Mansfield Park: What Fanny Price Refuses

A review of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

By H.R. Zimmerer

Spoiler warning: This review discusses the complete novel and its ending.

Henry Crawford’s proposal to Fanny Price appears to solve a great many problems.

He has money and position. He has helped her beloved brother, William, obtain a naval promotion. Sir Thomas Bertram approves. A young woman with Fanny’s limited prospects could scarcely be offered a more advantageous future.

Fanny does not want him.

The remarkable thing is how many people consider that the least persuasive fact in the room.

Mansfield Park is one of my favourite Austen novels, and one I reread every year. Its tension is quieter than the embarrassment of Darcy’s first proposal or the social disaster of Box Hill, but I find it no less compelling. Austen places a dependent young woman among people who have grown accustomed to deciding what ought to satisfy her, then allows her to disagree.

THE BOOK

Mansfield Park

Author
Jane Austen

First publication
1814

Rating
5/5

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That disagreement costs her.

Fanny arrives at Mansfield as a frightened child, taken from her struggling family in Portsmouth to live with her wealthier relations. She receives material advantages without being allowed to forget the distinction between herself and the Bertram children.

Mrs Norris is especially diligent about maintaining it.

Her cruelty is exhausting because she considers it useful. She treats humiliation as a necessary precaution against Fanny becoming ungrateful or thinking too well of herself. A child’s discomfort becomes evidence that the lesson must be continued.

Her cousin Edmund’s early kindness therefore matters enormously. He notices Fanny’s distress, helps her write to William, and gives her attention without making her feel ridiculous for needing it. Her later love for him grows within that history.

It also makes watching his attachment to Mary Crawford particularly difficult.

Mary is witty, attractive, and socially assured. Henry is equally gifted at making himself agreeable. Their arrival changes the atmosphere of Mansfield, drawing out ambitions and desires that were present before either Crawford entered the house.

The proposed performance of Lovers’ Vows brings those desires into view. Maria Bertram, already engaged to the wealthy and foolish Mr Rushworth, can rehearse intimacy with Henry under the respectable cover of a play. Edmund, initially opposed, finds a way to justify participating once Mary’s involvement makes participation tempting.

Fanny watches people produce reasons for doing what they already want to do.

I think that is more interesting than reading the episode as a simple objection to theatre. The rehearsals expose the gap between the principles people announce and the exceptions they grant themselves.

Sir Thomas’s unexpected return ends the performance, but it does not resolve the relationships it has revealed. Maria marries Rushworth despite her attachment to Henry. Henry, after initially deciding to amuse himself by making Fanny fall in love with him, becomes seriously attached to her.

Austen allows that attachment enough sincerity to make him a genuine possibility.

I understand why readers are drawn to him. He can be attentive and perceptive; his visit to Portsmouth suggests the prospect of better conduct. His apparent improvement creates a temptation to imagine that Fanny’s love might complete the work.

But she is being asked to commit herself before that improvement has proved durable.

Fanny has observed his treatment of her cousins. She does not trust him. Her feelings for Edmund complicate her refusal, and she is not an entirely disinterested judge of Mary, but neither fact obliges her to accept a marriage she does not want.

Sir Thomas interprets the refusal as a failure of gratitude. Even Edmund encourages her to think better of Henry’s suit. That is one of the book’s most uncomfortable features: affection does not reliably protect Fanny from being misunderstood.

Her visit to Portsmouth offers no uncomplicated refuge. She hopes for the warmth of her childhood family and encounters noise, disorder, strained resources, and a mother unable to give her the attention she longs for. Having become accustomed to Mansfield’s comforts, she also discovers how much her own expectations have changed.

Austen does not let either household become a convenient answer to the other.

The disaster at Mansfield arrives while Fanny is away. Henry runs off with the married Maria. Julia elopes with Mr Yates, and Tom’s serious illness has already shaken the family. Edmund’s hopes of marrying Mary collapse when he hears her treat the affair chiefly as a scandal to be managed. Her suggestion that Fanny might have prevented it by accepting Henry is particularly revealing.

Fanny’s refusal has become, in Mary’s account, another explanation for somebody else’s misconduct.

That is where Henry’s imagined reformation must finally be measured against his actual choices. His feelings for Fanny may have been genuine. His vanity and appetite for conquest remain stronger than the discipline required to honour them.

The contrast is painful precisely because he was capable of doing better.

I also appreciate that Sir Thomas eventually recognises failures in the upbringing of his own children. He has mistaken outward propriety for the development of sound judgement. The household that lectured Fanny has not adequately examined itself.

Even Mansfield’s material security is complicated by Sir Thomas’s interests in Antigua and the novel’s brief reference to the slave trade. Austen leaves that connection far less developed than her treatment of marriage and family obligation. Still, it prevents me from reading the estate as a wholly innocent refuge from corruption elsewhere.

The ending offers restoration, though not without difficulty. Maria’s marriage ends in divorce, and she lives in seclusion with Mrs Norris. Henry escapes an equivalent social punishment, an inequality the narrator acknowledges. Fanny returns to a family better able to value her, while her sister Susan gains a place at Mansfield.

Edmund eventually comes to love Fanny and marries her.

I wish we were allowed to see more of that transition. His change of heart is largely entrusted to the narrator’s brisk assurance, after the novel has devoted so much attention to his mistaken attachment to Mary. The speed of the telling leaves me wanting more evidence of the happiness Fanny has waited for.

Yet the marriage is not the only reason the ending matters.

Fanny has already made the decision on which her future depends. She made it before Henry’s conduct vindicated her, before her uncle understood her, and before Edmund offered the affection she wanted.

I love Mansfield Park for giving that decision its full difficulty. Fanny is frightened, constrained, and frequently unable to express herself with confidence. None of those things prevents her from knowing that she cannot marry this man.

The people around her eventually learn to take that knowledge seriously.

She has had to do so much earlier.

Read the primary text of Mansfield Park