Pray, is she out?

I watch the movie Jane Austen Book Club every now and then because I love, and sometimes love to hate, all things Jane. One of the conversations the book club has about Mansfield Park centers around the boring, priggishness of Fanny Price and her unpopularity as a heroine compared to Elizabeth Bennet. The movie’s token hot-young-lesbian slumps down in her chair and in her best valley girl air mumbles, “Fanny’s boring.” I find it interesting that the character meant to represent Marianne would dislike Fanny [as the two heroines seems to share Romantic sensibilities–love of poetry, nature (*cough* “dead leaves” *cough*), melancholy, and passion]. But I also find it interesting because I think a lesbian identified woman would sympathize with Fanny’s unwillingness to perform heterosocial norms and her likeness to Sedgwick’s Masturbating Girl. She dislikes being complimented and looked at and therefore she spurns the idea that her body is a “displayable commodity” (Gay 115). She speaks and shares with Edmund because, as he is her cousin, she need not fear that he will notice her sexually (although paradoxically, she desires his attention). Fanny desires but fears being desired. It seems that if someone other than herself were to participate in this desire, it would force her to behave as heteronormative folks do (with their simpering, flirting and playing of parts). For me, this is what makes Fanny the most interesting and admirable heroine. She never compromises her integrity and she never stoops to the lowly behavior often required in the heterosocial world (although last minute, she almost joins the cast of Lovers' Vows and the narrator suggests she might have married Henry). This is not to say that the characters are to blame for the heteronormative parts they must play in order to rise up in the world, but it is the "effect of their education" and the expectations that come with it (211). Also, Fanny is fascinated by this behavior, she is more than willing to hear stories about the night’s ball and she voraciously reads and watches Lovers’ Vows. She is an observer who is simultaneously fascinated and disappointed by the follies of those willing to conform to heteronormative expectations (she feeds on her envy as she watches Edmund’s horse-riding/sex education of Mary). I would argue that Fanny is not as pious and priggish as others would make her out to be, but instead that the reader’s disappointment in Fanny as a heroine stems from her unwillingness to play an active role in heteronormative courtship. Fanny is more passive than Elizabeth Bennet because “she will not play [the social world’s] games” (Gay 108). Even as she is “obliged, by the coercive power of the structure in which she lives, to enter upon the social stage,” she does not behave like any of the other women in the novel who flirt and cheat and fight over men (Gay 108). But as a marriage must and will be thrown in her way, Fanny “cannot escape the role that her class and gender dictate” (Gay 108).

Another aspect of the novel that interests me is Mary Crawford as a counterfeit heroine. Last year, I took a Jane Austen film class and learned all about counterfeit heroes, the charming rakes that muck about with the heroines’ emotional lives. But what about counterfeit heroines? How does a counterfeit heroine differ from a counterfeit hero? I believe I remember reading that Mrs. Austen thought, after reading all of Mansfield Park, that Mary Crawford was the heroine of the novel. This could possibly be because Mary Crawford, like the heroines from Austen’s first three novels, is willing to conform to hetero norms and does so with “wit” and “vivacity.” This also emphasizes Fanny’s position as being on the outskirts of the social world of the novel. The girl hardly dares to speak and is often forgot about, even by the narrator: “And Fanny, what was she doing and thinking all this while?” (Austen 38). Perhaps this is the narrator satirizing the forgetfulness of the reader that the narrator herself has caused. The narrator asks the rhetorical question which the reader should be asking, but most likely isn’t, as every character but Fanny has proven to be more interesting in their involvement in the social world. As a counterfeit heroine, Mary Crawford performs three roles in relation to Fanny: 1) rival, 2) voice of Henry’s love, and 3) love interest. Mary is a rival for Edmund’s and the reader’s love and attention. However different the two women might be, their actions and thoughts are often paralleled: “they were united, and a ‘there he is’ broke at the same moment from them both, more than once” (64). In this carriage, protected from the outside world, Mary and Fanny become mirror images of each other as occurs between lovers in lesbian fiction who isolate themselves from a world that has no place for them (ex. Radcliffe Hall). They are simultaneously rivals and lovers. Also, Fanny is more interested in Mary than in Henry, the counterfeit hero. Fanny would rather listen to her speak and admire her beauty, perhaps because Mary’s charms are less threatening than Henry’s. Mary’s admiration of Fanny is private and does not force Fanny to enter into the social, heteronormative world. Fanny is very naive in thinking that because Edmund is her cousin and Mary is a woman that they cannot look upon her sexually. In Edmund’s case, he wishes Fanny might learn that she is “worth looking at” and is often stubbornly silent when Fanny wants assistance to get out of the spot light. In Mary’s case, Mary sometimes voices Henry’s admiration of Fanny (“she is in fact wooing Fanny for Henry here” Gay 115), and not until then does Mary, as counterfeit heroine, indirectly force Fanny into the public, social world.

I wonder if Maria and Henry tried to pass off their performances as Agatha and Frederick as appropriate because the characters are blood-relatives and then are not likely to engage in any sexually suggestive acts. Once you read the scenes between them, you realize, as Fanny must realize, that even among cousins, sexually powered scenes can occur. “Dear mother, compose yourself: [leans her head against his breast] now, then, be comforted. How she trembles! She is fainting.” To me this resembles Fanny’s behavior when she first mounts a horse and when she “hardly know[s] how to support herself” after Edmund remembers Fanny’s physical need of the horse (which also resembles Sedgwick’s Case Study and the youngest girl who cannot stop mounting everything around her) (59). Fanny’s pleasure as masturbator is independent, but also dependent on Edmund’s procuring her the proper, ladylike means of getting pleasure. Penny Gay wrote her essay as if Austen came upon Lovers’ Vows half way through writing Mansfield Park and it must have been luck that the play and novel share themes and character interactions. Isn’t it quite possible that Austen had Lovers’ Vows in mind from the very beginning? Or that she went back to edit her manuscript so that it seemed as if she did? The melodrama in Lovers’ Vows is brought to the surface at Mansfield Park with the Crawfords arrival but it was not conjured out of no where. The Landlord in Lovers’ Vows, like Sir Thomas, thinks, “one must be charitable.” Certainly this obligation he feels arises long before the Crawfords invade the Park. Sir Thomas and Mrs. Norris themselves predict the possibilities of incest between Fanny and the two Bertram sons (which supposedly can only occur upon the stage among sentimental, passionate Germans), but Mrs. Norris assures Sir Thomas that, with a proper upbringing, an incestuous relationship would never occur between the cousins. It seems to me as if the ‘theatricals’ bring to the surface the underlying truths that no one wishes to speak of and everyone wants to imply.