REFLECTIONS

Re-reading Mansfield Park and contemplating Mary Crawford.  She is the only one of Jane Austen’s villainesses who can compete with the heroine.  She is the only one of Austen’s bad girls that almost steals the hero from the heroine.  Why is Mary Crawford so much more interesting than Caroline Bingley.  More importantly why is it, except for Fanny Price, all of Austen’s heroines dominate the books the way good girls never can dominate other author’s works.  

There is no point in denying that bad girls tend to dominate every book they enter.  Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley are supposed to share the limelight in Vanity Fair but no one can think of Amelia when Becky is in the book.  Lucie Manette is sweet and kind but who remembers anything from A Tale Of Two Citiies better than Madame Defarge’s scheming and knitting.  Hard as it is to believe, Margaret Mitchell intended for Melanie Wilkes to be as important and strong a figure as Scarlett O’Hara.  But as Ashley and Rhett find out if Scarlett is around she is going to dominate everything. 

In none of Jane Austen’s books does the bad girl steal the stage from the heroine.   In Austen’s work it is the good girl who keeps our attention long after we have closed the book.  It is the good Austen girl who fires the imagination the way only bad girls can in other novels.  I think it is because Jane Austen allows her good girls to sometimes be not so good.  She doesn’t create caricatures of sweetness and light, but fully realized, emotional women with a strong moral center.

Jane Austen’s heroines are, except for Fanny Price, not paragons of virtue like Melanie.  They are good girls, but they are human.   They jump to conclusions, get carried away by emotions and even break the good guys hearts’.  Because Austen made her heroines so fully realized, gave them flaws and virtues we can embrace them and take them to heart the way we never could with a Melanie Wilkes or a Lucie Manette.   Against such complex women Austen’s bad girls never have a chance to steal the show, except for Mary Crawford.   If Fanny could have just lost her temper once, or been honest with Edmund at any point Mary Crawford would have gone down with Lucy Steele.    

All of which now has me contemplating all that Caroline Kennedy and Fanny Price have in common.  Ah but that is a post for another time.

Oh and if any young person finds this post, prints it out and hands it into their English teacher as their own work, I will hunt you down and go all Madame Defarge on your head.