Few novels have divided critics more than Mansfield Park. It has
been fiercely argued over for more than 200 years, and with good
reason: it is open to radically different interpretations. At its
broadest, it is a novel about the condition of England, setting up
an opposition, as the Austen biographer Claire Tomalin has put it,
between someone with strongly held religious and moral principles
who will not consider a marriage that is not based on true feeling,
and is revolted by sexual immorality, and "a group of worldly,
highly cultivated, entertaining and well-to-do young people who
pursue pleasure without regard for religious or moral principles".
Many have dismissed the heroine, Fanny Price, as a mere picture of
goodness, but the author of this guide, John Wiltshire, one of the
most respected and original of modern Austen critics, dismisses
this argument. "The still, principled fulcrum of moral right,
celebrated and excoriated by earlier critics," he says, is now
"understood to be a trembling, unstable entity", an "erotically
driven and conflicted figure". Indeed, in part at least, this is a
novel about female desire - the plot revolves around the passionate
feelings of two young women, Fanny and Maria. The argument that it
is a straightforward defence of the conservative way of life is
hard to sustain; it is more plausibly seen as questioning the whole
patriarchal basis of society, and in particular the extent to which
women were trapped by a system over which they had no control. Far
from being devoid of irony, it is now frequently, and perhaps
rightly, thought of as the most ironic of all Austen's novels.
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