Fanny Emerges Victorious Simpl
...THIS READING OF FANNY’S ROLE IN ‘MANSFIELD PARK’
Mansfield Park has sometimes been considered as atypical of Jane Austen as being solemn and moralistic. Poor Fanny Price is brought up at Mansfield Park with her uncle and aunt. Where only her cousin Edmund helps her with the difficulties she suffers from the rest of the family, and from her own fearfulness and timidity. When the sophisticated Crawfords (Henry and Mary) visit the Mansfield neighbourhood, the moral sense of each marriageable member of the Mansfield family is tested in various ways, but Fanny emerges unscathed.
We need to look at the way Austen portrays Fanny Price after the wit and vivacity of her earlier heroines, it is often wondered how Austen could have created such a character as Fanny Price.
Fanny is a Christian heroine who is submissive, physically delicate and all too collusive with the privileged world of Mansfield Park. Having Fanny as the heroine displaces the energy and vitality of Mary Crawford. However Fanny is the heroine of this novel and we have to discover if she is only the heroine due to the fact that all the other characters in the novel falter in some way.
When Fanny comes to Mansfield she is an extremely timid young girl who is afraid of everyone and everything, it is her quiet passive manner that conceals this constant terror that leads to her nightly sobbing.
It is Edmund who unlocks her feelings, he knows that she is clever, has a quick apprehension and a love for reading. He also understands her love for reading, her need to feel important and her capacity to be so. Fanny herself has to learn to have faith in her own good sense and develop the strength to be able to transmit it to others.
From one point of view, Fanny price is an interesting psychological study in the manners and attitudes of her insecure and traumatised personality....
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