Mansfield Park Complete Notes PDF

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Mansfield Park Context ➢ Mansfield was the third of four novels published in Austen’s lifetime. She developed Mansfield between 1811 - 1813 during the Napoleonic Wars and a general period of instability. ➢ Traditional life, that had gone mostly unchanged for hundreds of years, was on the verge of giving way to the new life of the 19th century. ➢ Mansfield Park was considered one of Austen’s most serious works. ➢ England was controlled by the aristocracy and the landed gentry (families who owned land). ➢ The workforce were still primarily agricultural. ➢ 20 years later, labours moved to the urban workforce as the industrial revolution gained momentum and the dominant governing force moved from aristocracy to the commercial class. ➢ Literary critics suggest that Austen was a fan of the old way of life, pro-rural. Mansfield opposes those who represent the old way of life (Bertrams and Price) and those who represent the new, rising urban culture and modernity (Crawfords). Context in the novel ➢ Tony Tanner stated that Mansfield and be summaries by two opposing ideologies. Stability vs change. ➢ Mansfield, the estate, lies at the heart of the novel as it is a stronghold of old tory values and is the exact opposite of what London represents: fashion amusements, money. ➢ The Crawfords represent a threat to the Bertram way of life, influencing the traditionalists. They come from a world governed by money. ➢ Mansfield is also threatened from within: capacity vs self destruction. ➢ The novel depicts the modern degeneration of the landed gentry. ➢ Each character represents a different element of this fall: ○ Lady Bertram: signals that Mansfield is lost from within ○ Tom B: nearly swallowed by the temptations of London life. ○ Edmund B: tempted by the deceptive attractions of the Crawfords. ○ Fanny P: unwavered by the corruption of London. Her stillness can be read as a gesture of resistance. She is the true inheritor of Mansfield and what it represents. Critical Readings of Mansfield: ➢ Austen is typically not a point of indifference and debate. However, due to close readings, Mansfield Park is open to a range of readings - Marxist, Feminist, and New Historic to name a few. Opinions divide as some see the piece as conservative while others read it as radical. ➢ Classic Socio-historical - clash between old rural life and new urban culture (stillness vs movement; stability vs change). Explores the massive social landscape. ➢ New Historicist/Postcolonial - focuses on the subtext, literature is a part of history and cannot be separated. Explore the subtext to the novel, slavery and colonialism - only produced in an imperialistic environment. ○ “Since Austen refers to and uses Antigua as she does in Mansfield Park, there needs to be a commensurate effort on the part of her readers to understand concretely the historical valences in the reference; to put it differently, we should try to understand what she referred to, why she gave it the importance she did, and why indeed she made the choice, for she might have done something different to establish Sir

Thomas’s wealth.” - the Bertrams were reliant on a sugar plantation run by slave labour for their wealth. ○ The novel is thematically obsessed with the Geographical condition of the world. ○ London, Antigua, and Portsmouth all exist in a colonial relationship to Mansfield. Small spaces describe/explore ideas of ownership/power. Portsmouth poses as a colonial other to MP - rural material and slave labour (Fanny) - relies on them for self definition. A dominant society relies on colonial other as things within this novel are defined by their opposites. Fanny only finds the true meaning of Mansfield after visiting Portsmouth. ➢ New Historical/Feminist - a contemporary idea that explored the treatment of slaves and women. ○ Explores links made between the plight of women and the Slave Trade in Romantic period (e.g Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792] asks “Is one half of the human species, like the poor African Slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalize them?”). ○ In the summer of 1814 the debate over slave labour reached a climax; most female writers of the age wrote poems defending slaves and arguing against their plight. ○ Slavery was linked to women’s rights: Smith and Wollstonecraft were denied rights and property because of men and were dehumanised. ○ Austen would likely have been aware of this comparison - she links Sir Tom’s slave trade in Antigua to Fanny’s marriage potential - Fanny is Sir Tom’s property. He expects the same submission given by the slaves, in regards to Henry Crawford’s proposal.

Character Profiles ➢ Fanny Price - The protagonist. The daughter of a drunken sailor and a woman who married beneath her, she comes to live with her wealthy uncle and aunt, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram. They take her in as an act of charity to her parents. She is mistreated and always reminded of her "place" as a charity ward, but she eventually comes to be an indispensable member of the family. Modest, always proper, and, as she grows older, quite beautiful, Fanny is secretly in love with the Bertrams' son Edmund but is the subject of proposals by the slick Henry Crawford. ➢ Sir Thomas Bertram - A wealthy landowner and Fanny's uncle. He is authoritarian and rather hard on his children until a series of disasters show him the error of his ways. He owns slaves on his plantations in the Caribbean, a fact that hangs over the book. He means well and eventually does right by Fanny. ➢ Lady Bertram - Fanny's aunt; her mother's sister and Sir Thomas's wife. She is neurotic, a hypochondriac, and lazy. A beauty in her youth, she values people's attractiveness over all else, yet she is honest enough to admit how much Fanny means to her. Catatonic which she is able to leave, but wants to ignore the worries of the world, she sees what is happening but understands that in her position, she is powerless to change it. Taught to adorn the house, make it pretty, but not to cook due to her class. Critique of the result of such an education that doesn't teach women more than simple, often useless skills, instead of about politics, literature, and the world. ➢ Edmund Bertram - The Bertrams' younger son. Since he will not be the heir to Mansfield, he will become a clergyman. The only one of the Bertrams' children with a good head and a good heart, Edmund is Fanny's closest companion. He rather blindly falls in love with Mary Crawford, which almost leads to his downfall. Passive hero, romantic lead, easily tempted and close to corruption at Mary's/London; but, remains within his own believes. Fickle lover, dazzled by Mary, despite being close and having chemistry with Fanny. Unusually flawed for a hero as he went so far down the line of temptation until he reached a tipping point where he had to make a key decision (fanny/Mary). Like Sir Thomas, he only realises their relationship until Fanny is older and prettier. ➢ Tom Bertram - The Bertrams' older son and the heir to Mansfield. He lives to party and has gotten into debt, for which Edmund will suffer. Eventually, his lifestyle catches up to him, as he nearly dies from an illness caused by too much drinking. Entitled, drinker, and heir to Mansfield. Easily influenced for London life and culture, despite Sir Thomas's dismay. Used to represent the corruption of urban lifestyles and the possible fragile future of Mansfield Park. His physical illness indicates that he may be rotten to the core. ➢ Mrs. Norris - Sister to Fanny's mother and Lady Bertram; wife of the first parson at Mansfield Parsonage. She has no children of her own and is an officious busybody, always trying to derive glory from her association with the family. She is horribly cruel to Fanny, whom she is always reminding of her "place" in the family. Sour, treats Fanny awfully. Plus, she acts superior, attempting to climb the social ladder,

giving herself praise for others success. Meddles and plays the victim. Other characters do not seem to like her: Fanny and William are relieved that she cannot accompany them. Sir Thomas and others allow her to believe that she has power, influence, and their status in society. Keen to keep the lower class in their place. ➢ Mary Crawford - Sister of Mrs. Grant, who is the wife of the second parson at Mansfield. Only interested in 'new' and modernity. Represents money and materialism from the urbanisation of City areas. Moral attitudes are ambiguous, only ashamed that Henry got caught having an affair, not the affair itself. Patronising towards Fanny, offering cast offs and displaying range of necklaces. She is beautiful and charming, but also shallow and evil. She has been brought up poorly by an aunt and uncle and has been subject to the influences of her fashionable friends. She becomes friends with a reluctant Fanny, while Edmund falls in love with and nearly proposes to her. She is fake nice, and attempts to sway Edmund, and is friendly towards Fanny in a fake gesture to win Edmund's affection. ➢ Henry Crawford - Mary's brother. He is equally charming and possibly even more amoral, and he possesses a sizeable estate. First Maria and Julia fall in love with him, and he takes to Maria, despite her engagement. When Maria marries and the sisters leave Mansfield, he falls for Fanny and proposes to her. Everyone is convinced he is a changed man. Eventually, he meets up with Maria again, and the two run off, but their relationship ends badly. He is always playing a game for him own amusement and personal gain. Begins courting Fanny as a joke, then due to her reluctance, sees wooing her as a challenge. Byronic hero archetype - dashing, dynamic - Austen deconstruct this type of character through Henry. No intellectual capacity to Henry. May represent Austen's own difficult relationship with romance.

On Rozema’s Adaptation ➢ However, Austen’s Fanny Price does not actively correct or admonish the patriarchal status quo quite to Rozema’s satisfaction, and a new feminist Fanny is needed—a Fanny who names her horse Mrs. Shakespeare and takes wild rides in the pounding rain. Thus, in the film, Fanny’s empowerment is born not from confidence gained through keen observation and good judgment—Austen’s virtues, acquired and fostered through quiet reflection. Rozema’s heroine has confidence aplenty. Her source of empowerment, rather, appears to be a newly discovered sense of sexual energy and awareness that emerges during the ball, after which her bodices become lower and her powers of flirtation greater. (2) ➢ In Austen’s novel, Mary comes to represent a sort of lost potential, while in Rozema’s film, Mary is a character whose purpose in the plot is lost. (3) ➢

Austen’s parodic language, a caution against trusting solely to one’s emotions, becomes for Rozema a motto for freedom of expression. (3)

➢ “Rozema’s Mansfield Park is about getting free, about the liberating rewards of patience and intelligence we see in Fanny, but also about the expansive, uplifting, and liberating clarity Austen’s own art gives us”(9). By focusing on Austen’s childhood writings and adopting something of what Carol Shields calls their “unnuanced . . . world of black and white” (33), Rozema creates a heavy-handed film that traces only a shadow of the mature Austen’s clarifying and liberating examination of human nature in Mansfield Park. (4) ➢ In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Edmund and Fanny can share silence together easily and show mutual a ffection through unspoken acts, such as Edmund’s gift of the chain before the ball. In contrast, the Crawfords are accustomed to using displays of worldly wit as means to impress, and because of his constant barrage of conventional compliments and praise, Henry Crawford fails to convince Fanny of his sincerity. (4) ➢ Mary. The novel’s Edmund playfully asks Fanny, “‘when did you or anybody ever get a compliment from me?’” (197). Even Mary Crawford admires how “he talked no nonsense, he paid no compliments, his opinions were unbending, his attentions tranquil and simple” (65) (5) ➢ Jane Austen, of course, prefers to leave the dialogue between her lovers to the reader’s imagination as such narrative silence most keenly expresses the depths of their joy and intimacy. Where Edmund and Fanny are concerned, Rozema does not seem to want to trust much emotion to silence. (5) ➢ Whereas in Austen’s rendering, Henry is too self-absorbed to notice how conscious Fanny is of his attentions to Maria and Julia (6) ➢ Austen’s Mansfield Park is a complex study of how notions of class and gender inhibit speech, and it o ffers a vision of a society taught by its heroine to value the rewards of silent reflection—good judgment and judicious speech. (7) In Defense of Rozema ➢ John Wiltshire argues that “what the film represents is the marketing of a new ‘Jane

Austen’ to a post-feminist audience now receptive to its reinvention of the novel” (135). (1) ➢ For many of the film’s reviewers and critics, Rozema’s Fanny Price is most notable for her enlightened attitudes towards issues of gender, class and race. Presumably, Rozema attributes what are in e ffect late twentieth-century liberal humanist values to her early nineteenth-century heroine because she believes that these qualities will make her more acceptable to a modern audience than a character who fails to display any obvious disapproval of an uncle who is a sexist, a snob and a slave owner. (2) ➢ …the strategy of viewing the past entirely through a lens provided by modern values has the e ffect of flattening out the nuances both of the society under observation and the character who conducts the examination. (2) ➢ Women who conformed to the standards of their society simply yielded autonomous libidinal impulses to the uncertain workings of the marriage market while those who chose to act on their sexual desires risked disgrace and social ostracism. (3) ➢ By weaving together Fanny’s political consciousness with her development as an artist and a sexually powerful woman, Rozema thus succeeds in creating a truly complex character who models the aspirations of modern women as e ffectively as Austen’s Fanny Price does the very di fferent ideals of women in the Regency period. (4)

Jane Austen’s Novels: Social Change and Literary Form by Julia Brown ➢ Austen “achieved a new kind of realism.” (p. 80) ➢ Mansfield Park contains “exhausting intelligence and overpowering, unanswerable skepticism” and is “more ambitious” than Persuasion which is hailed as “more perfect”. ➢ Edmund Wilson recalled the “purely aesthetic sensations...a delight in the focusing of the complex group through the ingenious eyes of Fanny, the balance and harmony of the handling of the contrasting timbres of the characters, which are now heard in combination, now set off against one another.” ➢ “The psychology of character in Mansfield Park reverses this independance; the individual, powerless to change, is steeped in the ethos of place and circumstance.” ➢ “London, Portsmouth, and Mansfield Park, the three irreconcilable worlds of the novel, finally come to be seen as Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, each place is a prison for the human spirit;” (p. 81) ➢ “In the opening of Mansfield Park, the voice speaking is that of the neighborhood itself, and the irony is the kind of smirking irony the neighborhood enjoys. The details of fortune and physical appearance seem like neighborhood gossip. And the notion of marriage in this Northampton community is that of a “match,” the literal matching of two commodities: fortune and beauty.” (p. 83) Mansfield Park opens with the spiritual condition of the gentry at the close of the 18th century. Social Realism ➢ Jane Austen avidly devoured this pulp fiction, but she also reacted critically to it in writing her own novels. ○ In Self-Control the heroine Laura Montreville (note again the romantic, non-English sounding name, so different from those of Austen’s heroines). ○ “I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my Life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first Chapter. – No – I must keep to my own style & go on in my own Way; And though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.” (1 April 1816, to James Stanier Clarke, an enthusiastic admirer of romances). ➢ She was using it [the novel format] to describe probable reality and the kinds of people one felt one already knew. The narratives of her heroines play out within the realms of the possible. They are set in southern England, in places and a landscape Austen knew well. ○ Her plots are minimal and the adventures her heroines meet with are no more than the experiences of her readers: preparations for a dance, an outing to the seaside, a picnic. Austen used fiction to describe social reality within her own time and class (the gentry and professional classes of southern England in the early 19th century). ➢ Jane Austen’s social realism includes her understanding that women’s lives in the early 19th century are limited in opportunity, even among the gentry and upper middle classes. She understands that marriage is women’s best route to financial security and social respect. ➢ To say that Austen is a realist as a writer is not quite the same as saying she describes society as it really is. Her novels are also romantic comedies. In novel after novel, love and good fortune win out and the future looks perfect for the handsome young couple whose union is finally confirmed in the closing pages. This happens despite the fact that many married couples are portrayed as ill-suited or ridiculous (think of Mr and Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice or Mr and Mrs Elton in Emma). Realism is a literary device rejecting escapism and

extravagance to produce a lifelike illusion and not a direct translation of reality. Social Judgement ➢ Jane Austen’s characters are continually watching, judging and gossiping about others and, in turn, are watched, judged and gossiped about. ➢ Austen never suggests that our choices in life include freedom to act independently of wider obligations. ○ If we are fortunate (as Emma is), we have a duty of kindness and protection to those who are not. ➢ One of the reasons Austen’s world charms us is because it appears to follow stricter rules than our own, setting limits on behaviour. There are precise forms of introduction and address, conventions for ‘coming out’ into society (meaning a young girl’s official entry into society and therefore her marriageability), for paying and returning social visits, even for mixing with different social ranks. ➢ There are words that Jane Austen works hard across all her novels: adjectives ‘agreeable’, disagreeable’, ‘amiable’ are favourites with her; so too is the noun ‘opinion’. What they share are social and moral valuations. ➢ Her novels are awash with ‘opinions’ whose robustness will be probed and dismantled in the course of the narrative. In particular, Austen exposes the tendency of ‘opinion’ to masquerade as informed judgement when it may be no more than ignorance or prejudice. ➢ The convergence of narrative voice with character voice, one of Austen’s great legacies to the 19th-century European novel, is crucially an affirmation of opinion, or point of view, even of the gossip of village communities, over general truth. What this means is that just as her fictional worlds are constituted from multiple opinions, from people watching and commenting on one another’s behaviour, in the same way, Austen argues, novels can teach readers the essential skills of interpreting character and learning to live in society, by bearing others’ opinions in mind and knowing when to adjust our own. Courtship ➢ Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park, possessed of a good fortune and on the lookout for a husband, calls marriage ‘a manoeuvring business’ (ch. 5). Conduct books of the period tend to represent marriage as a solemn religious duty but in Austen’s novels the harsh economic reality of a young woman’s value in the marriage market is what preoccupies most of the characters. ➢ Fanny Price in Mansfield Park becomes engaged while still in their teens. At a certain age, ...