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Return to Jane Austen's art and her literary reputationThis file contains abstracts for three academic articles on Jane Austen, from the on-line version of the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature.
Northanger Abbey is organized around a covert debate between paired terms -- nature and probability -- in a manner reminiscent of Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice. "Nature" is associated with Catherine Morland, "probability" -- probable inference and prudentialism -- with Henry Tilney. The debate focuses on and exploits recent tensions in the critical model of literary probability. It is designed to reveal the limits of moral and technical probabilism, and to display the critical model as comic and absurd. Northanger Abbey is seen as an active critique of one kind of eighteenth-century fiction and criticism, and the literary and historical contexts within which Jane Austen is working are hence radically extended. This approach reveals the paradoxical quality of the novel, the curious combination of novelistic force with teasing and dismissive ironies, to be an aspect of Austen's mature and conscious comic artistry rather than a semi-juvenile lapse or oddity of technique.
The persistent riddle of how to read Austen's Mansfield Park is best approached not in the usual way, by looking for a thematic or ideological rationale instilled into the novel, but by considering it in terms of formal modeling, as an exercise in contrast or shading. Austen had tried out this technique, though in a less controlled way, in Sense and Sensibility, which consists of multiple overlays of meaning and tone; the various meanings of sensibility, for example, energize wholly disparate affective responses in readers. Mansfield Park consists of only two layers, worked out in studied independence of each other: a pervasive religiosity and, by contrast, an examination of Fanny Price's elemental growth in mind, body, and "consequence." This elemental growth, which has nothing to do with religion or morality, is the real subject of the novel. The main, illegitimate obstacles to reading the novel in this way are, first, a habitual reluctance, even among admirers of Austen's work, to credit a female writer with the experimental boldness often attributed to male contemporaries such as Byron and Shelley, and, second, the even more limiting "feminine" stereotype of Austen as a moralist.
Jane Austen's Mansfield Park is not, as has often been claimed, a dour morality tale, endorsing prim virtue over wit and charm. Fanny and Mary can be read as representatives of two opposing comic traditions, those of sentimental comedy and "laughing" comedy. The movement of the novel contrasts the strengths and weaknesses of these two traditions, ultimately suggesting that neither is entirely satisfactory. Fanny's moral good sense is unattractive without any leaven of Mary's charm, while Mary's witty amorality is shown to be both selfish and cruel. As Austen suggests the weaknesses of both comic traditions through the weaknesses of her heroines, she avoids endorsing either tradition and explores the limitations of both. Mansfield Park is not a funny novel, but in its exploration of comic conventions it continues, on a structural level, the playfulness that marks Austen's other works.
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