Now that I completed my large essay for class, I can finally buckle down and catch up on my leisure reading, just in time for summer! But first, a few catch-up reviews on books I had read over the past couple weeks, but didn’t get a chance to write about due to being too busy.
Those who’ve been following my reviews probably know that I’m a huge Jane Austen fan. Since I’m studying British Literature in school, many of my classes will of course cover Austen’s works, which is why I’ve been re-reading all of her novels over the past couple years. This time around, I re-read Mansfield Park and I will be honest in saying that I struggled quite intensely with how to rate this one (specifically, should I give it 5 stars or 4.5 stars?).
On the one hand, this IS my all-time favorite author Jane Austen – call me biased, but I feel like all her novels deserve 5 stars just based on the sheer complexity and nuance of her writing. On the other hand, MP is my least favorite of Austen’s novels, and the one that actually makes me angriest whenever I read/re-read it.
One of the things I’ve always loved about Austen is her ironic wit – she writes with a sardonic sense of humor that renders her novels funny, but in a subtle, inimitably nuanced way. With MP however, Austen went in a slightly different direction in that she seemed to tone down the satiric humor quite a bit, which had the effect of dialing up the overall “wretchedness” of the characters. What I mean by this is that in most of her novels, Austen uses humor (albeit subtly) to clever balance out her characters’ follies and vices, which still achieves the ‘cautionary tale’ effect but makes the characters more tolerable and less annoying. In other words, the mean and nasty (and generally deplorable) characters come across as less mean and nasty (and less deplorable) because the other more sensible characters in the story keep the follies of these characters in check. Think Mr. Woodhouse in Emma (whose hypochondriac ramblings the people around him pretend to indulge, but in reality, push back upon) or Lady Catherine in P&P (who gets ‘put in her place’ by both Darcy and Elizabeth and different points in the novel). Basically, with these characters, because they are so heavily caricatured and made fun of, their ridiculousness becomes obvious and they end up making me laugh, which also makes their unlikability less strong.
In MP, unlike the other novels, the nasty characters are allowed to ‘run amok’ so to speak and rarely, if ever, get put in their places. Aunt Norris, for example, is allowed to say all sorts of nasty things to Fanny Price and no one in the Bertram family (not even Fanny’s biggest defender Edmund) ever bothers to refute her or call her out for being abusive (I’ve seen Aunt Norris often described as a ‘bully’ but I personally feel that’s sugarcoating what she truly is: an abuser through and through). Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram are also awful, but in different ways. While it’s true that Austen does utilize her signature wit to describe these characters in a at various points in the novel, the sarcasm is relatively mild compared to her other works.
And yes, like many readers, I had an issue with Edmund and Fanny as the main couple in this story, as it honestly wasn’t convincing and I honestly did not feel that Edmund was worth Fanny ‘pining’ over for the entirety of the novel. With that said, I’m probably one of the few readers who does not ‘hate’ Fanny Price – sure, she is very different from Austen’s other heroines: she is meek, obedient, afraid to speak her mind, and self-effacing to the point of being annoying (there were multiple times where I wanted to shake her and tell her to stop putting herself down) – but when I think about the way the Bertram family treated her (subjecting her to constant verbal abuse and tamping down her confidence at every opportunity), it made perfect sense to me why Fanny’s personality turned out the way it did. Instead of disliking Fanny, I felt sorry for her, and couldn’t help thinking that, if she had been raised under different circumstances, perhaps she would’ve turned out differently.
As I mentioned earlier, MP may be my least favorite of Austen’s novels, but it is still a brilliantly written one that is well-worth reading, especially for serious Austen aficionados like myself. While definitely less charming than P&P (which was intentional on Austen’s part, as she famously thought P&P was too “bright and sparkling,” so her later novels focused on still being comedic but more serious), it’s just as thoughtfully written, with endless angles to explore that only become apparent upon re-reading.
