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Mansfield Park, in its second half, is my favorite of Austen's novels, and Fanny Price my favorite of her heroines, so I'm saddened by the unhappy fate she's suffered in her big- and small-screen representations. The only good reading of the character I've heard was done for radio by Amanda Root, who gave it the same quality as she did the character Anne in the film of "Persuasion": a stern, sure, heartfelt moral centeredness. If the actress had been younger she would have been good visual casting as well; but the Fannys that have reached our eyes to date have more resembled, respectively: Mary Crawford; Ruby the scullery girl; and (in this incarnation) a jovial serving wench, or possibly tart, with her high moral principles pulled down a peg.
Well, I had hoped for better, but had feared worse. The serial had a solid Edmund, in an actor who was best at likable saps, and the perfect, i.e. perfectly abominable, Mrs. Norris; otherwise it was dullish. The film, which was apparently intended as a deconstruction or some other bad theatrical idea, came off as a mixed-up burlesque. After such disappointments, and the more recent disappointments of this production's sister pieces (the new "Persuasion" and "Northanger Abbey"), I couldn't help but have mixed expectations for this one; and on the whole, it left me feeling slightly better disposed to it than not. It condensed the novel intelligently, and in the end left me with much the same feeling, as a comic-book version might. On the other hand, to do so it had to rework most of the characters, except the Crawfords, and it incidentally diminished or eliminated most or all of the most memorable things in the book, including its most famous character and what should be, if it isn't, its most famous scene.
The character is the officious Aunt Norris, always ready to direct other people in what to do, but always managing to avoid having to do any of it herself; here one gets no sense of that at all. And with her goes much else: her remark that cuts through Fanny, "...considering who and what you are"; Sir Thomas's discovery that she has forbidden Fanny a fire in her room all these years, and his roundabout apology for her; Fanny's honesty in acknowledging, during a visit home, that Aunt Norris, for all her faults, could manage the household better than either of her sisters. But then, that entire trip is missing from the story, and so is most of what goes on at the theatrical rehearsals and most of what discomfits Sir Thomas on his return; and in fact Sir Thomas himself, and his wife, are different from what they were. Above all, the scene in which Crawford proposes to Fanny, one of Austen's most complex, is simplified to a bare telling; missing from it is Fanny's staunch upholding of what she knows to be right, and what she knows to be very probably true, against all the distractions Crawford and anybody else can throw at her. To a male reader, now no less than when it was written, it reveals with unmatched clarity--unmatched, at any rate, as far as I know--what a woman goes through in trying to deal fairly but firmly with a man she has reason to distrust. It's a brilliant scene, in the novel; on TV it's just a scene.
And, Fanny, oh, Fanny: when will we see your like?


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