“Noisy Pleasures” and “Noisy Evil[s]”: The Political Dimensions of Sound in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

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Abstract: In this essay, I demonstrate how Jane Austen uses sound (chatter, commotion, and silence) in Mansfield Park (1814) to create a conservative soundscape, one that associates reticence with the elite and noise with the lower classes. At the same time, I argue that Austen creates this soundscape only to break down its hierarchical assumptions about class. By considering her depiction of sound in relation to other eighteenth-century texts that discuss the politics of sound—Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft’s texts on the French Revolution, as well as Thomas Clarkson and Samuel Johnson’s texts on slavery—I delineate the implications of who and what makes noise in Mansfield Park . Following Wollstonecraft’s lead, Austen suggests that the supposedly silent elite may refrain from speech when they are confronted with humanitarian topics but that they are often noisy and loud in order to promote their own selfish desires and interests. This behavior points not only to a hypocrisy among the elite, who claim to appreciate silence when they in fact produce their own noise, but also to their immorality, as they willfully suppress others in pursuit of their own gain.