Structural Layering in Jane Austen's Problem Novels

Abstract

FTER dozens, and decades, of conflicting readings of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, interpreters can easily come to feel like successors to the long line of Princess Turandot's quixotic suitors in Puccini's opera: still one more assay of the mystery so many forerunners have failed to penetrate would seem similarly foredoomed. (Admittedly, literary critics play for smaller stakes, not being required to put their very lives on the line.) Interpretations of Mansfield Park have not come close to producing a critical consensus-largely, I would argue, because they almost invariably appeal to a thematic or ideological rationale that Austen allegedly brought to this novel and instilled into it, however obliquely. Although satisfactory answers have been hard to come by, however, the critical disarray in the face of Mansfield Park has at least sharpened, as questions, certain rudimentary questions about Austen's competency as a novelist: Could she assess correctly the degree of sympathy her characters elicit in readers? More generally, could she achieve a sustained, organizing effect without half or entirely nullifying that effect? The wildly differing responses by readers to Fanny Price and Mary Crawford (not to mention other characters, including Edmund Bertram), from Austen's own day to the present, may