Sotherton and the Geography of Empire: The Landscapes of Mansfield Park

Abstract

LYNN VOSKUIL Sotherton and the Geography ofEmpire: The Landscapes of Mansfield Park W ITH ITS RESTORATION OF ORDER AND HARMONY ON THE ESTATE, THE conclusion to Mansfield Park has often been read as Jane Austen’s paean to conservative ideology and the triumph of empire.1 By the final chapter, the adulterous Maria Bertram has been ostracized along with her prolix Aunt Norris; the rakish Tom has reformed after an extended, chas­ tening illness; and Edmund and Fanny have acceded to the living at Mansfield. On the event of Mr. Grant’s death, as the novel concludes in its final, awkward sentence, Fanny and Edmund removed to Mansfield, and the parsonage there, which, under each of its two former owners, Fanny had never been able to approach but with some painful sensation of restraint or alarm, soon grew as dear to her heart, and as thoroughly perfect in her eyes, as everything else, within the view and patronage of Mansfield Park, had long been.2 This picture of sedate and ordered well-being does indeed seem to depict what Moira Ferguson has called “a kinder, gentler plantocracy,” a privi­ leged vision of ease, concord, and familiarity that contrasts starkly with the I am grateful to the Victorian Studies Seminar at Rice University for reading and discuss­ ing an earlier draft ofthis essay, with special thanks to Helena Michie for her encouragement and support. 1. See, for example, Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study ofJane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 80; John Halperin, “The Trouble with Mansfield Park,” Studies in the Novel 7, no. 1 (1975): 21—22; John Mee, “Austen’s Treacherous Ivory: Female Patriotism, Domestic Ideology, and Empire,” in The PostcolonialJane Austen, eds. You-me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (London: Routledge, 2000), 83, 91; and Savi Munjal, “Imagined Geographies: Mapping the Oriental Habitus in Three Nineteenth-Century Novels,” Postcolonial Text 4, no. 1 (2008): 4. 2. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. June Sturrock (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001), 468. Further references to the novel will be indicated by page number within the text of the essay. SiR, 53 (Winter 2014) 591 592 LYNN VOSKUIL squalor of Portsmouth, the decadence of London, and the otherness of an Antigua that can only be imagined by most ofMansfield’s inhabitants.3 The “perfection” of Mansfield Park depicted at the end of this novel seems al­ most “doctrinaire,” to quote Claudia L. Johnson, a concluding scene that “appears to let conservative ideologues have it their way.”4 It is thus striking that Austen chooses to reintroduce the spatial perspec­ tive of landscape gardening into these final phrases—a profession that is critiqued elsewhere in the novel—positioning Fanny along with the par­ sonage and everything else she treasures “within the view and patronage of Mansfield.” The views of and from landed estates are matters for heated debate in this novel, with Humphry Repton, Austen’s contemporary and the most celebrated landscape designer of his day, invoked several times by name when the oafish Rushworth seeks to “improve” his estate. In a novel set among genteel country houses in early nineteenth-century England, it is not surprising that Repton’s figure would appear or that Austen would use her last sentence to take the long view (as if from the house) of the property surrounding Mansfield. It is surprising, however, that Repton’s landscapes—and the question of the novel’s landscapes in general—have not figured more prominently in recent postcolonial analyses of Mansfield Park. Spurred initially by Edward Said’s controversial interpretation of this novel, a small postcolonial industry has variably considered the imperialist implications of Austen’s gender politics, her aesthetic practices, and her awareness of British abolitionist debates and the condition of slaves in Antigua, to mention just a few topics that have recently occupied critics of her work.5 While such critics have opened up important issues in our con­ sideration of Austen’s fiction, however, they have tended on the whole to read between the lines and in the margins—focusing on the novel’s 3. Ferguson, “Mansfield Park-. Slavery, Colonialism, and Gender,” Oxford Literary Review 13, no. 1...