Symbol, Allegory, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Statesman’s Manual distinguishes between symbol and allegory, and the distinction reveals what is at stake in Mansfield Park. Austen alludes to the country house tradition that empowers Edmund Burke’s counterrevolutionary rhetoric, but the persistence of allegory in the novel produces anti-Burkean insights. Mansfield Park also challenges Paul de Man’s famous reading of Coleridge: while de Man’s essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality” labors to discriminate between tropes, Austen sometimes blurs tropes and dramatizes the precariousness of a political order dependent on them. Yet de Man’s study of Romantic tropes sheds light on the non-realistic aspects of Austen’s novel.