Aegis 2011
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‘Let Other Pens Dwell on Guilt and Misery’: Mansfield Park and Social Commentary >>> Chris Thayer In the minds of many, Jane Austen in the quintessential romance novelist, the Regency queen of light, fluffy “chick-lit” fiction in which nothing of import ever happens, and perfect characters traipse through a gorgeous world of endless easy wealth where the most serious consequence is a poor marital match. However, when one considers her novels more closely, a careful reading of a book such as Mansfield Park reveals a much deeper concern with the world. The critical reader discovers that Jane Austen is in no way “chick lit.” In fact, the entirety of Mansfield Park acts as a self-referential criticism of the courtship or ‘female education’ novel for being focused on empty ‘accomplishments’ (such as embroidery or sketching), romance, and impossible ideals instead of social issues such as poverty and slavery. At the deepest level, it criticizes the overall social system of marriage match-making, positing the idea that romance is an illusion hiding both the courters’ true personalities and the lack of freedom for women in early nineteenth century society; it then attacks the beau monde the courters live, showing that it is only a mask over a heart of slave labor and economic turmoil. As Mary Severance once so cleanly put it, “Jane Austen was the inheritor of a long and well-established tradition of ‘women’s novels’” (453). The common literature of the day was one of the proper conduct novel, which were works designed to show a perfect lead female character with an extremely strict moral code triumphing over adversity and the wiles of wicked suitors to marry the proper, moral man. They frequently were known to sacrifice character development and realism, as well as anything like a probable plot, in this quest to educate. These novels frequently included such outlandish scenes as a heroine handling an overaggressive, inappropriate paramour by, rather than breaking off the engagement, allowing herself to be abducted and then “escap[ing] by a solitary and epic canoe-journey, presumably down the St. Lawrence” (Waldron 87). This particular escapade appears in a novel of which Austen specifically “twice joke[d] about the improbabilities” (Waldron 85). Austen is on record as disliking this type of novel, calling one such contemporary work “full of unnatural conduct & forced difficulties, without striking merit of any kind” (Waldron 84). Furthermore, she specifically disliked the stiff, improbable characters within them, criticizing their too-perfect natures, and those that would think that all young women should be like the characters in such unrealistic novels. She comments to her niece in a letter that one such fellow who “wish[es] to think well of all young Ladies” and Austen herself “should not in the least agree of course, in our ideas of Novels and Heroines; pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked,” and that he, and by extension all who think like him, “deserves better treatment than to be obliged to read any more of my Works” (Chapman 198). This attitude can be seen as not merely the product of a mind of clear intelligence
