The silence at Mansfield Park

Abstract

Abstract ‘The silence at Mansfield Park’ assesses Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) with reference to abolitionist sympathies within Austen’s milieu and, more broadly, the commitment to thematic seriousness that accompanied her growing sense of authorship as a professional vocation. Alongside the works she first drafted in the 1790s, there is a new artistic maturity about Mansfield Park, and with it a more recognizably conservative outlook on moral and social questions. At the same time, trenchant satirical implications persist. Mansfield Park is sometimes seen as a novel with a glaring blind spot: a novel that indicates the dependence of its characters on income from a contaminated source, but fails to integrate the issue of slavery within the overall moral scheme. The Bertrams prove disinclined to talk about the slave trade, and ‘a dead silence’ falls when the heroine raises the subject. Their silence is laden with telling ironies, however, and Austen, as ever, communicates messages of her own between the lines.