English

Mansfield park and national (Be)longing

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Paul Ricoeur cautions that the personal and public remembrance of traumatic history can be threatened by memory that has been blocked, manipulated, or censored. For Ricoeur, though, alongside this threat, stands the possibility of reconciliation with the traumatic past in the form of "happy forgetting". The resolution of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park seems to offer just such a "happy forgetting". Fanny Price's depiction of memory in Mansfield Park, which Austen connects to a sense of place, is suggestive of the political expediency underlying Fanny's budding appreciation of the national landscape. The great house and the great estate at Mansfield, both the site of Fanny's traumatic upbringing and the symbol of British nationalism, focuses her tale on geopolitical dynamics conveyed through a sense of place, similar to contemporary trauma narratives of the diasporic subject. Fanny's distressing introduction to Mansfield Park suggests that authoritarianism based in nothing more than the privilege of rank engenders ethical stasis.

Publication Title

Traumatic Tales: British Nationhood and National Trauma in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Publication Date

9-2017

First Page

57

Last Page

75

ISBN

9781315100487

DOI

10.4324/9781315100487

Keywords

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, British nationalism, national trauma

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