Mansfield Park (review)

Abstract

Film Review Mansfield Park. Directed and written by Patricia Rozema. 1999. Advertisements for Patricia Rozema's brilliantly tendentious adaptation of Jane Austen's novel show a half-length picture of Fanny Price looking directly at the viewer while holding a key to her bosom; superimposed on her figure is a small representation of a Georgian house in the classical style, with central pediment and matching wings. It is just such a "modern" house that Mary Crawford encounters in the novel when she comes to Mansfield: "so well placed ... as to deserve to be in any collection of engravings of gentlemen's seats." But as the film quickly shows us, this house is not Mansfield Park at all. The house that the nine-yearold Fanny Price is taken to, in the gloom of a Gothic night, is a ruinous structure dating from the Elizabethan period. Its formal gardens, with their pyramid yews and elaborate parterres, are as old-fashioned as its architecture. Represented by Kirby Hall (the ruined remnant of an Elizabethan "prodigy" house), the cinematic Mansfield Park is closer in character to the novel's Sotherton Park, "ill-placed ... in one of the lowest spots of the park." Oddly, the Elizabethan Sotherton is represented in the film by a "modern" house (Kenwood). The ruined Kirby Hall serves as an appropriate metonym for Rozema's purpose, which is to depict the moral ruin of Mansfield Park's inhabitants. Aided doubtless by her "literary researcher" (mentioned in the credits), she reveals a familiarity with recent scholarship treating the issue of slavery in Mansfield Park. Though slavery is barely touched on in the novel—when Fanny's question to Sir Thomas about the slave trade is met with "such a dead silence" (p. 198)'—scholars such as Moira Ferguson, Edward Said, Ruth Perry, Maaja Stewart, and Brian Southam have argued cogently for its importance, even centrality, to an understanding of the novel. The abolition of the slave trade—if not the emancipation of plantation slaves—had been debated in parliament for decades before a bill was passed into 1 Page references are to Jane Austen's novels, ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 12, Number 4, July 2000 566 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 12:4 law in two stages in 1807-8. Austen's family had good reason to feel involved in the question. Her father was the trustee of a plantation in Antigua; her sister Cassandra's fiancé died of yellow fever off Santo Domingo while serving as chaplain of a military mission; her brother James's first wife was the daughter of General Mathew, governor of Grenada; and her naval brothers Francis and Charles knew the West Indian possessions well; the evangelical Francis in particular was a critic of slavery. That Austen was in favour of abolition cannot be doubted. She was in love, she joked to Cassandra in an 1813 letter, with Thomas Clarkson, author of The History of ... The Abolition of the African Slave-Trade (1808); and beyond her humanitarianism she seems more than once to imply a parallel between the slavery of Africans in the colonies and the slavery of dependent women (like Fanny Price) at home. In Emma, Jane Fairfax, fearing her future as a governess, speaks bitterly of "offices for the sale—not quite of human flesh—but of human intellect" (p. 300). Armed with such support, Rozema clearly felt entitled to film Mansfield Park as a story of a world corrupted by its complicity in the ignoble institution of slavery. As the audience leaves the cinema, they hear the insistent rhythms of "Djonga," a slave song of lamentation. In the film itself Rozema's anticolonial aims are most obvious in the changes she made to the characters of Fanny, Sir Thomas, and Tom Bertram. From the beginning of the film Fanny is aware of slavery. On her carriage ride over the Downs to Mansfield Park she sees a ship in the Channel: "Black Cargo," the coachman says, "darkies" brought home as servants for officers' wives. Later, as a young woman, Fanny hears of Edmund's concern over the plantation in Antigua: "we all live on the profits," he admits...