Fanny Price: Love, Guilt, and Hysteria at Mansfield Park

2. 1775-1817 • Enjoyed Hampshire, then moved to Bath in 1801 • Father died in 1805 • Fell tragically in love • Engaged but broke it off the next day to Harris Bigg Wither • 1809 moved to Chawton with her brother Edward’s estate. There rewrote early novels and competed the others. • Died from Addison’s Disease in 1817 

3. Mansfield Park 1814 • Characters: Fanny Price, her wealthy uncle and aunt, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram; abused by her other aunt, Mrs. Norris; Bertram daughters, Maria and Julia, sons Tom and Edmund;

4. Lionel Trilling Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park.

5. “Confusions of guilt and complications of evil: hysteria and the high price of love at Mansfield Park” – Anna Mae Duane Lionel Trilling, perhaps the most famous commentator on Fanny's power to displease, blames Fanny's ill health for our discomfort with her. In the forty-five years since Trilling published his essay, critics have steadily reinforced the notion that Fanny's debility is a disturbing force--not by their focus on her sickliness, but through their neglect of it. As I will demonstrate, reading Mansfield Park as a reassuring endorsement of conservatism requires either ignoring or dismissing Fanny's sickly body and the critique it offers of Mansfield's family system.

6. Duane In this essay, I want to explore how Austen manipulates the narrative disjunctions caused by bestowing a happy ending on an enfeebled martyr-figure. Trilling's analysis, I suggest, was only partially correct. While it is indeed Fanny's illness that makes her a difficult heroine, that difficulty arises from her escape from martyrdom, not her embrace of it. More specifically, I suggest that Fanny makes us uncomfortable because her experience fuses fear and pain to the autonomous love novels are supposed to celebrate. Austen's decision to align physical suffering with romantic success in an English gentry household raises a series of questions about the reciprocity between female desire and self-deprecation as manifested through Mansfield's genteel ethos of gratitude and good manners. As a heroine who flourishes through weakness and achieves happiness through suffering, Fanny articulates a deeply diseased construction of both female desire and feminine desirability.

7. With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer), the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease – because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses. Susan Sontag - Illness as Metaphor 1978

8. “Hysteria” – Gk. hystery – “womb” often attached to women Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893) – real events can serve as a trigger – “provoking agents”, but hysteria is hereditary Freud – not only women (1869) product of environment traumatic sexual event in childhood