The Minor Protagonist, or the Reluctant Heroine (original) (raw)

Women and ‘Value’ in Jane Austen’s Novels

Abstract

One additional way to understand the potentially superfluous woman is to consider the heroine of Mansfield Park. Fanny Price’s story begins in a minor space, since she has no expressed value. When Fanny is thrust onto the marriage market and has the chance to gain some expressed value, she finds a voice and refuses to be commodified. Thus, as Fanny Price asserts her rights not to settle for a marriage without affection, rejects the possibility of speculating on the marriage market, and sheds her superfluous and minor role, she ultimately earns her place as a heroine with solidified intrinsic value. Reading the six published novels of Jane Austen through the lens of economic valuation exposes the importance of expressed value in the marriage market of the long eighteenth century and its continuing conflict with intrinsic value. Even as English society was struggling to reconcile the supposed intrinsic value of gold and silver coins with the less certain expressed value of paper bank-notes, women on the marriage market were struggling to retain their intrinsic value as they were assessed by their expressed value or monetary worth. Even as a woman’s intrinsic value was enduring, her expressed value was more likely to find her a “preservative from want” and a “comfortable home.” Austen’s novels recognize the importance of expressed value for women’s survival, but they also question the devaluing of the intrinsic worth of women within that marriage-market culture.

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