Abstract
‘No, indeed I cannot act,’ Spoken by Fanny Price in jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, the simple consLative also has a certain air of refusal (‘indeed’), and, as such, her statement will be voiced again, by other characters, in slightly different words, throughout my book. Fanny’s utterance is ambiguous: it not only describes a position, taken by Fanny; it is also the performance of an act — when saying that action is not possible. Fanny’s words are inscribed in a world of ‘delicate balance’,1 in a conversation culture, where a refusal to speak is absolutely unacceptable. And the action that Fanny talks about is most of all linguistic: she cannot speak with another’s tongue, she must be sincere, and not disguised; at the same time, her social and moral standing makes conversation difficult for her, especially since conversation does not promote sincerity, but rather politeness.2 Fanny speaks only to voice her silence.
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Notes
Cheryl Glenn, Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), p. 5.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), p. 66.
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 155.
I am quoting Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. J. Lucas (London: Oxford University Press, 1970).
John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 163.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 193.
Brontë, quoted in Bharat Tandon, Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation (London: Anthem, 2003), p. 41.
Jane Austen Emma (Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen) ed. R. Cronin and D. McMillan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005) p. 33.
Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 63.
Sarah Emsley, jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
jenny Davidson, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 76.
J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 14.
Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmilian, 1986), p. 156.
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of language (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 233.
Lionel Trilling, ‘Mansfield Park’, The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism (New York: Viking, 1955), p. 181.
D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 68.
Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation)’, On Ideology, tr. Ben Brewster, Radical Thinkers, 26 (new edn) (London and New York: Verso, 2008), p. 23.
Nina Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment: Womm and Other Glorified Outcasts (Mew York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 20.
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© 2013 Ulf Olsson
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Olsson, U. (2013). The Exemplary Becomes Problematic, or Gendered Silence: Austen’s Mansfield Park. In: Silence and Subject in Modern Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137350992_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137350992_2
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