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books, Fanny Price, Fiction, Jane Austen, literature, Mansfield Park, Mansfield Park 200th anniversary, Natasha Duquette, prayer, religion
Twenty-third in a series of posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. For more details, open Your Invitation to Mansfield Park.
Today is the first official day of the JASNA AGM in Montreal, where seven hundred of us are gathering to discuss and celebrate Mansfield Park. This weekend I get to have the pleasure of introducing Natasha Duquette and her work on Austen on two occasions. Tomorrow I’m introducing the AGM breakout session she and her husband Frederick Duquette are presenting on “Fanny Price Amidst the Philosophers,” and right now I get to introduce her guest post on Fanny’s “fervent prayers.”
Natasha and I attended the University of Alberta as undergraduates at the same time, but somehow we didn’t meet until several years later (at a conference in London, Ontario, even though – as we recently figured out – we took the same Chaucer class together at the U of A). It’s been a delight to reconnect with her and to discuss Mansfield Park.
Natasha is Associate Dean at Tyndale University College in Toronto, Ontario, where she also teaches in the Philosophy and English departments. Her research on Jane Austen has appeared in Jane Austen Sings the Blues (University of Alberta Press, 2009), Persuasions On-Line, and English Studies in Canada, and she co-edited – with Elisabeth Lenckos, whose guest post on Mansfield Park will appear in this series in December – Jane Austen and the Arts: Elegance, Propriety, and Harmony (Lehigh University Press, 2013). Natasha’s monograph Veiled Intent: Dissenting Women’s Theological Aesthetics is forthcoming with Pickwick.
He would marry Miss Crawford. It was a stab, in spite of every longstanding expectation; and she was obliged to repeat again and again that she was one of his dearest, before the words gave her any sensation. Could she believe Miss Crawford to deserve him, it would be – Oh, how different it would be – how far more tolerable! But he was deceived in her: he gave her merits which she had not; her faults were what they had ever been, but he saw them no longer. Till she had shed many tears over this deception, Fanny could not subdue her agitation; and the dejection which followed could only be relieved by fervent prayers for his happiness.
– From Mansfield Park, Chapter 27 (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2003)
Fanny Price is the only heroine who Jane Austen depicts in an act of private prayer. This small window into Fanny’s spiritual life is in accord with Austen’s general depiction of her as a contemplative. In her excellent study Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues (Palgrave, 2005), Sarah Emsley presents Fanny as a deep thinker engaged in “philosophical contemplation” (108), and I have argued Fanny’s observation of the starry sky over dark woods is a moment of contemplative sublimity (“Sublime Repose”: The Spiritual Aesthetics of Landscape in Austen” in Jane Austen Sings the Blues, 2009).
Like contemplative women through history – such as scientist and theologian Hildegaard of Bingen and phenomenologist Edith Stein – Fanny Price blends intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual contemplation in her figurative convent cell, the East Room of Mansfield Park. But unlike the idealized sisters of Williams Wordsworth’s sonnet “Nuns Fret Not,” the very human Fanny does balk at the limitations of a solitary, celibate future.
“Nun from Lavater,” an illustration in Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck’s Theory on the Classification of Beauty and Deformity (London: John & Arthur Arch, 1815). Thanks to Chawton House Librarian Charlotte Falconer for capturing this image.
Edmund Bertram’s apparent choice of Mary Crawford frustrates Fanny, and in response, she redirects her passion in spontaneous, almost Psalmic, cries of the heart. Like the biblical psalmist, Fanny wonders at the “prosperity of the wicked” (Psalm 73.3, KJV), and her fervent prayers are anguished and ardent petitions. Within the narrative framework of Mansfield Park, Fanny cannot initially accept the reality of Edmund’s attraction to Mary, despite the evidence she sees.
However, when Edmund tells Fanny that she and Mary are his “dearest objects,” Fanny quickly jumps to the conclusion that Edmund will wed Mary. Edmund’s statement breaks through any remaining layers of denial in her consciousness, and Fanny experiences harsh reality physically – “it was a stab.” Austen avoids simile and uses a powerful direct metaphor. It is not as if Fanny has been stabbed. She was stabbed. She feels it acutely. Stages of grief appear in rapid succession: shocked numbness marked by absence of “any sensation,” outrage emphasized with an exclamation mark, bafflement, weeping, and finally “dejection.” Paradoxically, this final stage functions as a turning point for Fanny, a pivot upwards towards faith and hope for “happiness” (Edmund’s, at least, if not her own). Fanny’s Psalmic descent will turn out to be a felix culpa or “happy fall.” It is a journey into the darkest aspects of her self – envy, judgment, rage, & doubt – with a redemptive twist at the end.
Upon re-visiting Mansfield Park for a second or third time, the reader may bring dramatic irony to Fanny’s impassioned prayers. They have a comic aspect in their very fervency. Fanny is far from perfect herself and very much a character in process of dynamic development. Her interpretation of Edmund’s statement as definitely indicating “he would marry Miss Crawford” is lacking in epistemological humility. Fanny is not omniscient, nor is the narrator, and her fatalistic, certain prediction of Edmund’s matrimonial future appears in a moment of free indirect discourse. Thankfully, the narrator is unreliable and fallible, the future is still open, and Fanny’s prayers will be answered in ways beyond anything she could ask or imagine.
To read more about all the posts in this series, visit An Invitation to Mansfield Park. Coming soon: guest posts by Margaret Horwitz, Sarah Woodberry, Joyce Tarpley, and Syrie James.
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Fanny prays for “his” happiness, not for MC’s. Furthermore “she would endeavour to be rational, and to deserve the right of judging of Miss Crawford’s character, … by a sound intellect and an honest heart.” Whether entitled or not, she does judge Mary pretty severely: “Cruel! … quite cruel. At such a moment to give way to gaiety, to speak with lightness, and to you! Absolute cruelty.” I’m really sorry, but try as I may I fail to see the redemptive twist …
As to the starry sky, the first part of her reflection is poetic and beautiful “When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world.” But it seems she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to moralise: “and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene” – in other words, the world would be a better place if people were more like me.
Fanny may be contemplative, but she’s also self-righteous and judgemental. I find her easier to understand as a woman in love who can’t bring herself to be fair to her rival.
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Well, when I argued that Fanny wonders why the wicked prosper, I was thinking of her perception of Mary Crawford. Envy is a very human emotion, and I am relieved it is very evident in the psalms and in Fanny’s prayers too. It helps me to graciously accept my own extremes of emotion to see even the usually calm Fanny in the throes of jealousy and crying out in “fervent prayers” from the depths. Fanny is fairly angry in this scene, but like the psalmist she feels free to channel that passion, even deep frustration, towards God.
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Thank you so much, Natasha, for reading my comment and replying. I rather like your take on Fanny – even feel like going back to the Psalms 🙂
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Your post reminded me of some fascinating reading I had just been doing on Jane Austen, ‘the sublime and beautiful’, landscape aesthetics, etc…as this is a favorite topic(s) for me. Then I realized this is the book featured above, edited by you! ‘Jane Austen and the Arts: Elegance, Propriety and Harmony’…I am loving this book. :o)
Particularly enjoyed the aspect of Jane Austen’s humorous slant on ‘real life colliding with aesthetics’, as it is expressed. Regarding this particular post, you could say that real life is colliding with Fanny’s deeply felt moral values—that goodness ‘will/should’ triumph—and the struggle is intense for her, as she does not consider Mary Crawford ‘good’, therefore she should not triumph by gaining the ultimate prize of Edmund. Yet rather than succumb to a very human trait to allow bitter disappointment to make her vengeful, Fanny (as singled out by Austen as an example to follow?) shows restraint, common sense, and stays true to her own moral compass. As Kant and Burke often are compared/contrasted with each other, and no doubt both influenced Jane Austen, it is interesting to note that Kant did assert that to take an interest in the beauty of nature, “is always the mark of a good soul,” and indicates “a mental attunement favorable to moral feeling.” I really feel that Austen was attempting to take the concepts, as she understood them, of the sublime and beautiful, and play them out—in Mansfield Park—in human terms. Enjoyed your thoughtful post.
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I am so glad you are enjoying _Jane Austen and the Arts_! And, yes, the quotation from Kant about interest in the beauty of nature indicating “mental attunement favourable to moral feeling” works well with Fanny Price and her musings on how attention to “the sublimity of nature” could lessen wickedness and sorrow in the world. Austen draws a limitation on this correspondence of aesthetic and ethical sensitivity, however, through characters like Henry Crawford. Henry appreciates the sparkling waves at Portsmouth, but he is ultimately not a “good soul” … Austen appears to be questioning the assumption that every person awake to the beauties of nature will necessarily be principled in action.
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I Think that in judging Fanny Price,I Think that in judging Fanny Price, we the readers need to keep in mind that her character has been very sheltered. The narrator repeatedly points this out through out the novel. Fanny does not go out into public with her cousins at the age of seventeen. She dines no where but with Mrs. Grant, she is always by the side of Lady Bertram. She does not go to the borders of Mansfield! And in Sir Thomas’s famous confrontation in the East Room, he too remarks on what little she has seen of other men. I have often wondered how the story might have turned out if Fanny Price had the same chances of interaction as the Miss Bertrams.
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You raise an interesting point. I suppose social intercourse would have made her more self-confident and open-minded.
As things stand, Fanny’s “morality” is so intertwined with her shyness that we are left wondering whether she’s not making a “virtue” out of necessity. We don’t quite know, for instance, whether she refuses to take part in the play because she “cannot act” or on “moral” grounds – or because she’s afraid of Sir Thomas. She certainly helps the others rehearse their lines and enjoys Henry Crawford’s performance.
Diffidence and isolation may well distort our perception of what happens beyond the confines of our sheltered lives. A “worldlier” Fanny would have been, it is to be hoped, happier, more relaxed, more understanding of other people’s motives and behaviour and less quick to pass judgement – less fearful of contamination and more charitable.
All this is, of course, mere guesswork, but thinking of the what ifs might help put things back into context.
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Contrast Fanny’s prayers with Mary Crawford’s attitude toward prayer. When told that the late Mr. Rushworth had left off the reading of prayers in the family chapel at Sotherton she can only say “Every generation has its improvements,” (ch. 9).
At the recent AGM in Montreal, A. Marie Sprayberry gave a paper titled “Fanny Price as Fordyce’s Ideal Woman? And Why?” suggesting that Jane Austen created Fanny as a heroine modeled on Fordyce’s sermons. She demonstrated how many of Fanny’s characteristics echo what Fordyce had written. Piety in the form of “heartfelt prayer on personally meaningful subjects” (from handout) was one of Fordyce’s characteristics. This certainly describes Fanny in the passage above. Perhaps, the paper suggests, Jane Austen wanted to experiment with a different kind of heroine.
While Marie noted that we may never know for certain if Jane Austen intended Fanny to be a Fordyce woman, it seems to me that in creating such a character Jane Austen may have wanted to demonstrate that heroines with exemplary character could come in packages that were not necessarily bright, witty, and sparkling, but were, nonetheless, deserving of our respect.
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