Reading Femininity through Horses

In light of the fact that women riding horses enhanced cultural capital for women but threatened their claims of traditional female domesticity, the distinctions between Fanny and her cousins/Mary Crawford become clearer. Edmund’s mare factors prominently in the triangulation of Edmund, Fanny and Mary, drawing attention to the contrast between Fanny and Mary. Their different responses to horses can not only be connected with their different temperaments (which also carries significance, since positive horse attributes in the 19th century were also connected with desirable female attributes), but also with their relationship to the sequestered female sphere. Immediately after Mary receives her first lesson in horsemanship, initiated by her for pleasure, the old coachman accompanying Fanny praises Mary’s giftedness saying “I never see one sit on a horse better. She did not seem to have a thought of fear. Very different from you, miss, when you first began…Lord bless me! how you did tremble…” (95). The Miss Bertrams take especial interest in Mary’s natural affinity for riding since “her early excellence in it was like their own” (95). Horsemanship draws Mary and the Bertram girls together at the expense of excluding Fanny.

There is also the question of motivation. Fanny rides for health whereas the other women ride for pleasure. By leaving the confines of the house, symbolically leaving the “feminine roles of passivity, submissiveness, and non-physicality” (Dorre 78), the Bertram girls and Mary unbecomingly embrace independence and freedom from the patriarchal rule, making them less womanly. It is harder to make a judgment on Fanny because she, in general, has less freedom to choose what she wants to do or what she is allowed to like. There is no point in the novel where Fanny explicitly expresses her enjoyment for riding. The narrator describes Fanny’s old grey poney as a “valued friend” (64) and subsequently talks about Fanny’s “delight” (66) in the new mare calculated for her use. Most of that delight seems to derive from the “consideration of that kindness…beyond all her words to express. She regarded her cousin as an example of everything good” (66). With her delicate health, Fanny has necessity in riding, but remains a homebody. In that sense, she escapes the censure that comes from denouncing traditional femininity. She remains, in Claudia Johnson’s words, “conventionally feminine” (Johnson 95).

NB. There are a lot more readings of horses that I could pursue in the novel: 1) the relationship of ideal woman to ideal horse and how that influences female education and the reading of Edmund’s “gentling” vs. “breaking” of Fanny, 2) Tom’s obsession with horses, Mary Crawford’s jealousy, and the idea that Tom successfully replaces women with horses, 3) the economic significance of horses and the way it distinguishes class, i.e. how Fanny can’t own a horse and Henry gives a costly loan horse to William, etc.