[In the following essay, McDonnell evaluates Mansfield Park as a Bildungsroman that deals authentically with feminine childhood experience.]

Mansfield Park has never lacked detractors. Kingsley Amis is typical, if a little intemperate, in calling it an “immoral book” and the character of Fanny Price a “monster of complacency and pride, who under a cloak of cringing self-abasement, dominates and gives meaning to the novel.”¹ Others have criticized the book for being too severely moral, for its serious and even pietistic tone which militates against the familiar Austen virtues of liveliness and wit.² And even those critics who praise the novel tend to see it as a thesis book, a book where character and action are subordinated to ideology, whether that be the “war of ideas” between Jacobinism and anti-Jacobinism, or the “improvement of the estate” versus the preservation of the estate with its ideals of stability and continuity.³ Finally, some readers who profess a sympathetic interest in the character of Fanny Price as having more than schematic interest, sometimes do so largely because of a clinical interest in the pathology of the abused child.⁴

It might be supposed that a feminist critic would be the last to take an interest in Fanny Price and her life history. As an image of weakness not strength, of obedience not independence, of passivity not venturesome activity, Fanny perfectly exemplifies ideal femininity in a patriarchal culture, leading Susan Gubar, for example, to see her as paradigmatically a Snow White, immobile in her deathly virtue.⁵ Because Mansfield Park is “the story of a girl who triumphs by doing nothing,”⁶ the most disturbing aspect of the book would appear to be Austen's endorsement of Fanny's weakness as a covert form of strength, leading to her unjustified recognition and redemption at the end.

Yet the novel does provide interesting issues for the feminist critic. As Austen's only subjective portrait of a vulnerable child growing to maturity, and also as a critical account of the failures of a patriarchal society to foster individuality in a woman, it commands our interest. The novel deals with crucial questions of female identity precisely because it shows us in Fanny that extreme “femininity” which is marked by sensitivity to the feelings and opinions of others, and a strong need for acceptance, approval, security and love. Like The Mill on the Floss, for example, Mansfield Park is a dramatic enactment of the social and cultural pathology that produces extreme dependency in women—making Fanny's later moment of rebellion against Sir Thomas all the more remarkable.

Furthermore, as an extended portrait of childhood, education, crisis and identity, Mansfield Park really asks to be called an early Bildungsroman. Like those later female Bildungsromane, Jane Eyre and The Mill on the Floss, Austen's novel involves a relatively long period of time to trace patterns of “growth” from an abused childhood to an assertion of independence in a crisis that involves both family and cultural ideals. And in Mansfield Park, as in Jane Eyre, an analogy is drawn between the dependency of the child (as orphan or virtual orphan) and the dependent position of women in general. Thus the novel uses the Bildungsroman theme of childhood and youth spent in a hostile setting to focus on questions of sexual politics as well.

We know that Mansfield Park was admired by Victorian readers,⁷ and indeed it shares a number of qualities (unusual to Austen) with later Victorian fiction and especially with the Bildungsroman. I have already mentioned the use of the child's experience, especially the abandoned or abused child. Other distinctive “Victorian” features of the novel include the focus on suffering, and in particular suffering as a “morally improving” experience for a woman; the religious tone, language and preoccupations of the book, so often noted by critics; the strict distinctions between masculine behavior, authority and power (with Sir Thomas as the failed ideal) and femininity as submissiveness and obedience to male authority; and of course Fanny as a “Romantic” heroine of sensibility much affected by the beauty of landscape.⁸

These “Victorian” qualities of the book are in fact the very qualities most often labelled unsatisfactory and disturbing in the novel. But how does the emerging Bildungsroman pattern fit with the eighteenth-century inheritance of the novel? Specifically, how does the novel deal with questions of female identity—accommodating both the new “experiential” conception of self (Fanny as suffering heroine), with the older “ethical” conception of self (Fanny as moral exemplar) deriving from the Education novel and other sources? In answering these questions perhaps we can also suggest answers to that central question: how can a submissive and passive heroine be the protagonist of a Bildungsroman?

In this essay, I will examine the distinctive features of Mansfield Park which associate it with later female Bildungsromane: the emphasis on childhood, the treatment of the mental history of the protagonist, the contrast between provincial life (Portsmouth) and sophisticated society (Mansfield Park and London), the conflict of the heroine with her elders, the “two suitor” convention, and finally, and most importantly, the questions of female “identity” raised by the book. I will also argue that Mansfield Park incorporates and ultimately rejects the typical older plot for a woman, what we might call the “erotic text” whereby a woman is identified with her sexuality—and in doing so makes possible the Bildungsroman emphasis on subjectivity and mental history. I will argue that much of the interest (and difficulty) in the book arises from this conflict between conventional fictional femininity as seen in the eighteenth-century “erotic text” and the newer, more subjective self appropriate to the “ambitious text,” the Bildungsroman.

Nancy K. Miller makes a useful distinction between what she calls the “erotic” and the “ambitious” texts.⁹ Taking Freud's distinction between erotic and ambitious wishes found in daydreams (from his 1908 essay “The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming”), Miller applies it to women's fiction, arguing that many plots of women's fiction have been labelled as “implausible” because they “reject the narrative logic of the dominant discourse,” which is the ambitious text, taking instead “female erotics” to structure their plots. In other words she finds that the “ambitious text” is the repressed content of this fiction, not the dominant one as it is in men's fiction.

Certainly we can say that most plots about male experience are “ambitious texts” and have to do with the impulse to power. They are stories of conflict and struggle leading to achievement and independence (as in the epic, quest romance, or Bildungsroman), or stories of conflict and struggle leading to a tragic death (as in tragedy). The Bildungsroman especially, could be characterized as an ambitious text. As a semiautobiographical, apprenticeship-to-life story, it deals significantly with the mental history, self-determination, and identity of the protagonist. In other words, it is pre-eminently the fictional form which celebrates subjectivity, autonomy and self-definition. As the story of a young person, making a choice of life, it values initiative and industry, separation and individuation, achieved through conflict and struggle with family and society.¹⁰

Thus the Bildungsroman, in most critical definitions and in many dominant examples, seems to reflect male experience and male gender identity (as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century conceptions of “self”), and as such it raises many troubling questions for the woman writer and for the feminist critic. If the form itself follows our cultural notions of so-called “normative development,” notions based not on some abstract ideal of human development, but on male development seen as typical, then how useful can it be for the woman writer writing the life history of a woman character? We know, of course, that, especially in 1814, women writers did not stress their resemblance to men and pattern the woman's life history after a narrative that involves worldly ambitions, career choices, a crisis of religion, conflict with the father, etc. (issues which come up again and again in male Bildungsromane especially in the nineteenth century). And yet in a sense that is what two male writers, Defoe in Moll Flanders and Cleland in Fanny Hill, did for their women characters. All of this seems to raise serious doubts about the appropriate use of the term to characterize women's fiction and especially a novel like Mansfield Park.

Furthermore we know that the woman writer of the early nineteenth century inherited a well-developed tradition of the “feminocentric” novel, novels by male writers in which women are identified with their sexuality. These are clearly “erotic texts” in which women enact a sexual destiny, and they testify, as Nancy Miller writes in The Heroine's Text, not to the “power of the female imagination,” but to the “power of the female in the male imagination.”¹¹ This heroine's text in eighteenth-century English and French fiction by male authors is usually either the “drama of the preservation of virtue” (what Miller calls the Euphoric text) or the “tragedy of the single misstep” leading to compromise and ruin (what she calls the Dysphoric text).

Thus we can assume a strong, even coercive tradition, inherited by Austen, of female sexual destiny portrayed in fiction, of “erotic education thematized as social initiation.”¹² Fiction about women before Austen was largely made up of stories where the very facts of the woman's biological and spiritual existence put her in jeopardy, where the heroine no matter what else she may have been, was forced to live in the world primarily as a sexual being, and where there was little room for the Bildungsroman issues of “self-definition” or the exploration of a mental history.

Clearly, the erotic text, the text where the woman is identical with her sexual nature, is the text inherited by Jane Austen. The real question for Austen, of course, is how to show female subjectivity, even feminine mastery, in a world dominated by the mercantile considerations of marriage—where the tragedy of the single misstep, or the drama of the preservation of virtue or the marriage market story define the possible lives for women. All of Austen's novels deal with this subject, and Mansfield Park confronts it in one of its rawest—or purest—forms.

Furthermore, Mansfield Park, the place itself, establishes a clear sense of the sexual politics of the book. This country estate is a place where right rule is vested in the father, Sir Thomas; where the eldest son, Tom, is the favored child, being groomed to inherit the estate; where the wife of Sir Thomas, Lady Bertram, is reduced to the indolence and extreme helplessness of a well-married woman in a patriarchal society, someone whose function in life has long ago been completed by marriage and the production of a male offspring; where Maria and Julia Bertram are the well-reared daughters according to patriarchal values—that is, they are trained in the arts of the marriage market, but are empty-headed and restive under these conditions of constraint.¹³

Of course, Fanny Price herself is in many ways perfect femininity in a patriarchal society. Introduced as a child, a poor cousin, into this wealthy Bertram family, she perfectly exemplifies the submissive ideal for a woman: gentle, modest, sweet-tempered and obedient, she makes herself useful as a virtual servant to the family. Kind and thoughtful to her selfish Aunt Bertram, submissive to her manipulative Aunt Norris, obedient to her rather distant and fearful uncle Sir Thomas, she perfectly fulfills the standard of behavior expected of women. In Sir Thomas's words, “she appears to feel as she ought.”

In discussing Mansfield Park as a Bildungsroman, it seems crucial to note at the beginning that the novel is unique to Austen's fiction and new to women's fiction in general in that it deals extensively and realistically with childhood experience.¹⁴ When Fanny is introduced as a poor cousin to be raised by the wealthy Bertram family, she is just ten years old—“Exceedingly timid and shy, and shrinking from notice,” “ashamed of herself,” but of an “obliging, yielding temper.” Austen's portrayal of her sudden uprooting is deeply sympathetic, juxtaposed as it is with the Bertram family's consciousness of their superiority in doing the poor child a favor.

… the little girl who was spoken of in the drawing-room when she left it at night, as seeming so desirably sensible of her peculiar good fortune, ended every day's sorrows by sobbing herself to sleep.

… her consciousness of misery was therefore increased by the idea of its being a wicked thing for her not to be happy.

… her feelings were very acute, and too little understood to be properly attended to.¹⁵

The great interest of this portrayal lies in the contrast between social expectation (Fanny is being given all the advantages of education and training in a wealthy family, thereby greatly increasing her prospects in life) with the simple feelings of a child—who, after all, has been taken from her home and is being turned into an object of charity. Furthermore, we also see that Fanny is beginning to “internalize” the social expectations and to see her grief and loneliness as unacceptable; she is beginning to censure her natural feelings as a form of ingratitude. Thus immediately in the novel, there is established this contrast between social role and feeling, her place in a “text” devised by others and her own internal history.

In noting this emphasis on feeling and childhood experience I do not wish to suggest that Austen shows us “development” in any modern sense of the term. On the contrary, the first two-thirds of the novel is a series of set pieces—the visit to Sotherton, the play rehearsals, the return of Sir Thomas, and the visit of William—designed to show, not Fanny's development, but rather her “deeper feelings” and “higher species of self command,” qualities which enable her to judge the mistakes of other characters.

The novel does not show us Fanny's development in the sense of her changing over a period of time; nevertheless, it does show us the connections between her personality and her circumstances. The passages just quoted demonstrate a very new subject and one that is distinctively appropriate to the Bildungsroman—that is, the psychological portrait of an abused child. The very qualities which most readers find so distressing in Fanny as the novel proceeds—her shrinking temperament, her passive, subservient nature, her very “goodness”—are those qualities which are established at the beginning of the novel as the psychological result of profound neglect.

Fanny's goodness has been extensively and convincingly studied by both Avron Fleishman and Bernard Paris as the defensive strategy of a terrified child and as an example of the Adlerian “feminine” personality type whose submission is really a form of hostility and self-protection.¹⁶

Here is the goodness of a terrified child who dreads total rejection if she does not conform in every way to the will of those in power. It is rigid, desperate, compulsive. Fanny is not actively loving or benevolent; she is obedient, submissive, driven by her fears and her shoulds. Her goodness provides, moreover, the only outlet for her repressed aggressive impulses.¹⁷

Paris is certainly convincing in ascribing Fanny's goodness to her utter vulnerability, in seeing it as the defensive strategy of someone who can gain acceptance only “by being useful, by being good, and by attaching herself to a stronger and more favoured member of the family.”¹⁸ As a poor relation with no rights to Mansfield Park, Fanny must earn a place for herself by all the arts of “gratitude.”¹⁹

The compensations for this emotionally impoverished life are what you would expect to find in a Bildungsroman. Fanny is given books and friendship by her older cousin, Edmund, who becomes a kind of life-long tutor to her:

… his attentions were … of the highest importance in assisting the improvement of her mind, and extending its pleasures. He knew her to be clever, to have a quick apprehension as well as good sense, and a fondness for reading, which, properly directed, must be an education in itself.

(22)

Thus Fanny's mental history is one of the important themes of the book and it continues for some time: she reads biography, poetry, Crabbe's Tales and Lord Macartney on China. She takes out a subscription to a lending library and she is moved by nature as none of the other characters seems to be. She even seems particularly well versed in Hannah More, who had written Coelebs in Search of a Wife, and also Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, which was a major influence on the contemporary education of women:

… she displays, only too obviously, the “thinking” mind that Hannah More and others were praising as the sign of a cultivated intellect. Some of her remarks, indeed, are painfully, and … deliberately, similar to passages from the Strictures and similar works. Her speech on memory during her conversation with Mary Crawford in the garden of the Mansfield parsonage is all too clearly an example of the sort of philosophizing on the “secret springs” of the mind that Miss More approves in the remarks on the purposes of the study of history. …²⁰

It is often pointed out that Fanny's education is an education in the “self-knowledge, generosity, and humility” so lacking in her cousins Maria and Julia—who are merely trained in the drawing-room accomplishments of music, drawing, and superficial facts about “the Roman emperors as low as Severus; besides a great deal of the Heathen Mythology, and all the Metals, Semi-Metals, Planets, and distinguished philosophers” (18-19). And much work has been done pointing out the similarities between this novel and earlier or contemporary novels about female education, which also contrasted this superficial marriage-market training so prevalent at the time with the sounder principles of a Christian discipline—Mrs. West's The Advantages of Education, Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story, or Fanny Burney's The Wanderer.²¹

But how is Fanny's story different from all those education novels or conduct books showing the inferiority of wit and cleverness to judgment, or of worldly accomplishments to Christian humility? Mansfield Park certainly inherits qualities from all those earlier formula stories concerning the “orphan,” the “young woman from the provinces” or the “young woman's entrance into the world.” (For example, Mary Crawford, new to the neighborhood, is very eager to know if Fanny is “out” or not out, to know whether or not she has been introduced to the world—in order to place her accurately in the right “text” and to decide accordingly how she must be treated.) I think the answer lies in the fact that Mansfield Park places emphasis on the educative process itself. The usual structure of the earlier education novel simply contrasted the character of judgment with the character of wit and cleverness. Mansfield Park does this certainly, but it goes one step farther and links judgment with feeling. Fanny's story thus is based more on “feeling” than on “knowing”—and in this is different from the typical Austen novel where the suspense is epistemological, and leads to the heroine's enlightenment or change of mind.

Avron Fleishman, who was the first critic (and to my knowledge the only one) to discuss the novel as Bildungsroman, makes this point:

… to see its central position in English fiction we must recognize it as a Bildungsroman—or, more evocatively, a story of the “young man (or girl) from the provinces.” The most important treatments of this theme in the eighteenth century—the novels of Fielding and Smollett—mix moral education with picaresque adventure in such a way that their heroes cannot be said to be educated at all … Fanny is the first young person … who learns enough of the world to win through to success by moral effort … in itself an educative process.²²

Comparing Fanny with Jane Eyre in her “sustained exercise of moral will” and in her desire to live according to her own “ideal conception of herself,” Fleishman also contrasts her story with the more typical Austen plot—that of Elizabeth Bennet who, he says, “merely changes her mind.”

I think it is this emphasis on psychological complexity, on the feelings of a character who seems to function in the novel as moral exemplar (placed there simply to judge the faults of others as she stays clear of any involvement), which has caused so much dissatisfaction with the novel. In other words, we don’t know if we are being asked to respond to Fanny as moral exemplar or as suffering heroine. A good passage of this kind of “psychological complexity” appearing in the midst of a passage ostensibly showing Fanny as judge comes during the play rehearsals. Fanny, of course, has been critical of the home theatricals all along and of the intrigues which they encourage, and when she is pressed to take part in them, she is horrified. In a very telling passage, however, she begins to question her own judgment:

Was she right in refusing what was so warmly asked, so strongly wished for? what might be so essential to a scheme on which some of those to whom she owed the greatest complaisance, had set their hearts? Was it not ill-nature—selfishness—and a fear of exposing herself? … It would be so horrible to her to act, that she was inclined to suspect the truth and purity of her own scruples, and as she looked around her, the claims of her cousins to being obliged, were strengthened by the sight of present upon present that she had received from them … and she grew bewildered as to the amount of the debt which all these kind remembrances produced.

(153)

Fanny judges the theatricals to be wrong, yet she begins to wonder if her judgment itself is flawed—if it might be based on the “fear of exposing herself,” rather than on real conviction. She begins to wonder if her convictions themselves are merely the reflex actions of timidity, and to be a convincing “cover” for fear. This is real insight, it seems to me. But immediately afterwards, we see Fanny doubting herself only from the old habits of “gratitude” and self-denial. The false claims coming from gifts received from her cousins are confused with any real debt she might owe them.

To sum up, Fanny makes a judgment (she opposes the theatricals and any involvement in them): she bases this judgment on feeling—and then she goes on to doubt this judgment precisely because it was based on feeling. This spells out something significant about Fanny. Nowhere does Austen show more clearly the confounding of the two conceptions of character in Fanny—what we might call the “experiential” and the “ethical,” or following Bernard Paris, the “mimetic” and the “thematic.”²³

Other critics of the novel have noted this discrepancy. Identifying these two incongruous roles in Fanny—the exemplary heroine and the suffering heroine—Marilyn Butler relates them to the conflict between the conservative, anti-Jacobin ideology of the novel (with its emphasis on the old values of class, social order and religion) and the expectations of the novel form itself (with its emphasis on the individual). She writes:

The fault lies in the incongruity of subjective, heroine-centered writing to the theme in hand; or perhaps it is more proper to say that it lies in the incongruity of the old absolutes to the novel, a form which historically is individualistic and morally relative … the failure lies not so much in the ideas, as in the attempt to use the inward life of the heroine as a vehicle for them.²⁴

She argues that, “since Fanny is the representative of orthodoxy, the individuality of her consciousness must be to a large extent denied.”²⁵

This does seem to be what happens in the novel. But the very discrepancy tells us something significant about women's fiction and female identity, and perhaps especially about the woman's Bildungsroman as it was developed later in the nineteenth century. The Mill on the Floss, to take one important example, also involves this same conflict between the subjective and the ethical conceptions of character in its protagonist—and points, as Mansfield Park does, not just to a major conflict in the novel, but also to a paradox at the heart of female identity. The conflict between ideology and feeling—or between responsibility to others and commitment to self, between an ethical concern for others and the demands of the growing consciousness—is squarely at the heart of much writing about women, and of our conceptions of female identity. Both Maggie Tulliver and Fanny Price are controlled by the “ideology” of the feminine—by what they think they ought to be as women—and as such they are representatives of an orthodoxy which succeeds in killing one of them.

Perhaps this is one reason why the novel treats the suffering of the child Fanny so sympathetically—as itself a moral education. If women must sacrifice self in the service of others, then that sacrifice itself has come to be seen as “enriching” the self. Like most nineteenth-century female Bildungsromane (once again, Jane Eyre and The Mill on the Floss spring to mind, as well as Villette) this novel both glorifies and deplores suffering. Suffering is on the one hand deplorable and without justification; it is on the other hand valuable as a superior education. Simply, Austen claims that Fanny's strength of character comes from being shut out from all the normal gratifications of a child's life—even from parental love and approval, earned respect and unearned love. We are invited to feel sympathy and indignation at the treatment of the child Fanny; but it is because of that treatment that she rightfully grows up to “inherit the estate,” to be preferred before all other female characters in the book.

But none of this answers the questions of why Austen should choose to write about such a child growing to womanhood—about someone who, after all, presents almost insuperable problems of dramatic sympathy, as goodness and unjustified suffering always does. I think the answer lies in the fact that her story is a virtual parable of the life of a woman in a patriarchal society—and the Bildungsroman pattern, which in a sense is a story of origins tracing everything back to childhood, provides the perfect outlines for such a story. The “deep structure” of this story, furthermore, and of the nineteenth-century female Bildungsroman in general, is the Cinderella story.²⁶ Thus is Mansfield Park we find the prototypical “persecuted heroine” who has lost her mother, is abused by her stepmother (both Aunt Norris and Lady Bertram) and by her stepsisters (Maria and Julia) and who is forced to live as a servant in her “own” household. We also find the “magical” help of the fairy tale, not literally in supernatural rescue, but rather in Edmund's sponsorship of her. Like Cinderella, Fanny is “discovered” at a feast (the ball), and she furnishes “proof of identity” (the cross and chain worn to the ball act as symbolic devices showing Fanny as ultimately chosen by and belonging to Edmund). Edmund, of course, is the prince who eventually rescues her, giving her the recognition of true merit and elevation of status at the end. We can even argue that the stepsisters in the tale mutilate themselves, not literally by cutting off their toes to fit the slipper, but by eloping and violating the code of behavior for a woman and therefore effectively exiling themselves from society.²⁷

This almost religious pattern of disguise and discovery,²⁸ of losing self and finding self, of outsider becoming insider²⁹ in Fanny's life history, seems to bear some deep affinity with the life of a woman in a patriarchal society. One is tempted to say that the conditions of being a woman in a patriarchal society are so desperate that only the “deep structure” of this universalized wish fable will rescue her. Thus in showing us Fanny first as a child, in emphasizing her suffering and, at the same time, showing her as exemplary, Austen is telling us something important about the female “self.”

Perhaps it is only during the “crisis” in Fanny's life—during the courtship of Henry Crawford—that Fanny moves out of her exemplary role in a fully satisfactory way and that her suffering comes to have deeper meaning. In these scenes, she becomes a heroine in her own right and her inner conflict as well as her conflict with her elders begins to have more than schematic value. In the rest of this essay I will deal with the Henry Crawford courtship (and with the two suitor convention involving Henry and Edmund), as well as with the Portsmouth episode, which of course occurs in the midst of that courtship. Furthermore, I will discuss the way this latter part of the book deals not only with crucial questions of female identity (as the first part does), but does so by playing off the “erotic” text against the “ambitious” text in such a way that we can begin to see the real appropriateness of the Bildungsroman pattern to the sexual politics of the book.

In the first part of the book, Fanny often functions as observer of the erotic texts of others. She watches Maria decide to accept Rushworth, Mary Crawford pursue Edmund, and Maria and Julia compete for Henry Crawford. However, after she appears at the ball and Henry Crawford takes it into his head to make her fall in love with him—and then begins rapidly to fall in love with her—at this point Fanny herself becomes the heroine of an erotic text.

In the ballroom scene Fanny is viewed explicitly as the creation of a man—Sir Thomas who has rescued her from a life of oblivion:

Sir Thomas himself was watching her progress down the dance with much complacency; he was proud of his niece, and without attributing all her personal beauty, as Mrs. Norris seemed to do, to her transplantation to Mansfield, he was pleased with himself for having supplied every thing else;—education and manners she owed to him.

(276)

Austen is evoking here all the old standards of the erotic text: whatever meaning the woman possesses has been conferred on her by a man. Defined as a male creation, Fanny is the product of Sir Thomas' beneficence and Edmund's tutelage, as soon she will be of Henry's recognition. She is the perfect “subdued heroine” who has repressed all indications of individuality and selfhood and accepted fully (so it seems) the character and personality others have assigned to her.

Susan Gubar discusses some of the many myths that show the female as creation, art object, poem or blank page to be inscribed by a male creator: “… if the creator is a man, the creation itself is the female, who, like Pygmalion's ivory girl, has no name or identity or voice of her own.”³⁰ Perhaps this will help us to see more clearly why Fanny Price has been such a cipher, such a nonentity throughout her story so far. Now, in the ballroom scene, where Henry Crawford decides to fall in love with her, it is clear that what makes Fanny so attractive to this most “eligible” suitor is her extreme passivity. In Henry's own words, she is attractive because of her “goodness of heart,” her “gentleness,” “modesty,” “patience and forbearance.”

Here is Henry explaining to his sister why he has fallen in love with Fanny:

“Had you seen her this morning, Mary,” he continued, “attending with such ineffable sweetness and patience, to all the demands of her aunt's stupidity, working with her, and for her, her colour beautifully heightened as she leant over the work, then returning to her seat to finish a note which she was previously engaged in writing for that stupid woman's service, and all this with such unpretending gentleness, so much as if it were a matter of course that she was not to have a moment at her own command. …”

(296)

In other words, Henry has fallen in love with Fanny's virtues. It is Fanny's perfect goodness and submissiveness that have won her the love of this rather shallow and selfish man—who, of course, clearly sees the advantages of a compliant woman. In this world, female virtue is one of the arts of attraction; its major purpose is to win the love of a suitable man, who then “gets her heart for his own use,” as Henry himself puts it.

Of course, everything points to the suitability of this match. As Sir Thomas says, “Here is a young man wishing to pay his addresses to you with every thing to recommend him; not merely situation in life, fortune, and character, but with more than common agreeableness, with address and conversation pleasing to everybody” (315-16). If Fanny were to marry him, she would be fulfilling the major function of marriage in an acquisitive society—she would be strengthening the ties between the two families of friends and she would be acquiring a status and identity she had not had before.

But of course Fanny refuses Henry Crawford. Furthermore her refusal, predictably, is misunderstood, and it is misunderstood in a way that reveals a lot about women's place in this world. The rejection is at first interpreted as a becoming modesty, a coy statement of the opposite from what she intends. “It shows a discretion highly to be commended,” says Sir Thomas. And even her beloved Edmund argues with her: “Let him succeed at last, Fanny, let him succeed at last. You have proved yourself upright and disinterested, prove yourself grateful and tenderhearted” (347). Since Fanny has spent her whole life proving herself upright and disinterested, as well as grateful and tenderhearted, Edmund's remark rings with a particular irony. The novel is beginning to call in question the whole ethos of female dependence and gratitude.

Thus it is highly significant that her simple “no” should be interpreted as part of her beguiling innocence, the statement of a young woman who doesn’t yet know her own mind, but who can be brought round in time. In other words, here is a serious comedy about male privileged vanity where the woman's refusal, based on her own feelings, is interpreted as itself an art of attraction. We remember Mr. Collins' address to Elizabeth Bennet as a similar case, when he says, “Naturally all elegant females must refuse at first,” and Elizabeth replies, “I am not an elegant female. I am a rational creature.”

By saying no, what is more, Fanny risks the very worst accusation of a patriarchal society—that of independence of mind. Sir Thomas says to Fanny, “I had thought you peculiarly free from wilfulness of temper, self-conceit, and every tendency to that independence of spirit, which prevails so much in modern days, even in young women, and which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offences” (318). By persisting in her “unfeminine” refusal, Fanny of course risks losing her sponsorship, the economic and familial support of Sir Thomas, without which she is nothing.

It is especially important here to note that in Mansfield Park there is no language, no favorable or neutral language for independence in a woman, no linguistic middle-ground between modesty and pride, gentleness and wilfulness, self-denial and self-conceit. These same either/or alternatives of self-indulgence versus service can be found in Jane Eyre, Villette, and The Mill on the Floss also, where once again they express something significant about the female “self” in the Bildungsroman: a woman may remain “good” and be less than adult and fully responsible, or she may become “bad” and risk being unfeminine. In other words the rights of the individual bring her into conflict with morality.

It is at this point in the action that Fanny is sent home to Portsmouth to visit her mother. She is sent by Sir Thomas, who hopes the contrast between Mansfield Park and Portsmouth will itself effect a change of heart in Fanny. But the scene works very differently. In contrasting “provincial” with “sophisticated” society, the scene is very important to the Bildungsroman pattern of the book: it shows us an important moment of insight in Fanny's history. But it also defines for us the sexual politics of the book, showing us that there is no alternative to patriarchal values in “home” and “Mother.” It demonstrates how Fanny, sponsored exclusively by men, grows up entirely “male-identified.”

Fanny is especially eager to be reunited with her Mother, having received a letter from her “convincing [Fanny] that she should now find a warm and affectionate friend in the ‘Mamma’ who had certainly shewn no remarkable fondness for her formerly” (371). The original rejection by her mother had certainly been the first trauma of Fanny's life, from which she had never recovered, and now she hopes desperately for a reconciliation.

But in returning home Fanny is disappointed in all her expectations, and especially in the hope of her mother's love and sponsorship:

Her disappointment in her mother was greater; there she had hoped much, and found almost nothing. Every flattering scheme of being of consequence to her soon fell to the ground. Mrs. Price was not unkind—but, instead of gaining on her affection and confidence, and becoming more and more dear, her daughter never met with greater kindness from her, than on the first day of her arrival.

(389)

Because her mother shows no real interest in her, Fanny sadly concludes that “William's concerns must be dearest—they always had been—and he had every right.” So she continues to think little of herself, and to place male rights, even to maternal affection, before her own.

The crucial significance of this separation from her mother (and the failure to find a mother substitute in her aunts) is made clear for us by such modern psychological theorists as Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan. Chodorow points out how women's identities are formed through closeness to the mother who tends to experience her daughter “as more like, and continuous, with” herself.³¹ Therefore, females grow up tending to discover self through relationship, mutuality, sameness and identification—not through the separation and autonomy we generally associate with male development (and with Bildungsromane as a portrait of male identity).

With the help of Chodorow and Gilligan, we can see how Fanny is an extreme case of “feminine” development. As any discussion of her history would make amply clear, empathy is built into her primary definition of self and she clearly has an unusual capacity for sensitivity to the needs of others. Nevertheless, she does not have that capacity for intimacy and attachment, for relationship, which Chodorow sees as an advantage in the training of girls. In the course of her lifetime, she has formed only two attachments and they are both to men (William and Edmund). In other words, she seems to have few of the advantages and all of the liabilities of this training.

Generally, critics have argued that the absent or weak mother in Austen's novels makes possible the daughter's development.³² This is clearly what happens in Emma or Pride and Prejudice, for example—but not in Mansfield Park. The failures of Fanny's mother establish the possibility for all future failures in Fanny herself—the major one being that she remains male-identified, never coming to have more than a fleeting sense of her own identity as a woman, and that she seeks the “safe” alternative in marriage with a brother figure.

Nevertheless, Fanny in a sense does escape the confines of the erotic text. And the way she does this is not just through her own resistance to Henry Crawford and to Sir Thomas, but also through the rebellion of another woman: Maria Bertram, having learned a false lesson from acting in the home theatricals, runs away with Henry Crawford, thus releasing Fanny to follow another destiny. By acting in Lover's Vows, Maria has learned the false lesson that a woman, seduced and abandoned by her lover, can later be redeemed and offered a second chance. In other words, the play can be read as one of those eighteenth-century “Dysphoric” texts (the sexual misstep leading to ruin and failure) falsely turned into a “Euphoric” text (the woman rescued and redeemed by marriage with the repentant seducer).

Many explanations have been advanced to explain the importance of the home theatricals to the novel, including the petty intrigues which they foster, the rivalry for parts and jealousy among lovers and family members (Julia and Maria especially), as well as the violation of the codes of fitness or propriety entailed in acting itself. But that they should also violate another possible “text”—the “ambitious” one whereby a woman can choose a husband thoughtfully and independently—has not been discussed. Perhaps the main “impropriety” of the play lies in the fact that, by acting these parts, Maria and Mary are participating in an “erotic” text which effectively destroys independence of judgment and freedom of choice. They are participating in an age-old text that renders them powerless as mere sexual beings. For this is precisely the destiny those two characters proceed to follow in the rest of the book. Maria, shortly after her marriage to Rushworth, runs away with Henry Crawford (her son in the play); Julia follows suit by eloping with Mr. Yates, who had played the seducer in the play; and Mary Crawford, by supporting her brother, becomes an outcast from Mansfield Park and from Edmund's affections. Only Fanny is left—both as daughter and as bride.

The scenes in which all of this happens are very interesting—largely because they happen off-stage and are reported to Fanny at Portsmouth in a series of letters. These passages are striking in the way they demonstrate all the excesses of the erotic text—not only in the letters that Fanny receives, but also in her reactions to them (“the horror of a mind like Fanny's,” her “stupefaction,” and “feelings of sickness,” etc.). The news item recounting the scandal of Maria's elopement shows the prurience of the erotic text:

Fanny read to herself that “it was with infinite concern the newspaper had to announce to the world, a matrimonial fracas in the family of Mr. R. of Wimpole Street; the beautiful Mrs. R. whose name had not long been enrolled in the lists of hymen, and who had promised to become so brilliant a leader in the fashionable world, having quitted her husband's roof in company with the well known and captivating Mr. C. the intimate friend and associate of Mr. R. and it was not known, even to the editor of the newspaper, whither they were gone.”

(440)

Maria's life has been reduced to a series of letters—and now to a brief gossip column notice in a newspaper. This is the perfect device for showing her objectification in the erotic text, where she will remain forever imprisoned.

But one question remains: why is Fanny's marriage with Edmund the necessary conclusion to this Bildungsroman? Many readers have pointed out that Edmund is the “safe” alternative in the two suitors, because he is the sexless brother figure. And a number of critics have pointed out the threat of passion itself to an Austen character, but only recently has the contrast between passion and self-determination been commented upon:

It seems that passion is antithetical to what these heroines are striving for, in the words of Elizabeth Bennet, as “rational creatures,” as women who are seeking to know themselves and control their lives. In the end they marry the men who have helped them most in this struggle, who have been most critical of them and most conscious of their compelling need for honesty.³³

So Edmund is the less threatening lover to Fanny's precarious and emerging sense of identity. It is significant that Edmund has been Fanny's teacher all along and therefore understands and values her mental and spiritual history as no one else can. He is the only character in Mansfield Park to foster her intellectual growth and to esteem her sensitivity and “spirituality.”

So Fanny chooses a mentor figure, a loving teacher, who has watched over her mental and spiritual growth. One is reminded of some of Charlotte Brontë's male heroes (M. Paul Emmanuel in Villette, for example), or some of Eliot's (Maggie Tulliver's “soulmate,” Philip Wakem, or Dorothea Brooke's Casaubon, who reminds her of Milton). Many, perhaps all, nineteenth-century female Bildungsromane seem to use in some way this male mentor figure, whose main attraction comes from his involvement (or supposed involvement) with the heroine's intellectual or spiritual quest.

But why end a Bildungsroman with marriage—even marriage with a mentor figure? The answer lies in the fact that choice of a marriage partner is the only really significant choice that an early nineteenth-century woman could exercise in life and one that had profound implications for her sense of self. Present day readers tend either to take this choice for granted or to see it finally insignificant for questions of “identity,” since in choosing the right husband a woman still has no real self-determination. Nevertheless, recent historians of women claim more radical implications for this choice of marriage partner:

The changes in the institution of marriage were … to alter the situation of women permanently because they altered women's self-concept. According to Miriam J. Benkovitz, “emotional and sexual self-awareness was the liberating force in woman's self-awareness, her self-evaluation” in the eighteenth century, and was more important than feminist politics in establishing a sense of identity in many women. The increased freedom of choice in marriage led to an emotional awakening in women that was revolutionary; it was the internal force behind the feminist movement of the early nineteenth century and is perhaps the origin of what we understand to be modern womanhood.³⁴

Thus Fanny is left free to follow the ambitious text, and the erotic text has been appropriated, revised, or even subverted by Austen for her own uses. Fanny is rescued, as I said, not just by her own resistance, but by the fall of another woman who can be dispensed with—sacrificed, as it were, to the requirements of the erotic text. The erotic text is the subtext of this Bildungsroman and, in a sense, makes it possible. I would like to conclude with a passage from Nancy Miller's article mentioned earlier:

Women writers … are writers … for whom the “ambitious wish” … manifests itself as fantasy within another economy. The repressed content … [of women's fiction] would be, not erotic impulses but an impulse to power: a fantasy of power that would revise the social grammar in which women are never defined as subjects; a fantasy of power that disdains a sexual exchange in which women can participate only as objects of circulation … I am talking, of course, about the power of the weak.³⁵

Fanny Price's story, then, is clearly a “fantasy of power that would revise the social grammar in which women are never defined as subjects.” It is Austen's revenge on the masculine vision of the submissive ideal for a woman. The novel shows the author's resistance to the ideal of feminine virtue for the purpose of attracting and supporting men, since Fanny's heart is for no one's “use” but her own. This heroine, who has been schooled largely by suffering and deprivation, whose power is “the power of the weak,” does nevertheless retain an unseduceable selfhood. True, this “self” as defined in Fanny's story may ultimately be just one that can say no; autonomy may be largely negative, the ability to resist and to hold out for the desired prize, the redemption that comes from finally being chosen by Edmund. Nevertheless, there is a significant sense in which Fanny does preserve her mind from violation, her affections from coercion.

Notes

1. Kingsley Amis, “What Became of Jane Austen?” Spectator (4 October 1957), pp. 33-40.

2. See, for example, Marvin Mudrick, Jane Austen, Irony as Defense and Discovery (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952).

3. Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: a Study of Jane Austen's Novels (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).

4. Bernard J. Paris, Character and Conflict in Jane Austen's Novels, a Psychological Approach (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1978).

5. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 165 ff.

6. Tony Tanner, ed., Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (New York: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 8.

7. See, for example, B. C. Southam, ed., Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, a Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1976).

8. See especially Julia Prewitt Brown, Jane Austen's Novels, Social Change and Literary Form (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). She argues that the novel's emphasis on stability and other conservative eighteenth-century ideals is an aspect of the “Victorian anxieties” of the book in the face of the new secularism, the fear of revolution following the French Revolution, and contemporary threats to the traditions of the gentry.

9. Nancy K. Miller, “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction,” PMLA 96 (1981): 36-48.

10. My definition of the Bildungsroman derives largely from Jerome H. Buckley's Season of Youth: the Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), although I am aware that more recent feminist critics expand on his definition, contrasting the “novel of apprenticeship” (the kind of nineteenth-century novel dealt with by Buckley) with “the novel of awakening” which is more common in women's fiction, especially in the twentieth century. This is an important contrast made by Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirch and Elizabeth Langland, eds., The Voyage In, Fictions of Female Development (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1983).

11. Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine's Text; Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722-1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 153.

12. Miller, p. 153.

13. For a good discussion of the sexual politics of the book (although not in relationship to the Bildungsroman), see Leroy W. Smith, “Mansfield Park: The Revolt of the ‘Feminine’ Woman,” in David Monaghan, ed., Jane Austen in a Social Context (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1981).

14. Education novels such as Mrs. West's The Advantages of Education had dealt with childhood experience—but schematically, to prove the virtue of the heroine, not realistically, as Austen does.

15. Mansfield Park, in The Novels of Jane Austen ed., R. W. Chapman (Oxford University Press, 1923), 3: 15, 13, 14. All references are to this edition.

16. Avron Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park: An Essay in Critical Synthesis (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1967), p. 45.

17. Paris, p. 49.

18. Paris, p. 48.

19. An interesting parallel between Fanny's circumstances and Jane Austen's own has been spelled out by Janet Todd in Women's Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). Todd points out parallels between Edmund and Austen's favourite brother, Henry, who delayed taking orders to gain favor with his cousin, Eliza—who lived in the Austen household for a time and whom he eventually married. She notes obvious parallels between Fanny's jealousy of Mary Crawford and Jane Austen's “distrust of the exotic older cousin who enjoyed the precedence her title gave her, boasted of her resources and captivated Jane Austen's older brother.” The Bildungsroman frequently has roots in autobiography, but few readers have stressed the autobiographical sources for this novel.

20. Kenneth Moler, Jane Austen's Art of Allusion, (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), p. 124.

21. Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas and Robert A. Colby, Fiction with a Purpose: Major and Minor Nineteenth-Century Novels, (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1967).

22. Fleishman, pp. 71-72.

23. Paris, p. 32.

24. Butler, pp. 248-49.

25. Butler, p. 247.

26. This is an argument of Gilbert and Gubar, also, in The Madwoman in the Attic.

27. At least Maria does. Julia, who does not commit adultery, doesn’t suffer the same exclusion.

28. For this insight, I am indebted to an unpublished manuscript by A. K. Ramanujan.

29. An interesting avenue to explore, perhaps in most women's fiction, would be the use of the outsider or marginal figure as protagonist. See Lee R. Edwards, “The Labors of Psyche: Toward a Theory of Female Heroism,” Critical Inquiry, 6 (1979): 33-49.

30. Susan Gubar, “The ‘Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity,” Critical Inquiry, 8, no. 2 (Winter 1981), 244.

31. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

32. Cathy N. Davidson and E. M. Broner, eds., The Lost Tradition: Mother and Daughter in Literature (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980).

33. Brown, Jane Austen's Novels, pp. 14-15.

34. Brown, pp. 19-20. One might argue that it is Maria and Julia who truly assert themselves, who strike out for freedom of choice in marriage partners, and that it is Fanny who remains the unawakened character, choosing as she does Edmund, the safe “brother” to marry. But the novel goes deeper than their either/or choice of marriage for love or marriage for advancement. After all, we remember that Maria had first chosen to marry Rushworth for advancement, then to elope with Henry for love and that neither is a deeply considered choice. Also the original Fanny, the mother of the present Fanny Price, had married her sailor for love—and had disappeared into a welter of babies and poverty, with a drunken husband who could not provide for them. Her sister, Lady Bertram, on the other hand, had married for advancement—and disappeared into a life of inanity with her pug. So the novel doesn’t simply contrast marriage for love with marriage for advantage—but rather the “conscious” life (the ambitious text) with the “unconscious” life (the erotic text).

35. Miller, “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction,” pp. 41-42.