“Interested by nobody but Mary Crawford”

Christina J. Gilligan, “‘Interested by nobody but Mary Crawford’: Identification and Critique in Mansfield Park” (pp. 157–181) Critics often characterize Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) as a conservative outlier in her oeuvre. In this article, I argue that Mansfield Park represents a shift not in Austen’s ethico-political commitments but rather in the way she affectively structures the novel in relation to the protagonist. While in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, Austen aligns merit and attention in her identificatory heroines, in Mansfield Park, she affords heroic attention to Fanny Price while reserving heroic merit for Mary Crawford. Through this bold decoupling of attention from merit, Austen destabilizes the way meaning is communicated in her novels. No longer can readers rely on an only slightly qualified affective identification with the heroine to comprehend the novel’s project. Rather, readers must now engage for themselves in the kind of critical reading practices modeled by Mary and by Austen’s earlier heroines to grasp Mansfield Park’s critiques both of the Bertram family’s abuse of Fanny and of Fanny’s own limited ethical program. These critiques are bodied forth not through Fanny, who secures her marriage to Edmund through her own unethical reading failures, but instead through Mary, who shares the novel’s commitment to taking seriously the injustices of gender-based precarity and whose open-ended escape from Mansfield has been critically mischaracterized as a punishment for misbehavior.