“ Masculinity in Mansfield Park”

Mansfield Park is an enormously complicated novel, even by the standards of Jane Austen, who creates characters and situations of unusual difficulty in all her novels. Like other Austen novels, this one is concerned with a young woman trying to find her place in the social order. Fanny comes from a poor family but is being raised by her rich aunt and uncle. She prefigures the orphans of later Victorian novels in her separation from …

…of married life afterwards--Mansfield Park hints at the essential ambiguity of knowledge. Austen cannot give a complete account of Edmund and Fanny's entire life together, so she leaves things hanging. On the other hand, Fanny's marriage has fixed her social position, and she is no longer a single, unaltered woman, so Mansfield Park has achieved the two major goals of a nineteenth-century novel. In its ambiguity about nearly everything else, however, Austen's novel is revolutionary.