Absent Boundaries; Immaterial Bodies

Abstract

The process ofnaturalising the country will be examined as a practice of domestication andregulation and ultimately a consolidation of both domestic and colonialauthority. With reference to Jane Austen’s MansfieldPark, the paper will focus on domestic order, as it was sustained throughnineteenth-century educational literature, foregrounding the premise on whichdomestic authority and the household became intangible strongholds ofputatively political power.Acting as agents of another body, women ofnineteenth-century domestic novels assume their role as the ambassadors ofabsolute power exercising a moderated supervision within the domestic sphere.Surrendering their individual selves and relinquishing their subjectivity andmaterial presence, they practice an internalised form of domestic authority,effectively regulating the household to the degree that they have disciplinedthe self. Shifting between the authority of the domestic woman and thepatriarch, the novel reveals how the overt force of patriarchal oppression, aswell as practices of undetectable self-regulation, are capable of eitherrelinquishing or sustaining power within the domestic realm. The paper willexplore how the processes of domestication and “ordaining” of the protagonistsbecome a way of augmenting patriarchal power as well as of maintaining theeffective regulation of the household.