In Defense of Dullness or Why Fanny Price is My Favorite Austen Heroine

Yes, it's true: I do love Fanny, "the quiet and in some ways uninteresting" protagonist of Mansfield Park, more than any of Jane Austen's other heroines. Though I rush now to explain that the tag uninteresting is not Austen's reduction but one lifted from the first edition of The Cambridge Guide to English Literature (the author does not appear to be fond of either Fanny or this novel), I must acknowledge a certain truth to the label. Fanny's character is a study of the English Protestant good-girl ideal: sweet-tempered and duty-driven, morally and socially obedient; also shy, stammering, self-effacing; also doubtful, tender, awkward, and embarrassed—and anyone who has herself been marked as a good girl recognizes at least those last two descriptors as painfully accurate. Doesn't every good girl suffer over the vision of herself as good? Just the recollection of myself in high school—earnest, long-haired, and studious, boringly voted "Most Musical Girl," and prone to having my English papers held up as models to classmates with better things to do than write essays on Puritanical sermons—makes me wince. I wish I could run away from the memory of my good-girl self, even though every one of those embarrassing characteristics (except possibly the hair) has been essential to my life as a busy, engaged, and wondering adult.

But my future at forty made no dent in my present at seventeen. I was horribly conscious of my unfashionable clothes, my wretched skills at volleyball, my prissy reputation. And this is also Fanny's torment, time after time. She is "ashamed of herself," perennially impaled on the thorn of her imperfections. Compare her character at age nine, soon after arriving at Mansfield Park, her uncle's Northamptonshire estate, with her character at sixteen as she says good-bye to her uncle, who is leaving for Antigua on business:

Her elder cousins mortified her by reflections on her size, and abashed her by noticing her shyness; Miss Lee [the governess] wondered at her ignorance, and the maid-servants sneered at her clothes. . . .

Fanny's relief, and her consciousness of it, were quite equal to her cousins', but a more tender nature suggested that her feelings were ungrateful, and she really grieved because she could not grieve. . . . Would he only have smiled upon her and called her "my dear Fanny," . . . every former frown or cold address might have been forgotten. But he had ended his speech in a way to sink her into sad mortification, by adding, "If [your brother] William does come to Mansfield, I hope you may be able to convince him that the many years that have passed since you parted, have not been spent on your side entirely without improvement—though I fear he must find his sister at sixteen in some respects too much like his sister at ten." She cried bitterly over this reflection when her uncle was gone; and her cousins, on seeing her with red eyes, set her down as a hypocrite.

In a world of charismatics, of "sons very well looking, the daughters decidedly handsome, and all of them well-grown and forward of their age," how hard it is to accept oneself as clumsy and charmless. Yet this pang of knowing is also the key to Fanny's humanity. Among all the major characters in Mansfield Park, she is the only one who studies her own personality. Everyone else, even the almost-good Edmund, disregards himself and thus falls into traps and errors. The exception may be her much-loved brother, William, who is cheerful and warmhearted throughout the novel. Yet our understanding of his character is sketchy and one-sided: we learn more about William from Fanny than we do from William himself.

So in a way Fanny is a remarkable argument in favor of a particular brand of selfishness—a minute interest in one's own behavior, thoughts, and reactions. Not that she necessarily trusts her perceptions; she teeters and wavers and questions her motives. Her...