'Your Complexion Is So Improved!": A Diagnosis of Fanny Price's "Dis-ease"

'Your Complexion Is So Improved!": A Diagnosis of Fanny Price's "Dis-ease" Akiko Takei The frailty of Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, is notorious. Because ofher physical weakness, she has been considered Austen's least likable and most incomprehensible heroine. In scholarly studies of this novel, critics have contrasted Fanny with Austen's other heroines, often attributing her weakness to psychosomatic factors. Lionel Trilling writes that "Fanny Price is overfly virtuous and consciouslyvirtuous" and diat "Fanny's debility becomes die more striking when we consider that no quality ofthe heroine of PrideandPrejudiceis more appealing than her physical energy."1John Wiltshire observes that "Fanny Price's stressors include alienation from a (minimally) supportive family background, inferior social status, her consciousness ofwhich is repeatedly re-enforced, and an affection which is socially impermissible. The external disconfirming experience is replicated by her internal self-criticism. These stresses are driven back into and played out in her body."2 Certainly, Fanny seems less attractive than Elizabedi Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, and her frailty is intimately coupled widi her sense ofinferiority in her 1 Lionel Trilling, "Mansfield Park," in The Opponng Self: Nine Essays in Criticism (London: Seeker, 1955), 212. 2 John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body: "The Picture ofHealth" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 72. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 17, Number 4,JuIy 2005 684 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION wealthy adoptive family. Nonetheless, ifwe read hervarious symptoms alongside medical works of the period, the grounds for Fanny's exceptional lack of buoyancy can be found in a recognized disease, chlorosis, which modern medicine sees as a form of iron-deficiency anemia. Like smallpox, chlorosis has been eradicated, but it was considered common in adolescent girls in the eighteendi and nineteendi centuries. Its most easily recognizable symptom was a pale complexion , as suggested by its popular names "the virgin's disease" and "green sickness." Mansfield Park focuses on Fanny's history from the age of sixteen to nearly nineteen, from puberty to the beginning of adultiiood, the very age thought most vulnerable to this disease. Let me begin die presentation ofthis tentative theory by examining a passage from volume 2, chapter 3, where Edmund Bertram reports Sir Thomas Bertram's admiration: 'Your uncle diinks you very pretty, dear Fanny .... Your uncle never did admire you till now—and now he does. Your complexion is so improved!—and you have gained so much countenance!"3 This comment hints that Fanny's complexion has been so bad as to impair her looks. In fact, her waxen complexion is repeatedly referred to in the novel, from girlhood, when she is described as having "no glow of complexion" (12), to Henry Crawford 's observation that her complexion is "less blooming than it ought to be" (409-10). The most likely contemporary diagnosis of her paleness would be chlorosis, a disease closely connected widi women's sexuality. Reading Fanny as chlorotic opens die possibility of a new perspective on not only Fanny's character but also on Austen's views on the awakening of women's sexuality and the management of women's health. Chlorosis, popularly known as the white fever, the virgin's disease, or the love fever, was traditionally understood to be a disease peculiar to young women, especially girls in puberty. Edward Shorter's study shows that the Greeks observed various symptoms in young women, such as a greenish complexion, suppressed menses, and pica—a cravingfor inedible substances, commonly clay and soil.4 The Hippocratic theory was that menstruation was hampered by sexual abstinence; as a result, superfluous blood compressed the heart and diaphragm. In the worst cases, Hippocrates wrote, the patients would die, and, as a cure, he recommended marriage. In the modern period, Johann 3 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814), vol. 2 in The Novels ofJane Austen, 6 vols., ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 197-98. References are to diis edition. 4 Edward Shorter, A History ofWomen's Bodies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 250. "YOUR COMPLEXION IS SO IMPROVED!" 685 Lange called it "morbus virgineus," die disease of virgins, and gave a clear description in 1554.5 In 1615, Jean Varandal, a professor at Montpellier, invented the term "chlorosis...