Abstract
Given the importance for the world depicted in Mansfield Park (1814) of various forms of propriety (social, moral, sexual, linguistic), it should not be surprising to find the textual operations of Jane Austen’s novel themselves marked by a certain concern with right conduct. The nature of such textual propriety can be gleaned by considering the point at which it is fleetingly disrupted, during a conversation (in volume 2, chapter 3) between Fanny Price, the novel’s heroine, and Edmund Bertram, her cousin and eventual spouse. This dialogue looks back to an earlier interdicted exchange between Fanny and her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, ‘master at Mansfield Park’.2 Edmund’s wish that Fanny ‘talk … more’ to Sir Thomas precipitates the following discussion:
‘But I do talk to him more than I used. I am sure I do. Did not you hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?’
‘I did — and was in hopes 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! And while my cousins were sitting by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like — I thought it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel.’ (MP, p. 178)
it is not a question of introducing a historical explanation which is stuck on to the work from the outside. On the contrary, [there is] a sort of splitting within the work: this division is its unconscious, in so far as it possesses one — the unconscious which is history, the play of history beyond its edges, encroaching on those edges: this is why it is possible to trace the path which leads from the haunted work to that which haunts it. Once again it is not a question of redoubling the work with an unconscious, but a question of revealing in the very gestures of expression that which it is not. Then, the reverse side of what is written will be history itself.
The speech of the book comes from a certain silence.
Pierre Machereyl
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Notes
The epigraphs to this chapter are taken from Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 94 and 85 respectively (emphasis in original).
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley, intro. Marilyn Butler (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 337. All subsequent references are to this edition — abbreviated as MP — and included in parenthesis after quotations in the text.
The most comprehensive critical readings of Austen’s text in terms of its oblique relation to questions of colonialism and slavery are: Moira Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 65–89
Maggie Malone, ‘Patriarchy and Slavery and the Problem of Fanny’, Essays in Poetics: Journal of the Neo-Formalist Circle, 18. 2 (1993), pp. 28–41
Maaja A. Stewart, Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions: Jane Austen’s Novels in Eighteenth-Century Contexts (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1993), pp. 105–36
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), pp. 95–116
See also Susan Fraiman’s important metacritical feminist response to Said in ‘Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture and Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry, 21 (1995), pp. 805–21. Questions of colonialism, slavery and related issues are addressed in less detail but with equal insight (in Mansfield Park and other Austen texts) in Isobel Armstrong, Mansfield Park (London: Penguin, 1988)
Meenakshi Mukherjee, Jane Austen (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 49–69
Suvendrini Perera, Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 35–57
The links between Austen’s own family and slavery (established through the Reverend George Austen’s trusteeship of an estate owned by James Langford Nibbs) are documented in Frank Gibbon, ‘The Antiguan Connection: New Light on Mansfield Park’, Cambridge Quarterly, 11 (1982), pp. 298–305.
Jane Austen’s Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others, ed. R. W. Chapman, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), II, p. 298.
James Walvin, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 11.
Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 92.
For a useful reading of the intersections between colonial and patriarchal oppression in Blake’s text, see Steven Vine, ‘“That Mild Beam”: Enlightenment and Enslavement in William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion’, in The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison, ed. and intro. Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring, Foreword by Isobel Armstrong (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 40–63.
Claudia L. Johnson, ‘Gender, Theory and Jane Austen Culture’, in Mansfield Park, ed. and intro. Nigel Wood (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1993), p. 110.
Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 15–16.
Said, p. 104. Said’s reference is to Warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 138–41
See also Avrom Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park: An Essay in Critical Synthesis (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), pp. 36–9.
As Joseph Litvak notes, Austen’s figuration of acting as disease echoes the rhetorical strategies of Thomas Gisborne’s Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797). For Gisborne, predictably, it is women rather than men who are especially prone to the dangers of acting because they evidently possess a greater disposition towards imitation and impersonation. See Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 7.
Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 232 (emphasis in original)
Trilling’s reading of the role of Lovers’ Vows in Mansfield Park appears in Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1955), pp. 206–30.
Von Sack, cited in an unsigned review in The Quarterly Review (May 1811), p. 490.
On this point, see L. F. Thompson, Kotzebue: A Survey of his Progress in France, and England Preceded by a Consideration of the Critical Attitude to him in Germany (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1928), p. 60.
See August von Kotzebue, The Negro Slaves, A Dramatic-Historical Piece, in Three Acts, Translated from the German of the President de Kotzebue (London: T. Cadell et al., 1796), pp. 51–6.
Lady Maria Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal: Jamaica One Hundred Years Ago, Reprinted from a Journal Kept by Maria, Lady Nugent, from 1801 to 1815, Issued for Private Circulation in 1839, ed. Frank Cundall (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1907), pp. 65–6.
It is no accident, in this context, that the ‘nest of comforts’ in Fanny’s ‘East room’ should include, as well as William’s ‘small sketch’ of ‘H. M. S. Antwerp’ (MP, p. 137), a transparency of Tintern Abbey. For in Wordsworth’s poem of the same name, of course, the historical ruin prompts a poetic excavation of subjective memory which climaxes with an affirmation of just that love between brother and sister, William and Dorothy, whose ‘precious remains’ are celebrated in Austen. For detailed analyses of the incest motif in Mansfield Park, see Glenda A. Hudson, ‘Incestuous Relationships: Mansfield Park Revisited’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 4 (1991), pp. 53–68
Johanna M. Smith ‘“My Only Sister Now”: Incest in Mansfield Park’, Studies in the Novel, 19 (1987), pp. 1–15.
For a fascinating account of the abolitionist emblem in both its male and female versions and British and American contexts see Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 3–28.
Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, ed. and intro. Moira Ferguson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 64.
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© 2000 Carl Plasa
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Plasa, C. (2000). ‘What was done there is not to be told’: Mansfield Park’s Colonial Unconscious. In: Textual Politics from Slavery to Postcolonialism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286719_3
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