A Study On The Heroine Fanny Price's Place Attachment To Mansfield In Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

Jane Austen is one of the most famous British women writers in the late 18 th and early 19 th century.Her later novel Mansfield Park mainly tells the story of Fanny Price who is involuntarily separated from Portsmouth's home to Mansfield.Many scholars have analyzed it from many perspectives such as feminism and colonialism but they rarely mention Fanny's place attachment.The thesis discovers that in Mansfield Park,Fanny's emotion in Mansfield presents a progressive trend as “strangeness-belonging-loyalty”.The thesis thinks Fanny's emotional change embodies her process of place attachment to Mansfield,her sense of placelessness to Mansfield,place adaptation to Mansfield,and place identity with Mansfield.In the introduction part,an introduction to Jane Austen and Mansfield Park,literature review,thesis statement,the theory of place attachment,terminology and thesis framework are included.The main body contains the following three chapters.The first chapter analyzes Fanny's sense of placelessness generated by her sense of strangeness towards Mansfield.The first part explores the reasons for Fanny's lacking sense of place,which can be concluded as the passive fostering and long journey due to poverty.The second part mainly analyses Fanny's sense of strangeness from three aspects,respectively her feeling of outsideness,loneliness and homesickness.Fanny leaves her hometown Portsmouth,experiences a long journey and is forced to be fostered at Mansfield.There,Fanny is full of nostalgia for Portsmouth and feels strange to Mansfield.Between leaving her familiar place—Portsmouth and perceiving nothing at the new place—Mansfield,Fanny's sense of placelessness arises.Chapter two mainly discusses Fanny's place adaptation to Mansfield with her sense of belonging increasing.In this chapter,the thesis writer analyses Fanny's adaptation to Mansfield from three parts,Fanny's increasing emotional attachment,her freeing external behaviors and improving cognitive structure.As for part one,Fanny's seeking for emotional attachment can be reflected in the friendship from her cousin Edmund,the love from Lady Bertram and Sir Thomas Bertram,as well as the health support by riding the little grey poney.The second part explores Fanny's continually changing behaviors by analyzing her daily actions and social interaction.Part three mainly analyses Fanny's improvement of cognition structure,including her knowledge enrichment and the awakening of her consciousness of feminism.As far as Fanny's affective,behavioral,and cognitive place adaptation are concerned,Fanny gradually has a sense of belonging to Mansfield.Chapter three explores Fanny's place identity with Mansfield and her loyalty to this place.The first part explores Fanny's identity with Mansfield by her rational cognition of three places,Portsmouth,London and Mansfield.The second part analyzes people in Mansfield identifying Fanny as a family member by the fact of picking up her to the house and the formation of her place identity.Therefore,the mutual identity of individual and place community is the highest embodiment of place attachment,the unity of place community values and personal values.After the argumentation of the three chapters,the thesis draws a conclusion.Through the description of Fanny's emotional change to Mansfield in Mansfield Park,the author Austen expresses her thinking about rural-urban place values in the time of the Regency in Britain,which implies her identity with elegant,moral and orderly place values in the country life.The academic significance of this thesis lies in its analysis on Fanny's place attachment to Mansfield Park,which provides a new research prospective for the study of the novel and the author.With regard to the realistic significance,this thesis suggests that people should identify places rationally and forge a sense of belonging under the background of globalization.