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Mansfield Park

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Summary

Jane Austen’s novel, which within her work carefully defines the moral and social values informing her other novels, and which Edward Said reads contrapuntally for the dependence of its domestic order on Sir Thomas Bertram’s slave plantation in Antigua (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.86, p.89 / printed p.59, p.62).

Details

  • Thomas Bertram’s slave plantation in Antigua is mysteriously necessary to the poise and beauty of Mansfield Park, described in moral and aesthetic terms well before the scramble for Africa or before the age of empire officially began (PDF p.86 / printed p.59).

  • The references to Bertram’s overseas possessions 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; if the novel is about “ordination”, as Austen says, the right to colonial possessions helps directly to establish social order and moral priorities at home (PDF p.89 / printed p.62).

  • In practical terms, contrapuntal reading means understanding what is involved when a colonial sugar plantation is seen as important to the process of maintaining a particular style of life in England (PDF p.93 / printed p.66).

  • The novel’s Antigua thread in full: the Bertram estate in Antigua is not doing well, and Fanny’s growth in importance and Sir Thomas’s absence there are two convergent processes worked through geographical and spatial clarification — her inability on arrival to put the map of Europe together (Austen’s phrase, checked against the original; the copy garbles “Europe”), the negotiation of rooms and fires, estate improvement and chapels (PDF p.112-113 / printed p.85-86).

  • What was wanting within the Bertrams was supplied by the wealth derived from a West Indian plantation and a poor provincial relative, both brought in and set to work, requiring executive disposition; Mrs. Norris’s dislodgement is “the great supplementary comfort of Sir Thomas’s life”, and Susan Price is brought in “first as a comfort to Fanny, then as an auxiliary, and at last as her substitute” (PDF p.119-120 / printed p.92-93).

  • The Bertrams’ usable colony points forward to Charles Gould’s San Tomé mine in Nostromo and the Wilcoxes’ Imperial and West African Rubber Company in Howards End; the Bertrams could not have been possible without the slave trade, sugar and the colonial planter class, whose decline Ragatz’s The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763-1833 (1928) records (PDF p.120-121 / printed p.93-94).

  • Having read the novel as part of the structure of an expanding imperialist venture, one cannot simply restore it to the canon of great literary masterpieces — to which it most certainly belongs — and leave it there; it encodes experiences and does not simply repeat them (PDF p.122-124 / printed p.95-97).

Culture and Imperialism, Jane Austen, Contrapuntalism, Structure of attitude and reference

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