Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

The least popular of all her novels, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) depicts a heroine, precariously situated in the margins of the aristocracy, who is intellectually educated rather than accomplished. As the timid Fanny Price navigates the morally fraught social world of Mansfield Park, Austen comments on the exclusion and mistreatment of women in the British public sphere at large as well as criticizes the practice of educating women into accomplishment as exemplified by the sparkling socialite, Mary Crawford. This thesis positions Austen in context with educational writers William Cowper, the poet, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the philosopher. I analyze all three writers’ messages about education, along with the implications of the genre/form with which they choose to enter public discourses, including the poem, the political tract, and the novel. Considering the historical and cultural conceptions of the novel as trivial and feminine during Austen’s day, her decision to employ this form suggests that she is interested in reforming the novel into a platform for serious public engagement. Austen ultimately anticipates the Victorian novel by revealing the form’s potential value as intellectual exercise and an important tool for women to join public conversation. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Using Mansfield Park and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, this essay will show how Sir Thomas and Mr Bennet fail in their role as fathers, related to expectations in the social context, and how their failure is necessary for the eventual marriages of the heroines, Fanny Price and Elizabeth Bennet. The fathers’ failure also leads to the elopement of Maria Bertram and Lydia Bennet. Sir Thomas and Mr Bennet’s failure is the result that comes from their need to counteract the overindulgence of Mrs Norris and Mrs Bennet. Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance will be used in this essay to show how Sir Thomas and Mr Bennet do not conform to their gender, as is shown through their repeated actions in the novels. The gender performance of these characters reveals the need for fluid gender roles for the happy ending.

Jane Austens <i>Mansfield Park</i> has earned a reputation as a difficult text for its politically-charged negotiations of ethics and unsatisfactory heroine. Since Edward Said presented the novel as an example of British literature that contributed to an expanding imperialist venture (95), scholarly attention has shifted to focus on the extent to which the novel critically engages with macrocosmic power structures and hegemonic discourse. That is, how does Mansfield Parks description of power dynamics at home reflect slave-related issues in the foreign atmosphere? Austens interest in and familial connections to slave-related issues, contemporary cultural awareness of abolitionist sentiment, and textual allusions to the slave trade all contribute to the novels counterpoint between domestic and foreign spaces: the Bertram family is economically dependent on a slave plantation in Antigua. A microcosm of plantation life, Mansfield Park represents the dilemmas of marginalized women who are presented with choices to rebel against or submit to patriarchal authority. In order to preserve her own physical, emotional, and psychological safety, Fanny Price bids for patriarchal favour. While others are punished severely for their rebellion, Fanny is rewarded for her submissive choices and enjoys an elevated social status. However, she inspires no reformation and remains an unsatisfactory heroine. Like the grateful Negro of contemporary plantation tales, Fanny functions to stabilize the status quo through her gratitude and loyalty, reinforcing societys tightly-controlled boundaries of acceptable behaviour. Mansfield Parks revelatory strength is that it exposes the mechanisms by which power is produced and maintained in domestic and imperial spaces.

Jane Austens <i>Mansfield Park</i> has earned a reputation as a difficult text for its politically-charged negotiations of ethics and unsatisfactory heroine. Since Edward Said presented the novel as an example of British literature that contributed to an expanding imperialist venture (95), scholarly attention has shifted to focus on the extent to which the novel critically engages with macrocosmic power structures and hegemonic discourse. That is, how does Mansfield Parks description of power dynamics at home reflect slave-related issues in the foreign atmosphere? Austens interest in and familial connections to slave-related issues, contemporary cultural awareness of abolitionist sentiment, and textual allusions to the slave trade all contribute to the novels counterpoint between domestic and foreign spaces: the Bertram family is economically dependent on a slave plantation in Antigua. A microcosm of plantation life, Mansfield Park represents the dilemmas of marginalized women who are presented with choices to rebel against or submit to patriarchal authority. In order to preserve her own physical, emotional, and psychological safety, Fanny Price bids for patriarchal favour. While others are punished severely for their rebellion, Fanny is rewarded for her submissive choices and enjoys an elevated social status. However, she inspires no reformation and remains an unsatisfactory heroine. Like the grateful Negro of contemporary plantation tales, Fanny functions to stabilize the status quo through her gratitude and loyalty, reinforcing societys tightly-controlled boundaries of acceptable behaviour. Mansfield Parks revelatory strength is that it exposes the mechanisms by which power is produced and maintained in domestic and imperial spaces.

The concept of the Victorian antitheatrical prejudice is both well-established and well-respected. This paper, however, examining the Victorian theatrical novel and the Victorian theater in terms of that prejudice, finds the ready assumption of the prejudice to be problematic at best. A close look at three novels that together span the early to mid-nineteenth century shows that, far from being ubiquitous and unilateral, antitheatricality was in many cases an anomaly; indeed, many of those novelistic elements that have long been assumed to be antitheatrical address different issues altogether. Employing close readings of the novels--Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens's Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, and Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury's The Half-Sisters--along with an examination of historical documents, and utilizing as well current scholarship in Victorian theater and theatrical novels, I demonstrate that the Victorians were instead keen appreciators of theater, and that the Victorian "antitheatrical novel" was in many cases far more interested in the authenticity of human interplay than in the inauthenticity of staged role-play.

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This thesis contextualises Austen’s novel within the issues of political economy contemporary to its publication, especially those associated with an emerging credit economy. It argues that the problem of determining the value of character is a central one and the source of much of the novel’s irony: the novel sets the narrator’s model of value against the models through which the various other characters understand value. Through language that represents character as the currency and as a commodity in a credit economy, Mansfield Park engages with the problems of value raised by an economy in flux. Austen uses this slipperiness of language to represent social interactions as a series of intricate economic transactions, revealing the irony of social exchanges and the expectations they engender, both within and without the context of courtship. / Graduate

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