Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is now read by literary critics as an anti-slavery novel set in a colonial context. Following on from her recent essay on Lord Mansfield himself – https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/literature-assumptions-and-history-more-thoughts-on-lord-mansfield/ – Lona Manning shows that this is a fanciful interpretation of the novel, which distorts Austen’s purpose, the book’s themes, and its reception.
In 1989, Edward Said pointed out that the wealth, the comfort, and the complacent English worldview of the Bertram family in Mansfield Park rests upon their ownership of a sugar plantation. He charged that this fact goes unacknowledged in Austen’s “uninflected, unreflective citations of Antigua” (93).
This moral shortcoming was not evident, or at least not worth mentioning, for earlier critics. From the time of its publication in 1814 until modern times, no one raised the issue of slavery in Mansfield Park, as we know by examining Brian Southam’s 1968 compilation of Austen reviews and commentary. There are only two references to Sir Thomas Bertram’s trip to the West Indies, and then it is only mentioned as a plot point. A 1927 review made the typically unfavourable comparison of the sparkling Mary Crawford with the priggish heroine Fanny Price but called Sir Thomas Bertram nothing worse than a “worthy old bore”:https://www.lonamanning.ca/blog/cmp232-a-100-year-old-review-of-mansfield-park . Said is credited with bringing the issue of slavery to the forefront, although Avrom Fleischman (1967, 15-8) and others had discussed the novel in the context of the slave trade before him.
Some major scholars such as Harold Bloom (2009, 65) pushed back against the notion thatMansfield Park could only be understood by coming to grips with its colonial backdrop. His rear-guard action has been overtaken by those who believe, in contradiction to Said, that the novel “contains a caustic assault on the moral basis of British colonial slavery” (Wood, 298). If so, Austen devoted far more energy to assailing absentee clergymen, private theatricals, and mercenary marriage, than she did to slavery. Her critiques of slavery, according to Wood, are “nuanced and ironic.”
As it happens, there were numerous novels of the era (to say nothing of essays and poetry) which were anti-slavery and not at all nuanced. Some novelists dropped scathing editorials in their books, as in The Microcosm (1801). The virtuous characters inveighed against it, as in What Has Been (1801), or opposing sides debated the issue, as in Edward (1798) or The Bristol Heiress (1809). Even the children’s book, The Barbadoes Girl (1816), features a frank discussion between parents and their children about the financial and social consequences of emancipation and the guilt of the planter class. The last three titles would be far more illuminating for a university course than Mansfield Park—that is, if the educational aim is to explore the guilty inheritance of slavery and empire.
On the other hand, if a teacher were so heterodox today as to teach Mansfield Park merely as a great novel, then it would be useful for the students to understand that the West Indies were invaluable as a plot device for writers of the era. It was exceedingly common for characters to exit stage left to the West Indies or stage right to the East Indies when the plot called for it, as in Miriam (1808) and A Winter in London (1806). Austen had to remove Sir Thomas so that Henry Crawford could work his seductive wiles on Maria and Julia. Ireland is not distant enough, while the Napoleonic Wars sealed off Europe. That leaves the East or West Indies as a plausible destination.
It might also surprise students to learn that West Indian plantations were sometimes presented as a fact of life. A hero saves the father of the girl he loves from a slave uprising in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), and no-one pops up to say that the planter had it coming. Some planters wanted to ameliorate the conditions of their workers, as in Mary Brunton’s Discipline (1814).
As for Austen’s supposed nuance, it would take a great deal of nuance to counterbalance what Austen actually says. When we examine every passage about Antigua, we find only narrative solicitude for Sir Thomas; reminders of the hardships and risks he must undergo, including the dangers of the West Indian climate, the possibility of shipwreck, or the risk of capture by the French. The “good” characters (his son Edmund and his niece Fanny Price) worry about his welfare, while his absence is welcomed by his daughters.
Austen doesn’t tell us exactly why Sir Thomas had to go to Antigua or what he did there. Fleishman suggests that a reader of Austen’s time would have surmised that Sir Thomas was “seeing to it that his slaves did not die so readily of malnutrition, overwork, and brutality” to compensate for the end of the slave trade and its cargoes of new workers (17). But we don’t know.
Modern critics, undaunted by the absence of an explicit anti-slavery message, have mined the book for symbolism. To take one example, the self-important Mrs. Norris identifies an apricot tree as a “Moor Park” when defending the quality of its fruit in a squabble with Dr. Grant. The Moor Park was a popular variety of apricot (Hatch, 120). Kelly believes that Austen’s readers would see “Moor,” then think “Othello,” then think “black man,” then think “chattel slavery,” and thus be reminded that slavery is a moral abomination (179). But if Kelly is correct, surely the most remarkable thing about Mansfield Park is not the anti-slavery message, readily and more explicitly available elsewhere, but that Austen was employing unheard-of subtlety and a type of indirect allusion which no other novelist begins to approach for decades (if ever?)
Some critics have argued that it is the absence of any mention of slavery which makes the anti-slavery message all the more powerful. In that respect, many critics will tell you that Sir Thomas met a question about the slave trade with a “dead silence,” but this is a misreading of the text. It’s true that Austen does not tell us what Fanny Price asked or Sir Thomas answered, but this is not, as we have seen, because the topic was too sensitive. He did respond to her question and would have been “pleased to have been enquired of further,” but Fanny was reluctant to continue because of the “dead silence” of the other family members. The “dead silence” is more likely intended to illustrate the unfilial behaviour of the Bertram girls, who are not interested in listening to their father hold forth about anything. Heroine Fanny, on the other hand, takes “pleasure” in the “information” Sir Thomas gives her and says: “I love to hear my uncle talk of the West Indies. I could listen to him for an hour together. It entertains me more than many other things have done.” Which is a very nuanced way indeed of saying, “I am utterly horrified by what I hear about our complicity in slavery.”
Well then, if slavery is not the theme of Mansfield Park, what is? I suggest that Austen’s theme is education. Mansfield Park belongs to a sub-genre of the sentimental novel concerned with the consequences of faulty education. Other examples include Twin Sisters, or the Effects of Education (1788), The Advantages of Education (1793), Elinor, or the Errors of Education (1796), and The Corinna of England (1809), a book which also features a prim hero and heroine who disapprove of private theatricals.
Female education is a theme that recurs throughout Mansfield Park. At the conclusion, the narrator dwells at some length on the regret and remorse Sir Thomas feels—not about owning human beings—but over the mismanagement of his daughters’ education and its scandalous outcome. In contrast, in the conclusion of Persuasion (1817) the narrator praises the hero for helping the widowed Mrs. Smith regain her West Indian income. Captain Wentworth helped “by writing for her, acting for her, and seeing her through all the petty difficulties of the case with the activity and exertion of a fearless man and a determined friend.” There is nary a hint that the money is blood-soaked. Jane Austen is known for her wry humour and ironic style, but who could seriously entertain the proposition that Austen really meant to fault Wentworth for his actions? And again, colonial fortunes provided a deus ex machina windfall in many other novels, such as in Seraphina (1809), Modern Times (1814), and even Jane Eyre (1847).
Jane Austen had no commercial or artistic incentive to write a story filled with ironic subversion from beginning to end, to present us with a family who live off the avails of slavery but suffer no consequences as a result. Where is the satisfaction in being assured that a slave-owner finds peace of mind when his son marries Fanny in the end? For me, the logical conclusion is that Austen did not intend this kind of message or this kind of novel. For others, the novel must be re-interpreted as a sustained experiment in irony, or failing that, be rejected as unworthy of inclusion in the canon.
My interpretation will be unpopular with modern admirers who embrace a conception of Austen as a woman at odds with her time. I, for one, have no difficulty in stipulating that she opposed slavery in real life, just as her brothers did. But unlike some of her contemporaries, she did not choose to make it a central feature of her novels.
Bibliography
Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. Ed. John Wiltshire. Cambridge: CUP 2005.
Boulukos, George E. “The Politics of Silence: Mansfield Park and the Amelioration of Slavery.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 39:3, 2006, pp. 361–83.
Fleishman, Avrom. “Mansfield Park in Its Time.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 22:1, 1967, pp. 1–18.
Hatch, Peter J. The Fruits and Fruit Trees of Monticello. UP Virginia, 1998.
Kelly, Helena. Jane Austen, the Secret Radical. Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.
Kiek, Miranda. “Celebrity–thou art translated! Corinne in England” in Celebrity Across the Channel, 1750–1850. Eds Anais Pedron and Claire Siviter. U of Delaware Press, 2021.
Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel,1800-1900. Verso, 1998.
S.A.G. “Mansfield Park—Jane Austen’s Worst Novel,” Sheffield Daily Telegraph, Jan. 20, 1927, p. 2.
Said, Edward W. “Jane Austen and Empire,” in Culture and Imperialism. Knopf Doubleday, 2012.
Southam, Brian (ed). Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage. Routledge & K. Paul: Barnes & Noble, 1987.
Wood, Marcus. Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography. OUP Oxford, 2002.
Lona Manning (MA Res U of York) is an independent researcher and writer. She lives in Canada. Her research for this article was first published on her blog, “Clutching My Pearls.” She studies the forgotten sentimental novels of the long eighteenth century, which are a rich trove of information about the social attitudes of the time. www.lonamanning.ca
