Jane Austen: Mansfield

Park (1814)
Bibliography: Tony Tanner, “Quella cosa
tranquilla”, introduzione all’ edizione Bur
di Mansfield Park e
E. Said: Culture and Imperialism
 Main Characters in Novels
Many protagonists of novels are foundlings, outcasts,
emigrants, dispossessed people in search of social
status and recognition (Defoe’s Moll Flanders,
Richardson’s Pamela, Fielding’s Tom Jones,
Thackeray’s Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair). They re-
define themselves, they look for a new social status
and identity. Some of them succeed and their virtue
is repaid, others succumb to their mistakes or fall
prey to misfortune and fail.
In Austen’s novels the protagonists’ development is
more personal and psychological. Each acquires
social status by growing as a person.
 Pride and Prejudice
• Development of both protagonists throughout the
novel: they grow up, change, become more mature.
They reach a better understanding of themselves
and the other.
• Pride and prejudice= two excesses that must be
avoided. Elizabeth and Darcy are both proud and
prejudiced towards each other. We see them at a
loss, they make mistakes, misunderstand or are
misunderstood. They are active and reactive. They
are witty.
• Elizabeth is ironic but, sometimes, also object of
irony when she is wrong.
 Fanny Price
• From a modest family in Portsmouth to a genteel married
status at Mansfield Park; from being an object of charity to
being an indispensable support for the Bertram family.
• Different from the typical Austen heroines: shy,
vulnerable, sickly, passive, not witty, not socially brilliant,
not vital.

•  immobility: she triumphs by not reacting, not rebelling,

just enduring, not doing rather than doing.
•  she is always right, she is never mistaken, she sees
farther and feels deeper than all the others. Austen seems
to totally agree with her, no ironic attitude towards her.
 A Strange Novel + Heroine
in Austen’s Production
• Fanny Price is Austen’s least loved
heroine by critics and readers.
• Is Fanny boring, self-satisfied and
proud, too static?
• What does she represent in Austen’s
world?
• Mansfield Park is a novel about
change and tradition, movement and
immobility (according to critic Tony
Tanner).
 Austen’s Writing of the Novel:
1811-1813
• England’s population, 13 million people, was mostly
occupied in rural work and agriculture. Provincial England is
a world untouched by the distant Napoleonic Wars (Waterloo
1815). Aristocracy = land owners bound to the land: they
live there, share their life with their peasants. Old order.
• But in the next two decades a deep change will occur:
process of urbanization, huge shifts of population from
countryside to cities, industrialization, the age of the railway.
A network of channels and roads is built. A new type of
landowners: they don’t live in the countryside but merely
exploit the land. Land = object of economic speculation.
New order
• Fear that French radicalism and Jacobinism could spread in
the English lower classes.
Antigua and the West Indies
• Sir Thomas leaves for Antigua  allusion to his
business, probably sugar cane plantations. Black
slaves used as manpower. War between French and
English in the West Indies (1781-83). He has to go
and check his business.
• Sir Thomas’s double face: the enlightened landowner
at home, the slave exploiter in the colonies. Even
the old order is not exempt from the new business.
• Austen is aware of the political events of her time
(her references are consistent) but she represents a
precise viewpoint on English reality (that of a
woman).
 Symbolic Places
• Mansfield Park is in the county of Northampton, a
traditional fortress of Tory values. A world of
unchanged order, propriety, decorum, old values,
tranquillity. No chaotic movement here or loud
noise. Symbolic value. Solid rural aristocratic values.
• Portsmouth, seen through Fanny’s eyes (when she
goes to visit her family), is a world of (domestic )
lower-class chaos. Its consequences are: dirt,
arguments, loud noises, lack of rules and decorum.
It is not a place of vice but of disorder. Fanny is
shocked and unable to help, to bring order and
decorum.
 London
• London is the world of freedom, fashion,
amusements, absence of rules. Money is the
dominant force. Dangerous place where values are
fleeting and elusive. Appearance rather than values
dominate. At the end of the book, in London, Maria
is involved in illicit affairs, dishonoured and
banished. Julia compromises her respectability with
(good-for-nothing) Yates. Tom will squander his
money and put his life in danger.
• London corrupts and produces people like the
Crawfords who are able to erode the values of
Mansfield Park.
 Old and New, Past and
Future
• Portsmouth produces raw material that must be
moulded and educated (William, Fanny and
finally their sister Susan will be)
• But without new forces from outside (from
Portsmouth, for example) Mansfield Park can
become arid and die.
• Old order is a paradigmatic world, everybody has
its role: ruling class and ruled, educated people
and people to educate. But this is the past.
• The book is concerned with the conflict between
an old world and a new future world.
 Fanny and Mansfield Park
• Fanny was born in Portsmouth but, at the end of the
novel, she feels she belongs to Mansfield, “it is her
house”  identification with a set of values and a way
of being. It reflects her spiritual being. A “spiritual
building”. When she comes back to Mansfield after
Portsmouth, the beautiful summer landscape predicts
her beautiful future as a warden of that place.
• Previous warden: Sir Thomas. He was the normative
figure and represented the old order (economic and
moral). It is no accident that the Crawfords arrive
when he is in Antigua. Sir Thomas (old rural order)
vs the Crawfords (new urban order)
 The Crawfords
• The Crawfords are not evil but nevertheless
dangerous in this rural world. They represent an
“amoral” lifestyle: devoted to amusements, rich,
spoilt, easily bored, They are a corrosive force.
Soon after their arrival, Henry deludes Julia, flirts
with Maria and finally tries to “capture” Fanny. Mary
plays first with Tom, then decides for Edmund but
criticises his religious vocation as an Anglican vicar
(and almost persuades him to renounce it).
• Henry’s love for Fanny? A novelty, because she is
different from his previous conquests. A fortress to
lay siege to.
Episode of the cart (Ch. 6), pp. 58-9

• Mary Crawford cannot find a horse and cart to

be rented to deliver her harp to her sister’s
home. It is the middle of the hay harvest, so
the peasants need every horse and cart.
• “I shall understand all your ways in time; but
coming down with the true London maxim,
that everything is to be got with money, I was
a little embarrassed at first by the sturdy
independence of your country customs.”
 Sir Thomas Bertram
• The normative figure of Mansfield Park. He appreciates
Fanny and understands her value (gives her fire in the
East-Room). He brings tranquillity and peace into the
house after the confusion of the theatre.
• But he is guilty of not having supervised his children’s
upbringing more and having left it to people like Mrs
Norris (a type of fatuous, manipulative and bossy
woman). Too reserved, cold and detached. He can’t
convey his moral values to his offspring. His behaviour is
superficial when he makes his daughter marry a dumb
like Rushworth, just because he is very rich, and when he
wants Fanny to accept Henry’s proposal.
 Lady Bertram and Mrs
Norris
• Lazy, apathetic, indifferent. She is guilty of the
lacking upbringing of her children. A humorous
character, represents the parody or weakening of the
aristocratic values
• Mrs Norris was supposed to be one of the wardens of
Mansfield Park. She is one of the most hideous figures
created by Austen: selfish, intrusive, opportunistic,
prejudiced, ignorant. She arranges the marriage
between Maria and Mr Rushworth, persecutes Fanny
because she is weak, poor and defenceless. No
sensitivity. The fact that she is expelled by Mansfield
Park so late shows the deterioration of the house.
 Tom, Maria and Julia
• Tom is reckless, wastes his time and money in
amusements and horse-races. He will change only
after a serious illness and will take his father as a
model.
• Maria and Julia are devoid of generosity, humility
and sympathy. For Maria, Mansfield is the
repression of her freedom only. Competition
between two sisters for Henry. Maria marries Mr
Rushford for money only, for being free to do what
she likes. She will be punished like Mrs Norris. Julia
elopes with a frivolous man but her destiny is still
open to redemption.
 Edmund
• Serious, compassionate, intelligent, sensitive. The
only in the family before Sir Thomas, who
understands Fanny and feels pity for her. But he is
attracted by the superficial charm of the Crawfords.
He is seriously interested in becoming an Anglican
pastor.
• But he is not devoid of defects. He surrenders to
the theatrical performance at home. He thinks he is
in love with Mary and does not understand how far
they are from each other. He supports his father in
convincing Fanny to marry Henry.
• Fanny actually saves them all.
 Mansfield Park
• Crawfords = changing forces, restlessness,
innovators but also corrupters.
• Fanny = stability, tranquillity, steadiness,
tradition, rationality, immobility.
• Austen supports a world regulated by rational
traditional forces and undermined by an
irrational modernity. A stoic book that supports
the reasons of immobility (Tony Tanner)
• In a turbulent world resisting movement is
more difficult that joining the flux, the mass.
The Postcolonial View: E. Said Culture
and Imperialism (C I) pp. 84-97
• Mansfield Park (MP)= Pre-imperialist novel . There
are limited references to the outside world but for
Said it is more implicated in the rationale
(fondamento, logica) for imperialist expansion than
one may think at first sight.
• The Bertram estate in Antigua is not doing very well.
Sir Thomas leaves to settle his business there.
Austen takes pain to show us two apparently distant
but actually convergent processes: the growth of
Fanny’s importance in the Bertrams’ economy as a
whole (she will finally inherit the estate) and her
growing steadfastness (fermezza, determinazione).
 The Theatre Scene: a Metaphor of a
“Rebellion” Which is Suppressed by the
Coloniser
• Fanny = a sort of surrogate conscience in the novel
about what is right and what is wrong, what is too
much when Sir Thomas is “abroad”.
• When he comes back he sweeps away every trace
of the “theatre”. He reinstates himself and his rule
 (MP chapter 20 p. 192). He is like a ‘Crusoe
setting things in order: it is also an early Protestant
eliminating all traces of frivolous behaviour. There
is nothing in MP that would contradict us, however,
if we were to assume that Sir Thomas does exactly
the same things –on a larger scale - in his Antigua
“plantations” ’. (C I, p. 87)
 Sir Thomas: the Coloniser
Fanny: his Heiress
• Said: ‘Whatever was wrong there … economic
depression, slavery, and competition with
France… Sit Thomas was able to fix , thereby
maintaining his control over his colonial domain.’
(C I, p. 87). - to hold and rule Mansfield Park is
to hold and rule an imperial estate.
• Colonising = bringing “a desired English order”
• What Fanny does is as a domestic or small-scale
movement in space that corresponds to the
larger, more openly colonial movements of Sir
Thomas, the man whose estate she inherits.
 Austen and the Empire
• Austen’s awareness of the empire is
obviously very different , alluded to much
more casually than Conrad’s or Kipling’s. In
her time the British were very active in the
Caribbean and in South America, notably
Brazil and Argentina; Austen seems only
vaguely aware of the details of these
activities, although the sense that extensive
West Indian plantations were important was
fairly widespread in metropolitan England.
 How much did Austen
Know?
• E. Said: ‘By that very odd combination of
casualness and stress, Austen reveals herself to be
assuming … the importance of an empire to the
situation at home… According to Austen we are to
conclude that no matter how isolated and
insulated the English place is (e.g., Mansfield Park),
it requires overseas sustenance. Sir Thomas’s
property in the Caribbean would have had to be a
sugar plantation maintained by slave labour (not
abolished until the 1820s). These are not dead
historical facts but , as Austen certainly knew,
evident historical realities.’ (C I p. 89).
 Difference between Earlier Empires
and the British and French Ones
• Earlier empires (Roman, Spanish,
Portuguese) were bent on loot (bottino), as
Conrad puts it, on the transport of treasure
from the colonies to Europe, with very little
attention to development, organisation or
system within the colonies themselves. On
the contrary, Britain and France wanted to
make their empires long-term, profitable,
ongoing concerns and they competed in
this enterprise especially in the Caribbean.
 Antigua
• Antigua is a real place of the novel, like
Portsmouth and London: a less desirable place
than Mansfield Park, but producing goods to be
consumed by everyone (by the early 19 th cent
every British person used sugar), although
owned and maintained by a small group of
aristocrats and gentry . The Bentrams and
other characters in the novel are a subgroup
within the minority and for them the island is
wealth, which Austen regards as being
concerted to propriety, order and comfort.
 Abroad and Out there: Usable
Colonies
• MP = not neutral but politically charged.
• Relationship between England (centre,
metropolis) and “out there” (the
Mediterranean, the Caribbean, India) is
evident in the scene of William’s visit.
When Lady Bertram learns about William
going to sea, she is quick to ask him what
she requires from the colonies (East
Indies, in this case) so that she may have
another shawl.
 The Centre and “out there” (the
colonies)

•  These signs of “abroad” include, even

as they repress, a rich complex history,
which has later achieved status, but at
Austen’s time was taken for granted.
• Overseas dominions are a source for local
fortunes. the Bertrams could not have
been possible without the slave trade,
sugar and the colonial planter class.
Mainstream vs Postcolonial readings

• Mainstream interpretations vs
postcolonial interpretation. The latter
underlines that a global perspective was
implied by Jane Austen and her
characters.
• It completes and complements the other
readings, by showing the link between
the social power of the Bertrams at
home and the British power overseas.