Mansfield Park :: essays research papers

Mansfield ParkThis novel, originally make in 1814, is the first of Jane Austens novels not to be arevised reading material of one of her pre-1800 writings. Mansfield Park has sometimes beenconsidered atypical of Jane Austen, as being grave and moralistic, especially whencontrasted with the immediately preceding Pride and Prejudice and the immediately followers Emma. Poor Fanny Price is brought up at Mansfield Park with her bounteous uncleand aunt, where only her cousin Edmund helps her with the difficulties she suffers fromthe rest of the family, and from her own fearfulness and timidity. When thesophisticated Crawfords (Henry and Mary), cry the Mansfield neighbourhood, the moralsense of each marriageable member of the Mansfield family is tested in various ways,but Fanny emerges more or less unscathed. The regular (if somewhat vacuous)house at Mansfield Park, and its country setting, play an important economic consumption in the novel,and are contrasted with the squalour of F annys own birth familys home at Portsmouth,and with the depravity of London.Readers have a wide variety of reactions to Mansfield Park-most of which alreadyappear in the Opinions of Mansfield Park collected by Jane Austen herself soon after thenovels publication. Some abhor the character of Fanny as "priggish" (however, it isEdmund who sets the moral tone here), or have no sympathy for her forced inaction(doubtless, those are good deal who have never lacked confidence, or been without adate on Friday iniquity). Mansfield Park has also been used to draw connections betweenthe "genteel" rude English society that Jane Austen describes and the outside world,since Fannys uncle is a slave-owner (with an estate in Antigua in the Caribbeanslavery was not abolished in the British empire until 1833).