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Agents, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, goodness, heroines, Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Mary Crawford, moral fiction, Saki, The Story-Teller
A man in a railway carriage, driven to desperation by noisy small children around him being unsuccessfully entertained by their unimaginative and strait-laced aunt, shuts them up with a story about a little girl called Bertha.
‘Was she pretty?’ asked the bigger of the small girls.
‘Not as pretty as any of you,’ said the bachelor, ‘but she was horribly good.’
There was a wave of reaction in favour of the story; the word horrible in connection with goodness was a novelty that commended itself. It seemed to introduce a ring of truth that was absent from the aunt’s tales of infant life. (from Saki’s The Story-Teller)
It looks as if adults don’t like heroines who are ‘good’ any more than children do. In modern fiction it’s difficult to think of more than a handful of heroines we might describe using the word. Is this because we no longer look to fiction for moral guidance or inspiration in the way that people once did?
This might help explain why Fanny Price is Jane Austen’s least popular heroine; she hasn’t aged well. Patience and gentleness and a faithful loving heart combined with strong principles were enough in a heroine at the time Jane Austen was writing Mansfield Park, but modern readers often find Fanny’s passivity spineless and her virtue irritating. They prefer the amusing and witty Mary Crawford, who takes active steps to get what she wants.
It may be that readers often dislike Fanny because she comes across as naturally good – and therefore difficult to identify with. There might even be a sense in which she shows us up, and we don’t like that either. She doesn’t make mistakes about people or find herself initially attracted to a dodgy man, like Elizabeth Bennet does. Elizabeth is morally upright, but she combines virtue with a sense of fun, dawning self-knowledge and awareness of her own errors of judgment; it’s not surprising that many people say she’s their favourite Jane Austen heroine.
I can’t think of a Fanny type heroine in modern fiction – and if a new author tried having one in a novel, agents would probably advise making them less wet. So is it that we don’t want heroines to be any more ‘good’ than we know ourselves to be?
Or can modern writers get away with a ‘good’ heroine if enough of their moral vacillation is shown? Maybe this is the problem with Fanny. Secret suffering and standing up for principles in silence: what’s the interest in that? But if a heroine is seen to struggle with moral choices, between right and wrong and the muddle between them, and then act on her decisions, her goodness is not the passive quality that we are warned to avoid when writing a novel.
ninevoices 
Poor Fanny Price wasn’t popular even at the time, was she? Jane Austen herself expressed doubts that anyone would like the character, precisely because she was so morally flawless and a little bit dull.
Dullness is the danger with perfectly ‘good’ characters, it seems to me. As a writer, you can take flawed characters on a journey from A to Z, whereas ‘good’ characters just fret between X and Y. Even with stupendous writing it’s hard to make that tiny space gripping. Fanny was dull because Jane Austen was using her as a device to expose a standard romantic trope: modest girl captures attention of attractive, high-status man, promotes changes (towards goodness) in him, is rewarded by an offer of marriage and security. The trope usually has the girl falling into the arms of the Good Catch and disappearing into the sunset. Austen subverted that by having Fanny look with cool-eyed pragmatism at how these things usually played out in the real world, concluding that he wasn’t really such a Good Catch as everyone was telling her, and accepting her punishment for not fulfilling the trope. Austen didn’t want flaws in Fanny to distract from the message that marriage was deadly serious and you needed to choose wisely and not believe what you read in romantic novels. But I did find Fanny, as written, a bit of a wet blanket.
I can’t think of many books with a ‘good’ heroine, but one with a ‘good’ male hero is Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. The story consists entirely of an elderly pastor writing down his family’s history to his very young son, who he knows will grow up without a father. Virtually nothing happens. The one conflict is in the pastor’s enmity towards a friend’s prodigal son. The pastor is an immensely good, wise and serene man, full of compassion. I found the book bewitching, and it won the Pulitzer prize so clearly others did too. However, my book group found it dull – I was its only defender – and I doubt if it found itself on many holiday beaches. It really is very hard to make virtue interesting!
– Christine
In theory the wrestling with conscience and resulting moral progress of a hero or heroine (what creative writing classes call the character arc?) should be interesting. Fanny is good already and perhaps this is the problem: she seems to escape temptation and apart from being less shy isn’t any different at the end of the novel.
The Rev John Ames in Gilead (someone once told me that Marilynne Robinson is Rowan Williams’ favourite novelist) is clearly a rare and wonderful example of a successful portrayal of goodness. In a more lightweight tradition, there is Sidney Chambers in James Runcie’s detective series, although significantly in the television series Grantchester he is much less good than in the books. If it is difficult to make virtue engaging in novels, it looks as though it’s even harder on the screen …