A modest question about Mansfield Park

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Volumn 16, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 245-264

  Davidson, Jenny ^a  

^a Columbia University ^*

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EID: 61249209445     PISSN: 08406286     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (63)

1. For the anti-theatricality argument, see especially Lionel Trilling, "The Sentiment of Being and the Sentiments of Art," Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 68;
2. the quotation is from Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), p. 90.
3. For a subtle argument that emphasizes the ambivalence of Mansfield Park towards theatricality, see Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 17-20;
4. and see also David Marshall, "True Acting and the Language of Real Feeling," Yale Journal of Criticism 3 (Fall 1989), 90.
5. While I suggest that the eighteenth-century vocabulary of modesty, virtue, and hypocrisy offers a more precise instrument for excavating the history of what she calls "the psychic life of power," the terms power and subjection are borrowed from the work of Judith Butler, whose account of subject-formation emphasizes the paradox that "to persist as oneself" it is required to "desire the conditions of one's own subordination"; see Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 9.
6. Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self (New York: Viking, 1955), p. 212.
7. Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 86.
8. Both Pamela and Lucy Steele condemn themselves by revealing too much, especially in their letters. Watson calls Lucy Steele an "efficient simulacrum of a sentimental heroine" and suggests that as "writer of the only substantive letter in the novel, Lucy is surely entitled to the position of the epistolary heroine, a role forwhich she is peculiarly well-suited by virtue of her well-practised hypocrisy" (p. 90).
9. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, vol. 1, The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3rd ed. (1933; reprint, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 376. References are to this edition.
10. Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 63.
11. Moreland Perkins, Reshaping the Sexes in "Sense and Sensibility" (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998), pp. 149-50.
12. See especially Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976; reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty, 1983), IV. ii. 4, esp. pp. 308-13.
13. For an interesting discussion of Richardson and what Gordon calls "Mandevillian (mis)reading," see Scott Paul Gordon, "Disinterested Selves: Clarissa and the Tactics of Sentiment," English Literary History 64:2 (1997), 473-502.
14. On the rhetorical instability of early eighteenth-century defences of hypocrisy, see Jenny Davidson, "Swift's Servant Problem," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 30 (2001), 105-25.
15. See especially J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 426.
16. Maria Edgeworth, Patronage, ed. Eva Figes (1814; reprint, London: Pandora, 1986), p. 147. Edgeworth's female inflection of the word patronage (specifically, in the phrase "patronage of fashion") is unusual enough to make it into the OED, the sole illustration that pertains to women in a long sequence of masculine examples.
17. On female patronage, see also Devoney Looser, "The Duty of Woman by Woman': Reforming Feminism in Emma," Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Alistair M. Duckworth (Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, Boston and New York: Bedford/St Martin's, 2002), pp. 577-93.
18. Austen, Mansfield Park (1814), vol. 3, The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3rd ed. (1934; reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 473. References are to this edition.
19. Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen, p. 116.
20. Nina Auerbach, "Jane Austen's Dangerous Charm: Feeling as One Ought about Fanny Price," Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 28.
21. See especially Edgeworth's attack on "address" (a fashionable kind of dishonesty modelled on diplomatic tact) in the tale Manœuvring (1809) in Tales and Novels, 10 vols (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1893), esp. 5:98, 130.
22. In one episode of Sense and Sensibility, the narrator provides this pointed summing-up of Elinor Dashwood's social manner: "thus by a little of that address, which Marianne could never condescend to practise, [Elinor] gained her own end, and pleased Lady Middleton at the same time" (p. 145).
23. On civility as an anti-Jacobin theme, see also Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), p. 188.
24. Mansfield Park, p. 33.
25. The OED cites this passage to illustrate the primary definition of "hypocrite. " The passage resonates with a scene from Pamela II; see Samuel Richardson, Pamela, 2 vols (1914; reprint, London: J. M. Dent and Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1946), 2:283.
26. The important discussion of Mansfield Park in Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), pp. 84-97
27. initiated the conversation, and it was taken up in a wide range of contexts: see especially Susan Fraiman, "Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism," Critical Inquiry 21 (Summer 1995), 805-21
28. reprinted in Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees, ed. Deidre Lynch (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 206-23;
29. Brian Southam, "The Silence of the Bertrams: Slavery and the Chronology of Mansfield Park," Times Literary Supplement (17 February 1995), 13-14;
30. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 162-64, 174-83;
31. and Ruth Perry, "Jane Austen and British Imperialism," Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2002), pp. 231-54.
32. For a more general treatment of the relationship between women's writing and the discourse on the abolition of slavery, see Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 3-35.
33. Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (New York: Viking, 1997), p. 232;
34. Tomalin summarizes the argument of Brian Southam. While no textual evidence supports such a reading, Austen does allude favourably to Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846), whose History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade was published in 1808;
35. see the letter of 24 January 1813 to Cassandra Austen, in Jane Austen's Letters, 3rd ed. , ed. Deirdre Le Faye (1995; reprint Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 198, 410n4.
36. On Austen and Clarkson more generally, see Isobel Grundy, "Jane Austen and Literary Traditions," The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 189-210;
37. and Moira Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 70-71.
38. Hannah More gives a description of how a woman should listen to a man read aloud that corresponds closely to Fanny Price's behaviour as she listens to Henry Crawford read Shakespeare (Mansfield Park, p. 337);
39. see More, Cœlebs in Search of a Wife. Comprehending Observations on Domestic Habits and Manners, Religion and Morals, 2nd ed. , 2 vols (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1809), 1:323-25.
40. For a more general discussion of the etiquette of conversation in the nineteenth century, see Andrew St George, The Descent of Manners: Etiquette, Rules and the Victorians (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), pp. 54-83.
41. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modem System of Female Education. With a view of the principles and conduct prevalent among women of rank and fortune, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1799), 2:42.
42. More, Strictures, 2:65, emphasis added.
43. An even cruder version of More's argument can be found in John Gregory's conduct manual, which directs young women to be silent in company with the outrageously repressive comment that "People of sense and discernment will never mistake such silence for dulness. One may take a share in conversation without uttering a syllable. The expression in the countenance shews it, and this never escapes an observing eye. " A Father's Legacy to his Daughters, 6th ed. (Dublin: J. Colley, 1774), p. 14.
44. More, Cœlebs in Search of a Wife, 1:174.
45. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (1951; London: Verso, 1996), p. 37.
46. See Claudia Johnson, "Gender, Theory, and Jane Austen Culture," Mansfield Park, ed. Nigel Wood (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993), p. 105.
47. Trilling, "The Sentiment of Being," p. 68.
48. On Jacobin sincerity and the search for hypocrisy, see also Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963; reprint, London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 97-98.
49. A. O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 43, 48, 50.
50. The choice of a mode of narration had certain political implications, especially in the 1790s but also in the decades that followed. Gary Kelly describes the conventional association of the first-person voice with the Jacobin novel and the third-person voice with the anti-Jacobin novel, then shows how Austen's free indirect discourse offers a flexible hybrid of the two modes; see "Jane Austen and the English Novel of the 1790's," Fetter'd or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670-1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), p. 296.
51. The phrase "chameleon-like" is that of Mary Lascelles, cited by Avrom Fleishman, A Reading of "Mansfield Park": An Essay in Critical Synthesis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967), p. 11.
52. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study of Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), pp. 97-98.
53. The defence of deception as tactical is also central to evolutionary psychology's account of human behaviour; see especially Robert Wright, "Deception and Self-Deception," The Moral Animal The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Pantheon, 1994), pp. 263-86.
54. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (written 1861, published 1869), in On Liberty, with The Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 141-42.
55. The question of communication between men and women is a perennial favourite for writers across many genres and disciplines; for popular recent examples, see esp. Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (New York: Morrow, 1990);
56. and John Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women Arefrom Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationship (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
57. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London: W. Strahan, 1755).
58. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. , 2 vols (London: W. Strahan, 1773).
59. See especially Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right (New York: Warner, 1995).
60. Two recent novels that simultaneously satirize and endorse these tropes are Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary (1996; reprint, New York: Viking Penguin, 1998);
61. and Melissa Bank, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing (New York: Viking, 1999).
62. In his popular account of evolutionary psychology, Robert Wright invokes the genre of the self-help book to justify his recommendation "that women practice sexual restraint": this piece of advice is "self-help, not moral philosophy," he says (The Moral Animal, p. 147).
63. On the movement of eighteenth-century political thought into a "paradigm of virtue and corruption," see J. G. A. Pocock, "Virtues, Rights, and Manners," Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 47-48.