H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e5 2interrelating. All of this is hilariously prefigured in Laurence
Sterne’s great eighteenth- century anti- novel Tristram Shandy,
which is peopled by a bunch of freaks, obsessives, paranoiacs and
emotional cripples. This is only one of several reasons why it is
among the great comic masterpieces of English literature.
Virtuous literary characters may not be exactly enthralling, but
there are novels and plays which seem to be aware of the fact.
Fanny Price, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, is a
dutiful, impeccably well- behaved young woman, and (so many
readers of the novel have felt) not a little pallid. She is meek,
passive and something of a pain. Yet it is as though the novel has a
riposte ready to hand to anyone tactless enough to point this out.
How else is a young, unmarried woman without money, social rank
or responsible parents to defend herself in the kind of predatory
society the novel portrays? Isn’t Fanny’s lack of vitality an implicit
criticism of that social order? She is not, after all, an Emma
Woodhouse, rich, attractive, high- ranking and thus able to do
pretty well as she likes. Those who are powerful can afford to kick
over the traces, whereas the poor and defenceless must look out for
themselves. They must court the charge of being insipid in order to
avoid graver accusations. If Fanny is something of a drag, it is not
her fault. Nor is it the fault of her author, who is well capable of
presenting vivacious young women.
One might feel much the same about Charlotte Brontë’s Jane
Eyre. Self- righteous, moralistic and mildly masochistic, Jane is
hardly the most agreeable heroine one could hope to share a taxi
with. As a critic once remarked of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, it
is not so much that she is scheming as that she is unconsciously
scheming. Yet it is hard to see how she could be open- hearted and
high- spirited in the oppressive circumstances in which she finds