A Darker Shade of Jane

So far, and when I say so far I mean that I have read four chapters of Mansfield Park, I can see the darker “shade” that Austen found lacking in Pride & Prejudice. The issue that has jumped out in my reading so far is class. While class was a very important theme of Pride & Prejudice, it was not a definitive aspect of their circumstances, i.e. class was much more flexible in the latter novel than in Mansfield. When Fanny Price comes to live with her aunt and uncle, Lady Bertram is constantly reminding not only Fanny, but Fanny’s “siblings” (her cousins), of Fanny’s inferiority. Especially so, Mrs. Norris makes a point of informing the young bertram girls that Fanny should have not need to learn music or art because she is inferior and should be so separated in that distinction. 

The class issue is much darker in Mansfield because the perspectives are changed. If the issue of class were portrayed through the mind of Fanny, perhaps, the inflexibility of her inferiority of birth might be lax. The perspective is infact from the prospective of those characters reflecting Ms. Caroline Bingley within Mansfield. It is intended from the beginning to have Fanny raise with Edmund and Thomas as siblings to rid the boys of the notion of Fanny as a possible love interest, stating that she will forever be viewed as a “sister” to the two.

Perhaps the most important reason that class is a darker “shade” of gray within Mansfield Park is because Fanny Price is in all definitions of the term Poor. She has not title and her parents, maybe her mother for she married improperly and scandalously to shame her family into stopping communication, come from relatively low means on the English class hierarchy. For this reason, the reaction to her rank, and how Fanny should be raised within her aunt and uncle’s house, is never questionable, but the norm and expected, possibly leading to a darker sequence of events, leading up to the inevitable “happily ever after” for the novels heroine Fanny Price.