I do not mean to suggest Sir Thomas is a perfect man or parent. His demeanor is off-putting and inspires no close confidence in his children. I feel he was too willing to believe in Maria’s professed joy in Rushworth simply for the sake of the connection. I think his value for wealth and consequence overpowered his natural instinct and better feeling Maria’s ‘happiness must not be sacrificed to it’ (21). Sir Thomas ought to have seen and stopped the terrible ill-usage Fanny has suffered primarily at Mrs. Norris’ hands in her zeal to enforce the distinction between Fanny and her cousins. Sir Thomas like Edmund (or visa-versa perhaps) is apt to see good in people and I feel never suspected Mrs. Norris to be the poster-girl for all he did not want his daughters to be or the tyrant she has been to Fanny. I am not saying Sir Thomas should not have been more observant but that his heart was in the right place.

That Sir Thomas has ‘never seemed the friend of their pleasures’ (3) appears to be the complaint of Tom as well as the Miss Bertrams but to me it is a shallow reason for not loving or respecting a parent. There is no evidence they have suffered any oppression or real deprivations because their father possesses a stern demeanor, stuffy ideas of decorum and desires a quite family circle to bustle and frivolity. Their true problems are incredible selfishness and they feel injury under their father’s care due to the want of their own characters. They seem only capable of rote adherence to duty because they lack the ‘higher species of self–command, that just consideration of others, that knowledge of… [their] own heart, that principle of right’ (9) which makes duty bearable if not pleasant. If they were less selfish and could see beyond their own concerns then I feel they could perhaps value their father as they ought.

Fanny’s relief, and her consciousness of it, were quite equal to her cousins’; but a more tender nature suggested that her feelings were ungrateful, and she really grieved because she could not grieve. “Sir Thomas, who had done so much for her and her brothers, and who was gone perhaps never to return! that she should see him go without a tear! it was a shameful insensibility.” (3)