Surprised by Beauty: Fanny Price and Anne Elliot

From an article by Dr. Kathleen Sullivan on the Benedictine College Media & Culture website, discussing Jane Austen's Mansfield Park:

[When Henry Crawford has set himself the challenge of making Fanny Price, the novel's heroine fall in love with him just for the fun of it and is startled by the good sense of one of her remarks,] "he begins to see her in a new light.":

This light shines more brightly when Fanny’s older brother William, on leave from the Navy, visits Mansfield Park. Animated by affection for her brother, “the glow of Fanny’s cheek, the brightness of her eye, the deep interest, the absorbed attention … was a picture which Henry Crawford had moral taste enough to value. … [He] was as much struck with it as any” (Austen 159). Henry is struck by the beauty of a sister’s selfless love for her brother; he is moved by Fanny’s fitting and right admiration of William’s courage and other virtues. At this moment, Henry realizes that Fanny’s beauty resides not in her physical traits but in her character and heart. An epiphany occurs to Henry; Austen’s narrator writes of his realization: “She had feeling, genuine feeling. It would something to be loved by such a girl. … She interested him more than he had foreseen” (159). The more he observes her, the more he respects her “steadiness and regularity of conduct,” her “high notion of honour,” her “observance of decorum,” and her “faith and integrity” (199). This encounter with beauty – the visible form of the good[6] – moves Henry’s heart in a surprising way; soon enough, he realizes he has fallen in love with her. Tony Tanner writes that Henry “finds he is seriously attracted to [Fanny], drawn … by a quality and depth of sincerity he has never known” (Tanner 154). Although initially aiming to wound Fanny’s heart in a temporary acting role as amusement for himself, Henry Crawford surprisingly chooses to take on a permanent role: he decides to propose marriage to her.[7]

This reminded me of a passage in Chapter XII from Persuasion, in which a transformation has taken place in Anne Elliot, and her erstwhile suitor, Captain Wentworth, notices:

When they came to the steps, leading upwards from the beach, a gentleman, at the same moment preparing to come down, politely drew back, and stopped to give them way. They ascended and passed him; and as they passed, Anne’s face caught his eye, and he looked at her with a degree of earnest admiration, which she could not be insensible of. She was looking remarkably well; her very regular, very pretty features, having the bloom and freshness of youth restored by the fine wind which had been blowing on her complexion, and by the animation of eye which it had also produced. It was evident that the gentleman, (completely a gentleman in manner) admired her exceedingly. Captain Wentworth looked round at her instantly in a way which shewed his noticing of it. He gave her a momentary glance, a glance of brightness, which seemed to say, “That man is struck with you, and even I, at this moment, see something like Anne Elliot again.”

Please note that I wrote my Master's Thesis on Persuasion so this parallel came to my mind immediately. 

Notice that in both cases, it is through the encounter with other men that Crawford and Wentworth see something different in Fanny and Anne: in both cases, it is in their eyes, animated and bright. Fanny and Anne are Austen's "dullest" heroines according to some critics: they don't have the sparkle of Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, or even the Dashwood sisters. Sullivan refers to Tony Tanner's discussion of Fanny in her essay, as he considers her too goody-goody in a way.

Of course, the parallel ends when the heroine finds happiness with her hero: Crawford is still not worthy of Fanny. Anne and Captain Wentworth are reconciled and marry happily after he is persuaded that she still loves him after having broken off their engagement so many years ago!

Image Source (Public Domain): Watercolour of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra, 1804

Jane Austen's Persuasion

Kathryn Davis discusses teaching and writing about my favorite Jane Austen novel, Persuasion, in The National Catholic Register:

What do your students enjoy about her writing?

I have taught two novels: Persuasion and Mansfield Park. Mansfield Park is tricky; its comedy is different from that of other novels with witty heroines like Lizzy Bennet [in Pride and Prejudice] or Emma [in Emma]. Here [in Mansfield Park], the heroine is quiet and humble, and the “light and bright and sparkling” character, Mary Crawford, is really more like a “villain.” Most of my students have read the other novels and are perplexed by this inversion: The humor is with the morally unprincipled character. Some love it — but see how interesting and instructive it is to see that the funny and interesting character lacks a moral sense.

Persuasion is my favorite — I can’t get enough. I wrote my dissertation on Persuasion.

You’re working on a book about Jane Austen. What will readers learn from your scholarship?

My forthcoming book, Liberty in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (Lehigh University Press), is about Persuasion and the theme of liberty of soul understood as self-governance. There are fine studies like After Virtue (1981) that have come out on Austen’s ethics and devout Christian sense. My study explores ways in which Austen’s Christian faith influenced and shaped her way of thinking about political questions. In Persuasion, the hero, Capt. Frederick Wentworth, has the qualities needed for engaging in practical political leadership beyond a ship. My book focuses on the moral sense required for individuals to govern well.

Rowman & Littlefield has this description of Professor Davis' forthcoming book:

Liberty in Jane Austen’s Persuasion is a meditation on Persuasion as a text in which Jane Austen, writing in the Age of Revolution, enters the conversation of her epoch. Poets, philosophers, theologians and political thinkers of the long eighteenth century, including William Cowper, George Gordon Byron, Samuel Johnson, Hugh Blair, Thomas Sherlock, Charles Pasley, and Edmund Burke, endeavored definitively to determine what it means for a human being to be free. Persuasion is Austen’s elegant, artful and complex addition to this conversation. In this study, Kathryn Davis proposes that Austen's last complete novel offers an apologia for human liberty primarily understood as self-governance. Austen’s characters struggle to attain liberty, not from an oppressive political regime or stifling social conventions, but for a type of excellence that is available to each human being. The novel's presentation of moral virtue has wider cultural significance as a force that shapes both the “little social commonwealth[s]” inhabited by characters of Austen’s own making and, possibly, the identity of the nation whose sovereign read Persuasion.

Of course I noticed that Davis includes Hugh Blair, whose sermons and Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres Austen certainly knew. That's because I wrote my M.A. thesis at WSU on "Hugh Blair's Rhetoric and Jane Austen's Persuasion".

Anne Elliot and Autumn

A Clerk of Oxford posted this scene from my favorite Jane Austen novel, Persuasion:

Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which has drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling. She occupied her mind as much as possible in such-like musings and quotations; but it was not possible, that when within reach of Captain Wentworth's conversation with either of the Miss Musgroves, she should not try to hear it...

What she hears of Captain Wentworth and Louisa Musgroves' conversation reminds her of how she had disappointed Wentworth years ago when she broke off their engagement. He has indicated to her that he thinks her inconstant and unfaithful, too easily persuaded, and Louisa Musgrove gives evidence that she would not be persuaded.

Anne could not immediately fall into a quotation again. The sweet scenes of autumn were for a while put by, unless some tender sonnet, fraught with the apt analogy of the declining year, with declining happiness, and the images of youth and hope, and spring, all gone together, blessed her memory.

Perhaps Anne thought of James Thomson's The Seasons and its passages on Autumn before she heard Wentworth's delight in Louisa's constancy:

Hence from the busy joy-resounding fields,
In cheerful error let us tread the maze
Of Autumn unconfined; and taste, revived,
The breath of orchard big with bending fruit.
Obedient to the breeze and beating ray,
From the deep-loaded bough a mellow shower
Incessant melts away. The juicy pear
Lies in a soft profusion scattered round.
A various sweetness swells the gentle race,
By Nature’s all-refining hand prepared,
Of tempered sun, and water, earth, and air,
In ever-changing compositions mixed.
Such, falling frequent through the chiller night,
The fragrant stores, the wide-projected heaps
Of apples, which the lusty-handed year
Innumerous o’er the blushing orchard shakes.