Fanny’s Place in the Family: Useful Service and the Social Order in Mansfield Park

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Notes

1. Scholars who write about servants explain that novels often use representations of these household figures to explore and intervene in questions about status and social relations. For example, in her book, Master and Servant, Carolyn Steedman makes the case that fictional servants can be looked to as a way of understanding the emergence of modern class society (11) because servants were a way to think about “the social order, rank, class and personhood” (145). In “A Boiling Copper and Some Arsenic” and Labor’s Lost, Steedman further discusses the ways representations of servants relate to the social order. For other discussions of the ways servants in literary texts relate to the social order, see Kristina Booker’s Domestic Service and the Cultural Transformation of British Society, 1650-1850 and Julie Nash’s Servants and Parternalism in the Works of Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell.

2. For other scholars that note Fanny’s likeness to servants, see Kirstyn Leuner, Marcia McClintcock Folsom, Roger Sales, Kay Torney Souter, and Julie Choi.

3. While I claim that critics have ignored the way service is a tool for thinking about the social order in Mansfield Park, many critics have certainly discussed the social aspects of this Austen novel and the way it comments on the changing social landscape of its time and ideas about the social order. For key examples, see Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Tony Tanner’s Jane Austen, and Claudia Johnson’s Women, Politics and the Novel.

4. Though for the most part, with the exception of Easton, critics have not looked at the way Austen uses service to think about social relations in Mansfield Park, this lens and approach has been applied to other Austen novels. For an example, see Elizabeth Veisz’s discussion of Northanger Abbey. Also, usefully, postcolonial scholars have noted Fanny’s and the novel’s connections to slavery. Though slaves and servants had vastly different experiences and slavery is outside the scope of this essay, postcolonial readings which look at the novel’s views on slavery explore questions of power and the novel’s views on the social hierarchy. For examples of such readings see Marcus Wood’s Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography and George E. Boulukos’s “The Politics of Silence: Mansfield Park and the Amelioration of Slavery.”

5. According to Easton, Fanny resists social changes that were disadvantageous to plebeians and at the end of the novel her return to the Bertram home “signals a change of regime at Mansfield” (482) as Fanny subversively challenges the family’s social structure, but does so to return them to more traditional social relations. While Easton’s argument problematizes the categories of social ideology in Mansfield Park by noting that “a conservative orientation is not necessarily a submissive one” (461), I extend his argument to say that the novel’s ideology both subverts and sustains the traditional social structures with which Fanny interferes.

6. For example, discussing Persuasion, Paul A. Cantor says of Austen, “she herself was not captive of any particular class consciousness, but instead tried to maneuver between classes in the hope of synthesizing the best of two social worlds” (135). And writing about Emma, Shinobu Minma says Austen shows an “unwillingness to commit herself to a particular political position” (65).

7. In his discussion of the concept of improvement in Mansfield Park and of Fanny’s connections to slavery, Marcus Wood does note that the novel resists the “types of static political positioning … laid upon” it (296).

8. While many critics have explored the social ideology of Mansfield Park, Austen’s stance is an ongoing debate. However, whether they believe that the novel’s social views are conservative or progressive, in the end, scholars tend to see a clear stance emerging, and the novel as either advocating against social changes and therefore conserving traditional social positions and relationships, or embracing social change and therefore as critiquing and subverting a traditional social order. Often sited scholars who read Austen as a conservative include Marilyn Butler and Alistair M. Duckworth. While examples of those that claim Austen is progressive include Claudia L. Johnson and Margaret Kirkham.

9. For more on the difficulty in defining servants, see Steedman’s Master and Servant, especially pages 14-21.

10. Similarly, Eileen Cleere and Ruth Bernard Yeazell look to the house and the spaces within to understand Fanny’s social identity vis-à-vis the family, making clear that Fanny’s relationship to the house reflects her status.

11. Roger Sales explains that “gentry life was a drama that had to be acted out daily in front of an audience of servants without whom a leisured lifestyle would have been impossible” (190). Employers were well aware of their domestics watching them and worried about it; their anxiety is indicated by the frequency with which conduct books for servants included warnings for domestics about repeating what they saw in the home and against purposely spying on their masters. For examples of such conduct books, see Eliza Haywood’s A Present for a Servant-Maid and Advice to Servants. Of Every Denomination.

12. The concern over “cross-class dressing” is a concern over servant’s potential social mobility, as Straub explains when discussing female servants’ ability to dress like those above them. She writes, “It is another variation on the allegedly dangerous mobility of the female domestic. Changing her clothes … gives her a suspect autonomy from the disciplinary family and her subordinate identity within it” (39). For examples of such warnings, see Thomas Broughton’s Serious Advice and Warning to Servants; Haywood’s A Present for a Servant Maid; Advice to Servants. Of Every Denomination; and James Townley’s An Apology for the Servants.

13. In the conduct literature, servants are told in a variety of ways that they should spend most of their time usefully employed on behalf of their master. Repeatedly there are statements like those in Advice to Servants of Every Denomination encouraging servants to “Industry” and “Busyness” and warning them to “Beware of Idleness.” The conduct literature also consistently tells readers that their time belongs to their masters and therefore they should always be serviceably employed on their masters’ behalf: the fictional servant of Sarah Trimmer’s conduct book is told by his soon to be master, “I have agreed to pay your wages, Thomas, for which you have agreed to give me your time and labor; therefore, if you should be idle, and neglect my work, and waste the time which you have in a manner sold to me, it would be all the same as robbing me of my money” (45). And Eliza Haywood encourages service that goes beyond the maid’s specific duties, saying that a good maid will, “after the common Affairs of the Family are over, ask if she [the mistress] has any thing to employ her [the maid] in” (41). Trimmer goes further and tells servants they are required to be useful beyond their actual physical work: “Servants, when they are tender-hearted and thoughtful, can afford great comfort to their masters and mistresses in times of affliction, and it is a principal part of their duty to do so” (108).

14. In an article written for the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mansfield Park, Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield review the history of readers’ opinions on Fanny and explain that “a majority of critics tend to agree on one thing – that Fanny is a failure, a disappointment as a character” (16). They also point out that the complaints about her passivity from both critics and general readers alike are plentiful.