Well, I guess that's the difficulty for me. Elizabeth weighs other people's treatment of her too heavily, and Fanny weighs it too lightly. She's a person too, and how people treat her is a relevant data point. I guess I feel like by ignoring that she essentially denies her own personhood. Everybody else seems to feel free to do so as well, and it requires a series of extraordinary circumstances for her worth to shine.
I'm probably being unnecessarily harsh to Fanny, but while nowhere near as angelic as she, I've spent a good deal of time in the "good girl" department. There's nothing wrong with that, but it has to be self-respecting and self-aware, like Anne Eliot, who recognizes that nobody respects her, that they really should, and then does the right thing because she chooses to do so and because she loves her family anyway.
Poor Fanny (how involuntarily one calls her so!) is very young, and I hope she will learn to stand up for herself one day. Until then, frankly, many of her troubles are of her own making. Should the people around her treat her better? Yes. Have they the moral imagination to realize how unhappy they are making her and stop? No. But quite a few of them would treat her better if she would say that she's tired, so she won't go fetch that. Only Aunt Norris is monster enough to insist, the rest are just inattentive. And as kind as Edmund is, he's not a mind-reader. If she goes into her marriage without the necessary self-respect to tell him when he's bothering her in some way, their marriage (and their marital intimacy) is going to go very, very badly.
I'm probably being unnecessarily harsh to Fanny, but while nowhere near as angelic as she, I've spent a good deal of time in the "good girl" department. There's nothing wrong with that, but it has to be self-respecting and self-aware, like Anne Eliot, who recognizes that nobody respects her, that they really should, and then does the right thing because she chooses to do so and because she loves her family anyway.
Poor Fanny (how involuntarily one calls her so!) is very young, and I hope she will learn to stand up for herself one day. Until then, frankly, many of her troubles are of her own making. Should the people around her treat her better? Yes. Have they the moral imagination to realize how unhappy they are making her and stop? No. But quite a few of them would treat her better if she would say that she's tired, so she won't go fetch that. Only Aunt Norris is monster enough to insist, the rest are just inattentive. And as kind as Edmund is, he's not a mind-reader. If she goes into her marriage without the necessary self-respect to tell him when he's bothering her in some way, their marriage (and their marital intimacy) is going to go very, very badly.