Mansfield Park (by Al Drake and Monika Mazurek)
Critics have pointed out that Mansfield Park begins where Pride and Prejudice left off. Can you explain that?
Why does Austen choose to title her novel after the name of the country house?
How does the dichotomy of “the country and the city” play out in the novel? Can we call Mansfield Park a pastoral novel?
Jane Austen seems to have considered Mansfield Park her best work, but many readers don't take kindly to Fanny Price as the heroine. Why might that be so? Do you feel that way about her, or do you find her an attractive and sympathetic character? Consider this quotation from Dr John Gregory's A Father's Legacy to His Daughters (1761), a bestselling handbook on women's education still popular in Austen's lifetime.
But though good health be one of the greatest blessings of life, never make a boast of it, but enjoy it in grateful silence. We so naturally associate the idea of female softness and delicacy with a correspondent delicacy of constitution, that when a woman speaks of her great strength, her extraordinary appetite, her ability to bear excessive fatigue, we recoil at the description in a way she is little aware of.
The whole text, if you are interested, is available at http://www.usask.ca/english/barbauld/related_texts/gregory_txt.html
5. Jane Austen, like Sir Walter Scott, is widely considered a conservative novelist who favors the interests and values of the landed gentry against the changes gathering in England during the Regency Period. On the whole that view is certainly correct, but how might a careful reading show Austen's work as something more than just an apology for all things old-fashioned and semi-aristocratic?
6. Why is the Crawford-led theatrical interlude such an important challenge to the value system operative in Mansfield Park itself and in the conduct of the Bertrams and Fanny Price? Which values win out in the end, and how do they win out? Again, a quote from the good Dr Gregory:
I know no entertainment that gives such pleasure to any person of sentiment or humour, as the theatre.--But I am sorry to say, there are few English comedies a lady can see, without a shock to delicacy. You will not readily suspect the comments on such occasions. Men are often best acquainted with the most worthless of your sex, and from them too readily form their judgment of the rest. A virtuous girl often hears very indelicate things with a countenance no wise embarrassed, because in truth she does not understand them. Yet this is, most ungenerously, ascribed to that command of features, and that ready presence of mind, which you are thought to possess in a degree far beyond us ; or, by still more malignant observers, it is ascribed to hardened effrontery.... The only way to avoid these inconveniencies, is never to go to a play that is particularly offensive to delicacy.--Tragedy subjects you to no such distress.--Its sorrows will soften and ennoble your hearts.
7. Despite its wariness about theatre, Mansfield Park does have a three-act structure. What particular events take place at the end of each volume?
8. How much of a role does the narrator of our story play in forming our perceptions of some of the characters aside from Fanny Price--how much access are we given to their "consciousness"? How much do we find out directly about what is supposedly going on inside the characters--their thoughts and feelings--and how much of what we find out seems to flow from the narrator's attitude towards them? Choose an instance or two and discuss.
9. Much has been said by contemporary critics about the passing mention of slavery that Austen makes in Vol. II Ch.3 (see an interesting polemic of Ibn Warraq at http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/8722/sec_id/8722 and another paper on the Austen family attitudes to slave trade at http://cavehill.uwi.edu/bnccde/antigua/conference/papers/davis.html). Do you think it matters in the plot of the novel that Mansfield Park is supported by the money made by slaves on sugar plantation?
10. It's clear that there are major contrasts in life at Portsmouth (where Fanny's parents live and where she is sent when she refuses to marry Henry Crawford) and life at Mansfield Park. But what similarities in perspective can you find amongst the representatives of these very different worlds?
11. What makes Edmund and Fanny an appropriate couple, a love match? What qualities do they share, and how do they differ?