Epistolarity, Narrative, and the Fallen Woman in Mansfield Park

Epistolarity, Narrative, and the Fallen Woman in Mansfield Park Amy Wolf "No vice can prove more fatal to dissolve the ties ofsociety, to bring distrust and distress into families; no vice can be more infectious, and have a more dreadful influence on the rising generation" than adultery.1 "My friend Yates brought the infection from Ecclesford, and it spread as those things always spread you know, sir"—Tom in Mansfield Park. Most of the critical attention focused on Mansfield Park emphasizes the significance ofthe Lovers' Vowssequence or the seemingly abrupt and unsatisfactory ending ofdie novel. Bom critical emphases are often viewed as windows into Austen's ideology. Whether concentrating on the play or the ending, critics pigeonhole Austen's novel on the one hand as conservative, reactionary, antiJacobin , and anti-dieatrical, or as radical, feminist, and deeply, almost bitterly ironic, on the other hand.3 Even the most interesting and 1 "The Evils ofAdultery and Prostitution" (1792), p. 3. 2 Jane Austen, MansfieldPark, ed. Claudia L.Johnson (1813; reprint, NewYork: W.W. Norton, 1998), p. 127. References are to diis edition. 3 For two ofdie most influential readings ofAusten as a conservative moralist, see Marilyn Buder, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) and Alistair Duckworth, TheImprovement oftheEstate(BaiúmoTe:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). Duckworth views Austen as "an autiior whose deepest impulse was not to subvert but to EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 2,January 2004 266 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION complicated readings that attempt to get past this either/or division remain mired in die same terms. For example, Claudiajohnson writes that despite die seeming "reactionary formulas" of the ending, Mansfield Park "erodes rather than upholds conclusions which comprise a conservative reading of the novel."4Joseph Litvak writes ofthe trope oftheatricality in the novel that it "is not a single, unitary phenomenon but an already self-divided set of practices capable of serving both reactionary and subversive causes."5 For him, the novel itself is "neither unequivocally conservative nor unequivocally progressive."6 Critics describe the end ofthe novel as only awkwardly carrying out die implications ofthe novel, or as forcing an unnatural, un-Austen-like resolution. Margaret Kirkham's reference to the ending expresses die typical critical dissatisfaction: "the narrator's stance in this [last] chapter is difficult ... the hero's falling in love being treated more cursorilyand ironically than in any other novel."7 Concentrating solely on the last chapter, Austen's modern readers critique the sudden and seemingly unnatural rush to marry Fanny and Edmund, marking its arbitrariness either as a failure by Austen or as a complicated choice—still arbitrary, but arbitrary on purpose for ideological reasons.8 Though such readings do more to emphasize the complexity of MansfieldPark than die either/or ones do, they still tend to ignore the narrative complexity of the novel in favour of once again examining and re-examining the same few scenes in an ideological context. Perhaps die critical inability to avoid the push and pull between opposing ideologies arises from something specific in Austen's novel. Instead ofattempting to make claims for her whole ideology on such maintain and properly improve a social heritage" (p. 80). Margaret Kirkham presents the opposite view, readingAusten as actively involved in feminist debate and sharing ideas with Mary Wollstonecraft.Jane Austen, Feminism, and Fiction (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1983). 4 Claudiajohnson,JaneAusten: Women, Politics, andtlieNovel (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1988), p. 114. 5 Joseph Litvak, "The Infection ofActing: Theatricals and Theatricality in Mansfield Park," English Literary History 61 (1986), 331. 6 Litvak, 352. 7 Kirkham, pp. 107-8. 8 For example. Pam Perkins writes, "by first sketching a plausible alternative ending ... and dien baldly rejecting diat conclusion, Austen stresses the arbitrariness ofthe resolution that she actually provides and forces readers out ofany uncritical contentmentwidi herallotment ofconventional rewards and punishments." "A Subdued Gaiety: The Comedy ofMansfield Park," Nineteentli-Century Literature48 (1993), 22. FALLEN WOMAN 267 broad issues as "attitudes towards women" or morality, itseems fruitful to examine one specific issue that plays an important role in narrative closure: Maria's adultery and its connection to epistolarity. The frequent use of the epistolary form and the consequent change in...