Tom Became What He Ought to Be: Mansfield Park as Homosocial Bildungsroman

This essay takes Tom Bertram as its subject, reexamining the critical assumptions that have caused him to be left out of readings of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Borrowing from D. A. Miller, I understand Tom as an “unheterosexual” figure who cannot be accommodated by the “revised” family at Mansfield without total transformation (Miller 15; Cleere 128). His reformation represents the purging of his threat to the economy of the family, which is organized around heterosexual marriage. Because it doesn’t forward the marriage plot, Tom’s energy—directed as it is towards other men—ultimately has no place “within the view and patronage of Mansfield Park” (Austen 321). Tom’s trajectory is read as a homosocial bildungsroman, wherein his moral growth is measured by the quality of his same-sex relationships; in contrast to the pattern of the hetero-oriented bildungsroman, this growth ultimately entails his exclusion from the narrative.