#there is an excellent line about how Mrs. Price can't buy susan off with maternal love

[bethanydelleman]

Fanny at Portsmouth

One of the biggest complaints that people have about Fanny is that she is judgey. And to be fair, she is, but she has become that way because she’s an abused child who is terrified to break a rule and be banished from the house/education/company that she has been told is the greatest single blessing that poor, unworthy her will ever receive. And also to be fair to her, everyone around her is a selfish jerk, at the very least. Elinor Dashwood is similarly judgey to Fanny but I think the people she is judgemental towards are more obviously flawed, maybe? It is also a bit later in the book. Both of them also tend to be internally judgemental, they rarely tell people what they think.

The culmination of Fanny’s judgey-ness, to those who dislike her for it, is displayed on her visit home. However, I don’t think the impression we are supposed to have is that Fanny is sitting there thinking her family is awful. It’s more like Fanny very excitedly went home and hoped to love her family and be loved back, and she was utterly disappointed:

Fanny could not conceal it from herself, in almost every respect the very reverse of what she could have wished. It was the abode of noise, disorder, and impropriety. Nobody was in their right place, nothing was done as it ought to be. She could not respect her parents as she had hoped.

Much of all this Fanny could not but be sensible of. She might scruple to make use of the words, but she must and did feel that her mother was a partial, ill-judging parent, a dawdle, a slattern, who neither taught nor restrained her children, whose house was the scene of mismanagement and discomfort from beginning to end, and who had no talent, no conversation, no affection towards herself; no curiosity to know her better, no desire of her friendship, and no inclination for her company that could lessen her sense of such feelings.

Fanny was very anxious to be useful, and not to appear above her home

The narrator emphasises that Fanny does not want to feel this way. She wants to respect her parents, she wants to be loved by her siblings, she wants to feel at home (I would go so far as to say she almost needs it), but she cannot conceal the truth even from herself. The truth is that her mother and father hardly care if she is alive or dead. Her siblings, except Susan, don’t care about her at all and will not let her win their affections. There is nothing Fanny can do. And this is despite Fanny trying her very best to be helpful to them.

I always feel somewhat ambivalent about Fanny taking Susan to Mansfield with her, in full understanding that Mrs. Norris is still there, because 1. why is Mansfield so great and 2. it almost feels like brain drain. Susan is the only person at home judging rightly and trying to oppose her mother’s spoiling of Betsey. However as Fanny observes, Susan is almost completely ineffective (she’s been trying to get the silver knife for two years) and she is also unloved by her mother. To Fanny, Mansfield is better than Portsmouth, and I think she’s probably objectively correct, so I guess I’m okay with it.

Last point, is it fair to blame Mrs. Price for her neglect of Fanny and the state of her house when she has so many children and lives in relative poverty? I think it is fair to judge her for not even loving her daughters. As the narrator notes: “The instinct of nature was soon satisfied, and Mrs. Price’s attachment had no other source. Her heart and her time were already quite full; she had neither leisure nor affection to bestow on Fanny. Her daughters never had been much to her.” We never hear that Mrs. Price even writes to her eldest daughter, who has been gone for 8 years. She has been unfairly withholding a knife which Mary bequeathed to Susan for two years because Betsey wants it. It doesn’t have anything to do with poverty, Mrs. Price plays favourites and pointedly does not love her elder daughters any more than the bare minimum required of her by nature. 

As for some of the other faults, I doubt Mrs. Price could hire a servant as good as the Mansfield ones because there is more prestige in working there than for a poor sailor in Portsmouth, so that may be hard to fix for anyone. I get the feeling that even after around twenty years of this life, Mrs. Price has no idea what she is doing or how to do it better. But she also did marry to disoblige her family and has to deal with the consequences. I think this sentence really sums up the problem and also contains my favourite Austen phrase “slow bustle”

Her days were spent in a kind of slow bustle; all was busy without getting on, always behindhand and lamenting it, without altering her ways; wishing to be an economist, without contrivance or regularity; dissatisfied with her servants, without skill to make them better, and whether helping, or reprimanding, or indulging them, without any power of engaging their respect.

So to sum up, Fanny can be internally judgemental, but narrator makes it pretty clear that her opinion of her family in Portsmouth is what anyone would be forced to think. And without any love from her parents, Fanny cannot help but clearly see their faults.

#mansfield park #fanny defence #fanny price #mrs. price #portsmouth #slow bustle #there is an excellent line about how Mrs. Price can't buy susan off with maternal love #susan price #jane austen #cannot help but judge #that place just sounds so gross