Decolonising mansfield park

Essays in Criticism

Volumn 53, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 303-322

  Wiltshire, John ^a  

^a LA TROBE UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 62949094140     PISSN: 00140856     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/eic/53.4.303     Document Type: Note

References (58)

1. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1994), pp. 95-115;
2. Avrom Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park (Minnesota, 1967).
3. See also R. S. Neale, 'Zapp Zapped: Property and Alienation in Mansfield Park', in Writing Marxist History, British Society, Economy and Culture since 1700 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 87-108.
4. Susan Fraiman, 'Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture and Imperialism', in Deirdre Lynch (ed.), Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees (Princeton and Oxford, 2000), pp. 206-23: 206.
5. Mansfield Park, Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (New York, 1998). The essays are Said's, Brian Southam's 'The Silence of the Bertrams: Slavery and the Chronology of Mansfield Park', and Joseph Lew's '"That abominable traffic": Mansfield Park and the Dynamics of Slavery'.
6. Katie Trumpener, 'The Virago Jane Austen', in Lynch (ed.), Janeites, pp. 140-65: 154.
7. Joseph Lew, '"That abominable traffic": Mansfield Park and the Dynamics of Slavery', in Beth Fowkles Tobin (ed.), History, Gender and Eighteenth Century Literature (Athens, Ohio, 1994), pp. 271-300: 272.
8. Mansfield Park, ed. June Sturrock (Peterborough, Ontario, 2001), p. 23.
9. Peter Smith, 'Mansfield Park and the World Stage', Cambridge Quarterly, 23/3 (1994), 203-29: 207.
10. Fraiman, 'Jane Austen and Edward Said', p. 212.
11. Moira Ferguson, 'Mansfield Park, Slavery, Colonialism and Gender', Oxford Literary Review, 3 (1991), 118-39: 128.
12. Trevor Lloyd, 'Myths of the Indies: Jane Austen and the British Empire', Comparative Criticism, 21 (1999), 50-78.
13. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel (1999), pp. 24-9, makes similar points. Graham Martin also emphasises that Austen 'nowhere suggests that the estate is economically in difficulties'.
14. 'Austen and Class', Women's Writing, 5/1 (1998), 131-44: 138. Said recently reiterated, and amplified, his claim in the London Review of Books, 25/6 (Mar. 2003).
15. For Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy and Pornography (Oxford, 2002), Fanny Price is finally 'absorbed' into 'a sugar fortune' (p. 322).
16. Brian Southam, 'The Silence of the Bertrams: Slavery and the Chronology of Mansfield Park', TLS, 17 Feb. 1995, pp. 13-14.
17. Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (1983), pp. 116-19.
18. Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill and L. F. Powell, 6 vols, (Oxford, 1934), iii. 87.
19. Mansfield, as a great man of the age, is mentioned many times by Boswell, and there is no reason why this, of all his judgments, should be the one signalled by Austen. Fraser Easton, for example, points out that Mansfield was 'a key legislative supporter of economic modernization': 'The Political Economy of Mansfield Park: Fanny Price and the Atlantic Working Class', Textual Practice, 12/3 (1998), 459-88: 460.
20. The fact that Austen knew Mansfield's grandchildren makes it all the more unlikely. See Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life (1997), p. 333.
21. This connection was first noted by Joseph Wiesenfarth, in The Errand of Form (New York, 1967), p. 90.
22. Jocelyn Harris, Jane Austen's Art of Memory (Cambridge, 1998). 'Mrs Norris is well-named as the bad nurse', p. 137
23. Barbara Hardy, 'The Objects in Mansfield Park', in John Halperin (ed.), Bicentenary Essays (Cambridge, 1975), p. 185.
24. Carl Plasa, '"What was done there is not to be told": Mansfield Park's Colonial Unconscious', in Textual Politics from Slavery to Postcolonialism (2001), 32-59: 35.
25. Ferguson, 'Slavery, Colonialism and Gender', p. 121.
26. Barbara K. Seeber, General Consent in Jane Austen: A Study of Dialogism (Montreal and Kingston, 2000), p. 97.
27. Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 104, 106. In these and the following quotations the italics are mine.
28. Plasa, 'Colonial Unconscious', p. 35.
29. Clara Tuite, 'Domestic Retrenchment and Imperial Expansion: The Property Plots of Mansfield Park', in You-me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (eds.), The Postcolonial Austen (2000), pp. 93-115: 93.
30. Tuite, 'Domestic Retrenchment', p. 109.
31. Deirdre Coleman, 'Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and English Women's Protest Writing in the 1790s', English Literary History, 61 (1994), 341-62.
32. Quoted in Lew, 'Abominable Traffic', p. 277.
33. 'The White Slave Trade ⋯', The Weekly Entertainer or agreeable and instructive repository, 45, Sherborne, Monday, 12 August 1805. Selected Writings of Hannah More, ed. Robert Hole (1996), pp. 36-41: 39.
34. In Miserable Slavery, Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica 1750-86, ed. Douglas Hall (1989), pp. 88-9; see e.g. p. 95.
35. Quoted in Elsa V. Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (1965; Westport, Conn., 1980), p. 135.
36. 'Abominable Traffic', p. 290.
37. Another Maria, in Edgeworth's Patronage, published the same year as Mansfield Park (1814), is a useful comparison. 'Maria Hauton shall be married this day fortnight', declares Lord Oldborough, in furtherance of his political ambitions. 'Maria Hauton was sent for to her uncle's study, heard her doom in sullen silence, but she made no show of resistance, and Lord Oldborough was satisfied' (Pandora Press edn., 1986, p. 103).
38. See Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992), p. 186.
39. As bell hooks argues in 'Racism and Feminism', in Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston, 1981), p. 144.
40. Ferguson, p. 119
41. Southam, 'Silence of the Bertrams', p. 14.
42. Were this line of argument to have any validity, one might note that 'the town and also the county of Northampton' offered support to the abolitionists as early as 1788: Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, 2 vols. (1808; repr. 1968), i. 468.
43. Mary Brunton, Discipline (repr. 1986), p. 117.
44. Ruth Perry, 'Austen and Empire: A Thinking Woman's Guide to British Imperialism', Persuasions, 16 (1994), 95-106: 103.
45. Tom Gibbon, 'The Antiguan Connection: Some New Light on Mansfield Park', Cambridge Quarterly, 11 (1982), 298-305.
46. Jane Austen's Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford, 1995), p. 198 (24 Jan. 1813).
47. Perry, 'Austen and Empire', p. 97, gives a list: her brother James's father-in-law, for example.
48. Clarkson, Abolition of the African Slave Trade, ii. 228.
49. Edwards, History, ii. 40
50. Goveia, Slave Society, p. 24.
51. Simon Schama, Rembrandt's Eyes (1999), passim.
52. See Jon Mee, 'Austen's Treacherous Ivory', in Park and Rajan (eds.), The Postcolonial Austen, pp. 74-92.
53. 'Jane Austen at Sixty', Nation and Athenaeum, 34 (1923), 433-4.
54. Ros Ballaster, 'The Invalid Heroine in Mansfield Park', English Review, 11/2 (2001), 36-9: 38
55. Kathryn Sutherland, Introduction to Mansfield Park (Harmondsworth, 1996), p. xvii.
56. Mary Favret, 'Free and Happy: Jane Austen in America', in Lynch (ed.), Janeites, pp. 166-87: 179.
57. I take this term from Gideon Polya, Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History (Melbourne, 1998).
58. Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts (New York, 1995).