In Defense of Dullness or Why Fanny Price is My Favorite Austen Heroine

Abstract

long ties to UNC, and incidentally the mother of one of my classmates (and my wife Jane's quondam suitor). In her later age, in the 1960s, she moved back to Chapel Hill and set up as an invigilator of undergraduate manners. When she spotted boorishness she would advance with her furled umbrella and deal a whack to the offender. Hailed, and I believe flattered, by her reputation as an arbitress of good behavior, she wrote occasional letters to my paper, the Greensboro Daily News. I once asked her to write a Sunday piece on the decline of manners. It was a ringer. Good manners, she wrote in effect, are no frivolous concern; they are the essential lubricant of civili zation. If only people would conduct themselves as ladies and gentlemen, peace would break out everywhere. After all, she concluded, playing her trump card, the Trojan War had been caused by a breach of good manners, when a guest stole his host's wife from under his roof?when Paris violated Menelaus's hospitality and abducted Helen, provoking twenty years of war and wandering. I cannot confirm the fact, but I feel sure that Connor had read her Jane Austen and, with her, viewed good manners, reflecting good hearts, as the essence of civility, and civility as the essence of civilized life. Now, in our debauched age, which not even our Miss Manners may be able to rescue from vulgarity, one is tempted to raise a cri de coeur: Otelia Connor, where are you and your umbrella now that we need you?