Sir Walter Elliot, at the end of Austen's career, shows her verging once again towards parody.
22. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), give a brief list of the ways Austen fathers fail their daughters (p. 137);
23. see also Mary Burgan, "Mr. Bennet and the Failures of Fatherhood in Jane Austen's Novels," Journal of English and German Philology (Fall 1975), 536-52
24. and Alistair Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). Duckworth discusses Austen fathers as financial failures.
25. George Starr, "'Only a Boy': Notes on Sentimental Novels," Genre 10 (1977), 501-27.
26. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley (1970; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 23. References are to this edition.
27. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 4 vols (London: G. G. and J. Robinson,1794), 1:428.
28. Open disavowal of sentimental postures does not, of course, mean that a work is free from sentimentalism. Todd notes the ability of a given novel to deny on one level what it enacts on another: "Ann Radcliffe in The Mysteries of Udolpho warns against the sensibility that is the salient characteristic of her heroine; she does so in a dying speech from a father who has first wiped away his single tear" (p. 144).
29. For an extended exploration of this topic in Evelina, see Joanne Cutting-Grey, Woman as "Nobody" and the Novels of Fanny Burney (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992).
30. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 164-65.
31. Lewis (p. 29) compares Fanny to Cinderella, as does Fleishman, who connects the Cinderella myth to the struggle for property (p. 58).
32. Italics here, as so often in Mansfield Park, seem to be more expressive of doubt than of conviction, despite the speaker's seeming intent.
33. Frances Burney, Evelina (1982; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 289.
34. Edmund too has to face insignificance in the form of Mary's disdainful opinion that "a clergyman is nothing" (p. 83).
35. Other moments of triangulation occur when Edmund and Mary both give Fanny a chain for her cross on the eve of the ball, and when Mary's letters to Fanny are meant to be read to Edmund. Edmund makes her function explicit when he writes to Fanny that "there is something soothing in the idea, that we [he and Mary] have the same friend, and that whatever unhappy differences of opinion may exist between us, we are united in our love of you" (p. 383).
36. Austen, Northanger Abbey (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 18.
37. Fanny is not the only one to benefit from Mrs Norris's egregious faults. As Claudia Johnson notes, Mrs Norris's "eruption into mythic loathsomeness" helps restore, by contrast, Sir Thomas's apparent dignity. Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 155.
38. The function of Mrs Norris in this case is similar to that of Mrs Jewkes in Pamela, as Ralph W. Rader explains in "Defoe, Richardson, Joyce and the Concept of Form in the Novel," Autobiography, Biography and Novel, ed. William Matthews and Ralph W. Rader (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1973), pp. 36-37.
39. Austen's nephew George Knight began the tradition. He "disliked" Fanny and was "interested by nobody but Mary Crawford" (Austen, Minor Works, p. 431. )
40. In her introduction to the 1990 edition of Mansfield Park, Butler claims that Fanny's inarticulateness and the "quiet tone" of the narrative voice serve as an "ideological counter to, or an ironic commentary on, the leading women novelists' preference for strong-voiced woman characters," but Butler does not make any reference to Austen's own strong-voiced heroines (is she chastising them as well?), or explain why Austen makes her stand against female expression in this particular novel. Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley, intro. Marilyn Butler, notes John Lucas (1970; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. xvii, xix.
41. Starr identifies inarticulateness as one of the distinguishing traits of the sentimental hero, explaining: "what is characteristic of sentimentalism is . . . a fundamental skepticism about the adequacy of language itself as a medium of communication" (p. 503).
42. See Amy Pawl, "'And What Other Name May I Claim?': Names and Their Owners in Frances Burney's Evelina," Eighteenth Century Fiction 3 (1991), 283-99, for an account of Evelina's nominally "doubled" family.
43. Waldron concludes that "What [Fanny] loves is Mansfield virtually empty" (p. 111).
44. Yeazell, p. 126.
45. John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 98.
46. Trilling, p. 227;
47. Duckworth, p. ix.
48. Finding herself prolonging a visit because of her brother's absence, Austen writes to Cassandra: "Tomorrow I shall be just like Camilla in Mr. Dubster's summer-house; for my Lionel will have taken away the ladder by which I came here. " R. W. Chapman, Jane Austen's letters to Her Sister Cassandra and Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 9.
49. Yeazell, p. 165.
50. Fanny muses over her reconstituted allegiance, remembering that "when she had been coming to Portsmouth, she had loved to call it her home . . . The word had been very dear to her; and so it still was, but it must be applied to Mansfield. That was now the home" (p. 392).
51. Trilling sees Lady Bertram as embodying Austen's desire "not to be conscious, especially not to be conscious of herself" (p. 228).
52. See Susan Peck MacDonald, "Jane Austen and the Tradition of the Absent Mother," The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, ed. Cathy Davidson and E. M. Broner (New York: F. Ungar Publishing, 1980), pp. 58-69.
53. Johnson, p. 97.
54. Johnson also thinks that "the conservative description of paternal authority invoked here and throughout the novel remarkably fails" (p. 97). I disagree with that assessment, as I will show later in this article.
55. Kirkham, p. 106. I agree with Kirkham that the scene is excessive, but I read the excess as evidence of the presence of the sentimental.
56. Nothing is easier than making fun of sentimental passages - merely reading them aloud is usually enough. This is not proof of intentional comedy. None of the rest of Evelina makes sense if the similar scenes with her father are considered parodic.
57. See Fleishman for an account that links Lear's three daughters with Freud's essay on "The Theme of the Three Caskets," ultimately reading Fanny as a figure of death (p. 62).
58. The conflict over marriage choice became a stock situation in sentimental novels after Clarissa. One way Austen avoids the clichéd nature of Fanny's situation is by not making Henry old and ugly as well as rich.
59. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), pp. 149, 151.
60. Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story, ed. J. M. S. Tompkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 224-25.
61. Johnson, pp. 96, 114, xxii.
62. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 44.
63. Marvin Mudrick, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), p. 1.
64. As many commentators have noted, sentimentalism can serve liberal and conservative sociopolitical ideologies with equal ease. Among other things, liberal authors will stress the appeal of sentimentalism to the individual and to the equalizing nature of common human emotions; conservatives will stress nostalgia for inherited hierarchical institutions. For an account of the political uses of sentimentalism with an emphasis on race and gender, see Markham Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
65. See John Halperin, The Life of Jane Austen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 155. Halperin provides a brief account of the women's various residences in Bath and in the seaside town of Southampton (pp. 146-52).
66. Among the more recent biographers of Austen - David Nokes, Claire Tomalin, and Valerie Myer - only Nokes challenges the assumption that the period in question was an unhappy one. David Nokes, Jane Austen, A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997), p. 351.