Critical Theory - Post-Structuralism

In my formalist analysis of the same passage, I pointed out how Fanny Price will go to any lengths to preserve her good opinion of her cousin, Edmund Bertram, though she feels neglected by him and jealous of another woman gaining his affections. Fanny rationalizes her feelings of neglect and jealousy by scapegoating and focusing on anyone but Edmund, including a horse. She accomplishes this by dividing the people around her into two sides of a binary: the naturally good/true and the evil performers. In this passage, only Edmund and the horse make the cut for the ‘naturally good’ group, while Mary Crawford and her brother, Henry, fall into the latter category. I asserted then how Austen utilizes narrated monologue or free-indirect discourse to “throw into ironic relief all false notes struck by a figural mind,” or more specifically, to point out the ridiculous hilarity of Fanny’s rationalizing (Cohn 494). In this deconstructionist reading, I will focus on the overarching irony and the internal contradictions of the passage which undermine the natural/performer binary Fanny uses to define others. I assert that by contrasting Fanny’s narrated monologue with the third-person narrator’s description of the situation, Austen displays the irony in Fanny putting on a performance just moments after she judges others for performing, thereby forcing the reader to blur the line between the naturally good and the evil performer, as well as question the correctness of those moral values.

As Fanny looks down on the scene, she feels a “pang” because Edmund has forgotten her in favor of Mary. Fanny chalks the event down to Mary’s “apparent suggestion,” as if the forward Mary is luring in the good-natured Edmund into a social evil. Fanny perceives Edmund as the innocent victim here: the naturally good person upon whom the evil performer acts. When Edmund and Mary move closer to one another, Fanny panics and asks herself: “She must not wonder at all this; what could be more natural than that Edmund should be making himself useful, and proving his good–nature by any one?”. Fanny reduces Mary down to “any one,” another faceless nobody Edmund helps. Fanny then moves beyond Mary and Edmund to blame Henry, who might have stopped this intimacy from going so far. As Mary’s brother, Henry should be the one teaching Mary how to ride, but Fanny knows of Henry’s “boasted good-nature,” which is not really backed by any substantial, natural good. Fanny compares Henry with Edmund, with the naturally good man he ought to be. She scapegoats Henry to avoid seeing the potential truth in front of her: that Edmund forgot her due to his desire for Mary and not due to his good nature.

Fanny is desperately trying to maintain the binary between the naturally good and the evil performer in this passage. Her world might crumble if it occurred to her that everyone is a performer and that performing does not have to be coded evil. What is Edmund doing but masking his desire for Mary with a neighborly concern for her riding abilities? As Edmund sees nothing wrong with his behavior, it seems that he thinks of himself much as Fanny does: as the good-natured parson who helps out “any one.” We know Edmund well enough to see that he has to convince himself that what he is doing is moral, even if his motivations are sexual. And so Fanny reads his behavior as good and true and therefore not performed. Instead, she moves in on the currently passive Henry. Henry, like Fanny, is merely watching the riding lesson, but to Fanny, that’s as good as aiding in its continuation. He is not an innocent bystander, but instead an evil do-er. Edmund must fill in for Henry, as Henry does not perform his proper duties as a brother though he boasts of his goodness.

The naturally good/evil performer binary leads to another: that of passivity versus activity. This is apparent even in the language of “good” and “performer”: a person is good and a person does perform. In the beginning, Fanny sees Mary as the actor who influences the innocent Edmund to do wrong (passive good is acted upon by active evil). Then Fanny takes Mary out of the picture altogether to comment on Edmund’s “active kindness” and Henry’s lack of it (passive evil in one brings about active goodness in another). There is no unity or stability in these definitions of evil, good, activity and passivity. Fanny is being extremely inconsistent with her definitions in order to pigeonhole the people she does not like into the evil category, even though their actions (or lack thereof) are quite different from each other. The mere fact that Henry’s passive evil brings out Edmund’s active goodness shows that that evil is not so passive (which keeps with Fanny’s perception of Henry—either active or passive, the man is an evil performer. He can’t win.). Mary, Edmund, and Henry are all active and passive, but only Edmund is good and he is always good. This is an example of Fanny’s prejudice against the Crawfords and her love for Edmund, and she will go to any lengths, to preserve that prejudice and love, even if it means risking an unstable argument about good and evil.

The greatest irony of the passage, though, is that Fanny judges Mary and Edmund for pretending to be good, for performing and covering up their evil side, when in the end, Fanny does the same herself. The entire passage has been through Fanny’s perspective and so what we read of the other three characters is all filtered through her judgment. While looking down on them, she feels morally questionable emotions. Fanny imagines sexual activity between Mary and Edmund, she feels jealous of Mary and panicked at the thought of being abandoned by Edmund which shows some ingratitude and doubt, and she feels pretty open hatred for Henry, though as we know, he has done nothing but watch the scene unfold like Fanny has. On first reading this passage, we might think that Fanny, by not participating in the events, is passive and therefore good, perfectly fitting her feminine role. But if Fanny were entirely passive, this passage would not have been written, because it depends upon the activity of Fanny’s mind and perceptions. Fanny is physically passive and psychologically active. By not participating, she seems good, but we know that she is not thinking strictly appropriate thoughts. Fanny constructs and perceives the evil we are reading, so we cannot know if the evil is actually occurring. Again, these binaries are entirely blurred. Is Fanny good or evil? Active or passive? True or a performer?

After Fanny judges and pigeonholes everyone else, we find that she is just as much of a performer and perhaps an even better one than the rest, as her performance is the most difficult to detect. In fact, Fanny is such a good performer that even she does not know she is performing. And this is how the scene ends for Fanny: “She began then to be afraid of appearing rude and impatient; and walked to meet them with a great anxiety to avoid the suspicion.” Fanny does not want to appear to be rude and impatient, though as we know from the whole passage, she is feeling much more discontent than that. She fears that her physically passive position will make others think she is being rude and impatient and so she becomes physically active to “avoid the suspicion” of being anything less than good. But should we deem Fanny morally corrupt for feeling and behaving this way?

Performing has good and bad aspects, but most of all, it is a symptom of social interaction, including our interactions with our own minds. Relating Fanny’s thoughts through free-indirect discourse is essential to the scene because it allows us to see how easy it is to have traditionally morally questionable thoughts and later put on a performance and not necessarily classify those behaviors as evil. We relate to Fanny here, however ridiculous she is being, and because we see the reasons behind her behavior, we are not as quick to pigeonhole her into either the naturally good or evil performer group. The more human someone seems to you, the less likely you are to judge them unfairly and call them good or evil. Fanny does not consider what is really going in the heads of Mary, Edmund and Henry, because they would become human and not chess-pieces easily moved from one side to the other for her own convenience.