Exploring Space: The Constellations of Mansfield Park

Exploring Space: The Constellations of Mansfield ParkJohn Skinner Twenty-five years ago an influential essay referred to the "difficult beauty" of Mansfield Park; whether or not subsequent criticism has clarified or merely reaffirmed the novel's "difficulty," it has happily done nothing to diminish its beauty.1 The difficulty is commonly related to certain aspects of the novel which isolate it from Jane Austen's other fiction. One such feature is the conspicuous passivity of the heroine. Fanny Price's lack of vitality may even be thought to produce a dramatic vacuum, which could be linked to another characteristic feature of the novel, the great thematic prominence achieved by the house itself. The house may ultimately be more important than all the people living in it. Alistair Duckworth placed particular emphasis on the Bertram estate in Mansfield Park as "a metonym for other inherited structures"—defining and regulating what may be regarded as a complete social order. Several years previously, Tony Tanner had successfully used a similar approach, when he described Mansfield as an "edifice of values."2 1 See Thomas R. Edwards, Jr, "The Difficult Beauty of Mansfield Park," Nineteenth Century Fiction 20 (1965), 51-67. Of particular interest is Edwards's analysis of die novel's "scenic resources " (52-55), essentially an allegorical reading of die "wilderness" section. After discussing "meddling," die dialectic of "conscience and consciousness," and sympadiy for "imperfection," Edwards returns once again—now perhaps unconsciously—to spatial metaphor, widi his suggestion diat Jane Austen includes her characters in a "largerfield of irony that Üiey never get out of (67, my emphasis). 2 Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement ofthe Estate: A Study ofJane Austen's Novels (BaIEIGHTEENTH -CENTURY FICTION, Volume 4, Number 2, January 1992 126 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION As other critics have shown, however, the text actually reflects several discrete kinds of order, which include the social order of the house, together with the psychological and moral order of the self and the aesthetic order of the novel.3 By a small shift of perspective, moreover, we may move from order itself to the space in which that order is inscribed. Mansfield Park has a massive repertoire of spatial referents, which— without detriment to its rich complexity—may be categorized in fairly schematic terms, to provide suitable parameters for a new reading of the novel. . There is thus an obvious public or social space, empirically established if not rigidly demarcated; it corresponds to the external connections of the great house and may be largely interpreted in terms of conventional topography . Coexistent with this spatial dimension is another more private or intimate space, derived from Mansfield's phenomenology (here defined simply as the connotations of various material objects). Just as the site of such imagery is the house itself, its main repository is Fanny. The other young people at Mansfield Park function in a kind of existential space (the adjective is here used purely descriptively—even reductively—and without any specialized philosophical implications): the celebrated figurative devices within the novel, exemplified by the amateur theatricals and the projected improvement of Sotherton, may be regarded as attempts by youth to evade social constraints and achieve a freedom of their own. From yet another perspective Mansfield Park is characterized by substantial diegetic space: this appears in a kind of narrative freedom, exemplified both by an emergent resistance to closure in the final chapter, and by a certain linguistic licence evinced by some of the more outspoken voices within the text. Finally, and perhaps most obviously, each of these spatial functions will contribute to the production of what we may call hermeneutic space, or the considerable interpretative scope available to readers in the formation of their own critical responses to the novel. timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), p. ix. In his introduction to die Penguin edition of the novel, Tanner actually interprets die characters of die novel in die light of their relationship widi the great house, grouping diem ingeniously as guardians, inheritors, and interlopers. The essay is reprinted in revised form in Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). In The Life ofJane Austen (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984) John Halperin dismissed claims about the difference...