By Rob Horning

Image via Denzil Grant

I’ve been reading Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, which, as far as I can tell, is about the varieties of servitude that early 19th century life had to offer women in England. That is to say it’s about property, which is maybe why it’s named after an estate and not a person. The main character, Fanny Price, is a poor relation more or less purchased by her rich relatives, the Bertrams. Brought to the Bertrams’ mansion as a child, she is then subject to serial humiliations meant to remind her of her social place while she is made over into an uncompensated servant who performs endless amounts of emotional labor (as well as running around and fetching things for her indolent aunt) without having the wherewithal to complain. In fact, she more often than not professes gratitude for her uprooted condition (rejected by her immediate family and, by and large, demeaned by her adoptive one); she has been carefully programmed to defeat the “servant problem” that even then plagued the country — no need to wait until Downton Abbey times a century later. (When Fanny returns to her parents’ house as an adult, her mother can talk of virtually nothing else but her inadequate servants; that even the “poor relations” had domestic servants is a reminder of how pervasive it was.)

But there are cracks beneath the surface of this convenient arrangement. Though extremely introverted and reflexively self-effacing, Fanny is also a judgmental prig (like most of Austen’s heroines, though Lionel Trilling in his essay on the novel singles her out as being impossible to like) sanctimoniously obsessed with other people’s expressions of proper piety, though we are given to believe that her love for her cousin Edmund, clergyman-to-be, has led her to adopt his reproving discernment. When she is not being bullied by her aunts, she spends her time silently monitoring her other cousins and their friends for their perceived lapses and eagerly sharing her contempt with Edmund to try to win his approval.

Basically Fanny is a seething cauldron of resentment, but because she is also beautiful, she is expected to be obedient and obliging when men ogle her.

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