Abstract
Mansfield Park seems to be determined to have everything to do with principles and nothing to do with principles of indeterminacy. It appears that anything like spirited critique or ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ is as it were ‘devolved’ to (or on to) Mary Crawford. And her discomfiture seems to be a ‘project’ of the book’s narrative strategies. This disconcerts, particularly as Mary seems at first blush a little like a return of the apparently unrepressed and approved-of Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice. And, as Lionel Trilling rightly points out, we are inclined to visit our suspicions on her severe critic and rival, the severely repressed Fanny. Trilling’s reading is itself a return of the repressive, as he proceeds to vindicate the ‘sternness’,1 the austerities and censoriousness of the Cinderella-like, perhaps Cordelia-like, figure of Fanny.2 Yet, finally, a displacement of Trilling’s reading is not quite the same as defiance of Mansfield Park’s ‘intentions’.
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Notes
Lionel Trilling, ‘Mansfield Park’ The Opposing Self (1955; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 198. References to Oxford University Press edition of Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley and John Lucas, 1970.
See Geoffrey Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (London: johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 129–30.
Edward Said,‘Jane Austen and Empire’, (1989), rpt. in Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism (Harlow: Longman,1992), pp. 97–113.
Alison G. Sulloway, Jane Austen and the Provtnce of Womanhood (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), p. 6.
Nina Auerbach, ‘Jane Austeri s Dangerous Charm: Feeling as one ought about Fanny Price,’ in Jane Austen: New Perspectives [Women and Literature] N.S. 3 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983), ed. Janet Todd, p. 210. Hence it seems a little unfair for Janis P. Stout to claim that ‘Fanny’s silences are rarely significant of anything except her timid self-effacement’ in Strategies of Reticence: Silence and Meaning in the Works of Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), p. 38.
Judith Lowder Newton, Women, Power and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction 1778–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), p. 73.
Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Conflict of Interpretations’, in Twentieth Century Literary Theory: a Reader, ed. K.M. Newton (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 193–6. •
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Lyre (1847), ch.15 (Harmonclsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 146.
Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), p. 96.
Tara Ghoshal Wallace, Jane Austen and Narrative Authority (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 59.
Arnold Kettle, An Introduction to the English Novel (New York: Harper & Row), 1951, pp. 93–4.
See, for example, James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. John Canning (London: Methuen, 1991), p. 119; and Patrick Cruttwell, in his Introductiori to Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 25.
David Lodge, ‘Mansfield Park’, in The Modes of Modern Fiction (London: Edward Arnold, 1977).
Avrom Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park (London: johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), p. 45.
Clive Bloom, The Occult Experience and the New Criticism (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), p. 18.
Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 216.
Tom Paine, The Rights of Man (1791–92; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 73: to him, Mr Burke was ‘accustomed to “kiss the aristocratical hand that hath purloined him from himself!”’.
W.H. Auden, ‘Dover’, (August 1937), Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1976), p. 124. (ed. Edward Mendelson).
Clive Bloom, The Occult Experience, op. cit., pp. 25–6. Together with Mary’s point about ‘Rears and Vices’ in the context of a work like Mansfield Park, I find helpful Lacari s reference to the unconscious in an unpublished remark cited by Shoshana Felman as ‘knowledge that cari t tolerate one’s knowing that one knows’ in Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insistht (London: Harvard University Press), p. 77.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 117.
Karl Marx’s analysis, although coming much too late to refer directly to the world of Jane Austen is still highly a propos here. In particular, it pursues the connection between ‘rents’ and ‘rants’ which is Mary Crawford’s at once indispensable and inadmissibly offensive characterization of the relation between economic base and linguistic superstructure: ‘Up to 1846, the Tories passed as the guardians of the traditions of old England. They were suspected of admiring in the British Constitution the eighth wonder of the world; to be laudatores temporis acti... enthusiasts for the throne, the High Church, the privileges and liberties of the British subject. The fatal year, 1846, with its repeal of the Corn Laws... proved they were enthusiasts for nothing but the rent of land, and at the same time disclosed the secret of their attachment to the political and religious institutions of Old England. The year 1846 transformed the Tories into protectionists. Tory was the sacred name, Protectionist is the profane one; Tory was the political battle-cry, Protectionist is the economical shout of distress; Tory seemed an idea, a principle, Protectionist is an interest. Protectionists of what? Of their own revenue, of the rent of their own land.’ (Karl Marx, ‘British Political Parties’, New York Daily Tribune (1852); rpt. in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. D. McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 326.
Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets: ‘He thought women made only for obedience’ (1779–81; London: J.M. Dent, 1925), p. 93.
Quoted in John Peter, Vladimir’s Carrot (London: André Deutsch, 1987), p. 104.
From a toast proposed by Samuel Johnson which Edward Said might like to consider when writing about Johnsori s most distinguished ‘student’, Jane Austen. See James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, vol. II (London: Everyman, 1992), p. 141.
Yeats, ‘Meditations in time of Civil War’, The Poems (London: Dent, 1990), ed. Daniel Albright, p. 246.
Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 120.
Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1975). D. 219.
See the argument of Margaret Kirkham’s Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction, most succinctly put in the observation that ‘Rousseau excluded women from liberation through enlightenment’ (p. 45).
Moliere, Dom Juan, 1.2.: in (e.g.) Tartuffe. Dom Juan. Le Misanthrope (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 161.
William Blake, ‘The Clod and the Pebble’, Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. D.V. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 19.
Byron, letter to Douglas Kinnaird, 26 October, 1tsiy, in (e.g.) Romantic Criticism, ed. W.R. Owens (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1984) p. 56.
Quot. Jenni Calder, Women and Marriage in Victorian Fictton (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976), pp. 20–1.
D.A. Miller, Narrative and its Viscontents: i’romems oJ Liosure in trw Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1981), p. 22.
From ‘The Dawn’ (1881), in (e.g.) The Portable Ntetzsche, tr. and ea. Walter Kaufmann (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971), p. 78.
Dr Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women (1766): quot. Kirkham, op. cit., pp. 43–4.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1/92), p. 179; quot. Kirkham, p. 42.
D. Devlin, Jane Austen and taueation (Lonaon: Macmillan, 1977), ), p. 126.
A.S. Neill, A Dominie’s Log (1915; 2nd edn, London: Hogartn rress, 1986), pp. 151–2.
As Daniel Cottom puts it, in The Civilised Imagination: a Study of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 105, ‘the portrait that emerges [from Mansfield Park] completely transfers desire from the realm of individual expression and spontaneous affinity... to a realm where it is little more than the intersection at a particular place and time of a great host of vagrant attachments and supplantations’.
For a more ‘orthodox’ discussion of the whole subject, see warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 133–7.
See, for example, D. Devlin, Jane Austen and Educatton, p. 11: ror Locke the four great aims of education are “virtue, wisdom, breeding and learning”. “You will wonder perhaps that I put learning last, especially if I tell you I think it the least part”’ — John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (5th edn, 1705), section 134.
John Donne, ‘Of the Progress of the Soul: the Second Anniversary,’ Selected Poetry, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 177. •
For an account of Gramsci s Sardinia, see A. Davidson, A nton t o Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography (London: Merlin Press, 1977), pp. 1–47. In particular, a traveller (1843) relates: ‘The father of a nobleman now holding one of the highest appointments under the Piedmontese government was... walking with his friend in one of his feudal estates on the island, and feeling tired, called to one of his vassals then working in the field, to come to him. The poor peasant obeyed, and was immediately ordered to place himself “on all fours”... upon the ground, which having done, the feudal baron leisurely sat upon his back till he was rested’ (pp. 7–8). Pozzo and Lucky indeed, and no doubt Antigua was more enlightened. The underlying psychic pattern was perhaps not so different, however, and, by transposition, was actually very much in evidence at Mansfield itself, where Sir Thomas spends so much of his time ‘sitting on’ neonle.
D.A. Miller, Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel, op. cit., D. 22.
Diane McDonell, Theories of Discourse (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 61.
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© 1999 Edward Neill
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Neill, E. (1999). ‘Capital Gratifications’ and the Spirit of Mansfield. In: The Politics of Jane Austen. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287662_5
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