Bravo Fanny Price

I finished re-reading Mansfield Park and it felt like the right book to read again during lockdown.

It's so easy to write-off Fanny's character because she's so passive, and she rarely pursues her own happiness. It makes it very tempting to dismiss her as a weak heroine.

Growing up, I always felt like an easy, outgoing nature was pretty much universally preferred to a character that was more quiet and thoughtful. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that being quiet and thoughtful is the absence of being talkative and engaging, and it's harder to see the merit in something in absentia.

You have to do more work to appreciate someone who is quiet and thoughtful. But a person who is lively and inviting has a much easier time of making you think you like them.

Fanny is passive but that doesn't mean she isn't doing anything. She is probably so passive because it requires an exorbitant amount of energy just to bear Mrs Norris' constant, reproachful nagging and the keen awareness that no one at Mansfield Park (except Edmund) really thinks she is their equal. But, because they've taken her in and given her an education, she cannot be resentful towards them, only grateful.

Compared to her earlier books, Mansfield Park feels much more polished and layered like Emma. Fanny might be the most polite and unimposing of Jane Austen's heroines but she also has the strongest empathy and moral integrity of them all, and more than any other heroine, her moral integrity is really put to the test.

Fanny was enlightened in a wealthy household, but her scruples become a luxury when she's sent home to her lower-middle class family and forced to reckon with the true consequence of putting love above duty.  Her mum married for love, but now she's so poor that she has no affection left for anybody. Fanny is forced to realise that she holds no respect for her parents and that Mansfield is her true home.

Is it a bad thing that Fanny now identifies more with her genteel relations who had the privilege of exercising moral judgment without being constrained by material needs? Fanny is in a tricky situation because her mind has been moulded to commit to principles that she doesn't necessarily have the means to live by. She might've chosen the home that gave her more comfort and which elevated her above her parents, but Jane Austen doesn't make it easy for her.

Fanny chooses to be a member of Mansfield Park and the country gentry, but she is made to prove that she is a worthy member above and beyond anyone who was born into it. But what defines membership? Jane Austen isn't talking about money, title, breeding or education, she is talking about what makes the nobility noble, something that cannot be simply inherited.

She is talking about duty, honour, integrity and charity. She is not saying that the gentry has a monopoly on these qualities, since both William and Fanny are born poor, but their characters are more sound than Tom, Maria or Julia Bertram. However, with the benefit and privilege of education, pedigree and wealth, being rich and selfish is more reprehensible than being poor and selfish.

This might seem like a patronising view. It also seems too much to ask that those who own all the capital exhibit none of the self-interest that helped them amass their wealth. But in Austen's view, that is what legitimises the gentry. She is saying that those who are truly noble must transcend their own interests, and this is what she asks of Fanny, who is all the more vulnerable because she has no position or fortune to fall back on. 

Fanny rises to the challenge. Since she has nothing, the pressure for Fanny to secure her own prosperity is much stronger than any of her cousins, yet she stays true to her moral compass. She chooses not to marry for wealth, and she defends her moral integrity again and again from Sir Thomas, the Crawfords and even Edmund - people who have a great deal of control over her, and on whom her future happiness depends on. Though there are moments where she falters (and might've fallen if not rescued by some external circumstance), Fanny shows true courage in sticking up for her principles.

Fanny once says to Henry Crawford, "We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be." Fanny's conscience is what makes her ascendant, but it doesn't inoculate her against competing influences, including the love and approval of those who have always shown her charity.

Our moral integrity is a valuable yet fragile thing. Against the backdrop of the industrial revolution and the wealth of the British West Indies, a more intensive capitalism was threatening to corrupt the old-timey values that Jane Austen cared about. The Crawfords are an example of the new glitzy, worldly leisure class who only care about themselves. Their moral compass is simply calibrated to their self-interest and duty and obligation are simply boring, odious things. Mary Crawford actually gets mad at Edmund for not exercising his duty to himself to strive for the highest station he could.

So, how to polish and preserve our moral integrity? You seek it, you question it, and then you listen to it and act on it - "if we would attend to it". Throughout the book, Fanny is constantly attending to it, she chooses, but is also made, to play the part of an observer throughout the book. This allows her to think, judge, learn and to resist participating in activities that others engage in thoughtlessly by only consulting their interests but not their conscience.

...to a world abandoning itself to the dangers of thoughtless restlessness, Jane Austen is holding up an image of the values of thoughtful rest. 

This is from one of the introductions to the book, and it made me think about lockdown (perhaps an enforced period of thoughtful rest) and my own state of mind going into this. 

I quit my job partly because I was doing a lot, but thinking very little. I was challenged, which was a good thing, but I had to carry myself in a way that I wasn't necessarily prepared to. It didn't always feel right, because it was difficult drawing a professional boundary between being self-motivated and proactive about the kind of workplace culture I wanted to foster, and investing too much in, and caring too much about, something that wasn't completely in my own power to change. 

My 2020 was meant to be a year of doing little, but thinking a lot - rejuvenating my brain to evolve into a better version of myself - so I think Mansfield Park came at a good time.