Mansfield Park 2
Outline
• Slavery as a ‘dead silence’ in MP
• JA and slavery
• Fanny Price as ‘spiritual mistress’ of
Mansfield Park
• Fanny Price and ‘the Atlantic working
class’
• Britain on the world stage from 1814
Slavery as a ‘dead silence’ in MP
• Said: ‘Antigua and Sir Thomas’s trip there
have a definitive function in MP, which …
is both incidental, referred to only in passing, and absolutely crucial to the action….
Sir Thomas, absent from Mansfield Park,
is never seen as present in Antigua, which
elicits at most a half-dozen references in
the novel’ (Culture and Imperialism, pp.
106-08)
Slavery as a ‘dead silence’ in MP
• Said: ‘How are we to assess Austen’s few
references to Antigua, and what are we to
make of them interpretatively?’ (ibid., p.
106)
• Fanny asks Sir Thomas about the slave
trade . . .
MP, vol. 2, ch. 3
• Fanny to Edmund: ‘Did you not hear me
ask him about the slave trade last night?’
‘I did – and was in hope the question
would be followed up by others. It would
have pleased your uncle to be inquired of
farther.’
‘And I longed to do it – but there was such
a dead silence!’
Slavery as a ‘dead silence’ in MP
• Fanny and geopolitics: ‘my cousin cannot
put the map of Europe together … my
cousin cannot tell the principal rivers in
Russia ... she never heard of Asia Minor’
(MP, vol. 1, ch. 2)
• Slavery a ‘dead silence’ in MP, therefore
not a live issue?
JA and slavery
• Voyages by Frank Austen (JA’s brother), in
1805 and 1806, to the West Indies (including Antigua) – FA critical of the treatment of slaves in Antigua
• JA’s father a trustee of an Antiguan sugar
plantation belonging to a close friend from
Oxford days
JA and slavery
• 1772, Lord Mansfield’s ruling (the ‘Mansfield
Judgement’): a slave becomes free once he or
she (in this case, James Somerset) sets foot on
British soil
• Women’s writing on slavery during the Romantic
era: e.g. Ann Yearsley, ‘A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade’ (1788); Hannah
More, ‘The Sorrows of Yamba, or the Negro
Woman’s Lamentation’ (1795)
JA and slavery
• Sir Thomas’s colonialism extends in relation to not just Antigua but also Fanny as
his niece
• Fanny brought into Mansfield Park by Sir
Thomas as a means by which to improve
both Mansfield Park itself and his niece
Said, Culture and
Imperialism, p.110
• ‘What was wanting within was in fact
supplied by the wealth derived from a
West Indian plantation and a poor provincial relative, both brought into Mansfield
Park and set to work. Yet on their own,
neither the one nor the other could have
sufficed….’
Said, Culture and
Imperialism, p.110
• ‘neither the one nor the other could have
sufficed; they require each other and then,
more important, they need executive disposition, which in turn helps to reform the
rest of the Bertram circle. All this Austen
leaves to her reader to supply in the way
of literal explication’
JA and slavery
• Fanny ‘colonized’ by Sir Thomas subsequently embraces the Mansfield regime
and rejects her Portsmouth home (the
smallness, the impropriety, etc., of the
Portsmouth home)
• At the same time, Fanny has a positive
effect on the Bertram circle (becomes Sir
Thomas’s favourite daughter, etc.)
Fanny Price as ‘spiritual mistress’
of Mansfield Park
• Through Fanny the moral values of the
Mansfield regime – symbolically, the landed gentry in general – are regenerated
• JA’s emphasis on interdependency as
mutually beneficial under the heading of
‘executive disposition’ (i.e. Sir Thomas is
reconfirmed as head of the family)
Fanny Price as ‘spiritual mistress’
of Mansfield Park
• Said: ‘the Bertrams did become better if
not altogether good…. all of this did occur
because outside (or rather outlying) factors were lodged properly inward, became
native to Mansfield Park, with Fanny the
niece its final spiritual mistress, and Edmund the second son its spiritual master’
(ibid., p. 110)
Fanny Price as ‘spiritual mistress’
of Mansfield Park
• But, in the end, who transforms whom?
The Bertrams transform Fanny? Or Fanny
transforms the Bertrams?
• Transformation from below? – Fanny
Price’s lower-middle-class status mirrored
by JA as herself a clergyman’s daughter
Fanny Price as ‘spiritual mistress’
of Mansfield Park
• Scott on JA: ‘her most distinguished characters do not rise greatly above well-bred
country gentlemen and ladies; and those
which are sketched with most originality
and precision, belong to a class rather
below that standard’ (Critical Heritage, p.
64)
Fanny Price and
‘the Atlantic working class’
• A valuable corrective to Said’s ‘transformation from above’ view of Fanny, from
Fraser Easton, ‘The Political Economy of
Mansfield Park: Fanny Price and the
Atlantic Working Class’, Textual Practice,
12/3 (1998), 459-88
Easton, ibid., p. 487
• ‘because [Said] places Fanny in a relationship of adoption or “affiliation”, rather
than resistance to the values of Sir
Thomas – even calling her the “spiritual
mistress” of Mansfield – his analysis of the
“geographical problematic” in the novel
fails to register Austen’s defence of
custom and its anti-imperial inspiration’
Fanny Price and
‘the Atlantic working class’
• Fanny’s return to Mansfield from Portsmouth even more significant than Sir
Thomas’s return after his trip to Antigua
• MP a novel of two ‘returns’
• The moral values that FP regenerates at
Mansfield are those having to do with
custom rather than colonialism
Fanny Price and
‘the Atlantic working class’
• Easton: ‘When Fanny finally does return to
Mansfield, it is not as the exponent of its
plantocratic and capitalist values, but as a
defender of common life and plebian
resistance. Her return signals a change of
regime at Mansfield, a change requiring
acceptance by Sir Thomas of what is truly
foreign about her’ (ibid., p. 482)
Fanny Price and
‘the Atlantic working class’
• Easton’s view: throughout the novel the
idea of interdependency – or ‘reciprocity’ –
that Fanny serves to embody has more to
do with a defence of custom than an advocacy of colonialism
• For a novelist who is supposedly ‘blind’ to
the condition of the servant class JA
names a remarkable number of servants
in MP
Fanny Price and
‘the Atlantic working class’
• Miss Lee, Nanny, Wilcox, Mr Green, John
Groom, Mrs Jefferies, Mrs Whitaker, Dick
Jackson, Baddeley, Christopher Jackson,
Stephen, Charles, Robert, Chapman,
Rebecca, Sally, Maddison
• Easton: ‘We resist the perspective of
labour and service, even when Austen
offers it to us’ (ibid., p. 480)
Fanny Price and
‘the Atlantic working class’
• From the ‘perspective of labour and service’, what we see in MP is the enactment
of forms of plebeian-patrician reciprocity
that have been customary within the tradition of rural life
• The land owners allow non-monetary
social privileges amongst their workers:
‘right of commonage’ – making use of the
‘left overs’ (wood, food, etc.)
Fanny Price and
‘the Atlantic working class’
• See also the right to ‘perks’, such as the
wooden chips in the Portsmouth dockyard
(cf. whiskey as both a gift and a right in
CR)
• In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries the ‘right of commonage’ under
threat from parliamentary acts of enclosure (cf. the law as a weapon in CR)
• ‘Enclosure’ a form of internal colonization
Fanny Price and
‘the Atlantic working class’
• Enclosure in Northamptonshire – the
emphasis on privacy at Mansfield Park
• Fanny’s plebeian perspective articulated in
terms of her strong sense of moral equality
– refusal of Henry Crawford’s marriage
proposal, for example
• Easton: ‘Fanny cannot be bought, there is
no “fanny price”’ (ibid., p. 472)
Fanny Price and
‘the Atlantic working class’
• Fanny’s sense of moral equality affirmed
by JA as novelist (the ‘Cinderella effect’!)
• MP as a novel is thus for custom and
against colonialism
• FP not so much the ‘spiritual mistress’
(Said) of Mansfield Park as a member of
‘the Atlantic working class’ (Easton) –
shared class identity of Northamptonshire
servants and Antiguan slaves
Britain on the world stage
from 1814
• Post-colonial and Marxist readings of MP:
Said/Easton
• How, then, to interpret the ‘dead silence’ about
slavery in JA’s novel
• Firstly, the ‘silence’ as such not dead in this particular work – the slave trade evidently a live
issue in connection with notions of moral equality that circulate around FP (as herself the
‘patron saint’ of the Atlantic working class)
Britain on the world stage
from 1814
• But at the same time, it remains the case that we
here never get past Sir Thomas’s ‘dead silence’
on the slavery issue
• No active interrogation of the slave trade, despite the fact that FP ‘longed’ to inquire farther of
her uncle about slavery
• The above may be said to mark the limit to FP’s
‘plebian perspective’
• Three stages to FP’s development as the ‘Cinderella’ of colonialism . . .
Britain on the world stage
from 1814
• 1) Putting the map of Europe together
• 2) Enquiring in conversation about the slave
trade
• 3) But, asking searching questions about colonialist practices in the West Indies…? – the fairytale character of FP’s opposition to slavery and
imperialism
• FP’s ‘dead silence’ on the slavery issue becomes a form of sanction for the production of
avowedly imperialist works in a nineteenthcentury ‘age of empire’ (e.g. Kipling as the unofficial poet laureate of the British empire)
Britain on the world stage
from 1814
• Said: ‘it is genuinely troubling to see how
little Britain’s great humanistic ideas, institutions, and monuments, which we still
celebrate as having the power ahistorically
to command our approval, how little they
stand in the way of the accelerating imperial process’ (Culture and Imperialism, p.
97)
Britain on the world stage
from 1814
• Britain’s ‘accelerating imperial process’ from
1814 . . .
• 1814 the year that marks Britain’s ascendancy in
Europe and on the world stage – beginning of
the end of the Napoleonic wars
• 1814 – the year of MP – an important occasion
in which to intervene from an anti-imperialist perspective: a missed opportunity for JA to fully
spell out her ethic of moral equality
Britain on the world stage
from 1814
• 1814 also the year in which Walter Scott’s
Waverley is published
• Waverley a ‘historical novel’ that shows as
such an awareness that 1814 is indeed an
important year in European history
• With his own 1814 novel, WS makes a
more decisive intervention than JA on the
question of empire?