There’s a bizarrely opaque, oddly modern question hovering over the legacy of Jane Austen. And despite centuries of debate, scholars still haven’t been able to figure out how to answer it.
Jane Austen lived under the rule of a slave-trading empire. What did she think about that? And if we could figure out what someone so smart and morally conscious thought about life in a colonizing power, what would that tell us about how ordinary people make their peace with living with an atrocity?
One scene in particular is key to this debate. It comes in Austen’s third published novel, 1814’s Mansfield Park. Today, Mansfield Park is one of Austen’s least-loved books. Nonetheless, it is her only book to feature characters discussing slavery without using it as a metaphor for something else — and, upon a close reading, the whole book is riddled with references to the slave trade and the slave economy.
The scene in question features the novel’s heroine, poor and downtrodden Fanny Price, talking with her cousin and love interest Edmund Bertram about his father, stern Sir Thomas Bertram.
Fanny is a little afraid of Sir Thomas, who took her into his lavish country home when she was 10 years old as an act of charity. Fanny is now in her late teens, and both Sir Thomas and Edmund know her to be the most upright and moral member of their household — but Sir Thomas is so forbidding, and Fanny so convinced of her social inferiority to her wealthy relations, that she rarely speaks to him of her own volition.
The scene begins with Edmund telling Fanny she should talk to Sir Thomas more. Then Fanny, out of apparently nowhere, starts talking about slavery: “[…]Did not you hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?”
“I did — and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.”
“And I longed to do it — but there was such a dead silence! And while my cousins were sitting by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like — I thought it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel.”
What, literary critics have demanded, is that scene doing in Mansfield Park? Does it have anything to do with why Mansfield Park is such a strange, sad, moralizing novel? What do we make of that “dead silence” that answered Fanny’s question? Is this how normal people talked about slavery at the time? Is it how Austen talked about slavery? What did she think of it? What did other people think of it? Most urgently of all: What horrible things are we treating as polite dinner table conversation without realizing it?
I’ve been thinking a lot about Jane Austen and Mansfield Park over the last few weeks, as President Donald Trump announced his intention to excise from the Smithsonian museums all references to slavery that he finds objectionable, and as conservatives promote educational materials that minimize the effects of slavery on America’s history.
Some scholars argue that Mansfield Park is Austen’s apologia for slavery. The first time I came across that reading, in college, I was depressed by it, in the same way that I was depressed when I learned about the Founding Fathers being slave owners.
Austen has such a clear, precise moral vision: You can hear it ticking through her fiction like clockwork. How awful, I thought, if someone who thought so carefully about what was ethical and what was pleasurable was able to talk herself into internalizing the logic of empire to the point that it warped the very machinery of her novels. What a disappointment. I had the instinct to try to forget Mansfield Park even existed, to bury it away, like the Trump administration demanding the Smithsonian stop talking about slavery so much. It had never been my favorite of Austen’s books, anyway.
But literary scholars aren’t looking for references to slavery in Mansfield Park to try to prove that it is a sinful book that must be forgotten. They are looking for those references to try to figure out how the citizens of the British Empire thought about the terrible acts that were committed in their name, the acts that brought them so much wealth and power. Looking at those thought processes with clear eyes helps us understand how the human mind is capable of deceiving itself — and what we might be deceiving ourselves about too, here at the other end of history.
“Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park.”
To modern readers, Mansfield Park is a strange book in Austen’s beloved oeuvre. Among its more fashionable sisters — sparkling Pride and Prejudice, melancholy Persuasion, clever Emma, bitchy Northanger Abbey, and sweet Sense and Sensibility — Mansfield Park is the Mary Bennet of the crowd. It reads as lugubrious, scolding, and far too moralistic to be any fun.
While Mansfield Park has gone through periods of approbation — the Austen scholar Devoney Looser notes that by the 1830s, male readers were particularly fond of it — it seems to have puzzled its first audience, too. The rest of Austen’s six novels were all covered by contemporary literary periodicals as soon as they were published, but Mansfield Park went six years without a single review. Austen’s records showed she asked her family what they thought of it, and her mother said that Fanny was “insipid.”
In 1954, the literary critic Lionel Trilling spoke for many when he described Mansfield Park as the only novel of Austen’s “in which the characteristic irony” could not be found. “Perhaps no other work of genius has ever spoken, or seemed to speak, so insistently for cautiousness and constraint, even for dullness,” he went on, adding, “Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park.”
Fanny Price is indeed a tough pill to swallow. While Austen’s other heroes are spirited, funny, and attractively willing to break with convention when it suits them, Cinderella-like Fanny Price is anxious, solemn, and aligns herself with conventional morality. Her moral goodness is, indeed, her only real strength. Physically she is so frail that she is overcome by gathering a basketful of roses, and emotionally she is so unwilling to stand up for herself that she spends her rare free time in a room kept frigidly cold, because she cannot bear to ask for a fire to be lit for her.
But Fanny, alone of all her wise and wealthy relations, is able to hold onto her moral courage even when it is inconvenient and unpleasant to do so. Her cousins are all seduced by the rich and charismatic Henry Crawford. So is the reader, who can recognize a bad boy ready to be redeemed by the love of a good woman as soon as he strides onto the page, quoting Shakespeare and talking about how he thinks he might be ready to give up his wickedness. Only Fanny looks at Henry, so anguished and so witty, and sees a cad.
In the end, Fanny is proven right to refuse Henry. He runs away with her married cousin, Maria. Fanny, in turn, marries the upright Edmund, the only Bertram who was ever kind to her, and ultimately inherits Mansfield Park and becomes its mistress. We may find it hard to love Fanny, but Austen directs us to notice that she is, in the end, correct, and rewarded for her correctness, too. Even if Edmund is much less charming and way more priggish than Henry.
Throughout the novel, the wealth of Mansfield Park stands as the redemptive factor that will save Fanny Price: luxurious, beautiful wealth, which takes her out of the wretched squalor of her parents’ house and into the withholding ease of the estate. And where does this wealth come from? It comes from Sir Thomas Bertram’s holdings in Antigua — which is to say, it comes from a sugar plantation worked by enslaved people.
“A dead silence when slavery was spoken of.”
The first critic to truly grapple with the problem of Sir Thomas’s slave holdings was the great postcolonialist critic Edward Said, in his classic 1994 essay “Jane Austen and Empire.” Said argued that because Austen lived in a slave-holding colonizing state, the ideology of empire inflected her worldview and fiction in ways that felt so natural as to slide under not only her notice but the notice of her readers.
In Mansfield Park, the Bertrams bring their niece Fanny to live with them partially out of a genuine desire to help the impoverished relative, and partially out of convenience. A girl like Fanny, they feel, could be a help around the house. In 1994, Said argued that the worldview that would import a poor relation into a person’s country estate is the same worldview that could lead a nation to export their agricultural work to a colony worked by enslaved people.
“I think Austen sees what Fanny does as a domestic or small-scale movement in space that corresponds to the larger, more openly colonial movements of Sir Thomas, her mentor, the man whose estate she inherits,” Said wrote. “The two movements depend on each other.”
This was one of the essays in which Said essentially invented postcolonialist literary criticism, or the idea of reading literature with a focus on the effects of colonialism. It was hugely influential and is still taught in colleges. A central part of his argument was that slavery formed a sort of lacuna in Austen’s tale, a pointedly ignored hole that spoke to a shameful guilt.
“All the evidence says that even the most routine aspects of holding slaves on a West Indian sugar plantation were cruel stuff. And everything we know about Austen and her values is at odds with the cruelty of slavery,” Said wrote. He thought the key to understanding how Austen made her peace with the contradiction lay in that famous scene where Fanny asks about the slave trade, and is met with “such a dead silence” — as though, Said wrote, “one world could not be connected with the other since there simply is no common language for both.”
For Said, reading Mansfield Park while paying special attention to the source of Sir Thomas’s wealth was a radical attack of redirecting one’s attention, of refusing to cover up an inconvenient truth, just as Fanny does when she refuses Henry Crawford.
In the time since Said’s essay, however, scholars have begun to make the case that Austen wasn’t being quite so silent on the problem of slavery as she appears to contemporary readers.
The new plantation aristocracy
When Austen published Mansfield Park in 1814, slavery was central to the British economy. It was a politically charged topic, and the newly enshrined aristocrat who owes their fortune to the slave trade was a known type. As ever is the case with new money, established gentry tended to sneer at them as coarse, unrefined, and — in this case, truthfully — inextricably intertwined with a moral atrocity.
Some scholars read the Bertram family as Austen parodying this prominent new type. Lady Bertram’s indolent carelessness, the relaxed morals of her daughters, their casual dependence on the imported labor of their ill-treated cousin: All this is a send-up of the slave-owning aristocratic class. Toward the end of the book, we even learn that the adulterous Maria Bertram has taken over a house previously owned by the Lascelleses, a prominent family of slave plantation owners of the same type Austen may have been parodying with the Bertrams.
The reference becomes more pointed with the repeated invocation of names associated with the slave trade and with abolition. Mansfield Park itself shares a name with William Murray, first earl of Mansfield, an aristocratic judge with a mixed-race adopted daughter. Lord Mansfield famously ruled in 1772 that it was illegal to transport a slave out of England and Wales against his or her will, a landmark decision that paved the way for the abolition of the slave trade.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Norris, Fanny’s most miserly and wicked aunt, shares a name with the infamous slave trader Robert Norris, a man whose venal sadism made him the villain in a book of history Austen said in her letters she read and admired.
Throughout the novel, Sir Thomas journeys back and forth between Mansfield Park and his holdings in Antigua, where he must set right some never-specified trouble that apparently involves his slaves.
In her recent book Wild for Austen, Looser sums up the debate: “To some readers, the fact that Sir Thomas isn’t explicitly damned for that quest, by any character or the narrator, suggests Austen must be pro-slavery. Others conclude the opposite: that the sordid, selfish doings of powerful white people at Mansfield Park…are meant to make readers connect these characters’ deep flaws to their ill-begotten colonial wealth. As is characteristic of her fiction, Austen raises these difficult moral and political questions, then doesn’t tell her readers what to do or think. It’s bewildering by design.”
What do we actually know about Jane Austen and slavery?
Austen left behind no clear account of her feelings about slavery in her surviving papers. But Austen was a very moral writer, and even Said thought that it was unlikely that she was in favor of slavery.
In Wild for Austen, Looser provides a fair amount of historical context that suggests Austen was probably in favor of abolition of the slave trade. Austen wrote in a letter that she had just finished a book by an abolitionist historian and found herself “in love” with the author. Three of her brothers were active abolitionist activists after her death, implying the Austens had a family history of anti-slavery thought. Further, as Fuller points out, women of Austen’s education and social class at the time were overwhelmingly likely to be abolitionists, in the same way that highly educated young women today are overwhelmingly likely to be liberal.
But if Austen was against slavery, why is it so hard to tell that from Mansfield Park?
One prominent theory, recently espoused by the author Lauren Groff in the New York Times, is that Austen wrote Mansfield Park with encoded anti-slavery messages, the better to foil censorious readers. Groff quotes the literary critic Helena Kelly, author of the 2017 book Jane Austen the Secret Radical, who argues that in the early 19th century, Austen was writing under what we should understand today as a totalitarian state.
To that end, Kelly approaches Austen’s novels with the spirit of an amateur detective with a decoder ring. She makes much of the appearance of an apricot tree of the Moor Park variety (“Is it just coincidence that it’s the same word Shakespeare uses to describe the ethnicity of black Africans and that ‘Moor Park’ echoes ‘Mansfield Park’?”), and she argues that when Fanny Price hangs a cross pendant on a gold chain gifted to her by the clergyman Edmund, Austen has provided us with a symbol that is “clear as daylight.” The chain, Kelly writes, represents slavery. The cross represents the Church of England.
“It’s the Church of England that is tainted; the Church that taints,” she writes. The Church of England, like other wealthy institutions of the day, was heavily invested in slave plantations. As such, Kelly theorizes that Austen wrote Mansfield Park with the aim of castigating the Church for its hypocrisy.
Other scholars, meanwhile, note that Austen’s contemporary peers wrote plenty of non-coded books that deal explicitly with slavery, and they don’t appear to have been arrested or tortured by the government for their daring.
“Discussion of the West Indies and slavery was a cornerstone of even educational fiction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century,” the scholar George E. Boulukos wrote in 2006. “Far from avoiding these issues so prominent in political and journalistic discourse, fiction considered them educational, topical, and even fashionable subjects.”
Another theory — and I must confess I find this one most convincing — is that Austen wrote from a perspective in favor of abolishing the slave trade, but for keeping slavery itself. This position was a surprisingly ubiquitous “moderate” stance in her era, a kind of attempt at finding reasonable common ground.
The idea was that while it was surely immoral to kidnap free-born people away from their homes and treat them as chattel, slavery itself was too entrenched in Britain’s economy to be reasonably outlawed. In that case, as long as a slave owner was merciful and humane to the enslaved people he owned, and he wasn’t enslaving anyone who wasn’t born into the system, then he was fulfilling his moral duty.
This theory helps make sense of why, in that dinner scene, Fanny and Edmund both think the slave-owning Sir Thomas was happy to hear Fanny ask questions about the slave trade: They could probably all agree that the trade of free-born people was wrong. “We are left with the sense that Fanny sees Sir Thomas’s trip to Antigua as fulfilling his moral obligation to ensure the humane treatment of his slaves,” Boulukos wrote.
In this reading, Austen is neither a shamefully repressed apolitical slave apologist, as Said argued, nor a secret abolitionist radical, as Kelly suggested. Instead, she’s a hypocritical centrist of a type who was all too common in her moment.
Ultimately, though, all this is theorizing. We don’t really know either way. We probably never will.
We don’t know what Mansfield Park is saying about slavery. But we do know what it’s saying about morality.
It really is so tempting to simply reject Mansfield Park. I never particularly liked the novel, and I never liked prim, preaching Fanny Price either. If I could simply discard her as a symbol of empire, and Mansfield Park as a novel irrevocably damaged by its moment, I could have the rest of Austen and her undeniable genius to myself.
Annoyingly, that’s the very trap that Mansfield Park warns us clearly against, in a way you don’t need a PhD in 19th-century abolitionist discourse to parse.
Every single character in that book except for Fanny is willing to embrace charming Henry Crawford and his sister, witty Mary, despite all the red flags suggesting that they aren’t overly bothered about other people’s pain. It’s almost as impossible to read Mansfield Park and not like the Crawfords, all their faults be damned, as Lionel Trilling said it was to read Mansfield Park and like dour, insipid Fanny.
Yet the second Fanny turns down Henry Crawford, the energy around her in the text seems to crackle. For the first time, there is something compelling about her, something that draws us in. When she tells Sir Thomas, through tears, that she would not be refusing Henry “if it were possible for me to do otherwise…but I am so perfectly convinced that I could never make him happy, and that I should be miserable myself,” there seems to be an electric strength of character about her that no one else in this novel has, not even the Crawfords.
Part of the project of postcolonial literary criticism is to use old literature to understand how people who lived within morally depraved institutions thought about those institutions for themselves. Whatever Mansfield Park has to say about slavery, it answers that question very clearly. The awful message of Mansfield Park is that we mistake charm and intelligence for true moral fiber at our peril, and that people who are good when it is convenient for them to be so may not continue to do what is right when it interferes with their pleasure.
Supporting something awful when it is fully integrated into the economic and political system in which you live is very convenient. Choosing to work against it requires real strength of character. Plenty of charming, likable people throughout history have done that math and come out on the side of keeping dead silent about an atrocity.
So we don’t know for sure, in the end, what Jane Austen really thought about slavery and empire. She chose her words too carefully for us to be able to tell. What we can see very clearly, nonetheless, is what she thought about doing something that you know to be wrong, because it’s too difficult or inconvenient to do otherwise.
