Dissertations and Theses
Date of Award
2023
Document Type
Thesis
Department
English
First Advisor
Daniel Gustafson
Second Advisor
Andras Kisery
Keywords
Jane Austen, chronic illness, disability studies, nineteenth century studies, ethics of care
Abstract
Improvement and cure are frequently on the minds of the characters in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. However, what happens when you introduce a chronically ill character like Fanny, who can’t ever be fully cured, into these curative plots? In order to better understand the ways Austen complicates curative discourse, this paper focuses on Fanny’s own perspective and embodied experience of chronic illness, in which she fatigues easily and experiences headaches and pain. Despite clear evidence in the novel of Fanny’s ill health, scholarship analyzing Fanny’s character has historically been fraught with ableist assumptions and subjective opinions. Ignoring the way Fanny’s perspective and the plot arc of the novel hinge on her ill health in favor of exclusively categorizing her as unappealing and lacking is a disservice to Fanny, Austen’s writing, and to the disabled community. This paper attends to Fanny as a distinctly disabled subject and analyzes how her ill health shapes her perspective and gives her a different sort of agency than the one typically expected of able-bodied characters, but that is agency nonetheless. Austen’s depiction of Fanny’s ill health also signals to later nineteenth-century invalid life writing that uses similar language, placing her work in a longer medical history.
Recommended Citation
Soriano, Aurora C., "The Incurable Fanny Price: Disabled Perspective and Resistance to the Cure Narrative in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park" (2023). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cc_etds_theses/1081