Fanny Price: “Is she solemn?—Is she queer?—Is she prudish?”

In Memory of Ralph W. Rader

In his 1973 landmark essay, “Defoe, Richardson, Joyce, and the Concept of Form in the Novel,” Ralph W. Rader articulated a concept of the novel form that has resonated with his students and novel critics and theorists since that time. For Rader, novels “present themselves to intuition as self-intelligible and self-justifying, that is, as forms the act of understanding which could be experienced as its own justification.”¹ In explaining this concept further, Rader describes what he calls the “general action model,” which

specifies works of fiction designed to develop and maximize concern for a character (or characters) along a line of development in which the ground of concern is a dynamically shifting contrast between the reader’s sense of the immediate and ultimate fate of the character (or characters) as compared with his (or their) immediate and ultimate desert, and to resolve this concern by a surprising but probable extension of the means used to raise it, so as to give the reader the greatest satisfaction in the ultimate fate of the character (or characters). To put it more simply, the author pits our induced sense of what will happen to a character against our induced sense of what we want to happen to him, our hopes against our fears, in order to give the greatest pleasure appropriate to their resolution.²

“The action model describes a work,” Rader says further, “which the reader at some level of consciousness must know from the outset is being shaped beneath its realistic surface to meet the requirements of desire.”³ As articulated, this “action model” would apply to most novels in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition, and it applies to none more obviously than to the novels of Jane Austen.

Austen usually brings her novels to tidy, if somewhat frustrating, conclusions. Sense and Sensibility (1811) ends with both sisters marrying, even if no one is fully persuaded that Brandon is right for Marianne; and in the other novels, the closure is clear, even if peremptory. But in Mansfield Park (1814), especially for twenty-first-century readers, there is a huge obstacle to narrative closure at the end of the novel. That difficulty involves Fanny Price herself. Fanny Price is of course central to the structure of the novel, just as her fate is central to the resolution of the plot. In each of her novels, Austen molds her central characters so carefully that they carry the burden of plot and resolution exactly as she intends: this is true of Catherine Morland, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Elizabeth and Jane Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot. It must also be true of Fanny Price, even if she challenges our sympathies in various ways. Why is Fanny so timid and self-effacing? Why so relentlessly moral and so unrelievedly judgmental? What is the function of a character who seems at times spineless, even though we know she has a spine that is perhaps too rigid? Joyce Jenkins represents this school of response to Fanny when she says, “there are at least three reasons for thinking that Fanny is not to be taken as a moral ideal in spite of her purity of principle. First, her principles may be good, but her sentiments are suspect. Second, she is a model of passivity and inaction. Third, she is a rule-governed wet blanket.”⁴ Of course, this is how other characters in the novel think of Fanny too. By seeing her mind and understanding her emotion, are we not given a different perspective?

Critics point to Austen’s astonishingly effective handling of the details of plot and her rich evocation of character. For Janet Todd, the key to Austen’s “universal popularity” is “her ability to create the illusion of psychologically believable and self-reflecting characters.”⁵ Rader argues that Austen’s novels are popular also because they adhere to what he calls “Johnson’s Rule.” He finds this rule in Rambler 4 (March 31, 1750), where Samuel Johnson says: “In narratives, where historical veracity has no place, I...