Netflix’s Persuasion makes me want to re-read Mansfield Park

In recent days, I’ve had a few friends ask whether I’m planning to watch the Netflix Persuasion. Like many of us who have read all of Jane Austen’s novels multiple times,* Persuasion is my favorite. Or at least sometimes it is my favorite. But somehow all of this talk about the latest apparently mediocre Persuasion adaptation is just making me want to re-read Mansfield Park.

Thinking about Persuasion naturally led me to reflect on Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park, the other two Austen novels that seem to emerge into popular culture less frequently and favorably than the big three: Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. Northanger Abbey is, for me, in a Jane Austen category of its own, but Persuasion and Mansfield Park have a thematic relationship in my personal classification system: their respective heroines Anne Elliot and Fanny Price have a lot in common.

If Pride and Prejudice is prosecco, Persuasion is a drinking chocolate: slow, warming, and dense with meaning. It is also satisfying enough to make the reading worthwhile. What then of Mansfield Park, Austen’s least sparkling novel?

It’s not even a beverage, but thick edgy sweet biting molasses. When I think Mansfield Park, I can smell suffering, and it’s an inescapable cloyingly sweet burnt and bitter miasma emanating from a morally rotten core. (Sorry, molasses.) The slave trade serves as a foundation of the wealth in the novel. As Marsha Huff’s “Sir Thomas Bertram and the Slave Trade” notes, “The first readers of the novel, published in 1814, would have assumed that Sir Thomas Bertram’s business in Antigua was a sugar plantation worked by enslaved people, as were all West Indian enterprises.” Though somewhat obscured by charades and shrubberies, and by the vivacious Mary Crawford, it’s hard not to read the novel with oppression on the mind given the deep background slavery and the overtly troubling treatment of the novel’s heroine.

No wonder it is what the Jane Austen Society of North America characterizes as Austen’s “‘problem’ novel.”

Since Austen is both one of the most well-known nineteenth century “women’s fiction” authors and her novels are frequently retold in various adaptations, her heroines are some of the most widely recognized nineteenth century women. I have the sense that Fanny Price is the easiest to forget.

If Persuasion’s Anne is slow to realize her own mind, slow to claim agency, Fanny’s reluctance and inability to do so is greater. When I read that the Netflix adaptation of Persuasion is understood to be off track because of the way Anne “has been given a spunky and outspoken persona absent from her character in the book” as CBR puts it, I can’t help but wonder what a Netflix adaptation in the same vein would do with Fanny. Her need for an entirely new, out-of-character re-write is far more desperate than Anne’s. If you haven’t yet read Mansfield Park or need a reminder, think of Fanny as a pathetic, more put-upon version of Pride and Prejudice's Charlotte Lucas, for whom things are bad enough that she is condemned by her place in life to willingly marry herself to perhaps the least appealing bachelor in a novel that includes the predatory villain George Wickham. At least Charlotte knows something of what she is trading for security.

Fanny is widely understood as too weak to be interesting due to such characterizations as this: “She had been quite overlooked by her cousins; and as her own opinion of her claims on Sir Thomas’s affection was much too humble to give her any idea of classing herself with his children, she was glad to remain behind and gain a little breathing-time” (Chapter XIX). She is not assertive, she does not recognize her own worth, and she does not expect attention. She is, as she puts it, “graver than other people” (Chapter XXI).

Of course she is. Nothing about Fanny’s circumstances builds her agency and everything about it conspires to make her “grave.”

Edmund, the brother with whom Fanny is in love without hope, has a suggestion about how she should ingratiate herself to her uncle. Her part in the conversation shows her to be analyzing everyone’s probable responses, hyperaware of the potential for criticism of herself: “‘Your uncle is disposed to be pleased with you in every respect; and I only wish you would talk to him more. You are one of those who are too silent in the evening circle.’ “But I do talk to him more than I used. I am sure I do. Did you not hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?’” The conversation continues and she defends herself by explaining why she did not pursue the conversation: “And while my cousins were sitting by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like—I though it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel” (Chapter XXI). Fanny’s attempt at self-defense is all the more painful because she has no appreciation of the unfairness of her situation. She understands herself to be trapped in this situation, with no way to win, but she does not recognize that she has been trapped by others whose control she cannot escape. In the context of the novel, her concerns make perfect sense. Her upbringing since age ten has been with a family determined that she should know her place and eager to scapegoat her.

Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price may not be a sparkling character, but she is a survivor. Her response to this impossible situation is intriguing. Lavish appreciation on characters like the witty, energetic, Elizabeth Bennet with her well developed sense of agency, but save some love for Fanny. She deserves it.

• Note: Though I’ve read all of Austen’s novels multiple times, I haven’t read them recently enough to be confident of accuracy with regard to the details. Specific comparison is not what this is about. What I’m exploring here is my memory of the books, my memory of the adaptations I’ve seen, of a range of criticism I’ve read, and my sense of the cultural role of the books, including the way they serve as indexes of societal priorities.