교육과 결혼문화

Abstract

The article argues at the center of Mansfield Park is the “mental superiority” of its heroin. Her intellectual education is what makes her a woman of mental superiority and, as its natural consequence, good taste and correct moral judgment. She as such is presented as an ideal spouse for the so-called rational man. As a way of promoting her as an ideal spouse, the novel adopts a negative approach. Instead of a romantic story involving its protagonists, the novel develops two romantic stories, each constructed around an “elegant” “alluring” woman and a young man with pleasant but essentially false “gallantry”. Both of them, not the protagonists, are trashed away in the end as embodiments of the ‘wrong’ traditional education for women and the courtship culture closely related to it. Together with the negative approach, the novel adopts the retrograde storytelling technique for conveying its main message for women’s education, imparting an anti-romantic nature to the novel.