Mansfield Park...the chase scenes, the lavender, the dew!

I don't know what to say about the Masterpiece Classic version of Mansfield Park. I've mentioned when talking about the feature movie that the character of heroine, Fanny Price, is a mouse who never roars. Seeing so many elements missing from the dramatization reminded me that the suspense in the novel is whether this painfully shy, unassertive woman will ever get the man she adores and the happiness that she deserves.

The 1999 motion picture resolved the problem of Fanny's passivity by reinventing her as a writer and assertive wit. Gillian Anderson's introduction The Masterpiece PBS version begins by suggesting that witty, hardened Mary Crawford in Mansfield is very much like Jane Austen herself--excuse me? Then she adds a bit regretfully that the actual heroine of Mansfield is Fanny Price, who has been always urged to be grateful.

This version of the story depicts Fanny as a sort of holy fool--with touseled blonde hair and the urge to play childish games on the lawn. This version doesn't go far into the threat hanging over Fanny--who lives with her relatives on sufferance. Fanny's primary persecutor-in-residence is the self-righteous Mrs. Norris, who never misses a chance to belittle Fanny. In this PBS version, Mrs. Norris is basically gutted like a trout--she has just a few lines.

The Masterpiece production perhaps did not have the budget to stage the episode where Fanny is returned to her impoverished family in Portsmouth after years of living a ladylike life with her rich Mansfield Park relatives. I'd better stop here. The primary realization I had watching this show--and missing Mrs. Norris's malevolent threats--was that Mrs. Norris is the name of the watch cat at Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter books. That must be a reference to the character in Mansfield Park.

Okay, okay, one more comment...what IS it with the insertion of a chase scene into Persuasion and now into Mansfield Park, where it seems even more forced--quick propose to her before the dew dries on the lavender!

Fanny Price, born to be mild

This past week, I was drawn back to re-read Mansfield Park after watching the beautiful but not-spectacularly-satisfying film adaptation written and directed by Patricia Rozema. The review below dislikes the movie. I liked the movie as a kind of meditation on Mansfield Park, but I missed the “real” heroine—Fanny Price as Austen wrote her.

One controversial aspect of the film was Rozema’s focus (it qualifies as a subplot) on what one character calls, “the people who pay for the party.” She takes pains to point out the ugliness of aristocratic families who derived most of their income from the slave trade and/or slave labor on colonial plantations. I think that added a reasonable dimension to the film and probably came close to expressing Austen’s actual views on slavery (see quote below).

In the DVD director’s comments segment, Rozema uses the word “prig” to refer to Fanny, and her solution is to give meek and mild Fanny a personality transplant. She uses material from Jane Austen’s own life – including impulsively accepting an unwise proposal followed by the next morning’s anguished withdrawal of that acceptance. That happened in real life to Jane Austen, but not to Fanny Price in the book Mansfield Park.

Rozema also has Fanny writing wildly satirical adventure tales, using excerpts from the actual stories a young Jane Austen wrote for her family’s amusement. In the movie Fanny indulges in Elizabeth-Bennet-style teasing of other characters. Fanny Price as Austen created her is missing from the film. Maybe she’s just not movie material, but I missed her.

It’s clear to me after last week's re-reading of Mansfield Park that Fanny Price had what we used to call an inferiority complex, and would nowadays call low self-esteem. Carol Shields’ 1998
salon article uses the words “wimpy, passive and “doormat” to describe poor Fanny, but Shields also gives a very keen perception of why and how she got there and how she manages to keep a light of spirit intact and burning. Raised to age 10 in degradation and poverty, then scooped up and dropped into an aristocratic household where she is daily hammered with demands to be grateful for every crumb that falls her way.

How could Fanny not be shy and reserved? She might not have survived if she was not very, very cautious, living in a snakes’ nest of indifference, neglect and cruelty. The life of the mind and spirit are her only refuge. The suspense in the book concerns Fanny’s survival. She can't go back to a life of grim poverty with her parents and 9 siblings in Portsmouth. This was not a time when women could work outside the home. The best she could hope for would be marriage or a kind of slavery as an attendant to a female relative. Fanny's hopes for happiness seem as impossible to the reader as they do to her throughout the book. (I also noticed as I never had in previous readings how precarious Fanny’s health was in the book and it brought home how close Austen was to her death at 41 when she wrote this book, which was published posthumously.)

In regard to Rozema’s strong (and graphic) statements about how owners of plantation in Antigua financed their lavish lifestyles through the use of slave labor, there is evidence that Austen would have agreed about this evil. The Republic of Pemberly website has a word search feature and I found the word "slave" used 3 times in the book. Once to refer to the actual slave trade, and twice to refer to women's situations.

In regards to the slavery theme, I found a scholarly, but interesting article tracing Jane Austen’s probable views on slavery, based on correspondence with her naval officer brother who hated having to protect the slaving ships, and a list of books and authors she reported loving, including prominent abolitionists.

One of the responsibilities of Commander Francis Austen was to engage in policing activities in the Americas, but he was authorized to intercept only English vessels. He reported on his deep revulsion not merely at the inhumane and heinous treatment of the African slave cargo on the Middle Passage, but also at the entire slave system, which he observed at first hand in other parts of the world as well. Commenting on the "harshness and despotism" of landholders and their managers in the West Indian context he writes that "slavery however it may be modified is still slavery." [footnote omitted] It is clear from this documentation that Francis Austen was, to his credit, truly appalled by the institution of slavery as such and, in this respect, as Southam points out (loc.cit.), he was considerably ahead of his time. In view of the attested close relationship Austen had with her sailor brothers, the elder Francis and the younger Charles, it is highly probable that she shared the former's unequivocal antipathy to the system.

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08-03-77 to 08-11-77 I read:

America in the Movies, Michael Wood

Michael Wood is evidently now teaching at Princeton and still publishing books and articles. Here’s his
review of The Simpsons movie

Inside Story, Brit Hume

High Stakes, Dick Francis

Note: My unfavorite Francis book
’07 note – I forget why I didn’t like this one. I’ve read every book I could find, and studied many of them to see how he achieves that effortless storytelling (I wish I could say I found the secret, but in any event it was time well spent.)

Who is Teddy Villanova?, Thomas Berger
Note: An esoteric cop story is a contradiction in terms

Thomas Berger info.


August 3, 2007 to August 11, 2007 I read:


Mansfield Park, Jane Austen