"Mansfield Park" by Jane Austen
13.09.2012
I’m trying to be impressed at Austen’s range instead of annoyed. I mean, how does the creator of Elizabeth Bennet create Fanny Price? You are unlikely to have encountered a more sanctimonious and annoying character than Miss Price. I’m torn regarding Edmund because at least he has some balls to say the ridiculous things he thinks. Mary Crawford is a bit better but by chapter 16 nobody has a distinct personality that cannot be described with stereotypical labels.
The first half was really boring, the second (around chapter 26) I started finding them hilarious. Also appreciated that Fanny stopped being basically continuously bullied and ignored. I was so predisposed to dislike her that having finished the book having come to tolerate her seems like as much as could be asked. Least favourite Austen heroine to date. Catherine Morland was young but hilarious, Elizabeth Bennet kicked ass, Fanny Price... preached, most often in the solitude of her own head. I didn’t feel even her forbidden crush *spoilers* on her cousin was used effectively. It’s like the plot is all about Things We Don’t Care About and Fanny is said to care but the reader can’t figure WHY she would. Why would you care so much about your cousins who pretty much ignore you and who have no morals or restraint or any qualities you admire? Maria and Julia are both represented to be irredeemably vain and stupid, and although I’d symphatize with them being taken in by a man playing with their hearts for his own amusement, that would be it.
Fanny is not a bad girl, herself, in real life I would probably love to hang out with her (if i could manage to make her open up a little) but she makes for a very poor show to watch, can’t even pine properly, that girl! Her distinguishing quality is her willingness to stand by her principles but the narrative allows her to do so very little, mostly because of her own shyness.
Quotes:
"I should have thought," said Fanny, after a pause of recollection and exertion, "that every woman must have felt the possibility of a man's not being approved, not being loved by some one of her sex at least, let him be ever so generally agreeable. Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.
"I hate to leave you. I shall see no one half so amiable where I am going. Who says we shall not be sisters? I know we shall. I feel that we are born to be connected; and those tears convince me that you feel it too, dear Fanny."
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