Organic and Unworked Communities in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

Abstract

The present article analyzes the bipolar perception of community in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) drawing on the communitarian model theorized by the French thinkers Jean-Luc Nancy (1983) and Maurice Blanchot (1983) with George Bataille as a third participant in absentia. Although Austen was obviously unaware of the postmodern theoretical implications stemming from the communal dimension of her novels, I argue that the institution of Mansfield Park functions as a self-enclosed and inbreeding community which is grounded on operative traits—birth, origin, filiation and generation—and which, therefore, has not a potential for otherness. And yet, there are some flirtatious intimations of inoperativeness in Mansfield Park that unwork the commonsensical model of community: the community of lovers that Henry and Maria form, which disrupts all the other organic communities in Mansfield Park; and the theatricals, which—through the characters’ parasitic speech acts—unleash the sexual tension that fluctuates between them.