Imagining Sameness and Difference: Domestic and Colonial Sisters in
            <i>Mansfield Park</i>

Coleman, Deirdre

doi:10.1002/9781444305968.ch25

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Having no children herself and always acting in her own best financial interest, Mrs Norris appeals on her niece's behalf by asking Sir Thomas, "Is not she a sister's child" (MP 9), almost echoing the famous abolitionist slogan "Am I not A Man/ Woman and a Brother/Sister". Deirdre Coleman (2009) understands this as satirising the very inequality that the supposed sibling bond between Black and white in abolitionist propaganda did not question. Rather than accepting Fanny into the family unconditionally, it is social etiquette and hierarchies that need stabilising.…”

Section: The Will To Feel: Jane Austen's Mansfield Parkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the meantime, her own reading has become subject to multiple critical interrogations. Coleman (2009) accuses her of wrongfully attributing the analogy between the "governess-trade" and the slave trade to Jane Fairfax rather than Mrs Elton in Emma. The widely cited passage in Emma begins with Jane Fairfax admitting that she would seek employment as a governess, phrasing it awkwardly: "'There are places in town, offices, where inquiry would soon produce something-Offices for the sale-not quite of human flesh-but of human intellect'."…”

Section: Additionally the Ongoing Military Conflict With France In Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…36. Coleman (2009) also reads this as an enclosing of the familiar in light of colonial expansion and Easton argues, "The bodily fear of external 'infection' […] and the xenophobic sense of others as 'foreign' […]-as well as the often noticed endogamy of the novel-are as much about the defence of a property line as a blood line" (1998: 469). 37.…”

Section: The Following Critics Link Austen's Naming Of Mansfield Parkmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Resistances: Austen and Wedderburn

Yekani

2020

Familial Feeling

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In this chapter the most famous writer of (female) affective individualism, Jane Austen, and her canonical third published novel Mansfield Park featuring her supposedly most unpopular heroine Fanny Price is juxtaposed with orator Robert Wedderburn’s much more obscure pamphlet The Horrors of Slavery. The chapter also revisits Edward Said’s famous theory of counterpoint in his reading of Austen and proposes instead a focus on entanglement. By contrasting the two texts and their relation to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, readers get a better understanding of how writers used the affective means of prose writing to introduce more resistant entangled tonalities of familial feeling. Austen presents wilful female subjectivity in a family that invested in slavery and Wedderburn, the unruly planter son, claims familiarity with both his enslaved mother and his slave-owning father, challenging the formula of the “horrors of slavery”. Via internal focalization and incendiary rhetoric respectively both texts tonally also create a more intimate familiarity with their readers. They thus aesthetically resist writing conventions and introduce more ambivalent nuance: pushing the limits of the genre of the country-house novel in Austen and refuting the demure tone of abolitionist writing in Wedderburn.

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Section: The Will To Feel: Jane Austen's Mansfield Parkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Additionally the Ongoing Military Conflict With France In Tmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Following Critics Link Austen's Naming Of Mansfield Parkmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation