Critical Theory - Formalism

In this passage from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, the heroine Fanny Price is watching her cousin, Edmund Bertram, give their neighbor, Mary Crawford, horse riding lessons using Fanny’s mare. Fanny is a ward of the Bertram family, stationing her somewhere between servant and family member. While the rest of the family mistreats her or neglects her on a daily basis, Edmund is usually there to defend her, but not since Mary came to live at the parsonage. Mary’s arrival awakens Fanny to her love for Edmund. This analysis will examine how Jane Austen’s use of free indirect discourse or narrated monologue highlights Fanny’s paradoxical position as an actively passive observer as well as her conflicted feelings for Edmund.

A narrated monologue is “the technique for rendering a character’s thought in his own idiom while maintaining the third-person reference and the basic tense of narration” (Cohn 494). In this case, the omniscient narrator and her satirical observations are put on the back burner and Fanny’s thoughts take precedence. Austen’s characteristic irony remains, however, and this narration “throw[s] into ironic relief all false notes struck by a figural mind” (504). The passage begins with an omniscient description of the setting and the positioning of the characters. Fanny views the horse-riding lessons from afar. The narrated monologue begins with Fanny’s emotional reaction to the scene she is watching. Her reaction is of a hurt and jealous nature: “the sound of merriment ascended even to her. It was a sound which did not make her cheerful” (Austen 49). Though Austen usually uses a dash in her narrated monologues, here she utilizes the semi-colon which serves much the same purpose as the dash: of listing Fanny’s conceptions of the events as one might when cataloguing in stream of consciousness. When the interactions between Mary and Edmund become particularly close, Fanny is removed from the sentence altogether, and we see what she sees: “Edmund was close to her; he was speaking to her; he was evidently directing her management of the bridle; he had hold of her hand; she saw it, or the imagination supplied what the eye could not reach.” Here, Fanny is focusing so intently and intensely on Mary and Edmund that she disappears and almost is what she sees. Using the narrated monologue instead of an omniscient narrator highlights Fanny’s shaping of the events, which is central to this scene.

As if the closeness of Mary and Edmund is too much to handle, Fanny immediately begins rationalizing Edmund’s behavior: “what could be more natural than that Edmund should be making himself useful, and proving his good-nature by any one?” (49). This is the only interrogative sentence in the passage, displaying her doubts about Edmund’s constancy to her. She rationalizes his neglect of herself by saying that his good-nature should always take over to help “any one,” hinting that Mary is a nobody in his eyes. Fanny goes further and with the hypothetical subjunctive, she scapegoats Mary’s brother, Henry Crawford, for “all his boasted good-nature” and lies. She will go to any lengths to preserve her good opinion of Edmund even if it means hiding her jealousy beneath her devotion. And this is wear Austen’s irony kicks in. We can laugh at Fanny for her desperate attempts to protect her love for Edmund, whether it be scapegoating the neighbors or thinking of the “poor mare[’s]” health. We can laugh because we all have done it at one point or another, making this a concrete universal. We rationalize to the point of ridiculousness.

Critics often pick on Fanny Price for her passivity, which supposedly makes for a poor heroine. However, we realize that though Fanny has not physically participated in these events, she certainly has an active mind. This is why the narrated monologue is perfect for someone as quiet as Fanny: the narration expresses her thoughts and her mental activity while also allowing her to remain physically passive. One of Fanny’s main characteristics is her inability or her lack of desire to articulate her feelings, to act. Here, the use of the narrated monologue displays Fanny’s paradox: that one can be simultaneously active and passive.