Clutching My Pearls is about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. Click here for the first in the series. 
​For the first post on this series about Mansfield Park and slavery, click here.

     In my previous post, I gave a sampling of non-fiction books of the late 18th and early 19th century, including books for children, which discussed slavery and colonialism.
​       Mansfield Park, as previously discussed, is not explicit about slavery. In fact, as you can see here, references to Sir Thomas Bertram's trip to Antigua in the novel tend to be sympathetic to him, the poor guy who must make the journey away from his family.
    Critics nevertheless insist that Austen's third novel is all about slavery, and they prove this by pointing out that Austen never talks about slavery in the novel. 

• "The second major social issue that Austen makes notable by its absence from discussion is slavery."
• "Austen "mask[s] the issue of slavery throughout the novel."
• "Disengaging the subject of slavery from the Mansfield Park estate seems to be the implied
  critique of slavery in Austen’s Mansfield Park."
• "Slavery plays an important, though subverted, role in the novel." 
• "Austen's art is ironic and subtly allusive"
• "It is significant that Austen’s only mention of the slave trade is in the form of an unanswered question."
  
• "One can find topics such as histories of slavery and colonialism, both as events and structures that have contributed and continue to contribute to climate change, in the certain silences on the topics in the text or in the refusals by characters to respond to questions about slavery — for example, in Mansfield Park. Bould writes, '[C]ritics are not bathyspheric explorers plumbing textual depths. At no point do we even need to break the surface. The clamour of the unspoken is everywhere.'"
• "We're reading the silences... we remember of course, the famous silence that everyone talks about when Fanny asks about slavery and she's met with silence.... and Austen names that silence in her books... Austen invites us to read the micro-communications..."
• More scholarly quotes are in my article here:

     In this respect, scholars sometimes rely on the incorrect claim that Sir Thomas Bertram was silent when Fanny Price asked him about the slave trade:

• "whatever political and colonial critique might have been implied by Fanny’s statement about Sir Thomas’s silence is subordinated to the familial drama of surrogacy and marriage and parenting... The world of the colonies is represented or subsumed by the terms of representation by the other world of the domestic."     
•  "the text disintegrates at 'dead silence,' a phrase that ironically speaks ..."
• “Austen deliberately invokes the dumbness of Mansfield Park concerning its own barbarity precisely because she means to rebuke it."
• "The unanswered question is a kind of Machereyan silence which ‘uncovers what it cannot say’ (Macherey 1978: 84). Slavery may haunt the novel as a negative presence - in the title, in Fanny’s preference for Cowper’s poetry, a noted abolitionist poet, and so on - but Austen keeps it off-stage..."

    In previous posts, I've briefly looked at the assertion that Austen could not speak out more explicitly about slavery in Mansfield Park (or Emma, for that matter) than she did. I've already quoted scholar George Boulokus who asserts that slavery was NOT a taboo topic in Austen's time: "In fact, there is no evidence that readers, publishers or booksellers of early nineteenth-century London either looked askance at fictional works treating these topics or worried that such topics might upset the public’s sense of propriety.” 
     In addition to works of fiction that discussed slavery, there were also many non-fiction books and pamphlets which discussed the West Indian colonies in detail. Some were abolitionist, some defended slavery, some were travel guides in which slavery was just a fact of life. In addition, there were extensive parliamentary debates and speeches.
   Anyone could read opinion pieces on all aspects: humanitarian, economic, political.
    An 1807 book titled A Permanent and Effectual Remedy for the Evils under which the British West Indies Now Labour was not about the evils of slavery, but the “evils” of the falling price of sugar and global competition, and the lack of support for the West Indies traders from the British government.  
    The Authentic History of the English West Indies (1810), described the geography and climate of the West Indies. The book included explicit accounts of the suffering of the slaves.        

       Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park is almost certainly a slave owner. That being the case, it may seem not only impossible to rehabilitate his character, but indefensible to make the attempt. The question of slavery hangs over the novel, as I discussed in the previous post about symbolism.
       ​In Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics, Tom Keymer points out “Austen could perfectly well have positioned [Sir Thomas] as a self-serving anti-abolitionist, or she could have made him a reformist like the hero of Mary Brunton’s Discipline (1815)...”
​        Yes, she could have made him a villain or a reformer, but she does neither. She tells us nothing about Sir Thomas's holdings in Antigua or how he manages them. The 1999 movie adaptation portrays him as a menacing and perverted man who forced himself on captive women, but even people who like this movie understand it is not a faithful representation of the novel.
​         On the other hand, some have suggested that Sir Thomas must have sold his plantation when he went to Antigua, or that after all, the income from Antigua probably didn’t represent much of the family income compared to his local rents, and so on. Yes, perhaps he was the most benevolent slaveowner in Antigua. I won't bother attempting to speculate, because while, as we have seen, emancipation versus amelioration was discussed in Austen's time, freedom versus slavery is not contentious today. No-one today would be inclined to give Sir Thomas a patient hearing  on the matter. And in the end it is unproven and unprovable because he's a fictional character. I am not excusing the fact of Antigua.; I"m just asserting that Austen didn't tell us anything about Antigua. ​