Mansfield Park: An Annotated Edition

Women's Writing, 2018

is a novel preoccupied with the value of things. The novel presents characters who continually struggle to figure out what people, objects, and places are worth: Mary Crawford attempts to size up Edmund's potential worth as a husband; Sir Thomas Bertram struggles to assess the value of his property in the West Indies; and virtually every character spends the length of the novel figuring out just how valuable Fanny is to Mansfield Park. Jane Austen began planning Mansfield Park in 1811shortly after her family moved to Chawton due to their own financial difficultiesand published it in 1814. During this same period, Britainas a nationwas also struggling to figure out the worth of things; political economists like Adam Smith and T.R. Malthus were trying to assess the value of people, labor, and material goods in the face of rapidly developing industrial and credit economies. There were also major bank crises in 1793, 1797, and 1810, which resulted in bank notes that were, suddenly, worth nothing. Through close analysis of Mansfield Park's mediations on value, this essay shows Austen to be a writer not only concerned with the economic realities and prospects of her characters, but also the extent to which economic thinking influenced their understanding of the world around them, and the people and objects that populated it. In a letter written to her publisher, John Murray, on 1 April 1816, Jane Austen comments that she is returning his copy of the Quarterly Review and laments the "total omission of 'Mansfield Park'" in its pages. "I cannot but be sorry", she writes, "that so clever a man as the Reviewer of 'Emma' should consider it as unworthy of being noticed". 1 She continues, "You will be pleased to hear that I have received the Prince's thanks for the handsome copy I sent him of 'Emma.' Whatever he may think of my share of the work, yours seems to have been quite right" (Austen-Leigh, 101). The joke here is typical of Austenunderstated, self-deprecating, and funny. In the next line of the letter, though, she turns to a more serious topic: her brother Henry's recently failed bank. "In consequence of the late event in Henrietta Street", she explains, "I must request that if you should at any time have anything to

The moral landscape of Mansfi eld Park has long been the focus of uneasy critical attention. The novel is often read as a baffl ing domestic tragedy, with unlikable main characters and even echoes of King Lear. The Internet-based Fanny wars provide a contemporary manifestation of this confusion, people exchanging fi re over the assessment of Fanny Price-resilient domestic heroine or charmless puritan?-and Mary Crawford-crude adventuress or bright spirit? As the persistence of these debates indicates, the moral-ethical core of Mansfi eld Park continues to resist summation. It seems hard to make up our minds about the characters. The novel's treatment of the social landscape, however, is very clear. The treatment of the social is comic rather than tragic, although it is comedy of the unsettling sort where, as in The Merchant of Venice, the good (about whom we have serious reservations) end fairly happily and the bad (with whom we rather sympathize) are punished quite unpleasantly. There is, in short, a tension in Mansfi eld Park between the comic and the tragic, between the morally equivocal on the one hand and precise psychosocial detail on the other. I suggest that this tension is the effect of Austen's careful elaboration of unhappy multigenerational and multifamily dynamics and their effect on individuals. The main characters in Mansfi eld Park are much more socially embedded and constructed than is usual in the English novel, and they can be fully understood only if read as part of the social and psychological interactions in which they live. Mansfi eld Park is not an aberration in Austen's oeuvre, the sole unsatisfactory novel in a glorious pantheon, but the logical conclusion of one aspect M6504.indb 105 M6504.indb 105

2016

The least popular of all her novels, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814) depicts a heroine, precariously situated in the margins of the aristocracy, who is intellectually educated rather than accomplished. As the timid Fanny Price navigates the morally fraught social world of Mansfield Park, Austen comments on the exclusion and mistreatment of women in the British public sphere at large as well as criticizes the practice of educating women into accomplishment as exemplified by the sparkling socialite, Mary Crawford. This thesis positions Austen in context with educational writers William Cowper, the poet, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the philosopher. I analyze all three writers' messages about education, along with the implications of the genre/form with which they choose to enter public discourses, including the poem, the political tract, and the novel. Considering the historical and cultural conceptions of the novel as trivial and feminine during Austen's day, her decision to employ this form suggests that she is interested in reforming the novel into a platform for serious public engagement. Austen ultimately anticipates the Victorian novel by revealing the form's potential value as intellectual exercise and an important tool for women to join public conversation. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Gena Zuroski Jenkins, who guided me every step of the way and consistently transformed the incoherent ramblings of my brain into finely tuned phrases and insightful ideas. Dr. King gave me a way into the project and the masses of Austen scholarship very early on in its development, which smoothed my journey considerably. Of the faculty and staff in the McMaster University Department of English and Cultural Studies, I also owe thanks to

It is a commonplace observation that good characters are the most difficult for an artist to make interesting. This was the basis of one of Plato's arguments against art: '[The] fretful temper gives scope for a great diversity of dramatic representation; whereas the calm and wise character in its unvarying constancy is not easy to represent, nor when represented is it readily understood.' 1 Perhaps for this reason many novels are about not fundamentally evil characters, but imperfect people, often young, whose progress towards maturity claims the interest of the reader, and who at the end are presumed to have reached the less interesting state of 'calmness and wisdom.' A writer who does not wish to glamorise evil may choose to write this kind of bildungsroman instead of trying to present a character who is morally exemplary from the start. The more difficult path is to place in the foreground a 'good' character who must deal with vicissitudes which form the interest of the novel. This, for example, seems to have been the task Jane Austen set herself when she wrote Mansfield Park. She had tackled this problem to some extent in Sense and Sensibility, but Elinor's maturity and good sense is balanced by the painful lessons Marianne has to learn: there are two heroines. In Mansfield Park, on the other hand, despite the attractions of Mary Crawford, Fanny Price is undoubtedly the central figure. The problem Austen faced in presenting such an unglamorous, passive and, to many, unpalatably virtuous heroine is similar to that faced by Iris Murdoch when she dramatises a figure of good such as Tallis Browne in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), although their methods are somewhat different.

2020

Jane Austen can be regarded as an author renowned for her conventional novels at first glance. Nevertheless, reading Austen in a profound way reveals that there lies a hidden critical voice against the irregularities of society. In this article, the novel, Mansfield Park, is analysed to demonstrate how the author interrogates class as a constructed notion by employing unusual techniques which are reminiscent of postmodernist devices. After the function of ex-centric characters, Fanny Price and James Rushworth, is focused on, the role of the intertextual references employed by Austen in unearthing artificial class distinctions is examined. It is concluded that the author implicitly challenges the class-oriented social system of her age.

GAP Bodhi Taru: A Global Journal of Humanities, 2020

Multiple classic texts in English literature have portrayed how emotions are fraught with politics during different moments in human history. This paper highlights how Jane Austen's Mansfield Park is one such nineteenth-century classic which demonstrates the complicity between emotions and imperial discourses by analyzing the subjectivity and agency of its protagonist, Fanny Price. By drawing on Edward Said's contention in Culture and Imperialism, this paper will demonstrate how Fanny's movements across domestic spaces correspond to the movements of her master Sir Thomas Bertram and how her subjectivity transforms from that of a slave into a subordinate imperial agent, as the narrative unfolds. A reader might consider Fanny to be the heroine of Mansfield Park, but one cannot ignore how almost all the other characters foist their perceptions and decisions on her. While Fanny thwarts some decisions, she is helpless to absorb and reinstate certain discourses of imperial hegemony which influence her emotions and thoughts infinitely. The textual language in Mansfield Park is ruptured with words and symbols which relegate Fanny into a slave's disposition. Yet, by the end of the narrative, she is reinstated as a successful agent of imperialism. This paper will throw light on how the imperial discourses which are complicit with Fanny's emotions come to define her subjectivity and her unique imperial agency. It will unpack Fanny's interpellation of the ideas of home, morality, propriety and ordination in Mansfield Park.

2016

Family relationship and the topic of parenting in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park are discussed. The position of the parents and the upbringing or lack of it in the two novels is put into social context of Austen's time, in which the individual is still subjected to social norms and accepted behaviour patterns, but which also reflects the new ideas of a more balanced distribution of power and autonomy within the family unit. The focus is on two heroines Elizabeth Bennet and Fanny Price and the emergence of a new domestic female that dictates the path of courtship and marriage. In Pride and Prejudice, the domestic reform comes in the form of assertive and outspoken Elizabeth Bennet. In Mansfield Park, it comes through the recognition and incorporation of the poor cousin into the family. Elizabeth's father Mr. Bennet neglects his parental role, and Mrs. Bennet's main preoccupation is to see her daughters married. Fanny's substitute father Sir Thomas is an oppressive parent who alienates his children, and his wife Mrs. Bertram is a non-existent mother. Fanny's birth parents are equally inadequate. However, all parents make themselves inadvertently of use to the heroines. Mrs. Bennet's habitual impropriety and her father's neglect challenge Elizabeth's passivity and provoke her into action. By distancing herself from her parents and learning from their mistakes, Elizabeth is able to grow and eventually achieve happiness through marriage. The negligence from her substitute and birth parents causes Fanny to further develop her sense of propriety and ultimately make her the moral compass of the story. In the end, the heroines achieve a balanced union between their private lives and the requirements of their society. Through the marriages shown in the novels, the idea is asserted that marriages based on love and esteem are more likely to endure the test of time than those contracted for material gain.

Reading Mansfield Park as Jane Austen's most active critique of consequentialist ethics, this paper argues that Austen's premise offers the conflicting recommendation that outcome alone cannot be used as a demarcation of morality. My approach works backwards to ground new evaluations concerning the novel’s moral controversies, and attempts to affirm an Aristotelian perspective to Austen’s work. My research is concerned with the philosophic concepts which inform Austen’s base premises about her virtues. By also using Austen's personal letters and biography during Mansfield Park's composition, I argue the novel foregrounds what she sees as the significance in aspiring to create a new type of community through marriage and modeled on classical socially teleological accounts of the virtues.

The achievement of Mansfield Park (1814) lies in the way Austen links a series of domestic scenes with a nation in transition. By the time Austen was writing Mansfield Park, the scrutiny of the organization of the body politic brought to the fore the question of women's position in civic society (Kinley xi). Consequently, a large number of women asked for a more active part in the highly patriarchal English society, thereby challenging the means by which it imposes order on a subject: ownership of property vested in the male (the law of entail as depicted in Pride and Prejudice), deification of the father figure and fostering dependency in children. It is supported by the artificial polarization of gender traits: the man is rational, aggressive, objective, dominating and manipulative, while, the woman is intuitive, and passive. Traditionally, the question of gender difference is treated by coupling it with the opposition: activity/passivity, where the man is allotted the active role and the woman the passive (Cixous 148). Being defined and limited by the methods of patriarchal control __ education, law and religion __ a woman could not exercise her powers of reasoning to discover the resources in herself, thereby, being trapped in the vicious cycle of 'feminine' woman roleplay.

2019

I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public.