From Sensation to Society: Representations of Marriage in the Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, 1862-1866, and: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel: Family Ideology and Narrative Form (review)

When Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park (1814) "advises" his niece Fanny Price, against her inclination, to retire before the ball he has given in her honor comes to an end, Jane Austen's narrator remarks on his ability to mask his command as counsel. "'Advise' was his word, but it was the advice of absolute power, and she had only to rise and . . . pass quietly away," Austen writes, her own euphemistic phrase—"had only to rise"—masking Fanny's lack of options with a sense of easy compliance. Yet when Sir Thomas next "advises" Fanny—to marry the untrustworthy Henry Crawford—his niece balks. "Tell[ing] her uncle that he was wrong," she challenges his power and implicitly distinguishes it from authority, even as he claims to reprove her in its "voice": "I had thought you peculiarly free from . . . that independence of spirit, which prevails so much in modern days . . . and which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offense. But you have now shewn me that you can be willful and perverse, that you can and will decide for yourself, without any consideration or deference for those who have surely some right to guide you" ([Oxford University Press, 1990], 254, 285, 287–88).

For readers who have borne with the selfless obedience of Austen's heroine for two of three volumes, the ironies here are striking, yet they get short shrift in James F. Kilroy's discussion of the scene in The Nineteenth-Century English Novel. Situating Mansfield Park at the beginning of his literary history, Kilroy characterizes Austen as an author anxious to defend the family and "patriarchal rule" (37). While acknowledging that Sir Thomas has "limitations and even faults" and "attempt[s] to coerce his niece into a loveless marriage" (45), Kilroy sees the novel "affirm[ing] the strict exercise of patriarchal authority, not its opposite" (62). For Austen, as for most of the writers Kilroy discusses, the family provides "a model of benevolence and social order," although it is "subject to dangerous corrupting influences" (39). Insofar as Austen subjects Sir Thomas to critique in Kilroy's view, she does so because he resists endogamy, which is necessary for the survival of the family, not because his power is overbearing or misused or his "right to guide" Fanny questionable.

Kilroy's defense of Sir Thomas is typical of his study, which often relegates the heroine to "a subsidiary position, not only in the plot line, but in terms of the ideological issues treated in the narrative" (39), granting the patriarch center stage, making the best of his abuses of power, and highlighting the daughter's sense of obligation to him. Minimizing the significance of gender differences and inequities, Kilroy represents scenes such as the one in which Fanny resists her uncle as "classic" conflicts between patriarchal authority and what he terms "individual principles" (58) or "the developing individual's pursuit of identity" (151). "The prodigal son has become a daughter" (60, 124), Kilroy says of both Fanny Price and Maggie Tulliver, without fully considering how or why the return of the daughter necessarily differs from the return of the son. Yet Austen and George Eliot urge these distinctions upon us; Austen's patriarch, for example, finds independent young women particularly disgusting, and the family ideology he supports unfairly permits the homecoming of the adulterer, Henry Crawford, while prohibiting that of the adulteress, Maria Rushworth. "Dombey and Son" may become "Dombey and Daughter" (85), as Kilroy notes, but sons and daughters cannot be interchanged, and the family ideologies that shape the narratives are thoroughly entangled with...