“A Dead Silence” of Slavery in Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park

Abstract

Adapting Jane Austen’s 1814 novel to film, Mansfield Park (1999), Patricia Rozema transforms Austen’s Fanny Price into an active, witty, and rebellious heroine and centralizes the theme of slavery. The film’s fidelity has been earnestly debated, but Rozema claims that her film is faithful to the original source. As she points out, the seemingly incongruent link—between Austen and slavery—is not new. Austen’s Mansfield Park has been widely examined regarding the issue of slavery and Fanny has been commonly read as a character who represents the Other, women and slaves. These readings, however, reveal an uneasy relationship between feminism and post- colonialism by conceptualizing white women as a homogenous group of the powerless and oppressed. The relationship becomes more problematic when they readily equate Fanny with the non-white exploited racial Other, the slaves in Antigua. Analyzing the limitations of Austen’s representation of slavery, I examine how Rozema not only faithfully reproduces the limitations but also silences the Black Other—the slaves in Antigua—who only appear in Tom’s sketches of Antiguan slaves and sculptures of Black servants at Mansfield Park.