Since I started Clutching My Pearls, I’ve read a lot of Austen scholarship, some of which I've found informative and thought-provoking, but some of it I've found to be agenda-driven and influenced by presentism.
    Granted, I'm not an academic. My eyes glaze over at mentions of Derrida and Foucault--all that stuff is just beyond me. I'd like to know more about Austen's contributions to the development of the novel, but modern scholars have moved beyond that. Or rather, they seem to take it for granted that Austen was writing at such an advanced level of subtlety and symbolism that the merest object or reference--an apricot, a shawl, a hedge, a surname--can unlock the key to a hidden level of meaning that exists underneath and sometimes in contradiction to the narrative. I'm unconvinced: would an author of her time, even an author of genius, write novels about happy marriages that aren't really about happy marriages at all?
    I have no quarrel with individual reactions to Austen, or with what people draw out of Austen. But I do differ with those who ascribe improbable opinions to Austen, hence the following rebuttal.
   For my 100th blog post, I offer six simple questions which I think academics might profitably ask themselves when formulating their theories about who Jane Austen was, and what she believed...

“Fanny found herself obliged to yield:”
​ the hermeneutics of the cross and the chain in Mansfield Park
A special guest editorial by Aprille Stulti, Ph.D.​

​     “I cannot look out of my dressing-closet without seeing one farmyard, nor walk in the shrubbery without passing another,” Mary Crawford complains in Mansfield Park. Modern readers have often missed or misunderstood Austen's critical stance on the agricultural revolution and the growth of the British empire. On the surface, we see Mary, a quintessential city girl, surprised to find that she is not able to hire a horse and wagon to transport her harp to the parsonage. But a closer interrogation of the text reveals that Jane Austen was working both with and against Mary Crawford’s seeming ignorance of the realities of agricultural life.
    This essay will contend that a close reading of language in Mansfield Park—especially of such seemingly innocuous words such as “survey” and “yield”—reveals Austen’s counter-reaction to agricultural development. Mary Crawford is not merely trying to hire a horse, she is protesting the encroachment of capitalist-based agriculture, which ironically supports the prosperity of her own gentry class. Mary is paradoxically presented as both victim and beneficiary--and finally perpetrator--of imperialist violence.
    This essay will explore how key scenes in Mansfield Park, especially those concerning the amber cross and chain, might adumbrate Austen's resistance to her times... 

    When Jane Austen wrote in Northanger Abbey about book reviewers who "talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans," she wasn't exaggerating. Reviewers in periodicals and journals during this period often expressed their contempt for novels in exactly these terms. 
    Charles Robert Maturin was a writer of gothic novels. But he was also one of the critics who wrote dismissively of sentimental novels and the people who read them and wrote them.
    “The path of novel-writing once laid open was imagined easy by all, and for about forty years the press was deluged with works to which we believe the literary history of no other country could produce a parallel. The milliner’s prentices who had expended their furtive hours, and drenched their maudlin fancies with tales of kneeling lords and ranting baronets at the feet of fair seamstresses, fair as they believed themselves to be, and in narrow back parlours as dark as their own, soon found it easy to stain the well-thumbed pages of a circulating library book with flimsy sentiments, and loose descriptions of their own..."
​       Just like Austen, Maturin wrote a pretty funny parody of this type of novel. Read on for more...

   Mansfield Park, a novel set amongst the landed gentry of Britain, has long been thought by some scholars to essentially endorse a patriarchal status quo. On the contrary, a careful interrogation of the text, informed by an anti-colonialist lens, establishes that Mansfield Park contains a cloaked yet pointed condemnation of imperialism. The current critical conversation, however, does not adequately address Austen's allusions to Ireland.
     Early in the novel, the Bertram girls ask Fanny Price "which way she would go to get to Ireland." Fanny's response that she would "cross to the Isle of Wight," contextualizes the struggle against empire. She is saying that the Bertrams shouldn't go to Ireland at all--but tellingly, she is then derided as "ignorant."
     But this is merely prelude to the Sotherton episode in the novel. On the journey out -- we might almost say "on the expedition" -- Julia Bertram sits beside Henry Crawford on the barouche-box. He "entertains" her with some anecdotes about an "old Irish groom" of his uncle's.  Henry's bigoted remarks are not necessary to move the plot along. Austen could easily have come up with an alternative topic for Henry.  Julia joins in the laughter at the expense of a man who is both an immigrant and a subordinate.