A Genealogical Study Of Jane Austenian "Humanistic Return" In Mansfield Park

Jane Austen (1775-1817) is one of the most influential female writers in the British literature, whose works mainly explore women's marriage and life in the British countryside in the late 18th century and the early 19th century and truly reproduce love stories between ladies and gentlemen in the Georgian era. Mansfield Park (1814), the most controversial novel in Austen's six complete novels, is Austen's literary attempt to reflect the then social realities, characterized by moral depravity, neglect of individual values and abandonment of humanistic traditions, when people are obsessed with material comforts and desire enactment and ignore the cultivation of individual ethics and spiritual well-being incurred from the industrial revolution.This thesis attempts to examine the main heroine Fanny Price's struggle for existence encaged in Mansfield Park under the perspective of Michel Foucault's Subject theory and genealogical methodology. It unravels how Fanny achieves the state of "self-pleasure" highly valued in Greek culture by making full use of the disciplinary power in the patriarchal society and the technologies of "epimeleia heautou", which brings her a happy ending. Fanny's growth undergoes the process of shaping herself as knowledge subject and power subject passively enforced by the external disciplinary power, then resisting and subverting these two passive subjects with feminine praise worthiness, and finally cultivating herself as ethical subject actively by pursuing her own free, aesthetic and ethical lifestyle during her striving for self-improvement. The final choice indicates her returning to humanistic values and ensures her to be an elegant and graceful lady welcomed by the British society in the early nineteenth century. This thesis contends that the three phases of discipline, resistance and self-improvement in Fanny Price's growth are in consistent with Austen's literary exploration of how females can return and recapture the humanistic values and ethics prevalent in the Greco-Roman culture, which is a kind of heterogeneity and faultage in the development of humanism in her age. The three modes of subject in the Subject theory and the elements of heterogeneity and faultage in the history are the focus of Foucault's genealogical methodology. Therefore, combining the social background and the moral integrity exhibited by Fanny, this thesis is tentative in defining Austenian "humanistic return" as advocating human beings to attach great importance to humanistic values, the return to and expression of spiritual self and moral-ethical self in the earlier age of mechanization. This thesis also outlines the characteristics and path of Austenian "humanistic return". In this sense, this thesis achieves a genealogical study of Jane Austenian "humanistic return".Through a comprehensive study of textual and theoretical analysis, this thesis proposes that Austen, in the portrayal of Fanny Price's struggle for existence in the Mansfield Park, explores how females in the rural families can pursue a free, aesthetic and ethical lifestyle against the then social context. In this way, Austen suggests the pursuit of "humanistic return", that is, rediscovery and re-capture of humanistic values and re-cultivation of ethics and morality, as her proposed solution to the inescapable decline of social ethics and morality or even humanistic disaster in her age.