Summary
English novelist whose Mansfield Park Edward Said makes the perfect example of a metropolitan work whose poise and beauty depend on an overseas slave plantation, and whose novels’ accession to stability through marriage or confirmed identity exemplifies the novel’s normative pattern of social authority (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.86, p.98 / printed p.59, p.71).
Details
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In Mansfield Park, Thomas Bertram’s slave plantation in Antigua is mysteriously necessary to the poise and beauty of Mansfield Park, a place described in moral and aesthetic terms well before the scramble for Africa; Austen sublimates the agonies of Caribbean existence to a mere half dozen passing references to Antigua (PDF p.86 / printed p.59).
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References to Sir Thomas Bertram’s overseas possessions in Mansfield Park are threaded through the novel: they give him his wealth, occasion his absences, fix his social status at home and abroad and make possible his values, to which Fanny Price (and Austen herself) finally subscribes (PDF p.89 / printed p.62).
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Austen referred to Antigua in Mansfield Park and to realms visited by the British navy in Persuasion without any thought of possible responses by the Caribbean or Indian natives resident there — which, Said argues, is no reason for present readers to do the same (PDF p.93 / printed p.66).
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To read Austen without also reading Fanon and Cabral is, for Said, to disaffiliate modern culture from its engagements and attachments (PDF p.87 / printed p.60).
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Austen sees the legitimacy of Sir Thomas Bertram’s overseas properties as a natural extension of the calm, order and beauties of Mansfield Park, one central estate validating the economically supportive role of the peripheral other; even where colonies are not perceptibly in evidence, her narrative sanctions a spatial moral order (PDF p.106 / printed p.79).
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Said’s reading in full: Mansfield Park (1814) is about a series of dislocations and relocations in space before Fanny Price becomes spiritual mistress of the place, which Austen locates at the centre of an arc of interests spanning the hemisphere, two major seas and four continents; Sir Thomas’s return restores local rule as a Crusoe setting things in order, and to hold and rule Mansfield Park is to “hold and rule an imperial estate in close, not to say inevitable association with it” (PDF p.111-114 / printed p.84-87).
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Austen assumes, as Fanny does, the importance of an empire to the situation at home: Sir Thomas’s Caribbean property would have had to be a sugar plantation maintained by slave labour, not abolished until the 1830s, and Antigua elicits at most a half dozen references while remaining absolutely crucial to the action (PDF p.116-117 / printed p.89-90).
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The paradox Said cannot resolve: after Fanny asks Sir Thomas about the slave trade, “There was such a dead silence” — yet Austen belonged to a slave-owning society and her novels are not to be jettisoned for it; the task is to lose neither a true historical sense of Antigua nor a full enjoyment of Mansfield Park, while seeing both together (PDF p.123-124 / printed p.96-97).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, Mansfield Park, Contrapuntalism, Frantz Fanon