Austen’s Cosmopolitanism: Women and the World in Austen’s Fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACTDespite the fact that Edward Said’s reading of Mansfield Park (1814) is over twenty years old, his claim that Jane Austen’s novel provides implicit support for slavery in the Caribbean continues to be a divisive topic among scholars. In this essay I will consider some of the most important postcolonial readings of Austen’s work before proposing a new way of understanding her fiction in its global nexus. As I will argue, Mansfield Park represents the ways in which women can gain independence through the inculcation of global knowledge, while Sanditon (1817) and its portrayal of a wealthy, “half-mulatto”, West-Indian heiress, creates an elision between exploitative economics in the Caribbean and gender relations at home. In her consideration of the conjuncture between deficiencies in both domestic and colonial governance Austen, as I will demonstrate, initiates a fledgling cosmopolitan discourse in which female liberty, slavery and colonial conduct converge to form a sophisticated debate. James M. Morris graduated with a PhD from the University of Glasgow in 2016 with a thesis entitled, “Beyond Orientalism: ‘The Stranger’ and ‘Colonial Cosmopolitanism’ in the Romantic-Period Novel.” He is currently teaching in the English Literature departments at the Universities of Glasgow and Dundee.