Mansfield Park 2

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Mansfield Park 2
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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

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Slavery as a dead silence in MP

• Said Antigua and Sir Thomass trip there have a
  definitive function in MP, which is both
  incidental, referred to only in pass-ing, 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)

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Slavery as a dead silence in MP

• Said How are we to assess Austens few
  references to Antigua, and what are we to make of
  them interpretatively? (ibid., p. 106)
• Fanny asks Sir Thomas about the slave trade . . .

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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!

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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?

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JA and slavery

• Voyages by Frank Austen (JAs brother), in 1805
  and 1806, to the West Indies (in-cluding Antigua)
  FA critical of the treat-ment of slaves in
  Antigua
• JAs father a trustee of an Antiguan sugar
  plantation belonging to a close friend from
  Oxford days

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JA and slavery

• 1772, Lord Mansfields ruling (the Mansfield
  Judgement) a slave becomes free once he or she
  (in this case, James Somerset) sets foot on
  British soil
• Womens writing on slavery during the Romantic
  era e.g. Ann Yearsley, A Poem on the
  In-humanity of the Slave Trade (1788) Hannah
  More, The Sorrows of Yamba, or the Negro Womans
  Lamentation (1795)

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JA and slavery

• Sir Thomass colonialism extends in rel-ation 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

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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 prov-incial relative, both brought
  into Mansfield Park and set to work. Yet on their
  own, neither the one nor the other could have
  sufficed.

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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 dis-position,
  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

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JA and slavery

• Fanny colonized by Sir Thomas sub-sequently
  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 Thomass
  favourite daughter, etc.)

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Fanny Price as spiritual mistress of Mansfield
Park

• Through Fanny the moral values of the Mansfield
  regime symbolically, the land-ed gentry in
  general are regenerated
• JAs emphasis on interdependency as mutually
  beneficial under the heading of executive
  disposition (i.e. Sir Thomas is reconfirmed as
  head of the family)

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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) fac-tors were lodged
  properly inward, became native to Mansfield Park,
  with Fanny the niece its final spiritual
  mistress, and Ed-mund the second son its
  spiritual master (ibid., p. 110)

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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 Prices
  lower-middle-class status mirrored by JA as
  herself a clergymans daughter

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Fanny Price as spiritual mistress of Mansfield
Park

• Scott on JA her most distinguished char-acters
  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)

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Fanny Price and the Atlantic working class

• A valuable corrective to Saids transform-ation
  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

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Easton, ibid., p. 487

• because Said places Fanny in a rel-ationship
  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 Austens defence
  of custom and its anti-imperial inspiration

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Fanny Price and the Atlantic working class

• Fannys return to Mansfield from Ports-mouth even
  more significant than Sir Thomass 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

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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)

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Fanny Price and the Atlantic working class

• Eastons 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 ad-vocacy 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

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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)

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Fanny Price and the Atlantic working class

• From the perspective of labour and ser-vice,
  what we see in MP is the enactment of forms of
  plebeian-patrician reciprocity that have been
  customary within the tra-dition 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.)

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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 enclo-sure (cf. the
  law as a weapon in CR)
• Enclosure a form of internal colonization

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Fanny Price and the Atlantic working class

• Enclosure in Northamptonshire the emphasis on
  privacy at Mansfield Park
• Fannys plebeian perspective articulated in terms
  of her strong sense of moral equality refusal
  of Henry Crawfords marriage proposal, for
  example
• Easton Fanny cannot be bought, there is no
  fanny price (ibid., p. 472)

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Fanny Price and the Atlantic working class

• Fannys 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

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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 JAs novel
• Firstly, the silence as such not dead in this
  part-icular work the slave trade evidently a
  live issue in connection with notions of moral
  equal-ity that circulate around FP (as herself
  the patron saint of the Atlantic working class)

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Britain on the world stage from 1814

• But at the same time, it remains the case that we
  here never get past Sir Thomass dead silence
  on the slavery issue
• No active interrogation of the slave trade,
  des-pite the fact that FP longed to inquire
  farther of her uncle about slavery
• The above may be said to mark the limit to FPs
  plebian perspective
• Three stages to FPs development as the
  Cin-derella of colonialism . . .

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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
  colon-ialist practices in the West Indies? the
  fairy-tale character of FPs opposition to
  slavery and imperialism
• FPs dead silence on the slavery issue be-comes
  a form of sanction for the production of avowedly
  imperialist works in a nineteenth-century age of
  empire (e.g. Kipling as the un-official poet
  laureate of the British empire)

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Britain on the world stage from 1814

• Said it is genuinely troubling to see how
  little Britains great humanistic ideas,
  insti-tutions, 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 im-perial process
  (Culture and Imperialism, p. 97)

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Britain on the world stage from 1814

• Britains accelerating imperial process from
  1814 . . .
• 1814 the year that marks Britains 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
  per-spective a missed opportunity for JA to
  fully spell out her ethic of moral equality

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Britain on the world stage from 1814

• 1814 also the year in which Walter Scotts
  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?