"Mansfield Park" - in which it is better to have not begun at all

[catherineldf]

Seriously. So "Mansfield Park" is about a young woman named Fanny Price. She's adopted from her impoverished, dysfunctional family by rich relatives and goes to live with them in the titular mansion. She's generally ignored or crushed and is treated as a sort of companion/pet. Not surprisingly, she is passive, quiet and sanctimonious. More surprisingly, she has the gumption to question the morality of slavery, the economic foundation of the family that lives at Mansfield Park, and to refuse a good match with a rich and charming man because she doesn't love him. The price of this refusal is to be sent back to live with her drunken, abusive father and unsanitary, cowed family until the Bertrams of Mansfield Park recognize the error of their ways and summon her to pull them back together.
In short, Fanny is unlikeable by modern standards but earns the reader's reluctant admiration (unless you are among those who love her immediately). Her rival for the hand of her beloved, Mary Crawford is far more fun and interesting but has no moral core so she loses the guy to Fanny.
Hands up anyone who saw the PBS version this week and got this from it? Anyone? Right, thought not.
Suddenly Fanny is pretty and disheveled and giggles alot and has no compunction about inviting men into her room while she's bathing. Slavery? That's icky so we don't talk about that. Sent home to Portsmouth in disgrace to demonstrate the class conflicts at the heart of the novel? Gosh, why would we do that? No, now there's the section that makes no sense where Fanny has to stay at the huge mansion by herself EXCEPT FOR THE SEVERAL HUNDRED SERVANTS NECESSARY TO KEEP THE PLACE GOING when the family goes away. Wow. That really tells her...something. And the watcher really understands that Austen was getting at...something.
She also jogs! That's my favorite part. SInce she is the only one with clothing from the right time period, at least she has the chance to do so corset free. Unlike everyone else who's wearing clothing from 20 or so years in the future. And since she's hip, fun Fanny, she even reads the racing form to Tom in between bouts of giggling. And jogging. Fordyce's sermons, anyone?
The bright spot on my horizon, since I will keep watching the train wreck, is that there's only one more novel that they're planning on butchering. "Emma" and "P & P" are both done by A&E which has a clue so that's something. Then I'm going to have read it all again to cleanse my mind of the drivel I've been watching.

Comments

[lexiphanic.livejournal.com]

As an interesting side note, Mansfield Park was included in a class I took on satire, the only Austen book to be so classified. Being a reasonably average college student, I never quite got around to reading the whole thing, so I have no authority to comment on the contents, but I was surprised to find Austen in that class at all.

[catherineldf.livejournal.com]

Well, she definitely did a lot of pretty satirical work but I don't know that I'd put MP in that category. It's the one of her books that you either love wildly or end up constantly saying "I don't like it as much as the others," assuming Austen fandom. :-)