I wonder about Mansfield Park. It seems so heavy handed compared to most other Austen. Fanny is so good - other Austen heroines are not so good (perhaps Elinor Dashwood is as good as Fanny). Elizabeth Bennett is judgmental, Emma is a meddling gossip who is quite full of herself, Marianne Dashwood endless sentimentality, Catherine Morland too wrapped up in her imagination. Fanny starts good, bad things happen around her, remains good, and is rewarded. Austen usually has silly characters around - from the Palmers to Mr. Collins to the Allens. The silliest character in Mansfield Park is Mr. Rushford - and he is more pitiable than anything - no fun at all to find him silly. The Crawfords are just so much more interesting than anyone else in the book.
Elinor and Anne Eliot are both as good as Fanny, I think… I don’t know why they both seem so much more interesting and likeable.
I hated it, but not as much as the hair.
Anne Eliot’s fault is that she always compromises herself for others - Anne Eliot seems to be Jane saying “you can be too good - sometimes, you need a backbone.” And I think that’s what makes her interesting.
Elinor is interesting because as good as she is, she is still a keen observer of the follies of others - and not terribly tolerant of them except as far as she needs to be to be polite. “It is perhaps good that they were not aware of your engagement” is one of the best insults in literature. She is polite, proper and sensible - but I’m not sure she is Good. Fanny lacks Elinor’s wit.
I read somewhere that Jane Austen was a little bit ashamed (or merely uneasy?) of her other books, thought they were too worldly, did not express her Christian faith, and wrote Mansfield Park in an effort to be less worldly and light. She was a clergyman’s daughter, after all, and every biography I’ve read tells me she was sincerely religious. She wasn’t “pi”, though, and I think Fanny tends to be “pi”.
How funny. I was going to complain about the horrible dye job, too. I did note that at least they didn’t allow roots to show, though the contrast between her hair and eyebrows was completely unnatural. They should have either found a natural blonde or just allowed her to have dark hair.
Actually I thought her teeth, so clearly in need of orthodontics, was the only thing that fit the century it was supposed to take place in.
I also thought it would be wildly inappropriate for a single woman to visit a man in his bedroom. I could be wrong.
Fanny’s headgear, or lack thereof, is also pretty jarring in this production. Even when the other ladies were wearing hats or bonnets, she was always bareheaded. Respectable women just didn’t go out without hats or bonnets; otherwise they might get suntanned and look “common”.
When Billie Piper starred in “The Ruby in the Smoke”, which is also set in the 19th century although much later, she had the same teeth and dyed hair but at least was properly dressed, and looked much more like she belonged in the time. She looked nice with her hair up, too.
Her family is known to have “expunged” her reputation - so the Jane we get may or may not be the Jane who lived. She may have been sincerely religious, but the Austen children - Jane’s generation and her nieces and nephews - staged plays.
About the only thing they go right costuming wise were Lady Bertram’s and Aunt Norris’s out of date dresses. They weren’t wearing the high-waisted styles the younger women were, but were wearing styles that would have been fashionable in their youth. Although, now that I think about it, the dresses they were wearing were even a little bit too out of date for them – Lady Bertram and Aunt Norris looked like they were in their late forties at the most, and I’d place the other’s clothes at around 1815-20, so they would still have been young enough to dress fashionably at the beginning of the Directoire period.
Oh, well. I think I’m thinking too hard about this.
I enjoyed the production in a general sort of way, but it felt a lot fluffier than the book. It was missing a lot of the more serious elements, which I would love to tell you about, but I appear to have jettisoned the book with my last move. I don’t like the book very much, though. Fanny’s so boring and good.
Fanny totally should have been wearing her hair up. Only little girls wore it down all the time. The only way it makes sense is if the Bertrams were trying to force her into an extended childhood, and it seems that her uncle was trying to force her out into the world with the birthday ball. The idea of Fanny as a child-woman is a little disturbing to me. There were an awful lot of instances where she acted more like a little girl than a young woman though: running off to give her cousin her parasol, wearing her hair down and without a hat, chasing that little girl around at the wedding, and probably couple others I’m forgetting about. Kind of creepy.
I also think that the portrayal of Henry Crawford didn’t show him as nearly as vile as he was in the novel. I mean, there’s the little scene where he tells his sister that he’s going to make Fanny fall in love with him, but he doesn’t really slip up in Fanny’s presence to make her aware of his ickiness. Instead of thinking, “Fanny, say no!” when he proposes, I couldn’t help but wonder why she wasn’t saying yes.
I find that kind of hard to believe because in her letters, Jane Austen has a thoroughly wicked sense of humor that matches that of her books. In fact, in one of her letters, she describes her family as “great novel-readers and not ashamed of being so”. Her letters are just as worldly as her books, too, very much concerned with clothes and fashion and gossip.
I only caught the end of it (and what I saw didn’t make me sad I missed the rest), but were my eyes deceiving me, or was there a scene where Fanny let Edmund see her in her bedroom, at night, in her nightgown and with wet hair?(!)
Yes, there is. And he’s ready to turn tail and leave, because whoa! he shouldn’t be there, but she basically says, “Oh, no, it’s perfectly all right. Come in.” So chaste. So demure. So nearly naked.
And then there’s the scene earlier where he gives her the chain for the pendant her brother gave her for her birthday, and helps her put it on. She turns around and he’s ostensibly looking at the pendant, but there’s a lot of cleavage on display.
Remember, its Regency cleavage - where women wet down the front of their dresses to get them clingier. Victorian modesty is still 40 years away - and is partly a reaction to the excesses of this period.
Actually it doesn’t give away the plot line - it’s shot in close up and you have no idea of who the characters are! I had not read S&S and it was only two thirds of the way through I went, “Aahh - that what it was all about!”
See, somehow I didn’t even notice the impropriety of Fanny letting him into her room, because I was so distracted by her saying “I have to go to bed now” with her hair still all wet. So she can catch her death of … something.
Eh, by the time this is set, that wasn’t happening any more. The really clingy styles belong to 1795-1805, and this production is set in the 1810s, when hems were beginning to expand for the Romantic era silhouette already. A lot of women wore chemisettes and kerchiefs to fill in the low necklines of their gowns during the day, because those old manor houses get really cold and you don’t want a nipple to escape.
It just seemed out of character for Fanny, considering how modest she is. Her character is practically a more likeable version of Mary in P&P.