FANNY: i dont approve of anything
HENRY CRAWFORD: my god thats hot
LADY BERTRAM: uuuugh
JULIA: what is it, Mama
LADY BERTRAM [slowly sliding off the couch to the floor]: uuuuuuuuuugggghhhhhhhhhh
MARY CRAWFORD: hello we’re here
HENRY CRAWFORD: yes we’re here
MARY CRAWFORD: and very sexy
HENRY CRAWFORD: yes we’re sexily here
MARY CRAWFORD: what a sexy library this is
HENRY CRAWFORD: very nearly as sexy as the last room i was in
MARY CRAWFORD: which room was that
HENRY CRAWFORD: the drawing room
MARY CRAWFORD: very sexy drawing room
HENRY CRAWFORD: drawing is the sexiest of pursuits
and drawing rooms the sexiest of chambers
MARY CRAWFORD: let’s have sex with everybody in this house
HENRY CRAWFORD: how very sexy
JAMES RUSHWORTH: hi every–
JULIA: shut up, James
MARIA: yes, shut up, James
HENRY CRAWFORD: yes, do shut up, James
MARY CRAWFORD: James, shut up
MARY: lets put on a play
FANNY: plays aren’t cool
you know what’s cool?
monogamy
EDMUND: you know who i hate
FANNY: who
EDMUND: the woman i’m going to propose to
i think she’s just terrible
FANNY: why don’t you just propose to someone else
EDMUND: don’t be ridiculous
i love her
FANNY: oh sorry
EDMUND: someone has to be around to disapprove of her character for the rest of her life
and i think it should be me
LADY BERTRAM [her bones melt and she turns into a puddle on the rug]: uuuuuugggghhhhh
Tags: books, jane austen, mansfield park, probably
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The best thing about Mansfield Park is that Hayley Atwell played Mary Crawford in that one remake and she is the best at everything she does.
I was all excited to see a new version of MP, but it was a tv movie so not sure where I can find it. Is that Rose from Dr Who? Awesome!
“Someone has to disapprove of her for the rest of her life” ha ha!
Yes, that is Billie Piper playing Fanny! Mostly she just runs around and smiles a lot, but she’s pretty decent. Hayley steals the show of course.
I’m pretty sure you can find it all in parts on YouTube. It’s the 2007 adaptation. There was a time in the mid-late 2000s when BBC and ITV were making new adaptations of every Austen novel, and this is one of them.
Hayley and Jarvis, together again!
Fanny/Mary is definitely in my top ten of Literary Pairings Who Would Be More Compelling Than Pretty Much Any Of The Other Actual Relationships Featured In The Book. (Top spot goes to Severe Bronte Heroine/Bronte Heroine’s Pretty, Petty Best Frenemy. Apply as suitable.)
Ugh, I adored the Frances O’Connor film version, and was terribly disappointed in how flat Fanny turned out to be, when I read the book later. And Embeth Davidtz’s Mary Crawford definitely makes that argument for you. /fans self.
Lucy/Ginevra 4eva!!!
Lindsay Duncan as Lady Bertram, though. She made me want to have a pug puppy!
Also, who is worse, for real: Edmund or Mr. Collins? Who would win in a bore-off?
Imma just going to leave 1983 Nicholas Farrell here as Edmund. He made the dullness WORK
YES, PLEASE. (fans self)
And Fanny in that one fascinated me–she kept making hand gestures that were simultaneously super awkward and super convincing, because Fanny is basically that weird, super awkward girl that everyone thinks is kind of a drag to have around. What I love about Mansfield Park is that we get the inner life of Weird Super Awkward Girl and I don’t care what Mallory Ortberg says, I was totally Fanny Price in my weird, awkward adolescence and she is literally the only person in that book who gets what she wants in life and it’s SO vindicating.
Mansfield Park was the best of the 1980s BBC Austen adaptions. They were all good, but Mansfield Park was beautifully cast.
And, yes, Fanny is so lovely and socially awkward — Sylvestra Le Touzel captures perfectly that awkwardness when surrounded by people who shine socially
I bought the boxed DVD set of the 1980s BBC Austen adaptations a while back. MP broke. 🙁 I gave the rest to Goodwill, because what’s even the point. Sylvestra L-T is Fanny for me, full stop. There can be no other. And I loved seeing her as Mrs. Allen in the recent Northanger Abbey adaptation.
Especially because recent adaptations seem to confuse the characters of Mary and Fanny. Fanny should not be *sparkling*
I loved Sylvestra L-T and Nicholas Farrell reuniting as the aunt and uncle in Amazing Grace
*swoons*
I think I disliked Edmund slightly more just because we’re supposed to like him. Presumably. Mr. Collins you can loathe with careless abandon.
You’re not actually supposed to like Edmund. He is the actual worst. Always second guessing Fanny, and then hurting her terribly and to top it all off, forgetting she’s there. Ron Lit has some excellent youtube videos about Mansfield Park. And the other Austens. Also, find Manfeels Park. It’s amazing.
I say this whenever potatoes are served 🙁
I just really love potatoes tho 🙁 🙁
I think once Mr. Collins starts reading Fordyce’s Sermons at you, the competition is over.
When any man reads anything at me really…
Mansfield Park reads totally differently once you realize how unlikely Fanny is to survive childbirth
But doesn’t her mom have like 500 children or something, and that’s why Fanny is sent to live with the Bertrams? I would think that’s good genetics to survive childbirth, myself.
And her children would all be beaten down, sad sacks who were afraid to do anything and thus earn their mother’s stern look of disapproval.
Yes, but she is consistently in poor health and tires easily throughout. … I just think her chances aren’t great.
I think she’s a depiction of someone with ME/CFS (which I have myself, it’s a bugger). The way Austen looks at illness is something that interests me in that book. And then there’s all the barely sublimated incest and lesbianism, of course…
Lady B was discreetly played as stoned out of her mind on laudanum in the 1983 version, which suddenly made a lot of things make sense.
I don’t think I’ve ever in my life been as excited about something as those kids were about that play.
That said, I quite liked Mansfield Park and I was kinda sad to find out that 90% of Austen’s friends/family/everyone haaaated it.
The first time I read Mansfield Park, I thought it was fairly boring. The second time I read it, I thought it was hilarious. I’m not sure what changed in the interim? I think I was taking it too seriously the first time around and not realizing that things were, you know, jokes.
Every time I read it I have a different reaction to it. Like sometimes I love Fanny and hate Mary, then the next time I dislike Mary and Fanny and then I love them both and hate the insipid people who surround them.
Last time I read Mansfield Park I took a quick detour to read the play they put on (Lover’s Vows – it’s on Project Gutenberg.) It’s kind of a fun read after all the bickering about who gets what part. And you get to see exactly how much VICE there is (seduction and out-of-wedlock pregnancy, if I’m remembering right).
Mansfield Park is one of those strange books in which I HATE all the characters and yet I sorta like the book? I think you have to take its moral universe on its own terms. Also, a friend of mine in a Austen college class posited Fanny is a secret sadist and not a masochist because EVERYONE in the book whom she disapproved of was punished. If you read Fanny as a Secret Unknowing Old Testament-style vengeful God, the book gets more interesting. . .
Absolutely! I think of Fanny also as this kind of changeling who wreaks havoc in the house that fosters her.
Mansfield Park is one of those strange books in which I HATE all the characters and yet I sorta like the book? I think you have to take its moral universe on its own terms. Also, a friend of mine in a Austen college class posited Fanny is a secret sadist and not a masochist because EVERYONE in the book whom she disapproved of was punished. If you read Fanny as a Secret Unknowing Old Testament-style vengeful God, the book gets more interesting. . .
Liked your comment so much I was glad you double posted so I could double like it!!
Man, I would have married Henry Crawford and never looked back. You’re a better woman than I, Fanny Price (but way more boring, have fun with your cousin who thinks you’re just okay)
Fanny does start to like Henry despite her reservations and morals! And who wouldn’t he’s irresistibly charming. Er, Edmund, so bland. I think this is Austen’s dullest marriage, can you imagine going over for dinner – yawn!!! I dislike the flack that Maria gets for running away with Henry though. Can you blame her? The Park sucks, Rushworth is a dummy, I think no one wins in this novel, not really. Okay maybe Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram.
General rule for Austen novels: if a clergyman is the hero, it’s going to bug. (Okay, not Edward Ferrars. He was cool. But he was just an aspiring clergyman, so.)
I just wish better for Fanny, you know, with the shitty life she’s had. She deserves better than someone who leaves her to sit alone in a forest for an hour!
On the topic of sitting in forests alone, I’m generally more pro than anti. Not a good way to handle a date, though.
But since it is a date with Edmund, sitting alone in a forest would be more stimulating.
Nooooo but I love Mr. Tilney!!! He’s one of my favorite Austen heroes.
This is one of those times where I have nothing of value to add, but merely liking the comment does not do enough to express my agreement, so.
Indeed! Tilney > Darcy. Tilney 4eva!
I’m late to the Mr Tilney appreciation party, but still. So glad I’ve found my people.
Oh, wait, I forgot Tilney was clergy too. Maybe “if you can’t forget that the clergyman is a clergyman, it’s going to bug.”
He’s my favorite, too. He and Catherine Morland are my favorite Austen couple.
alessandro nivola
mamma mia
Oh, yes.
I am always _undone_ by the scene in the Rozema film when she finally – finally – says yes to Henry in Portsmouth and he swings her around and says “Fanny Price!”. I think Alessandro Nivola nailed this character and I love that scene so much. (Obviously I would have married Henry too).
I have definitely read that fanfic.
The thing is, after all that misery, we don’t get *any* romance between Fanny and Edmund. It’s just like ‘Epilogue: E. eventually thought fuck it and proposed to F.’
I have been working on my Edmund/Fanny fic in my head for years now. Thanks to JA for leaving us all such a killer opening!
Hahaha I wish I had read your Epilogue instead of the book. To satisfy myself I like to imagine the E & F’s wedding night being a huge disappointment for them both. Fanny would be horrified Edmund would want anything so morally repulsive as physical intimacy but being strongly pro-creation and the descendant of a massive breeder she’ll tolerate it by cutting a hole in her long sleeved, flannel nightie and allow Edmund to lie on top of her once a week while she stares at him in disapproval. Edmund would have to contend himself with making love to an angry plank while fantasising about Mary or one of his parishioners.
I was teaching Mansfield Park to my undergrads yesterday! They all start out hating it, but a selective recitation of Mary Crawford’s sly dirty jokes usually gets things on the right footing.
What are these dirty jokes you speak of? I need something to redeem this book.
I’m still most intrigued by Mary’s comment regarding her uncle the Vice-Admiral: “Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.”
Did Jane Austen really just make an anal sex joke??
Popular scholarly opinion is that she’s referring to masochism (known as “le vice Anglais”, and generally practised and illustrated as caning or whipping of the rear) – still rude enough to titillate, but not quite as extreme as your reading.
I’ve always believed it was an anal joke! I’m going to continue doing so, it just makes me too happy to imagine that Austen would know that stuff.
good fact! Mary Crawford was clearly also a delight
Reading the comment as a reference to flagellation doesn’t really answer the question though, since many scholars follow Steven Marcus in reading flagellation porn itself as code for homosexual activity, which brings us right back where we started. (The funny thing is I’m an academic who specializes in masochism and those w(h)acky Victorians–roughly 30-years post Austen to be fair–so I can tell you more than you probably want to know about le vice Anglais.)
It certainly works to set Mary up as a naughty, naughty girl 🙂
Pitch, pitch, pitch.
Changes in the connotations of words between Jane Austen’s time and ours also caused a great deal of surprise among some of my English classmates when we read those scenes where characters unexpectedly start “making love” to each other.
Hahah yes I was confused by that exact term when I first read Georgette Heyer – ‘He’s making love to her in the corner of the ballroom while everyone else is just trying to enjoy the party? That seems kind of inappropriate’
The possibly slightly less popular scholarly opinion that’s in an appendix at the back of the paperback edition on my bookshelf is firmly in favor of the sodomy option, complete with a fascinating history of a scandalous British Navy trial that had taken place a few years prior to Austen writing MP and that reads amazingly like slash fic.
Oh, that’s interesting! Yeah, if it was a scandal that was fresh in the mind at the time she could definitely be referencing it, with later more timid scholars in deep denial. Of course, there’s nothing to say both interpretations aren’t true – with masochism as the fig-leaf of plausible deniability for sodomy.
That’s a fun sentence to type.
Regardless, I think we can all agree. There Is No Cannibalism In The Royal Navy.
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2009/08/rea…
I strongly believe Yes.
Oh, she absolutely did! There was all kinds of anxiety about what was happening on naval vessels, and as a result you can find plenty of veiled references to sodomy in periodicals of the time. There is a book by Jillian Heydt-Stevenson that deals with it (Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions), if slogging through academic monographs appeals.
(Hi, first time posting, long-time lurker. Figures this would be the thing that made me finally post something.)
Rum, sodomy, and the lash.
YES.
You forgot:
Mary: Maybe we don’t have to shun Maria forever guys?
Everyone: BOO YOU WHORE.
When I was fourteen I wrote a re-telling of Mansfield Park from Mary Crawford’s perspective.
I can’t remember ANY of it and the hard drive is in a storage unit somewhere and I’m so curious.
I would love to see more film adaptations of Jane Austen from other character’s perspectives.
Isn’t Mrs Norris the worst?!
I just realized this is probably why Filch’s cat is named Mrs. Norris in the Harry Potter books.
And YES she is the WORST ever. EVER. If she’d had even a grain of affection in her Fanny’s life would have been so different.
She really gets under my skin. And there’s no way to laugh off her behaviour as well intentioned but missing the mark. She’s scary to me because she’s so real!
OH GOD HOW HAVE I MISSED THAT ALL THESE YEARS?!?
Yup, JKR confirmed that Mrs. Norris is named for her. BRILLIANT WOMAN.
So Lady Bertram is basically Tina Belcher?
Has anyone else ever noticed the Mansfield Park echo in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell? It’s really neatly tucked in there and gives Maria a little voice/vengance about the way she is treated by her family and lover man Henry.
Edmund is the male version of the strawwoman who loves bad boys because she wants to ~change~ them, but eventually settles for a Nice Guy because she doesn’t want to be alone. I can’t decide what social statement Austen is making with this.
++ very accurate.
Obligatory link to Manfeels Park
Mansfield Park is my favorite Austen and I will love it forever. I remember reading some critic somewhere theorized that Mansfield Park was the inverse of Pride and Prejudice where the boring, weird girl Mary/Fanny gets to be the hero and the smart, witty, action taking girl Elizabeth/Mary is the bad guy. Fanny is the worst but god dammit, her story deserves to be told too!
I’d like to change my answer from yesterday: I’m actually Lady Bertram, right down to the indolence and the shoddy needlepoint
Never forget that a) a Jane Austen dating sim exists, and b) it has no dudes from Mansfield Park in it, because they are the most boring.
Edmund is the ACTUAL WORST.
ELIZABETH BENNET: My sister ran off with a wastrel! Who will ever marry me now?
DARCY: OMG, me, me. *fixes sister situation*
EDMUND BERTRAM: My sister ran off with your brother! Who will ever marry you now?
MARY: Well… it’s not the actual end of the world? No one died? And as her husband’s divorcing her wouldn’t it be for the best if she married my brother and everyone waited for the fuss to blow over?
EDMUND BERTRAM: I cannot BELIEVE you suggested a pragmatic, rational approach to the problem. In fact I cannot believe you have the nerve to even be still alive right now, a decent woman would have suffered at least ten heart attacks in horror over this whole thing. I am of course leaving forever, you slut-by-association.
EDMUND BERTRAM: Fanny I loved her so much, you can tell by how I loyally stuck by her side in a time of crisis. Fanny I am so sad. Fanny, think of ME.*
*actual quote.
Oh God I have just remembered how thoroughly Fanny is also the worst.
FANNY: I thought it would be nice to see my family of origin again, but…
Ugh.
I’d forgotten they were so… poor. I mean, poor with several servants and no need for any family member to work, but they’re so gross.
I can’t eat off this plate. It’s dirty.
REBECCA THE SERVANT: *desperately cooking and cleaning for at least eight people*
FANNY: God Rebecca sucks.
FANNY: If only there was something I could do about that plate being so dirty.
FANNY: I’ll have to just starve to death, I guess.
I have to assume Lady Bertram has failing kidneys.
The description of her constant exhaustion and inability to rouse herself from the couch reminds me of how I felt just before I went on dialysis (something they didn’t have back then) and how much more energy I had after my kidney transplant (another thing they didn’t have back then.)
I hope you’re all aware of ManFeels Park…. http://www.manfeels-park.com/
I would loveeee to see your take on Northanger Abbey because 1. I love your perspective and you always make me laugh 2. Northanger Abbey is my fave even if no one else loves it and 3. the Thorpes. (Plus Cathy is adorable and so is Tilney despite his condescension)