CMP#36 The "Dead Silence"

Clutching My Pearls is about Jane Austen and the times she lived in. Click here for the first in the series. 

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The "Dead Silence"

Fanny, Lady Bertram and Edmund bid Sir Thomas farewell on his journey to Antigua, 1983 adaptation

   ​In my last post, I ventured the opinion that Mansfield Park is not about slavery, despite the fact that it’s about a slave-owning family. Now, let's look at the passage in Mansfield Park which is “Exhibit A” in any discussion of Austen and abolition, the “dead silence” passage. It’s a crucial passage for many an essay, lecture, blog and vlog about Austen and Mansfield Park. However, many of these discussions misinterpret what is being described in this passage.
    It's a conversation between Fanny Price and her cousin Edmund Bertram (whom she secretly loves) about his father, her uncle, Sir Thomas, after his return from a lengthy journey to Antigua.
     Fanny tells Edmund "I love to hear my uncle talk of the West Indies. I could listen to him for an hour together." Edmund tells her, "Your uncle thinks you very pretty.” Fanny turns away in embarrassment, and modern readers are cringing as well. Eeuw, an uncle notices that his young niece has filled out nicely while he’s been away and mentions it to his son. Austen makes it clear that Fanny’s discomfort also arises out of hearing Edmund praise her face and figure. “’Oh! don’t talk so, don’t talk so,’ cried Fanny, distressed by more feelings than he was aware of.”
   Edmund sees she is embarrassed; he stops talking about her countenance and her figure: “Your uncle is disposed to be pleased with you in every respect; and I only wish you would talk to him more. You are one of those who are too silent in the evening circle.”
   “But I do talk to him more than I used. I am sure I do.” [answers Fanny] “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.”
    This reminds Edmund of something perceptive that Mary Crawford said, and away he goes, talking about Mary Crawford and so much for the slave trade, or any explanation of what Fanny's question was, or what in Sir Thomas’s answer gave Fanny pleasure, or what she longed to ask her uncle as a follow-up question.

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A windmill grinding sugar cane in Antigua

   Here is what this passage describes: The entire family was sitting, as they always did, in the parlour in the evening. Fanny asked her uncle a question about the slave trade. He answered, that is, he gave her some “information.” His answer was followed by a dead silence in the room. Fanny “longed” to ask a follow-up question. Edmund perceived that Sir Thomas would have been “pleased” if she had.
        Fanny held herself back, although she "longed to" ask more, because no-one else showed  “curiosity” or “pleasure” in the “information” which Sir Thomas gave. She did not want anyone to think that she thought herself wiser, or better, or more dutiful, or more interested in social issues, or the family business, than his own daughters.
       That short exchange  -- that’s it. An opinion about the slave trade is not expressed. 
     Here it is again, in condensed form:

1. Fanny asks a question about the slave trade.
2. Sir Thomas answers.
3. Dead silence – no-one else in the room said anything.
4. Because of her retiring personality and her take on Bertram family dynamics, Fanny doesn't ask any more questions.

       The “dead silence” is the silence of the Bertram family, most particularly Maria and Julia.
    However, if you look around the world of literary criticism for commentary on the “dead silence,” you discover many, perhaps the majority, start with the mistaken premise that the “dead silence” refers to an embarrassed silence on the part of Sir Thomas. There are books and journal articles and textbooks and study guides and podcasts and videos and tweets and theses repeating the error that Fanny’s question was met with dead silence:
     Here’s a collection of quotes erroneously claiming that it was Sir Thomas who was silent (it's quite lengthy, so you can just scroll down):

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• "When [Edward Said's] Culture and Imperialism was published in 1993, the chapter on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park aroused anger among some critics, because of his discussion of the "dead silence" (Austen's phrase) that occurs when its heroine, Fanny Price, asks her uncle about the slave trade."
• “This failure of Mansfield Park according to critics such as Ghosh, Said, and Spivak, becomes obvious when Fanny's question about Sir Thomas' business in Antigua goes unanswered.”
• ​“[Edward] Said quotes the line about Fanny’s inquiry into the slave trade being met with a dead silence…”
• “We certainly know that those who raise difficult topics in Jane Austen’s fiction often receive muted replies, as when Fanny Price observes that her inquiry of her uncle about the slave trade in the West Indies was met by ‘a dead silence’”
• "Fanny asks Sir Thomas at one stage about the slave trade but her question is answered with a dead silence." 
• “On his return Fanny asks him about the slave trade, but her question is met with “dead silence” around the dinner table.”
• Sir Thomas’s “dead silence” following Fanny’s question about the slave trade may well have been caused by a bad conscience over bills of sale. Fanny’s question was not really the voice of prophetic challenge, as we shall see, but may have felt so to her uncle.
• “Fanny mentions to Edmund that she asked her uncle, Sir Thomas, about the slave trade, which was met with “dead silence””
• “At one point in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, the upright Fanny Price speaks to her uncle Sir Thomas Bertram... Following the question, Austen writes, ‘there was such a dead silence!’”
• “In the novel, when Fanny Price asks Sir Thomas about his involvement with the slave trade over dinner her question is met by ''such a dead silence'' that the subject is awkwardly dropped.”
• ”when Fanny's question to Sir Thomas about the slave trade is met with "such a dead silence"”
• “While the characters in Austen's novel readily banter on a variety of trivial topics, the heroine Fanny Price meets ''dead silence” when she queries her uncle about the slave trade.”
• “In an emblematic episode in the novel, Fanny Price asks her uncle Bertram, who has just returned from his plantation in Antigua, about the slave trade, only to be met with 'a dead silence'"
• “When one of the female characters, Fanny Price, asked Sir Thomas about the slave trade and slave labour, all she got was silence: 'There was such a dead silence.'"
• Fanny Price recounts she asked [Sir Thomas] "about the slave trade" and received in reply "a dead silence."
• "This is seen when Fanny Price raises a question about slavery, and Sir Thomas answers with silence."
• "When Fanny raises the topic with her uncle, her question is met with a 'dead silence.'"
• "It is Fanny who thinks to ask Sir Thomas Bertram about the slave trade, although the only response to her question is dead silence"
• “Fanny gets no reply to her forbidden question because none is possible from a man who has supported 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... 
• “But in her novel, there is scarcely any kind of disapproval of Sir Thomas' wealth. Fanny asks Sir Thomas at one stage about the slave trade but her question is answered with a dead silence.”
• “But when [Fanny] asks the head of the house about the slave trade, he responds with uncomfortable silence.”
• “a bit like the ‘dead silence’ that greets Fanny Price’s inquiry about the slave trade in Mansfield Park”
• "the heroine Fanny Price's outburst about the treatment of slaves and the "dead silence" her question is met with..."
• "[I]t seems reasonable to infer from the infamous "dead silence" that greets the heroine Fanny Price's inquiries about the slave trade in the novel that the issue was disquietingly "too close to home" for her adopted father... Postcolonial critics of the novel are surely on the right track when they assert that Bertram's enigmatic "dead silence" cannot be divorced from the embarrassing issue of the trade's role in the maintenance of his income."
• Fraiman similarly argues that when Fanny’s inquiry regarding the slave trade is met with ‘dead silence’, “Austen deliberately invokes the dumbness of Mansfield Park concerning its own barbarity precisely because she means to rebuke it”.
• “Fanny gets no reply to her forbidden question because none is possible from a man who has supported the slave trade as a buyer of slaves… The gap of ‘silence’ between his slave-owning ‘values’ and those of Fanny, the sole questioner of those ‘values,’ could not be more effectively shown.’
• “Brian Southam explains that because Sir Thomas is so chatty in other forums about his visit to Antigua and so silent on this occasion, the dead silence indicates the breach of a taboo subject.” ​“Now, the ‘dead silence’ hints that his loquacity may have dried up at the mention of slaves.”
• "Most critics stop with the observation that Mansfield and Norris are both names connected with slavery, that the estate owned by the Bertrams in Antigua is presumably run on slave labour, and that we’re told that Fanny asks her uncle about “the slave trade.” Most of them seem to feel this is all there is, that the “dead silence” that meets Fanny’s question means that there is, quite simply, nothing else to see, or say." (in the way of allusions to slavery in the novel)
• ​​"However, this moment is not a ‘silence’ in or on the part of the text but a pointed representation of silence - Sir Thomas’s silence on the subject of slavery. The point is that Fanny problematizes Sir Thomas’s silence. Also of significance here is the issue of how swiftly this pointed representation is displaced by the text. No sooner has the text announced and problematized Sir Thomas’s silence than it rushes to fill this silence — and implicitly rescue Sir Thomas from the critical implications of this silence”

Sylvestra Le Touzel as Fanny in the 1983 mini-series, which is true to the book.

     Again and again we're told Fanny's question was "met with" or "answered with" dead silence. And these scholars and commentators have used this faulty premise – the idea that Sir Thomas didn’t answer Fanny’s question -- to spin off into their analyses of the meaning of Mansfield Park.    
     If I have convinced you that the text says Sir Thomas did answer Fanny, and the "dead silence" refers to his family, I take a leaf from Anne Steele in Sense & Sensibility: "I beg you will contradict it, if you ever hear it talked of" when someone says Fanny Price's question was met with silence.  
    Some scholars and critics do understand what is being described in the passage -- they correctly state that Sir Thomas answered Fanny, and then the subject was dropped.  However, their interpretations of the meaning and significance of that exchange vary greatly.
​       To be continued.​

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In my Mansfield Trilogy, Fanny Price meets some abolitionists and also hears some of the arguments made by those who defended slavery. We also meet the sailors tasked with suppressing the African slave trade. In this respect, I tried the same technique used by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin, putting varying opinions into the mouths of the characters. Click here for more about my books.