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- OMNIA - Europe's Culture in One Place
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- Fanny and the Servant Problem
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Norris is even more hostile to her than to Dr. Grant, complaining angrily and repeatedly about Mrs. None of these things actually harms Mrs. Norris in the least. The key to her resentment is the size of Mrs. By her expansive style of housekeeping the modestly-dowered Mrs. Grant is stepping out of her proper sphere, aspiring to be a great lady. She is threatening the social order in ways that Dr. Grant does not 31, Another example, having to do with Mrs. She professes great concern for the old coachman, but we never see it in operation, and probably it is imaginary. Similarly, she approves of Mrs.
Having in her youth had the prestige of being the oldest daughter, she probably enjoyed the power over her sisters given her by her birthright as well as by her greater energy, and expected to marry first and marry well. By her own lights she is virtually a failure, yet she is disinclined to see this fact as due to any fault of her own.
Fanny becomes the scapegoat upon whom she vents this accumulated resentment McMaster In theological language, she projects onto Fanny her self-hatred for having failed to gain the high favor of the false gods Rank and Wealth that the Bertrams enjoy.
OMNIA - Europe's Culture in One Place
Norris lives so completely in her projections that she knows none of her nieces. Fanny, by contrast, is brought into the family only to be kept out of its text and relegated to the margins, treated like a perfidious servant with designs on the inheritance. Norris protests and undermines.
Norris does not know her own heart any more than those of her nieces. Throughout the story, in almost every utterance, she is at least partially lying, muddying the waters of her own mind as well as those of the other family members. Her decisions are hard to pinpoint, being so habitual that they are apparently done half-consciously or even unconsciously. But there is at least one passage of free indirect speech in which the narrator catches her in a deliberate lie.
The aunt declares that she wants the indulgence of accompanying Fanny and William to Portsmouth to see her poor dear sister Price and to give the young people the benefit of her older head whereas in fact she probably wants to bully both Fannys. But then, recalling that she will have to pay for her return fare, she announces her change of mind as motivated by a conviction that she is indispensible to her sister and Sir Thomas.
We may assume that she will soon forget that the expense had any part in her motivation. The central question is, of course, whether Mrs. It seems very unlikely. Her apparent siege-mentality strongly suggests that she has long been aware of the criticisms of class oppression and amassed wealth which were in the air in the late eighteenth century. Thus, although her prejudiced actions are mostly half-conscious, they are in the realm of the deliberate. We may doubt that Miss Ward with her spirit of activity spent much time reading Burns or Goldsmith or Cowper, but she could not have missed such widespread themes as the idealization of the simple life in picturesque cottages as in Sense and Sensibility , talk of noble savages and childish innocence, activity aimed at ameliorating the suffering of prisoners and the poor, and the like.
Much of this interest was of course the Lady Bountiful kind of top-down charity that Mrs. Norris applauded and thought to enact with her Fanny-project, but it included serious claims of human dignity and equality that she would not applaud. But trends were favorable to her mindset. From the time of the Reign of Terror in and throughout the years of the Napoleonic wars, reaction against concepts of equality and fraternity was widespread in England, increasing during the time of the main action of the novel, which takes place either in Chapman or Southam For nearly two decades, Mrs.
Norris would have heard much to support her in dismissing such odious ideas. Generalizations aside, one ongoing challenge to her class prejudices comes in the person of Fanny herself with her superior qualities. Norris rejects this evidence. For years she receives no effective challenge from the Bertrams. Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, who share Mrs. At length, in the play-production scene in which Mrs. Even though he does not know about her abusiveness in that scene, she might have remembered her words to Fanny and felt some shame.
A critical and stunning challenge to Mrs. With the brilliant marriage Mrs. But she refuses; instead, she proceeds to rewrite the past.
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Not only does the projection on Fanny remain intact as well, Mrs. Norris is ready with a further projection on Susan. When a changed Sir Thomas refuses to accept her proposal, she goes into exile with Maria. Ironically, the worst harm Mrs. Norris could not teach Maria or Julia what she had never learned herself. Unintentionally she has worked to prevent Maria from attaining her full potential as a human being in loving relation to others.
The golden idols Rank and Wealth, shown up for what they are, have betrayed Mrs. Norris in the act of betraying Maria, whom she taught to venerate them. Of course, Maria was betrayed not only by her deities but by her wrongheaded quest for fulfillment in love. But rather than undergoing the pain of self-excoriation and the loss of her identity by swearing off the service of her false gods, Mrs Norris continues to cling to their broken images and to their world of illusions, lies, and death-in-life.
Her scope for doing evil is now much more closely contained, limited as it is to Maria. We may guess that she will do her utmost to keep Maria ignorant of her own heart and clinging to the same death-dealing illusions. Unlike Mrs. Norris, who is a thoroughgoing villain, Sir Thomas is a morally ambiguous character: benign yet hard, of good will yet unconsciously cruel, home-loving and solicitous yet failing his family out of blindness, domination, and materialism.
His visible failings are closely linked to his class and gender prejudices. About how his slaveholding affects him we know little, but can make some responsible guesses. First, his class prejudice. The qualification is, of course, that he sees the unwisdom of her flatterires and excessive indulgence, and tries to compensate by his own stiffness—another cause of the catastrophe. It is also with his consent, as his commisioned agent, that Mrs. Norris puts Fanny in her place with such cruelty. Norris, asking for her help The home-loving Sir Thomas cannot have missed hearing Mrs.
Fanny and the Servant Problem
Norris with no delicacy at all repeatedly clubbing into Fanny the remembrance that she is not a Miss Bertram, but he sees no problem, makes no objection. For a long time he is of one mind with Mrs. Having approved her abuse of Fanny for six years, he is also responsible for its continuation in his two-year absence. After his return, beginning to value his family more, he acknowledges that the aunt has carried her principle too far in depriving Fanny of a fire, but asserts that in treating Fanny as an inferior, Mrs.
Norris was being her friend. But he is deceiving himself. In fact, Sir Thomas acknowledges that Mrs. But that the attempt does not finally succeed may owe something to his willingness to undergo metanoia. At length, in gladly affirming Fanny as his cherished daughter, fully a Bertram, he tacitly or explicitly, we are not told apologizes to her for his sins of class prejudice, and makes amends with frequent visits. We may assume she represents his ideal woman.
Maria Ward was not afflicted with that independence of spirit which Sir Thomas finds so disgusting in young women. On the rare occasions when they have opposite wishes about a course of action he proposes, she mildly submits.
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Contributing so profoundly to the stunting of a human being is morally wrong, but there is no warning signal of pain when stunting is just what the other wants. Of even lower vitality than Fanny, Lady Bertram spends her days nicely dressed on a sofa doing needlework or dozing, untroubled by any felt obligation to exert herself to run her household or guide her children mentally or morally. Of the vacuous lifestyle of his child-woman, leading to eventual catastrophe for her daughter, Sir Thomas is the enabler.
The key term here is modesty. As Claudia Johnson shows in her excellent analysis, propriety prohibited a well-bred lady from displaying herself on the stage, and, especially, from portraying feelings or actions out of keeping with her place. She was surely expressing his training when she reflected that the situation of Agatha the unwed mother, and the assertive language of Amelia as suitor of her beloved, were conspicuously unfit to be expressed by any woman of modesty. Effacing themselves, women were to leave all major initiative, all important decisions to their male guardians, who could be counted on to see to their best interests.
The gender-based stunting to which Sir Thomas has apparently subjected Fanny ever since her coming to Mansfield becomes explicit in his initial incredulity and rising wrath when he learns of her refusal of Henry Crawford. He had, he says, formed a very favorable opinion of her since his return. He had thought her free from that disgusting and offensive willfulness of temper and independence of spirit so prevalent among young women in modern days. His verbal battering culminates with an accusation of ingratitude, cruelly effective, for Fanny has hardly begun to clear up the moral confusion of the past seven years.
He does not expect so frail a creature to hold her ground.
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Showing more inner strength than anyone might have expected, Fanny does hold her ground. Keeping an adult who is committed to integrity mentally child-sized—the foot-binding of the soul—means doing violence to reality at some points, and if insisted upon, must lead to dishonesty. He orders a fire. He half-protects her from Mrs. He offers her the happy prospect of a visit home which will give her more time with William, but with an intention closer to blackmail, or perhaps penal transportation, than to benevolence Lew The narrator tells us that he was a truly anxious parent, one who has unwisely chosen a severe demeanor toward his daughters—a statement that is at least a half-truth, for he has been ambivalent all along.