9. Mansfield Park -- Ever seen Whit Stillman's Metropolitan? You know that scene in which Tom and Audrey argue over Mansfield Park, offering their opinions on the book? I'm with Tom. All the way. Fanny is a self-righteous, egotistical goody-two-shoes who is so caught up in herself and her irrational hatred of Miss Crawford that any sympathetic traits she may have become invisible. When Fanny gets away from Mansfield and sees her birth family, the story shows the promise of what could have been had Austen chosen a different route and followed that family and dealt with Fanny's sense of class and superiority. Unfortunately, the story soon goes back to Mansfield for a finale that left a very bad taste in my mouth.
I hated Mansfield Park when I first read it at age 18 in 1977/1978. I had already read P&P and Emma by that point, but didn't read another book by Austen until the mid-1990s, which is when Austenmania really took hold. Yes, MP had left that bad a taste in my mouth.
But then I re-read it in anticipation of the 1999 movie (which was, IMO, such an abomination that it is the only Austen adaptation that I flatly refuse to own). Anyway, I was 40 in 1999 and this time, I absolutely loved it. There are parts of it that are laugh-out-loud funny (check out Austen's various comments about Mrs. Norris). As for Fanny being a stick-in-the-mud, I most sincerely beg to differ. She has, as I have said before, a spine of stainless steel. She runs rings around Elizabeth Bennet as a judge of character. In short, if Fanny doesn't like or trust someone, that person will end up not being worth liking or trusting. Fanny stands up to her uncle and refuses to marry Henry Crawford. It takes true intestinal fortitude to tell someone who has a lot of power over her that she will not obey him. How does that make her a weakling? I would submit that it's just the opposite -- Fanny has a lot of inner strength which is, in this book, more important than physical strength. Maria Bertram is perfectly healthy physically, but she proves herself to be weak morally. She's engaged to a man just for his money and then flirts with Henry to make her own sister jealous, marries the rich guy, dumps him for a roll in the hay with Henry and then gets dumped herself and has to spend the rest of her life with Mrs. Norris. She deserves it.
MP is, to me at least, a story about appearance over substance. The Crawfords have all the appearance, and Fanny has all the substance. Edmund who, like most of us, is somewhere in the middle, falls for Mary, and it does take him a while to realize that she is as shallow as the kiddie pool. She sneers at his vocation for the clergy and even wishes that his brother would die. How does that make Fanny's dislike of her irrational? Mary Crawford would make a terrible clergyman's wife, and Edmund really does want to be a clergyman. As a younger son, he could have chosen the military or the law instead, but he chose the clergy. Fanny, on the other hand, would be an excellent clergyman's wife. She has empathy and compassion, two qualities which you appear to dismiss as unimportant. I, however, do not.
I can't think that Fanny and I would be friends because we don't have much in common, but she is a better person than most of us.
As an aside, Metropolitan is an all-time favorite movie.
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