Abstract
Mansfield Park is in many respects a dark and alienating book. Its dystopic effect has been variously ascribed to its moral rigidity, to its rejection of wit, and to its personally unattractive heroine.1 These complaints have a certain validity, as does Claudia Johnson’s compelling characterization of Mansfield Park as ‘Austen’s most, rather than her least, ironic novel and a bitter parody of conservative fiction.’2 The book’s negative effect seems to me, however, to lie in something even more powerful: its horrifying picture of family life. Written on the threshold of nineteenth-century pieties about family love and at the end of a century of attempts to set domestic life apart from political strife, it explodes the myth of the apolitical home. In Mansfield Park, the family is a site of competition and exploitation, of struggles for power and vengeance that match the intensity of social and economic class struggles.
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Notes
Lionel Trilling’s famous essay makes the most memorable case for Mansfield Park as an articulation of moral intolerance, its ‘impulse … not to forgive but to condemn’ (‘Mansfield Park’ in The Opposing Self Nine Essays in Criticism [New York: Viking Press, 1955] 211). Marvin Mudrick and Darrel Mansell both point to the novel’s rejection of wit, Mudrick seeing this as a betrayal of Austen’s own instincts (164–9) and Mansell finding the novel a culmination of long-standing misgivings ‘about the propriety of her irony and wit’ (123). More recently, Nina Auerbach has connected Fanny Price to monstrously destructive figures such as Grendel and Frankenstein: ‘there is something horrible about her, something that deprives the imagination of its appetite for ordinary life and compels it toward the deformed, the dispossessed’ (‘Jane Austen’s Dangerous Charm: Feeling as One Ought about Fanny Price’ in Jane Austen: New Perspectives 210).
Jane Austen: Women, P olitics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) 96. It will become clear that I am convinced by Johnson’s argument that Austen is engaged in cultural politics, but I see a bleaker, more personally defeated vision than Johnson does.
Spacks, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 222.
Jane Spencer makes this point in The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980): ‘In Mansfield Park she attacks the whole idea of either good man or good woman reforming the opposite sex through love and guidance. … Jane Austen is deliberately undercutting the complacent belief in the power of love to reform’ (173–4). Williams takes an even broader view, saying that Mansfield Park ‘becomes, in fact, a means for considering the limitations of morality in individual lives and in their mutual dealings’ (86).
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© 1995 Tara Ghoshal Wallace
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Wallace, T.G. (1995). The Family Plot of Mansfield Park . In: Jane Austen and Narrative Authority. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372948_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372948_5
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