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

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 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)


• 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!’


• 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 (in-cluding Antigua) – FA critical of the treat-ment 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 In-humanity 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 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

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….’

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’

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 Thomas’s favourite daughter, etc.)

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

• 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)


• 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)


• 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


• 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)

Fanny Price and ‘the Atlantic working class’

• A valuable corrective to Said’s ‘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

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 Austen’s defence of custom and its anti-imperial inspiration’


• Fanny’s return to Mansfield from Ports-mouth 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


• 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)


• 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 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


• 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)


• 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.)


• 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


• 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’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 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)


• 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, 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 FP’s ‘plebian perspective’

• Three stages to FP’s development as the ‘Cin-derella’ of colonialism . . .


• 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 FP’s opposition to slavery and imperialism

• FP’s ‘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)


• Said: ‘it is genuinely troubling to see how little Britain’s 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)


• 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 per-spective: a missed opportunity for JA to fully spell out her ethic of moral equality


• 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?

Documents

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