Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen

I caved to peer pressure and decided to re-read Mansfield Park as part of a friend's challenge to read the complete works of Jane Austen in a year. I wasn't particularly excited about reading it again, but that is mostly due to the fact that I have so many other things I want to read during the course of this year. If you don't count re-reads, I'm ridiculously far behind myself in terms of the number of books read in a given year. This is what happens, I guess, when one realizes that it has been nearly a decade since reading some of the greatest books of all time. This year's other re-reads include Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, Count Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, Jane Austen's Persuasion, and huge chunks of George Eliot's Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. I don't count re-reads in my reading spreadsheet, so these feats will remain undocumented for the time being.

What clinched my decision to go for Mansfield Park was Janeheiress' reminder that the first third of the book is rather boring. When reading it, it seems as if it could go on in that insipid way all the way to the end, and while I don't find Fanny Price an insipid heroine at all, I definitely think the first part of the book is.

And now, my opinion of Fanny. I am convinced that Fanny Price, more than almost any other heroine of great literature, was a daring feat on the part of her author. For someone to succeed so well in writing about someone who lived through so little action or adventure, who had little wit (or none), and whose character was defined by her refusal to fight against anyone who railroaded her, is a mark of genius. Fanny is the quintessential anti-heroine, because her one great heroic act is in remaining consistent to her principles when everyone around her tries to coerce, manipulate, and guilt her into doing things she knows are not right when she has no fair way of explaining herself.

I think that an anti-heroine (or anti-hero) might generally be considered someone like Michael Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge, or Lily Bart in The House of Mirth--people whose lives are defined by the flaws in their characters that make destruction impossible to avoid. In other words, the very opposite of a hero--because a hero is usually someone who learns and triumphs over their own character flaws and misfortunes. Fanny isn't like that. She reminds me a lot of the lovely character Farmer Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd. Both of them, in spite of their misfortunes, their unpopular steadiness of character and affection, their awkward status in their social circles, demand the affection of any honest reader because even though what is right isn't popular, and everyone tends to wish for adventure over moral uprightness, they triumph because they have so little to be ashamed of and so few regrets. And all this in spite of, not because of, the fact that they have not created their own difficulties. Fanny's difficulties are never vanquished; they don't even really disappear. The ending of the book, while satisfactory in every sense, really only confirms that her life was never meant to be remarkable, and that she would probably always suffer being overlooked and undervalued.

In our present-day mindset, we usually think that the only way to conquer difficulty is to either destroy circumstances or change them to our liking. We look for that in stories, because in spite of all the motivational speakers and motivational posters we are raised with, most of us know that in most situations, the only thing that will give us a victory is enduring a torturous event, or a torturous situation, as positively and proactively as possible. People who live in a fictional world often spend their entire lives dissatisfied with their lot, constantly on a quest for a cure or a quickfix or a life-altering miracle; mistakenly believing that persistence in dissatisfaction alone will change things. Single girls who wait around for Captain Moroni to ride up in shining armor on a white horse, sweeping them up in his saddle and riding off with her into the sunset; overweight people always latching on to the newest fad diet, or waiting for a pill that will get rid of all their excesses; low-level employees watching their superiors with jealousy, waiting for the next opportunity to make the boss see they're worth a promotion and a raise; poor people spending too much percentage of their salary on lottery tickets. We don't think in terms of the reality that some things just need to be suffered through, and sometimes that miracle fix will never come.

This is what makes Fanny Price remarkable. She recognized that even though she might not particularly relish her lot in life, she had to do her best to be reconciled to it. She didn't waste her energy on things she had no power to change; she never blamed anyone for the discomfort of her circumstances. She didn't conquer--she endured. And in doing so, she did come to a happy end, but it was a happy end consistent with the self-denying desires she had perfected by refusing to become bitter when people, or chance, did not distinguish her as anything special.