A New Historical Approach To Mansfield Park

Jane Austen (1775—1817) is one of the prominent British female writers of thenineteenth century. She wrote six novels in her lifetime. Because of the socialenvironment she lives in, her novels mostly describe countryside life like dailyentertainments, emotional entanglements and marriage. Some critics claim that Janeonly cares about those people and things she is familiar with, and gives no attention tothe outside world. But after careful reading, we could find the sensitivity and interestAusten has in social changes around the nation. Mansfield Park, the fourth novel ofAusten, is an ambitious and difficult novel. It is regarded as her most profound andcomplicated novel, as well as the one which has the most insightful political ideas. Upto now, the scholars home and abroad mainly interpret the novel from the perspectiveof feminism, romanticism, and morality; few have analyzed it in the light of NewHistoricism.Led by Professor Stephen Greenblatt at Berkeley Campus of CaliforniaUniversity, New Historicism swept the field in Renaissance studies in the1980s, itsprimary goal was to redescribe the relationship between text and the culture system,and it put forward the theory of the historicity of texts and the textuality of history.New Historicists state that the relationship between history and the text is seen asdialectic: the literary text is interpreted not only as product and end but producer andsource of history. Mansfield Park is considered by many as a novel which gives adetailed description of the18thcentury British society. Therefore, the textuality ofhistory and the historicity of texts are explicitly embodied in this novel. To furtherexpain the relationship between history and texts, Stephen Greenblatt put forwardvarious strategies such as containment, subversion and self-fashioning which couldbetter explain how characters in the text are created under certain historicalbackground. Subversion refers to the critical attitude towards social ideology whichrepresents the ruling class, and provides an outlet of the dissatisfaction for ordinary people. Containment is intended to inhibit the power of subversion and keep it in thelimited range so that subversion could not achieve substantive results. Theself-fashioning of the human being is the result of the intertwining of subversion andcontainment. By looking into the life of ordinary people, it discloses the distortion andimprovement of human nature. In this thesis, Chapter One discloses the influenceoccupational and religious changes bring to the writing of Mansfield Park through thetheory of historicity of text. While Chapter Two demonstrates the principle of thetextuality of history by revealing the patriarchal and slavery problems in the novel. InCapter Three, containment and subversion will be used to analyze the self-fashioningof several young characters to help us understand human nature better. By analyzingthe novel from the principles of New Historicism, this thesis attempts to provide aninnovative interpretation to the studies of Mansfield Park, and it also intends to arousepeople’s attention on those marginalized people in the society.