Reading for Agency: The Literary Bildung of Fanny Price

This chapter focuses on the role of reading in Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park (1814). I will look at the ways in which the representation of female readers in this particular novel allows us to identify the different forms of reading Austen represents in her fiction. The attitudes of Austen’s heroines towards reading and literary models oscillate between two poles: on the one hand, some characters show a naïve and almost acritical devotion to literary texts as a source of inspiration for their own interpretation of reality (an attitude that might be legitimately described as “bovaristic”); on the other hand, some characters are able to enact a more discerning strategy in which the passion for books and reading becomes the premise of a deeper understanding of social reality and is always accompanied by a subtle awareness of the possible pitfalls of desire and imagination. It is through this form of reading that, in Mansfield Park, Fanny Price gains an uncommonly accurate understanding of the darkest side of Georgian society, of the undisclosed violence and exploitation that guarantee its order and prosperity; as a consequence, she becomes able to beat patriarchal authority at its own game and conquer a new form of agency.