Transatlantic Literature and Transitivity, 1780-1850

Subjects, Texts, and Print Culture

Annika Bautz, Kathryn Gray, Annika Bautz, Kathryn Gray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351851190
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria moderna

This book makes an important contribution to transatlantic literary studies and an emerging body of work on identity formation and print culture in the Atlantic world. The collection identifies the ways in which historically-situated but malleable subjectivities engage with popular and pressing debates about class, slavery, natural knowledge, democracy, and religion. In addition, the book also considers the ways in which material texts and genres, including, for example, the essay, the guidebook, the travel narrative, the periodical, the novel, and the poem, can be scrutinized in relation to historically-situated transatlantic transitions, transformations, and border crossings. The volume is underpinned by a thorough examination of historical and conceptual frameworks and prioritizes notions of circulation and exchange, as opposed to transfer and continuance, in its analysis of authors, texts, and ideas. The collection is concerned with the movement of people, texts, and ideas in the currents of transatlantic markets and politics, taking a fresh look at a range of canonical and popular writers of the period, including Austen, Poe, Crèvecoeur, Brockden Brown, Sedgwick, Hemans, Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, and Melville. In different ways, the essays gathered together here are concerned with the potentially empowering realities of the transitive, circulatory, and contingent experiences of transatlantic literary and cultural production as they are manifest in the long nineteenth century.

Part I
Travelling Subjects and Transitive Identities

1 Reformation in Mansfield Park

The Slave Trade and the Stillpoint of Knowledge

Elizabeth Fay

The colonial layers of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) rehearse public sphere debates she was clearly conversant in: the Mansfield ruling and abolition; Jacobinism; and education reform, especially through widely disseminated children’s texts, and published sermons that equated reform with morality and ethics. While the novel narratively foregrounds other important historical contexts, particularly anxiety over the marriage market, as well as patrimony and materialism, Regency debates provide much of the underlying tension in the novel around behaviour that appears enslaving, amoral or anti-authoritarian. Austen also participates in those debates by illustrating just how integral the very tool of debate, language itself, is to the colonial economy. Her use of the slave trade in a novel whose interrogation of the nature of exploitation might as easily have targeted factory ownership, utilises the geographical distance between plantations and new estates funded by those plantations to unsettle our concept of distance. Factories were usually close to their owners’ houses, but when plantation owners began to resettle in England as absentee landlords, their source of wealth was made distant and invisible. Fanny Price, whose surname indicates the cost of living within the cash-nexus, comes to understand that the invisibility of labour and wealth is a dangerous fiction, one that hides the necessary relation of people to each other, traditionally established through customary use and interdependency, a relation disastrously at risk in the novel. I argue that Fanny occupies the central role in the narrative in order to reclaim the Bertrams’ moral, relational centre from its vanquished position.

The slave trade was rationalised as a necessary way to sustain Britain’s economy. Because cheap labour was required in the 1600s to work the new plantations created by the rise of the Atlantic trade, slaves as well as indentured servants and transported criminals became the solution to the labour problem. Plantations became the model for eighteenth-century factories, with the stream of production organised on the greatest output for the cheapest cost. From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries plantations were viewed as factories since sugar was processed there as well, while the new industrial factories increasingly depended on sugar as a cheap source of energy for labourers who, like slaves, worked long hours for little recompense (Mintz 45–73). At the same time that sugar fuelled the Industrial Revolution, plantations were put under pressure since sugar was also viewed as a revenue source, and the British government taxed it heavily when requiring a boost in income.¹ With Britain dependent on sugar production on two counts, West Indian landowners were able to demand relative autonomy in conducting their political affairs, and to wield power in Parliament as Sir Thomas does, in exchange for their contribution to the national coffers. Isolated by geography, the West Indian plantocracy was able to create a different social identity for itself from the rest of eighteenth-century Britain; middle-class men could own large tracts of land and control a huge labour force much in the manner of feudal lords, with a similar political heft. Planters and their families saw themselves as fundamentally different from their slaves rather than dependent on them for their labour; like factory owners, planters saw the exploitation of the worker as essential to their enterprise, and they saw discipline as the only means for ensuring productivity from a resistant workforce. When Sir Thomas goes to Antigua to remedy the difficulties at his estate, however, it is not just in response to the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade of 1807, which abolished slave trading but not slavery, making it necessary for landowners to personally oversee their estates since slaves were no longer expendable (Ferguson 66). It was also because better techniques and labour management were required in the face of a national depression that had resulted in, among other crises, a sharp drop in the price of sugar in tandem with the British grain shortage. Sir Thomas faced both a potential labour shortage and a cash deficit. He returns from his plantation lean and exhausted, as if these shortfalls had undermined his own health, his appearance mirroring the overall national health.

When people are considered only as objects for sale, the necessary relation between people, labour and wealth, is itself made invisible; in such a condition, everyone has his or her price. Maria Bertram will marry without love or respect for the right fortune; Mary Crawford will deny love if the fortune is not equal to her estimate of her own worth; Sir Thomas will condone Maria’s marriage despite his awareness that Mr. Rushworth is a poor partner for her since he wants Rushworth’s political support. Aunt Norris becomes the mouthpiece for this kind of mentality in which cost-benefit overwhelms all other considerations. Fanny’s disapproval of both Maria’s and Mary’s motives in searching for a husband reflect her embrace of a more traditional valuing of relationship. Fanny’s seemingly conservative stance, with its implied critique of colonialism, is in fact a Romantic reaction to the economic theories of Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith. The Romantics looked to the past in order to assess the difficulties of the present’s headlong move into a fragmented society in which individualism meant taking in order to enrich the self. A developing anxiety about this alienating process is reflected in the arguments put forth by both abolitionists and anti-abolitionists concerning the similarity between wage earners in Britain and West Indian slaves.

The fundamental social problem raised by Mansfield Park is the cost of colonialism, the very thing that off-balances its production of wealth. But the novel does not focus on empire-building per se; rather, it examines colonial thinking. The colonial mind-set is that which distances colony from home front, owner from worker, one family member from another. For Fanny, the contrast is all too apparent between a colonial divisiveness founded on the cash-nexus, and the traditional relation to the land. When land is an integral part of communal identity rather than a mere source of wealth, landowners cannot afford to be absentee, and labourers hold customary privileges such as the right to graze on common lands, or the right to residual leavings such as woodchips. When Aunt Norris attacks Dick Jackson, the carpenter’s son, for taking chips from the theatrical set of Lover’s Vows, she re-labels his customary right as “theft”.² This deliberate change from custom to the exchange of labour for wages only echoes the eighteenth-century enclosure by large landowners of what were previously common lands, a deliberate change from custom to cash-nexus that impoverished large numbers of rural workers who depended on perquisites for survival. The connection between land enclosure, factory ownership and landlord absenteeism and colonialism can be seen in the fact that these are also the hallmarks of West Indian plantations.

Edward Said has called attention to the way in which the novel depends on Antiguan sugar plantations and yet pushes that consideration to the background.³ But because empire and capitalism are the two most important forces giving rise to the modern world, Said considers that literary interpretation must fall under one of the two historical realities of that world: either the colonised or the coloniser. He proposes that the task of literary analysis is to make the often-veiled connections between these two realities visible by examining them in a “counterpoint” or “contrapuntal” manner, a counterpoint that “is not temporal but spatial”.⁴ Without Said’s foregrounding of a contrapuntal methodology (which he reserves for critics, but which can be found in Mansfield Park itself, revealing Austen’s critical self-awareness) it is difficult to see Austen’s organisation of narrative as so completely engaged with the problems of empire. In fact, the novel is a critique of the colonialist mindset. When Said asserts that the novel embraces empire, he offers as proof Sir Thomas’s reinstitution of discipline and organisation at Mansfield Park after his difficult trip to administer his Antiguan estate; Mansfield Park in this reading is a microcosm of successful imperial management. However, Sir Thomas’s reign at Mansfield is shown through Fanny’s perspective to be domineering, even corrupt: after all, he allows Aunt Norris a free hand, agrees to Maria’s marriage knowing her to dislike Rushworth, and attempts to force Fanny into marriage with Henry. The reader can add the subtle ironic gestures toward Lady Bertram’s “West Indian” indolence. Although Edward Said’s famous dismissals of Austen and Mansfield Park have themselves provoked much criticism,⁵ they nevertheless re-situate our reading of the novel within the colonial context against how it can otherwise be read: as an example of the romance mode, a Cinderella story with recognisable fairytale structures, or a Gothic tale in which the poor wanderer is discovered in the end to be the inheritor of the estate. But though “everything we know about Jane Austen and her values is at odds with the cruelty of slavery” (Culture and Imperialism 96), Said’s assertion that the two worlds of plantation and estate do not talk to each other ignore that there is indeed textual language for the concurrences between the two placements of park and plantation. Indeed, Austen has anticipated his project by providing within her novel a spatially-oriented contrapuntal style that allows the two places to “talk” to each other through the medium of Fanny. Although Fanny and the Bertrams are not specifically aligned by social status with a particular geography, the spatial nuances in the novel are indexical of social critique. Most telling is the comment in free indirect speech, in what we have come to associate with Fanny’s conscience, that after questioning Maria about her impending marriage to Rushworth, “Sir Thomas was satisfied; too glad to be satisfied perhaps to urge the matter quite so far as his judgment might have dictated to others” (180–181). It is left for Fanny as mediator to interject this discerning note into Sir Thomas’s empire-building.

The novel’s contrapuntal technique creates a dialectical relation between space, event and comment that plays with shadows and reality, and is specified in the dialectic between Antigua, the productive landholding, and Mansfield Park, the secondary superstructure. In this sense it echoes abolitionist discourse, which depended on occlusion as much as exposure to fortify its message in a “specific dialectic of acknowledgement and disavowal” (Tuite 100). The contrapuntal between acknowledgement and disavowal also inheres in Sir Thomas’s guardianship along with Aunt Norris of Fanny, and in the source of Henry Crawford’s wealth. It is available everywhere in a culture that depends on the marginal, which is effaced in order to control it; even reformist and radical discourses were not clear-eyed about disavowals of marginal groups whose interests could derail those of the dominant ones.⁶ The relation between abolition discourse and the places, placements, and displacements in Mansfield Park is not just one of historical context. In the hands of Austen, colonial places are intricately co-respondent, and language, which occludes and ironically reveals, is one of the tools by which their discipline is enforced and reformed.

Unlike Austen’s other published novels, Mansfield Park, as its title indicates, is about a place, an enclosed zone of safety but also restriction. Mansfield Park has definitive boundaries that are permeable for characters in relation to those characters’ changeable status in the novel. Discovering the importance of place and placement means that it takes us some time to learn that Fanny Price will be the novel’s protagonist rather than either of the two Bertram sisters first introduced, despite the fact that unlike Fanny they belong to and maintain some proprietary rights to Mansfield. It is Fanny’s outsider status that, through a contrapuntal progression, makes her paradoxically central to the narrative. Ultimately, an inverse ratio between the Bertram sisters and their cousin Fanny will determine their relation to the centre. The deconstructive agent, Fanny’s marginalised subjectivity will partner with the destabilising forces that unseat those at the centre, heroically becoming the new daughter that she has always already been. How Fanny understands her role as a colonial subject, operating in the contact zone between the culture of mastery and possession and the culture of restriction and merit; and how she negotiates boundaries, restrictions, permeability, patriarchal rights and laws, the disciplinary use of language; and her place in relation to all of these, become the novel’s obsessive concern. But we cannot as readers create a comprehensive account of this concern, which is indeed obsessive in relation to Austen’s other published novels, without taking seriously the binarism of placement and displacement that governs the novel’s geography (Mansfield Park to Antigua, London to Portsmouth) and spatial terms (boundedness, borders, interstices and networks).

The spatial nexus is consequently also important: the graded valuation of each family member and friend within the Bertram circle is registered somewhat differently through Fanny’s emotional appraisal. Patriarchy as the institutionalised marker of aristocracy and plantocracy is put in tension with this secondary register as a touchstone for the differential assessments of social and moral worth, and subjective status. Colonialism acts as a metaphor for understanding the complexities of familial relation: in a colonial situation, value is encoded as racial and class difference, but in the Bertram family first cousins are differentiated as belonging to the master or slave class. As Aunt Norris remarks to Maria and Julia, “it is not at all necessary that she [Fanny] should be as accomplished as you are; – on the contrary, it is much more desirable that there should be a difference” (16). The remark hints at the unsettling similarities in the way free-born Englishmen suffer what is, all but in name, slavery, including its practice of kidnapping and selling bodies, through destitution, child labour, and the low ranks of the navy and military, and the nasty suspicion that indenturing and transporting criminals and naval press-ganging might make British practices look a bit too much like Africa’s indigenous form of slavery.⁷

Aunt Norris plays out this class abuse verbally with her vicious attack after Fanny declines to play an old peasant woman in the family theatrical: “What a piece of work here is about nothing … to make such a difficulty of obliging your cousins … [s]o kind as they are to you!”, and then to the others, “I am not going to urge her [further] … but I shall think her a very obstinate, ungrateful girl, if she does not do what her aunt and cousins wish her – very ungrateful indeed, considering who and what she is” (132–133). Fanny’s unsettled status as both a who and a what, both of which must be “considered”, rather than accepted, is left ambivalent in order to pose the alien and differentiated against the natural and normative. This act of considering sets her apart from the rest of the family including Aunt Norris. It is, of course, Fanny’s class and poverty that determine her ontological status in relation to the family, but her thingness is what puts her in the same categorical space of subjective uncertainty as a slave. At the same time, the familial machine, which spews out gross unrealities in the mouths of its actors, puts pressure on the imagined familial life on Antigua. The domestic articulation of place and agency reveals the structural oppression within and between communities: the denial of subjectivity in the name of ontology is conjoined in the slave trade and in Austen’s novel through the mangling and depredations ...