For all her reticence and awkwardness (she blushes more often than any other Austen heroine), Fanny has to be as stubborn and resourceful as any Brontë heroine. "Fond of Fanny," said her sister Cassandra. "Fanny is a delightful Character!" thought her brother Francis. Fanny, the only Austen heroine who is seen in childhood, is shaped by the compliance that is forced upon her.Īusten's own relations and friends perhaps grasped this better than later readers, for they did not seem disappointed to turn from Elizabeth to Fanny. Austen shows how character and circumstance are never completely distinct. Fanny is introduced into the Bertram house as an inferior – a poor relation who is being done a great kindness and must always be "sensible of her uncommon good fortune", as Mrs Norris puts it. "I can never be important to any one," is Fanny's heartfelt response when Edmund tells her she will be a valuable companion for her Aunt Norris, one of the most beautifully drawn sadists in all literature. The 2007 ITV version fearlessly cast Billie Piper as a put-upon Fanny who was clearly a wild child beneath the surface, her silence legible as unexpressed rebellion. Rozema claimed that her interpretation had been shaped by the work of feminist academics it certainly had little sanction from the novel. Patricia Rozema's 1999 film starred Frances O'Connor as a sharp-tongued Fanny who rode bareback through thunderstorms and was not averse to a snog with Henry Crawford. Modern discontent with Austen's heroine has been expressed clearly enough in the two most recent film adaptations of the novel. Kingsley Amis called Fanny "a monster of complacency and pride" concealed under "a cloak of cringing self-abasement". Marilyn Butler, whose book Jane Austen and the War of Ideas did much to establish the novelist's intellectual credentials, nevertheless conceded "that Fanny is a failure is widely agreed". "Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park," declared the great critic and Austen aficionado Lionel Trilling.
Even lovers of Austen's novels have their problems with Fanny Price. ‘It is as if Austen is daring her readers to stay with her' … Frances O'Connor as Fanny Price Photograph: Miramax/Everett /Rex
0 kommentar(er)
