Defending Crawford

Austen’s Henry Crawford is set out as the moral opposite of Edmund. He is morally lax, he does not wish to settle down (initially at least) and ends up eloping with a married woman. It is a generally held opinion that he was a bad guy from the beginning to the end and only the highly moral Fanny was perceptive enough to see it.

I disagree. Crawford is a bad boy, no doubts about that. However, he is one of the most interesting characters of Austen’s Mansfield Park. The general impression that one gets from the way Austen presents Crawford is that she was building up on Darcy’s character. Give Darcy a bad child hood and make Elizabeth Bennet a Miss Goody Two Shoes in love with Mr Collins and voila- that’s the story of Henry Crawford and Fanny Price.  

However, the reason I disagreed was not because Crawford was Darcy’s brother from another mother. I disagreed about Crawford’s characterisation as the villain because that is not entirely true. He is a young man who was raised by a bitter and squabbling couple who could agree on nothing. This explains his indifference towards the married state and his unwillingness to be caught in it. That is until he meets our dear Miss Price and gradually falls in love with her and wants to marry her. However, that is not to be. It really makes one feel sorry for him even when he elopes with Maria in the end. Most of HC fans end up blaming Fanny Price for that. I don’t.

Crawford is an example of the British household falling apart. He is the ultimate example of what happens when the “home” is a place of conflict rather than comfort. He is a man who has money and status so that should have made him the epitome of all that was wonderful and gentlemanly, as the phrase goes, but he is not. He is introduced as a flirt who then falls in love only to be rejected. Crawford was flirt because that was his way of staying out of the marital state- a state that he might have perceived as and undesirable one given his childhood. However, when he falls in love with Fanny Price and sets out to change his ways he ends up getting rejected. He lashes out the only way he knows will hurt Price- by eloping with Maria. This act of his makes him the ultimate villain in an Austen novel. And those who are the Edmund fan club always use this as an example of how Crawford was bad all along. He wasn't. He had the potential to be good but Price was in love with Edmund and therefore didn't want to waste her time on Crawford. That is all well and good. But one can’t really blame Crawford for being what he is. He did not choose to be what he was. His society made him into what he became. Although most people really have it out for him, I think his character is the most realistic character of Mansfield Park and provides a breath of fresh air amidst all those hypocritically high moral characters that fill its pages.