The Christianity of Fanny Price

When reading Jane Austen, it helps to remember that she was a Christian—and so were her heroines. This simple truth is often overlooked by supposedly expert commentators and scholars. Consider, for example, the recent argument by novelist Lauren Groff. She wrote an introduction to a new edition of Austen’s Mansfield Park and then adapted her argument in an insipid essay published just recently in the New York Times.

Though Groff praises Manfield Park as Austen’s “boldest, riskiest, most subversive and most artistically mature work,” she gets basic points about the plot and characters wrong, perhaps because she was more interested in using the secondary literature to identify a trendy theme in the novel than in understanding it herself. This is a shame, because Mansfield Park is Austen’s most underrated book, and it ought to be read and appreciated much more than it is.

The longstanding barrier for readers is that Mansfield Park has the gravest tone of Austen’s works. Furthermore, its protagonist, Fanny Price, isn’t witty, charming, or even a particularly beautiful young woman, but a painfully shy girl sent to live with her wealthy relatives, the Bertrams. Modern readers will likely be further put off by everything from her unfashionable name to her love for her cousin, Edmund—though not forbidden at the time, it is pure “ick” to readers today.

Nonetheless, Mansfield Park is very much worth reading. Groff suggests that this is because it “is entirely built around the ideal of deep, serious moral purpose” adding that “serious moral purpose happens to be the primary, and perhaps sole, heroic attribute of our protagonist.” This is too cruel to Fanny, who is intelligent (though not witty), kind, discerning, and even becoming rather pretty as she emerges from adolescence. Though she does not sparkle like some of Austen’s creations, she is still an interesting and even attractive character for those readers who take the time to get to know her.

Groff does not bother to understand Fanny, especially her sense of moral purpose. Groff interprets Fanny as a victim who finally stands up for herself, and thereby vicariously for all the other victims of British heteropatriarchal Anglican colonialism (or something like that). In particular, Groff seizes on the issue of slavery, which, though it is mentioned directly only once (by Fanny), would have been on the minds of Austen’s readers given her uncle’s estate in Antigua. And so Groff reads Mansfield Park

as speaking loudly and clearly about the subjugation of all of the vulnerable in the world to the will of the powerful. In this book, those who are wealthy and adult and male run roughshod over the weak, the poor, the women and the children among them. Women who dare to step outside the boundaries of what is expected of them are entirely crushed. The men of Fanny’s family attempt to force her to bend under their will, and are enraged when they cannot. Far from Austen subscribing to and upholding the hegemonic imperial power in the England of her time, I see this book as a brave and lonely voice standing up for the tyrannized creatures of the world.

No wonder Groff thinks it a tragedy that in the end Fanny marries Edmund and settles down among her supposed oppressors. But Groff has misunderstood Fanny’s (and Austen’s) principles. Austen hints at abolitionist sentiments for herself and her character, but that is not her focus, and the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy is not her preferred moral lens. And in trying to make that the theme of the book, Groff makes too much of the Bertram family’s sins and not enough of their virtues. For example, the Bertram men are not nearly as “enraged” as Groff claims, and Edmund did much more than just drop a few scraps of kindness on Fanny over the years.

Groff badly misunderstands Fanny’s character, writing that “Austen so adeptly lulls the reader into seeing Fanny as something of a pale little pushover for the first part of the book that it’s a dash of cold water in the face” when Fanny “adamantly refuses” to marry the eligible but unprincipled Henry Crawford. But no attentive reader is surprised because this refusal is both consistent with Fanny’s character and heavily foreshadowed.

The key to the book is not oppression, but that Fanny is an earnest Christian—perhaps the most thoroughly Christian of all Austen’s characters. She is bound by her conscience and sense of duty, which she follows with fortitude and patience, even when wronged by relatives who ought to know better. And in the end, her Christian virtue is vindicated. She is honored as the moral exemplar of the Bertram family, and they learn from and lean on her goodness. Groff wants Fanny to be a bitter revolutionary tallying the wrongs of the world and the church (and especially those done to her), but Austen gave us a gentle Christian who reforms her family with love and patience.

Austen got it right.