In defence of Jane Austen’s unlikeable heroine

Fanny Price: passive and prudish or brave and resilient?

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

A 18th century woman sits at a desk, beside a candle and stares out the window.

Frances O'Conner as Fanny in Mansfield Park, 1999.

BBC Films.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that nobody has ever liked Fanny Price. Or is it? Many in Austen’s own family liked the heroine of Mansfield Park. Her sister Cassandra was ‘fond’ of Fanny; her brother Francis called her ‘delightful’. Early critics of Austen’s works, like archbishop Richard Whately, also praised both the novel and its protagonist.

Where does our current dislike towards Fanny Price come from, then? The major literary critics of the last century certainly didn’t help. Lionel Trilling paved the way, announcing confidently in the 1960s that ‘Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park’; Kingsley Amis even called Fanny a ‘monster of complacency and pride’. Two decades later, Tony Tanner agreed: ‘Even sympathetic readers have often found [Fanny] something of a prig…nobody falls in love with [her]’. The list goes on.

But we can’t blame academia alone. Sometime in the twentieth century, we simply stopped liking Fanny. Most Austen readers I know rank her as the worst of her heroines. We don’t like her moralising, her priggishness, and her insistence that she must follow her conscience along with the religious precepts which she holds so dear. To make her appealing to contemporary viewers, both major recent adaptations of the novel (Patricia Rozema’s 1999 film adaptation and Iain B. MacDonald’s 2007 TV adaptation) completely butchered her, turning a quiet, timid character into an outspoken Elizabeth Bennet type. The problem is not that we think Fanny is evil, it’s that we find her boring.

Enter Whit Stillman’s brilliant 1990 film Metropolitan, itself a loose adaptation of Austen’s novel. Tom Townsend, one of the film’s young protagonists, recommends the very essay by Lionel Trilling that I’ve cited above to Audrey Rouget, the main character and moral compass of the film. When they later discuss the essay, Audrey is puzzled by Trilling’s dislike of Fanny:

I think [Trilling] is very strange. He says that nobody could like the heroine of Mansfield Park? I like her. Then he goes on and on about how we modern people today with our modern attitudes bitterly resent Mansfield Park because…its heroine is virtuous? What’s wrong with a novel having a virtuous heroine?

Trilling is at least partly right. Fanny, with her religious principles, offends our modern sensibilities. Our reading culture is one deeply embarrassed by goodness, and Fanny’s piety makes us deeply uncomfortable. But Audrey is right, too. There shouldn’t be anything wrong with ‘a novel having a virtuous heroine’. What if the fault is not with Fanny Price, but with us, the readers? What if we’ve simply lost our taste for goodness?

Fanny is often compared unfavourably to Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet. Mary Crawford, the argument goes, is the Elizabeth Bennet character in Mansfield Park: blunt, stubborn, self-assured. Fanny, on the other hand, is a kind of Charlotte Lucas, quiet, introspective, and concerned with social mores. But following her conscience doesn’t squash Fanny’s individuality, and neither does it make her ‘conventional’. This is only true on a surface level.

Presentism, the insistence to project current sensibilities onto the past, is the poison of good literature.

In fact, these four characters (Elizabeth, Charlotte, Mary, and Fanny) represent examples of real versus false virtues – what philosopher Alasdair Macintyre would call ‘simulacra’ of virtue. While both Elizabeth Bennet and Mary Crawford are opinionated, only Elizabeth is truly brave. Mary, though she acts like she doesn’t care about social norms, is all too eager to marry Fanny off to her brother Henry – after he has committed adultery with a married woman – for the sake of keeping appearances. Similarly, although both Charlotte Lucas and Fanny Price are reserved, Fanny’s reserve comes from humility, Charlotte’s from the kind of timidity that is a failure of courage.

I think that’s precisely the challenge that Austen sets for us in Mansfield Park: to discern true from simulated virtue, even when true virtue might be less immediately attractive, less noticeable. When we look below the surface, Fanny emerges not as a passive, prudish character, but rather as brave and resilient. She may not be witty, but she is not a pushover. She rejects Henry Crawford’s proposal of marriage even as her uncle Sir Thomas pressures her to accept, on the grounds that he’s not good enough for her.

By going against the will of her uncle Sir Thomas, Fanny finds herself banished from Mansfield Park, the only place she knows as her home. She’s sent off to visit her parents in Portsmouth, not knowing when she’ll be allowed back. What’s more, she is rejecting the prospect of financial security through marriage with a rich man for the sake of her principles. She neither respects nor loves Crawford enough for the commitment of marriage: ‘I—I cannot like him, sir, well enough to marry him’, she confesses to her uncle despite her own shyness. In her confidence about a decision that will affect her future happiness, she can be as headstrong as Elizabeth Bennet is when she turns down Mr. Collins.

Once we acknowledge how brave and resilient Fanny can truly be, we can begin to cherish her other qualities, too. Still, someone might ask, why do we need to force ourselves to appreciate characters like Fanny in the first place? Why can’t we just leave people to have their own taste in literature? To that I answer: if we have come to dislike a character for being virtuous, as Trilling claims, isn’t that in itself pretty compelling evidence that something has gone amiss in our literary taste? Don’t we need to rediscover our lost enjoyment of goodness, if we want our culture to be a flourishing one?

Fortunately, the line connecting Austen to our culture today has not been entirely cut off. ‘Somewhere between us and [Jane Austen], the chasm runs’, wrote C. S. Lewis around the same time that Trilling pronounced Fanny Price to be unlikeable. Perhaps they were both wrong. If literary critics won’t value characters like Fanny, then it’s the common reader’s job to do so. Metropolitan’s Audrey is the fictionalised appreciator of Fanny Price par excellence, a custodian of good taste. But I remain hopeful that there are Audreys in real life, too: readers who are perceptive enough to appreciate Fanny; readers who, instead of judging a character written 200 years ago for not being ‘modern’ enough, choose to let past literature challenge their current assumptions. Presentism, the insistence to project current sensibilities onto the past, is the poison of good literature. Fanny Price, with all of her goodness, is the perfect cure.

Article

Art

Culture

24 January 2024

5 min read

Witnessing the unseen: why cave art captivates us

Iwan Russell-Jones recounts the discovery of stone age art that still connects 30,000 years after its creation.

Iwan Russell-Jones

Iwan Russell-Jones is a Cardiff-based filmmaker and theologian.

A cave wall drawing of wild animals galloping across other images of themselves.

Animals on the wall of Chauvet Cave.

Late on a winter’s afternoon in December 1994, a group of three French cavers received the kind of Christmas present that most spelunkers can only dream of. They were exploring a cave system that they had just discovered in a deep gorge in southeastern France, and were already delighted by some of the natural geological formations that they’d seen. Suddenly they emerged into a large cavern and found themselves standing in front of a series of wall paintings that took their breath away. In the feeble beams of light from their torches the three explorers were stunned to see huge painted panels swarming with vibrant, beautifully crafted images of animals, including species like mammoths, lions and rhinoceros that had long been extinct in Europe.

The only way in and out of the cavern was through a series of narrow passageways and shafts. So, these experienced explorers understood immediately that the paintings must have been created in the Stone Age and that they were probably the first people in tens of thousands of years to see them. They had made a spectacular archaeological discovery and Chauvet Cave - named after the group’s leader, Jean-Marie Chauvet - quickly took its place alongside Altamira and Lascaux as one of the most important sites of prehistoric art.

Although the cavers were very much aware of the historical and scientific value of their discovery, what really overwhelmed them was the nature and quality of the images. In their book, The Chauvet Cave: The Oldest Known Paintings in the World (London: 1996), Chauvet and his colleagues described their feelings in this way:

“During those moments there were only shouts and exclamations; the emotions that gripped us made us incapable of uttering a single word…. Everything was so beautiful, so fresh, almost too much so. Time was abolished, as if the tens of thousands of years that separated us from the producers of these paintings no longer existed. It seemed as if they had just created these masterpieces. Suddenly we felt like intruders. Deeply impressed, we were weighed down by the feeling that we were not alone; the artists’ souls and spirits surrounded us. We thought we could feel their presence; we were disturbing them.”

These modern explorers felt strongly connected across an almost unimaginable chasm of time to the people who had once frequented the cave, and at the heart of this vivid sensation was the images they had created. This is a remarkable thing to consider. ‘Presence’ is certainly a quality that contemporary lovers of art look for and admire in paintings. When viewers stand in front of an original work by the likes of Caravaggio or Van Gogh or Chagall, they often experience a very powerful connection with them. They see their brushstrokes, marvel at their distinctive technique, and get a strong sense of their personal investment in the work, their individual genius and vision. It’s as if the artists are very much alive and kicking and still making their presence felt. Jean-Marie Chauvet and his colleagues had an electrifying sense of that on their first encounters with the cave paintings.

Many of the painted caves discovered across France and Spain have a shrine-like quality and contain evidence that rituals of one kind or another were practised in them.

But the notion of ‘presence’ in art goes way beyond the artist’s personal charisma and touches on an even more profound matter - the feeling that one is somehow being confronted by the mystery and reality at the heart of life. It’s an understanding of presence that modern people, in their enthusiasm for the individual brilliance and skill of artistic superstars, can sometimes overlook. But it’s an important dimension of palaeolithic art which cannot be ignored. The painters of Chauvet Cave were clearly captivated by the multitude of creatures who shared the world with them. Their imaginations were stirred by the grace of the ibex, the power of the bison, the dignity of the horse, the inquisitiveness of the bear, the ferocity of the lion, and their close observation of these animals is striking. There can be little doubt that the behaviour and characteristics of these fellow creatures led them to reflect on the meaning and significance of their own lives. And underlying all of this is a quality of wonder in their paintings, a sense of what the Jewish philosopher, Abraham Heschel, called ‘radical amazement’ at the sheer fact of being alive in such an extraordinary and beautiful world.

Of course, we’ll never know exactly what was in the minds of these ancient artists as they were busy creating their masterpieces twenty thousand years before writing was invented. But archaeologists and anthropologists are convinced that the cave paintings are intimately linked with the beliefs and rituals of Stone Age peoples, and that this was their way of connecting with unseen spiritual realities. Many of the painted caves discovered across France and Spain have a shrine-like quality and contain evidence that rituals of one kind or another were practised in them. It seems that when these people went deep underground to create their images, it was in the belief that they were immersed in, and surrounded by, spiritual power and meaning. As scholar David Lewis-Williams puts it, ‘Every image made hidden presences visible’.

Art still has this power. In the modern world it is rarely produced for overtly religious or ritualistic purposes. Nevertheless, art of any era cannot but bear witness to the unseen, sometimes in ways of which the artists themselves are not aware. Whatever their own philosophical and religious convictions may be, artists who labour in the fields of truth and beauty and meaning cannot help but create work that is allusive and open to transcendence. They cannot avoid the untameable and disruptive presence of their Creator. This will come as no surprise to anyone who has read the Psalms:

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there also…

The understanding of reality found in the Bible leads to a recognition that wherever people may be on the face of the planet and at whatever point they stand in the long, long history of the human race, they are always in the presence of, and confronted by, the Great I Am, who is the Lord of all times and places.

The spelunkers of Chauvet Cave received an extraordinary gift at Christmas 1994, and through their discovery the rest of the world has been its beneficiary too. It’s a truly wonderful thing to have been given this glimpse into the lives of people so long ago, and through their creative endeavours to recognise our common humanity and the abiding power of art and the imagination. And at the heart of this present to us all was a presence that Jean-Marie Chauvet and his friends felt so vividly. But they were only partly right in linking that sense to the creative artists. For beyond those ancient cave painters is the object of their concern, the One who, as the Welsh poet, Waldo Williams put it, stands before us all as ‘Each witness’s witness, each memory’s memory, life of every life’ - the Presence behind all presence.