"Improved Countenance": Capitalist Relations in Mansfield Park

There is no neat division between the economic and the domestic. Not only are they connected, but their meaning, structure, and value are decidedly conditioned by one another. Yet, since it is capitalism’s nature to conceal exploitation, domesticity becomes outwardly coded as the domain of tradition, despite the productive forces of the market shaping domesticity through the process of social reproduction. Lise Vogel asks how the worker is produced in capitalism, analyzing the peculiar way women are exploited in this process. Using Vogel’s theory of labor and Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, this thesis analyzes Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park as a remarkable and salient example of capitalist relations invading and determining the realm of the domestic in the early 19th-century. At the beginning of the novel, Fanny Price, the protagonist of the novel, is intimately involved in social reproduction, but when she is displaced to the extravagant halls of Mansfield Park, her uncle’s estate, she enters the commodity sphere and becomes an ideological weapon, emptied out of her original and unique value to fervently justify the ruling class's power.

Caryl Phillips’s Rewriting of the Canonical Romance as a Genre

The paper considers Phillips’s rewriting of the canonical nineteenth-century romances in three of his novels – A State of Independence (1986), The Lost Child (2015), and A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018). The three texts resettle the romance genre through the postcolonial concept of ‘home’. In A State of Independence, Phillips rearranges the role of one of Jane Austen’s most orthodox characters, the landowner Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park (1814), by transposing the Austenian character’s features to his protagonist Bertram Francis, a Caribbean man who comes back to his ancestral homeland after twenty years in Britain. In The Lost Child, chronicling literary-historical events in the present tense by transferring the life of the Brontë family into the protagonists of Wuthering Heights (1847) is for the author one way of calling into question the real sense of literature. It is for this reason that Phillips constructs a cyclic narration around the figure of Branwell Brontë, fictionalised by his sister Emily in the romance protagonist Heathcliff, and mirrored in The Lost Child in the character of Tommy Wilson. In A View of the Empire at Sunset, Phillips definitely overturns the colonial and genre categories by reassessing the in-between life of the Dominican-born writer Jean Rhys through her personal return journey to Dominica: as a result, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) (an intense rewriting of Jane Eyre) becomes a fictional character, and the literary events of her life sum up the vicissitudes both of the two ‘Bertrams’ – of Mansfield Park and A State of Independence – and the protagonists of Wuthering Heights and The Lost Child.

Between the Theater and the Novel

Chapter 4 investigates the domestic novel as a literary form in which the woman as protagonist and the site of the household come to the fore as subject and scene of modernity. It concentrates on novels by two of the form’s pre-eminent practitioners in English and Chinese, Jane Austen and Eileen Chang, who have drawn comparisons to each other for their clear, even cold-eyed, depictions of social and economic constraints on femininity and the complexity of feminine interiority. It reads together Austen’s 1814 Mansfield Park and Chang’s 1967 novels, Yuannü and The Rouge of the North, rewritings of her 1943 novella Jinsuo ji. These novels show how changes in the articulation of femininity in different historical and cultural contexts take place in correlation to redefinitions of the status of the household itself as site of modern life. Each novel incorporates the medium of theater to restage “woman” as modern agent and spectatorial subject on the plane of the ordinary.